Furnicovering

Don't we all wish that our homes are inviting enough when people walk in to it for the first time? In all my (vain?) attempts to accomplish this feat, one big hurdle has been this big hole in my living room wall which has a pipe sticking out of it! And it gets better. It has been covered in Newspaper since the day I step foot into this house a year and a half ago. I have been meaning to unwrap that newspaper around the pipe and see what it looks like. But I'm terrified that these dead flies are going to jump out of it and invade my property! (I would have said rats for more dramatic effect. But if there were dead rats in my living room for a year and a half, one would think I would have noticed by now right?)

Unfortunately, the pipe is not the only thing sticking out of my living room. There is ANOTHER, slightly smaller, hole right below that pipe which has a newspaper stuffed into it. Now I COULD try taking that out. But then those rats, that I refused to acknowledge previously, could make their way into my house through that hole!

All idiosyncrasies apart, there is no getting around the fact that this pipe/hole in my living room wall looked very ugly! So I had two options. I could either deal with this pipe/hole problem by trying to get it fixed. Or do what any other reasonable guy would do! Hide it!

Was it too obvious that I decided to pick option 2?

So after procrastinating for a year and a half, I realized that the parents showing up in a couple of weeks is a good enough reason to get my act together. So I started looking for solutions! I needed something that would a) have room to store some of my worldly possessions accumulated over a period of 6 years, b) work out in such a way that I can finally use the 5.1 subwoofer system that I have and finally be able to wire it to have decent surround sound in my living room, c) be able to seat people who rarely come to my house, and, most importantly, d) hide that hole in the wall. It was hard. All pieces of furniture were either too big, too small or too expensive. Also, it involved me spending a lot of time doing research online or in stores.

So I went to Home depot to try my luck with a self build. I went with this part incomplete design for this shelf/bench thing. I designed a 2 row/3 column design with cell 1,1 and 1,3 empty and the other cells covered on all four sides. Being an amateur furniture builder, I had to spend 3 hours in home depot to figure out what all the things were that I needed for my project. After some deliberation and talking to a couple of people in the store, I bought about 4 ft X 4 ft of wood. Got it cut into dimensions which would allow me to build what I needed to build without needing ME to make any cuts. (I do not own a power saw. It is now on my shopping list. I also don't own a garage.) Either way, my wood was cut into 9 appropriately sized pieces. Apart from this, I bought wood screws and brackets. I also bought this liquid nails thing (which, I realized later, was not quite useful)

The power saw in home depot is pretty good. The cuts are pretty straight. The edges are mostly squared. The saw is also not super thick (so the loss of material during cuts is pretty small). But, all said and done, the original wood was off from its advertised 4 ft X 4ft by as much as an inch. Moreover, the dimensions of the cuts on the wood was eyeballed. This left me with these wood pieces which were a bit too short or a bit too long! I made do. After some time figuring out the brackets and eyeballing the joining positions, and taking corrective actions to account for the dimension errors, I put together my first subassembly. It took a couple of hours to get here. But I was fairly proud of this accomplishment. But by now, it was also past 11 pm. I could not continue working lest the cops showed up for all the noise. And all that adrenaline rush had killed my sleep. So I decided to get MORE sugar in the form of icecream from J.P. Licks.

The rest of the furniture putting together didn't take too long. I was done in about three more hours! The shelves and brackets were not as well aligned as I would have liked them to be. It was not as pretty as I originally imagined it would be. But all in all, it was still something that was half decent. It covered the hole. It could seat people (How comfortably is arguable). It also had a place for my subwoofer system. Now all I need to do is put some doors and hinges on some of the shelves. That requires another trip to home depot to get more wood and brackets and screws. I now also have ideas on how to make my own entertainment center unit for the living room!

All in all, building your own furniture is time well spent :)

Tango for Taj

The title of the post is inspired by one of A. R. Rahman's latest instrumental compositions for his most recent album Rockstar. Some people have asserted that the maestro has lost his touch in the past few years. Some accusations have been floating around that excessive involvement of his younger subordinates has diluted some of the quality. And also that his music has become repetitive.

I believe that his compositions still consistently leave you wanting more of the same. How he pulls it off is a big mystery. While I personally still believe Thiruda Thiruda was one of his best compositions, my Rahman loyalty leaves me no doubt that whatever he touches turns to gold. But that is not saying much is it?

In the past, I have always found myself waiting with bated breath for Rahman's latest album. Personally though, his songs have always taken some time to grow. The key is that you have to keep listening to them till you fall completely in love with them. And you HAVE to believe it will happen. I did that with Boys. I did that with Blue. I did that with Yuvvraaj, Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya, Raavan..... The list is endless.

In the past year or so however, I'll have to admit, my Rahman loyalty had faded. I had been distracted with some other music. (What with the likes of Amit Trivedi hitting the music scene, it was hard not to be. Please to forgive) So when a friend told me about Rockstar, while I spent no time deciding to download the music, the first hear left me with the "it's just aight" feeling. Maybe along with my loyalty, my memory of the approach towards his music had also faded. After about 2 weeks of Rockstar's dormant presence in my itunes library, I decided to adopt my publicized approach of playing the songs in repeat mode. It totally worked!!

I found myself deeply analyzing the excessive involvement of Mohit Chauhan in Rahman's troop. (He's a good singer and his nasal style probably adds value to some songs. But I find the excessive use of the nose a little annoying. Fine I'll take off 2 points out of 100 for Mohit Chauhan. The album still scores in Upper 80s, lower 90s.)

The most striking observation to me was Rahman's approach towards instrumental themes. Take Dichotomy of fame for instance, which has a very interesting Shehnai/Guitar fusion. The shehnai makes you think about a wedding and then the guitar which follows suddenly transports your imagination to a patio restaurant in Delhi with someone playing the guitar live! I don't know what to think anymore.

My most favorite piece in the entire album is the title of this post. I find Tango for Taj intoxicatingly brilliant! The generous use of the piano and the bandoneon puts you in a state of trance. It is a perfect example of a song where I wish he played that piece with the clapping sounds in the middle of the song a couple of times more. The song ended a little prematurely for me. The last time I felt so about an instrumental piece was the Duet theme. (Kadri Gopalnath is brilliant in that. But unfortunately none of Kadri's other songs seem to be even half as brilliant) I don't know how Rahman pulls off the instrumental so well. I guess since he knows all the right chords to strike, it can't be that hard......

A.R. Rahman! You'll always be my rockstar. And you used to be an iyer veetu pillai right? ;)