The wisdom of ancient Greeks

I picked up a book last week on some great quotes by the Greek philosophers and thinkers. It is a very small book with around 300 quotes on different subjects like virtue, humanity, god and religion, education, arts and so on. It is a light and fun read.

I love quotes and it always sends out strong and deep messages in a sentence. I get a thrill after reading the quotes and commenting how true it is. In this case, it also gave me an insight into Greek culture and how good they were at that time. I also read about these Greek thinkers briefly and I want to go a little deeper into those guys. It was well worth a read.

Some of the ones that I liked,

Don't appear just, be just [Aeschylus]
Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom [ Aristotle ]
The truth is always the strongest argument [ Sopochles ]
Death is a debt which all of us must pay [ Sopochles ]
Friendship is equality [ Artistotle ]
The fool learns by suffering [Hesiod]
Man's best possession is a sympathetic wife [Euripedes]
He is no lover who does not love always [ Aristotle ]
The measure of a speech is not the orator but the listener [ Plato]

Most watched movies

People always talk about their favourite movies of all times. There are very few movies that are excellent and affect you in some way deeply. There are some movies that you like it when you watch it and forget about it the next day. Obviously, there are a few that you want to forget as soon as you finish watching them. But, there are some movies that due to some reason you dont mind watching it over and over again. There are some movies that I could watch say once every month and enjoy it thoroughly.

The following movies have the most repeat value for me and I have watched these movies multiple number of times. The list is in no particular order. I just came up with this list instantly, but some things are missing still.

1. Godfather I
2. A Few Good Men
3. Jurassic Park I
4. Die Hard I
5. Ronin
6. Clear and Present Danger
7. A Beautiful Mind
8. When Harry Met Sally
9. My Cousin Vinny
10. Saamy
11. Arunachalam
12. Oru CBI Diary Kurippu
13. Ocean's Eleven
14. Speed
15. Kannathil Muthamittal
16. The American President
17. --
18. --
19. --
20. --

Television Series

1. The Cosby Show
2. Everybody Loves Raymond
3. Law and Order (All the 3 types).

The week that was!!

This has been quite an eventful week. The week started off with my first visit to Madison Square Garden (MSG) [ the world's most famous arena] for a NBA game between the home team Knicks and the Detroit Pistons. The game was exciting in the first and third quarters when the knicks made a fight of it, but ultimately the Pistons had too much class. Pistons is leading the Eastern conference overall, but they are nowhere near the Western teams like the Suns, Mavericks or the Spurs. I think the Western conference is an overwhelming favorite to win the title this time around.

I was quite excited for the game, but ultimately it turned out to be less exciting. First of all, the arena looks quite old and it badly needs a facelift. The lights were not so good, it was quite hot inside and the big display screens were so dull that nobody could see them. The Knicks were not upto the mark and a lot of their players were injured as well. The players were tired towards the end of the season and Knicks had the play off hopes dashed as well.

I went out with my cousins to an Ethiopian restaurant for dinner. The ethiopian cuisine is so similar to south indian food, with their staple food being injira (pulicha dosai) and the different vegetables resembling keera mashial, beans, chutney, cabbage curry and so on. It is very surprising that they have so much of vegetarian options. A nice dinner overall.

Today is Visu, Tamil New Year's day. I miss the celebrations back home, where you go to your relatives houses and get the Visu Kani. It was quite fun and I used to get quite a collection by the end of the day. I wanted to go to the Flushing temple today, but due to heavy rains I am under house arrest.

Overall, not a bad week!!!!!!

Raju Shrivastav - finally an Indian standup comedian

Cable TV in my place has stopped working for a couple of weeks and I have intentionally not taken any interest to fix it. I am living in a world without TV for the last two weeks and it has been quite an experience. Suddenly, I find a lot of time in my hands especially during the weekends. So, what do I do, i have started reading and using my computer more.

Stand up comedy is big in the United States and I love standup comedy. It is a mirror of your life and captures the events that happen soaked in humour. I love observing these small things that always seem to happen all around you and laughing about it. I was always thinking that why is standup comedy not popular in India. With the variety of people who are living in India and the kind of naatak that they make, standup comedy has the potential to be a big industry and the art needs to be marketed more. The main problem in India is that comedy is always a side dish and never the main course. Also, there are very few comedians and they were always doing mimicry rather than standup. In this regard, the name of Johny Lever or Dayanand in Kannada come to mind. If you watch their shows, the main theme was mimicry and they had these short jokes (questions and answers kind of style) floating around. It was never that they engrossed an audience with things that go on in day to day life.

With all this history behind me, I got a google video that said Raju Shrivastav, best standup comedian in India participating in the Indian Laughter challenge. I watched that 10 minute clip and atlast I knew that i found a true Indian standup comedian. He just described the things that go on during a marriage celebration and how all the people react and it was just too good. Then, i started searching for his different videos and I found a bunch of them and saw that he had such a great variety, he was daring to be different from others, and how he went in depth into a situation, his facial expressions, his own delivery style and his novelty. He is the king of comedy i should say at the moment in India and hope he popularizes it and a lot of comedians make it big. I found later on that he has been a television actor for a long time and he has acted in movies as well. The Indian laughter challenge tv show has given him a big break and his talents have come to the fore.

On the same note, i came across a couple of interesting standups. One is on cricket and the other is by a kannada standup. Hope there are more Raju Shrivastav's coming up and making people laugh.

NY Auto Show

I think the NY auto show happens once a year, although it is not as big as the Detroit show, it is quite significant. As for myself, I am not such a big fan of cars and I am not too much into its technical aspects as well. I wanted to go for it though just to see the progress in cars (the last show i went to was in Delhi 3 yrs back).

The show was in Javits center in Manhattan and it was pretty crowded as expected. My friend with whom I went is quite interested in cars and was all excited. All the big guys whom you would except in the world of cars were there with the exhibits. Ford, Chevrolet, Mazda, Ferrari, Mercedez, BMW, Honda and the list goes on. Each company had their latest models on display and also some concept cars which are not ready for production. I believe most of those concept cars will never hit the market. Ford Airstream was the concept car that i liked the most and it seemed very much practical that it might come on the mainstream market. I got a fair idea in terms of the types of cars that are in the market and their price ranges. There were lot of value for money cars, cars with a lot of style, some useless cars, cars with a ton of features that nobody can remember, big cars, small cars, 10 seater minivans, a few bikes, rally cars and the list goes on.

My main grouse with cars is that there is no revolution in car technology for the last 30-40 years. The technology is more or less the same, there is no big change in terms of alternative fuel or improving the fuel efficiency by a big margin or coming up with something new and exciting. The improvements that i could see were the safety standards and ease of use for the driver of the car. There were features in some cars like revving up your engine 200m away, keyless start and lock opening, refrigerator within the car, place to heat up your coffee (only starbucks of course) , on the road entertainment system, parking a car by itself and others.

The car companies have to keep coming up with new models, good marketing and competitive pricing to compete and grow. From the looks of it, it is a grind with so many competitors involved. There was a separate accessories exhibition where there were no auto accessories and they were signing up for credit cards and had some games. Another interesting aspect was the marker on the hand when you entered the exhibition was invisible, but was flourescent when put under a scanner.

Overall, it was a US car market 101 session and it might prove useful to me in the future.