Karthik posted about searching for books and the trouble involved in paying for them. Well, when I need a book I usually drive down to Pycrofts Road and there’ll be huge rows of used book sellers. I’ve gotten some really good books from there for dirt cheap because they charge you on the weight of the book or on what they think is its value. If you’re good at bargaining you can drop the price to 50% of what they ask, which will be a fraction of the cost of the book and you can get a book that’s worth 500 bucks at 80 bucks or so.

While on the topic of used book stores, these places are so awesome because of what you can find. One of my professors in college has a first edition of the Silmarillion which his friend got for him from a used book store for less that 200 bucks. Imagine!

It’s harvest season and I don’t want any produce, but the taxmen are out and they’re watching the alleys. Take care, comrades, ’tis a dangerous time when even the rails where you smoke a cigarette may not be safe. They’ll want their cut of your stash, of course, and if you look a bit well off, they’ll want money, and maybe they’ll take you in even then. Even the old man with the pipe sitting on the edge of the pavement must pay, it’s summer time you know, if it’s hot they’ll tax your … tobacco . Greed, my dear friends, ’tis a horrible thing.

We aren’t like them, of course. Sharing comes naturally to us, but sharing forced isn’t sharing at all and sharing inequitably is synonymous with robbery, and ’tis the state that does it, or its enforcers anyway. They’re as bad us anyway, except we’re the nice black musicians in the car in Back to the Future and they’re… them, thieves sanctioned by the government. How tragic. But then, c’est la vie.

I haven’t touched weed in two weeks now, it’s good. I’ve really had just about enough. We went to score yesterday though, the same place as otherwise, ice-cream:petrol bunk chaat shop:tea shop:road side. Someone I know said that their professor claimed that weed doesn’t have a smell and so you can’t tell if a person is smoking up or not when he lights up. That’s funny, that guy knows nothing. The first time B and I went to that place we knew we were at the right zone because of the smell, it was like runway lights pointing us in the right direction. Very strange, very funny. Just a little note, if you want stuff for 100 bucks, ask for two packets of 25 and then get a friend to ask for another two packets of 25. I just think there’s something fishy otherwise.

PS: You’re right, I don’t actually give a shit about Naruto or Sasuke or Kakashi or whatever, I couldn’t care less.

Chetan mentions that his college didn’t allow him to do a particular project because they thought it had been done already. They encouraged him to go to a project centre to get a project that would be sure of being accepted. That’s strange considering the reason they gave for rejecting his project. This seems to mean that they don’t mind many students doing the same project in the same semester, strange.

Frankly, I think they’re getting kickbacks from this project centre.

The College Auditions 2007 had a couple of good questions, and we took lots of it to the Deep Woods quiz too simply because they were good. There was less trivia in the Deep Woods quiz though, I hate trivia. Which year did, how many toenails does, useful information.

College Auditions Quiz Finals [PDF]

Every time there’s a literary event in our college, there’s a quiz. It’s one of those inevitable things. I’ll put up all of the quizzes in PDF form on this blog when I find them. This’ll teach me to be more organised. Anyway, here’s the College Auditions Prelims quiz. Simple, with a little trivia to make it painful for no reason.

College Auditions Quiz Prelims [PDF]

I was thinking perhaps it is only right that some of our college newsletter stuff should go up on the Internet if the college isn’t keen on it being in print. They can’t censor me here, and I doubt they’ll find this before I graduate. These are all from the print issue, so yes, they are carefully censored:

Creativity, are we at the end of our rope?

Creativity. It is the sole reason why we aren’t hunting for dinner or bashing women on the head and dragging them off when we want to marry them (and yes, no matter how interesting that sounds we can’t do it anymore gents, sorry).

If it weren’t for different people and their seemingly crazy ideas, life would be a whole lot more boring. Imagine life with no music, books, movies, television or any of our modern comforts. Well, think about this, every single invention that man has cooked up is the fruit of some seed of inspiration and creativity which germinates in somebody’s mind. Creativity is not just limited to art; it is applicable to every facet of our existence. BUT, as I am more concerned with how creativity applies to entertainment, I shall stop rambling and come to the point.

When new movies, books, et cetera come out these days, we find increasingly less original material. We have come to the point in our history where we have reached the conventional and contemporary limits for all facets of entertainment. And it’s not just the artists’ fault either, but also ours. The onset of Consumerism has brught artistic development to a screeching halt. Too afraid to come up with something that might upset the pblic, artists have chosen to make formula art that will please the masses and keep their fridges stocked.

Mankind has been coming up with stories and music for over 5000 years! When we view it from this angle, it’s not too hard to see why there’s a dearth of original material; it’s all been done before. Our fear of the new and of change should also be taken into account. We are getting far too comfortable with what we have already and are not ready to accept something which might be amazing but drastically different to what we are used to. As I said before, we have reached our limits. If we want to evolve not just in mind but in soul, we must cast off the chains that are binding us to yesterday and keeping us from flying. The conventional and contemporary limits of our imagination have been found wanting.

So it is up to us, the newest and latest generation of artists and people, to come up with something better, something new, something that will make people shudder with some new and hitherto unknown sensation as they experience our art. Something.

But how are we to accomplish this mammoth task? We live in MCC, Tambaram. What ever could we do to make ourselves think a lot and come up with new, original art? What, I wonder? Hmmm…