Enough with the kolaveri already!

I'm in an irate mood, and I'm taking it out on you. Sometime last evening, I went to an ATM to get some money to buy food. Turns out the ATM was hungrier than me, and proceeded to eat my fucking ATM card. To compound matters, despite being a staunch Atheist I am supposed to attend a religious function at my uncle's house in a couple of hours. Oh, and I happen to owe this uncle A LOT of money, which I currently do not have; and which even if I did, I cannot give because I have no ATM card or cheque-book.

Now that you know that I'm merely venting out the frustrations and anger brought about by my own repeated stupidity, I shall direct my mountain-dew infused venom at you for something trivial. There's no shortage of insignificant acts of stupidity on the internet. There isn't even a paucity of substantial acts of gut-numbing, mind-wrenching stupidity on the internet. But I am going to focus on perhaps the first video to go properly viral in India: 'Why This Kolaveri Di'; a satirical song about love and loss, written and sung by Rajnikanth's son-in-law, and featuring Kamal Hasan's daughter trying to act all cool in the mixing room.



Of course, some might argue that the first Indian viral video was "How could she slap?" or perhaps the DPS-RKP mms. If you are one of those people, I'd like to tell you that the notion is cute, BUT WROOOOONG! 'How could she slap?' and its ilk were popular almost exclusively amongst the nation's netizens/netirati/net-working yuppies (What's the current phrase used by people who don't use the internet to describe people who do?).

What sets Kolaveri apart is how insanely popular it has become amongst people who still think that the only way to log on to the internet is through IE 6. Even the mainstream media in this land of golden soil which sprouts diamonds and pearls has taken notice of its popularity, and it takes a lot to get Indian mainstream media outlets to take notice of something that isn't related to Bollywood and/or Big Boss.

I'll be honest; the first time I saw the song, I loved it. I instantly downloaded it and made it my ringtone. That was last Saturday. By Tuesday, I was getting tired of it; and by Thursday I could pretty much wretch at the sight of anything even remotely connected to the word 'kolaveri'.

Analogy time! A good joke is like a good South-Indian spice; sprinkle a bit to add flavor to the otherwise drab and dull dish that we call life. Use too much, and that same dish will burn your living soul and result in you having to defecate every last organ in your body over the next few days. And this post is an example of that very defecation. By posting the video on Facebook NOW or making 'Why this kolaveri' jokes about EVERYTHING makes you like one of those annoying mofos who hear a good joke and subsequently proceed to ruin it completely by repeating its punchline all the time; specifically on occasions where it doesn't even make sense in context. You guys are like Steve Carrell in the US version of 'The Office', and kolaveri is your "That's what she said!". But even those morons didn't overuse a gag that was a gag about a moron overusing a gag as much as you morons are overusing this gag on places like 9Gag. Don't kill the joke, mama.

In any case, this post is little more than an ill-researched rambling rancorous rant reeking with resent, resplendent with repetition, raving for a rostrum of respectability by reducing itself to reiterating rehashed ideas through the rancid and rank act of regurgitating rhetoric written on a rarely-read but raring to be riveting web-rag by a ragged, rife-stricken bit of riffraff. I would direct your attention HERE, if you want to get a better idea of what I am trying to express (or a good laugh). Cracked is always better at this kind of stuff. Then again, it should be! If I was paid to spend my entire work-day thinking of the right simile to describe why I hate some unimportant bit of pop-culture... Man, I'd be the happiest person alive.

I'd also like to take this moment to coin a neologism which I think succinctly communicates the internet's obsession with a dead meme: Netrophilia. Whatever humor 'Kolaveri' had is dead, dude. Humping it's rotting carcass is not going to bring it back to life, it's just going to give you zombie-herpes.

God's Final Message To His Creation

The Carina Nebula is a cloud of gas, hydrogen, helium, dust, and other assorted nonsense that surrounds an open cluster of stars. (An open cluster is a whole bunch of stars formed by the gravitational collapse of the same molecular cloud. It’s a bit like how monozygotic twins are born, if that helps.) The nebula features Eta Carinae, one of my favorite stars. Of course, my all-time favorite star is Sol. Another star I like is IK Pegasi, because it is only 150 light years away and is a barely detectable white dwarf star that, at any minute now, can go supernova. This would release so much gamma radiation that it would cause the nitrogen in the Earth’s atmosphere to oxidize into Nitrogen Oxide (NO₂), which would summarily rip the ozone layer to shreds; of course, that really won’t matter because before the NO₂ does any of that, it would mix with water vapor to form Nitric Acid, which would rain from the sky. That also won’t matter because we’ll all be dead by that point, either from radiation or from being in an atmosphere that’s 80% NO₂.

Where was I? Ah, yes. Eta Carinae. It’s 8,000 light years away, 150 times more massive than the sun, and five million times as bright. It is, and I cannot tell you how proud I am of this pun, a stellar badass. In April 1843, astronomers noticed that this star had become really, really bright. Aboriginals in Australia said it was the wife of War. For a while it was the 2^nd brightest star in the night sky in the Southern Hemisphere. That burst of brightness was because Eta Carinae had gone supernova. A supernova, to the uninitiated, is the single most powerful explosion that can ever happen. Think of it this way: If you take ALL the energy that the sun has ever released in its 4.6-billion-year lifespan, and release that energy in 1 second, you get a Supernova. If you like numbers, there's a nifty table for you.

Event:	Amount of energy released (approx.):
Sachin Tendulkar hitting a six	100 J
Tsar Bomba, the world’s most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever tested	100,000,000,000,000,000 Joules (1017 J)
A Supernova	10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Joules (1046 J)

And it survived. That’s right; Eta Carinae survived the most powerful explosion possible within the laws of physics. It still glows there (or doesn't; we'll know in the next 8000 years if it collapsed into a black hole, or went supernova again and died, or even went supernova again and survived again). But this story of Eta Carinae is a favorite of mine. I like looking at photos of it. Unfortunately, you can only see it from the Southern Hemisphere, so I’ll have to wait until my Antarctic expedition before I can see it in the night sky. Eta Carinae is inside the Carina Nebula; which was extensively photographed in 1999 by the Hubble Space Telescope.



Photography is a funny thing, and astronomical photography is not that dissimilar to terrestrial photography. One afternoon in New York City, Joel Brodsky was taking photographs of a rock group. After a few group shots, he started to take individual photographs. He knew that the group’s lead singer was going to be the focus of this, so Joel decided to save the individual shots of the singer for the end of the session, and was taking photos of the other guys instead. Bored, the singer began to drink. By the time it was his turn, the singer was plastered and Joel didn’t get as many photos as he would’ve liked. It didn’t matter though, because he took one photograph that would go on to define what it means to be a rock-star, and inspire me to grow my hair long when I was 15.

Like all the other great photo-shoots of human history, no one at the time knew that one of the photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope was going to be one of most defining images of human history, and has almost made me recant my atheism and start believing in God. It’s not the “landscape” photo of the Carina Nebula, which is an astonishing photograph in itself; you can’t look at it without Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ playing in your head.

THE picture (the one for which I've used nearly a thousand words, 3 photographs, a table, references to chemistry, rock music, photography, and -in my first draft- politics, to build up...) is a close-up of a portion of the Carina Nebula known as the Keyhole Nebula. This photograph has made me susceptible to believing in God again simply because it proves that the only way I feel it is possible to reconcile the reality of the universe we live in and the idea that it’s all the creation of an omnipotent deity is that the deity is apathetic. Or to put it mildly, it proves my belief that if God exists, he’s a fucking asshole.

(Look to the top-left to see what I'm on about)