TAAQing

Here’s the short-list for the PaperPulitzers 2009. And, no surprise, it’s the same as the long list! To vote, go to the poll on the right sidebar!

In this edition of That Day This Morning, Hari Adivarekar asks: “Which was the first huge international act that TAAQ supported?”

Fire away your answers to taaqmail[at]yahoo[duht]com or use the form below

TIMES OF NEED is not on time but that’s because we’ve been saving ourselves some trouble for the yearend holiday season. So, you will notice that the November-December issue is a double-issue — your first-ever! Which also means that in the effort to give you some extra reading material, we’ve compromised on our tagline ‘No more page threes’. In this issue:

grammyGrammy Nim Ajji*

Oh, oh, oh, oh, ohhhh, ohh-oh-e-ohh-oh-oh
I’ll get him hot, show him what I’ve got
Oh, oh, oh, oh, ohhhh, ohh-oh-e-ohh-oh-oh,
I’ll get him hot, show him what I’ve got

Is that another musical epiphany like the one that made Rajeev pen the lyrics for Sold? Nope, says TAAQ’s drummer. Those are the lyrics for Poker Face, Lady Gaga’s Grammy nomination for Song of the Year. Songwriters: Germanotta, Stefani, Khayat, Nadir.

Impressive, eh? “I think Germanotta wrote ‘oh’, Stefani wrote ‘ohhhh’, Khayat wrote ‘ohh-oh-e-ohh-oh-oh’ and Nadir just stood there looking HAWTT!” he says.

*For the un-Bangalored: Nim Ajji, a mildly ribald term of endearment, is Kannada for ‘your granny’

climate1Hot earth, cold feet

A magazine cover went: ‘Can we save this fragile Earth?’ Heck, it’s us who are fragile. Once we’ve all been expurgated in a cloud of greenhouse gas, good old Gaia will take a well-deserved few million years off and be ready to welcome other, maybe less ‘intelligent’ but more ‘aware’ species.

But then again, if there is one turning point in the history of mankind that screwed everything up, it’s the creation of the drum machine.

Jailhouse Crock

raju01We learn that the shamed and now imprisoned boss of Satyam has asked for a few simple pleasures to make his incarceration worth the time. Buttermilk? Yes, said the guards. Guntur Chicken? Hmmm, ok. Gongura pickle? Ok, but only on Sundays. You can already see where this is leading, so why wouldn’t the prison authorities?
By the time he got to asking the management for what he really, really wanted (nope, not a Spice Girl), the authorities had enough. So when Raju wanted a laptop, they shook their heads. “There is a mouse in his prison cell, let him make do with that,” the warden was reported as saying (off the record, of course).

Tiger, Tiger burning out?

savethetigerIt is every cat’s prerogative to bring home something that disgusts the hell out of his folks. When you’re a big cat, that something has to be bigger and badder and smellier than most. But then again, not every cat has the privilege of driving (yeah, we know it’s a responsibility, not a privilege) a Cadillac Escalade. You should know, if you are Tiger Woods.

Inspired by Frank Zappa and our own favourite ditty Paper Puli (Plan B, 2004), were born the PaperPulitzers — our (hopefully) annual awards for journalism about Thermal And A Quarter that bends the word, reinvents the game, changes the rules and does just about everything but get the story right.

On November 18, 2009 we slept through an important anniversary — it was a full ten years since our first website went up into cyberspace (yes, that was what they all liked to call it then along with other shibboleths like Information Superhighway, etc.). Anyhoo, it was our first great gig in the sky.