A R Rahman ad jingles

In spending time with my feedreader this afternoon, I saw this, featuring a clip from the movie Slumdog Millionaire that apparently has music composed by my man ARR. It is the first I heard of this movie. I am way behind on my Rahman listening. I was stuck on Jaane tu ya jaane na for a long time. I have just moved on to Sakkarakatti, am yet to open my Ada CD (I know, Sakkarakatti jumped the line, but it was in Tamil, so that was inevitable). And it also got me thinking that I have not yielded to my Rahmania in a while. So, I spent some time that was to be used to finish a calculation googling around for A R Rahman ad jingles that I remembered from a long time ago. Find below a few for your amusement :

1. Garden Sarees

Featuring Lisa Ray and sounding so Rahman:

2. MRF tires

I actually did not realize this was Rahman until recently actually:

3. Premier

This one is sung by Sujatha, you know the one that sang “puthu vellai mazhai” in Roja:

4. Titan

And of course the famous one that has Rahman paraphrasing Mozart for Rajiv Menon:

And finally the bonus video of anyone that made it this far down the post, Baby Rahman on Surabhi

Trigger any nostalgic memories that you want to share? Pointers to any ads that I missed (I know the leo coffee one, but it featured in an earlier post), or trivia about the ads featured here would be great too!

Religion again

I do not know how I missed knowing about this guy for so long...this is fun!

Amusement

Came across this joke recently. Should resonate with anyone that has TA'd a basic science course:

A college physics professor was explaining a concept to his class when a pre-med student interrupted him.

“Why do we have to learn this stuff?” he blurted out.

“To save lives,” the professor responded before continuing the lecture.

A few minutes later the student spoke up again. “Wait– how does physics save lives?”

The professor responded. “By keeping idiots out of medical school.”

LHC linking park

The Large Hadron Collider comes online on the 10^th and there is little else that is the topic of conversation at any place where there are more than two physicists. Higgs or no Higgs? That is the first thing we will know. And supposedly a whole lot more.

As with all else in the world, LHC has been associated with theories that tell you that the world will end when we turn the machine on. You can find out about these concerns from the horse’s mouth here. And I also came across this refutation/explanation by Sunil Mukhi (via).

If you wanted to know more about the LHC, you could try this. Or at 8pm on the history channel tomorrow there is a show on the LHC that I must have received 10 emails telling me to watch. The host of the show talks about it over at Cosmic Variance.

Or, you could watch this video I found recently…LHC rap…pretty cool I thought it was…

On names

A short while ago I learned from Bongo what the name “thong” means in Australia and that got me thinking about names and how contextual they are and how they have evolved in my mind. Let me take food for example, Capsicum has been replaced by green peppers, red peppers etc, lady’s finger by Okra. And peppers no longer stands for the round black things you put in pongal or molagu rasam. I have to think hard to remember what I used to call an eggplant, the word Brinjal has totally dropped out of my mind.

There used to be a time when any piece of paper whose purpose was to clean I called a tissue. Now depending on the location in my house it is present in, it has a different name, and when somebody refers to a paper napkin as tissue, I cringe. I cannot bring myself to say the word “rubber” any more. I call it the eraser, even in my mind.

What is surprising about this whole thing to me is that within a relatively short time, under complete immersion (in that to everybody else in my environment that fat purple vegetable is an eggplant), with no conscious effort, our brain adjusts and rewires so that we start thinking that way too! Adaptability thy name is the human brain?

Geeky Foxtrot