Song Sketches: Coloring Outside the Lines

By Ananda | Published: June 20, 2008

Front cover for Coloring Outside the LinesAfter years and years and years, I’ve finally gotten around to getting the existing Song Sketches stuff together and compile a somewhat coherent collection of what we were about. To get an idea, you could start by reading the description of the band at the main part of the 2657 Productions site, but there’s always more to a story, right?
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iPower Kills Me….

By Ananda Mahto | Published: June 19, 2008

Seriously! My relationship with this web-host has been seriously a love/hate one.

In the past couple of months, it has been more of a hate one, especially with all the problems I had while they were moving my account to their new hosting system. In the process, a lot of my subdomains got totally screwed up, and everything was redirecting automatically to the root of the site. A few back and forts later with online tech-support and my “ticket tracker”, and I decided to just take down all of the stuff, reset all the subdomains, and re-upload. Not a huge problem, but still pretty inconvenient.

So, anyway, it seems like things are back where they should be, and working how they should.

On a positive note, it seems like they’ve finally given unlimited subdomains, meaning I might be able to try out the multi-user version of WordPress and actually have each “site” as a subdomain instead of a /something. We’ll see. I’m being cautious for a little while.

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“Self portraits” aka “The end of an era”

By Ananda Mahto | Published: March 29, 2008
Braidless Beardless Monster

It’s the end of an era, I guess. My trademark is no more. I’m serious. It’s gone. My built-in cat-toy… my man-leash…—whatever you want to call that strange braided patch of long hair that I have had for what? Fifteen years?—met its fate with a pair of scissors on Sunday, March 23, 2008.

Seeing that I had shaved my beard some two weeks before that, I guess it is going to be a lot more difficult to do self portraits now (see Exhibit A).

Oh well.

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Promoting people who don’t need promoting…

By Ananda Mahto | Published: March 12, 2008

… but I’ve been enjoying this too much to not point it out for people who aren’t following what goes on in the Nine Inch Nails world. Reminds me of the kind of stuff that John would probably do….

Oh, and if anyone wants to buy me the $75 version available from Artists in Residence, my Indian bank account and I won’t argue….

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Six new old stories….

By Ananda Mahto | Published: February 18, 2008

I was ego-surfing the internet archives the other day, and I realized that some of the posts that I had made before my old server went down had actually been archived there and not simply lost to the digital graveyard. I’ve decided to pre-date them to match the dates they were originally posted, so you can either jump to the end of the archives and poke around or you can cheat and pick from the list below:

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Compassion and Empathy and Sticks and Stones

By Ananda Mahto | Published: December 8, 2007

For people in a country that is supposed to be based on Gandhian principles of tolerance and pacifism and where people won’t eat meat because all animals are God’s creatures or whatever, most Indians I’ve observed sure seem to have a strange way of showing compassion for animals.

It looks like a special kind of hatred found only in people who may actually be too stupid to know better.

Maybe that’s cruel and exaggerated. After all, they decorate their godly cows so beautifully, right? And worship them at Pongal and paint them in fantastic colors. So how can I say that they’re hateful?
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Reality Control? Compilations

By Ananda Mahto | Published: October 22, 2007

After quite some time, I’ve decided to get around to taking some stuff off my minidiscs again, converting them to mp3s, and uploading some more music. This time, I’ve decided to revisit some of the cool stuff that John Lyons used to release. (John’s much too busy doing much cooler things these days, so he doesn’t spend time putting out cool records with nice hand-silk-screened covers and so on. I guess we can’t have too much of a good thing, right?)

Anyway, here, I’ve uploaded the two Reality Control? compilations released on Reality Control? Recordings a long time ago.

View the rest of this post to find yourself some music to enjoy!
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The Birth of Mithun

By Ananda Mahto | Published: September 18, 2007

There are times when India really makes me laugh….

… I mean, other than things like watching Bollywood videos where it seems like people are always going through weird mating rituals replete with bright costumes, head bobbing, and peculiar synchronized dancing….

… or like the time that a student asked me to download a song for him. “There is this Hindi song, Hum Honge Kaamyab,” he said, “and it has been remade into an English song called ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Can you see if you can download it for us to play at next week’s cultural event?”

“Sure,” I said, deciding not to correct him. “I’ll see what I can do.”

But I couldn’t help sharing the story with someone else.

“No. You’re wrong,” they told me. “Of course it’s a Hindi song.”

“How do you know for sure?” I asked.

“Because we have a version of it in all our local languages.”

Pete Seeger, you’d better relinquish your copyright….

Anyway, this post isn’t about “We Shall Overcome,” but, there is some happy “overcoming” in this story. This post is about the mithun—and animal whose appearance “gave endless hopes to the people and fulfilled their aspirations.” The following is the text of a story, The Birth of Mithun. Because the text is a little too funny to be believable, I’ve also included a scan of the three pages from the book as proof that, unlike my claim that We Shall Overcome is an English song, this isn’t something I’ve made up in my spare time.

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Sat. Jan 27 – In Delhi, living like royalty…

By Ananda Mahto | Published: March 18, 2007

What an interesting morning. We all woke up very well-rested from our comfortable business hotel, but nevertheless, were dissatisfied with the pricing, location, and so on. We were most dissatisfied by their treatment of our driver, however. They wouldn’t provide a room for him (most hotels make some form of accommodations for drivers) and when he asked for a blanket so he could sleep in his car, they wouldn’t give him one! Since they hadn’t confirmed us for two nights anyway, we decided to open up our options.


The ladies chillin at the Imperial while waiting for our room to be made up….

Henny went to Amy, and speaking in part for Karin, but I think more for herself, said she wanted to stay somewhere nice for this, our last night of traveling. She put out a very luxurious budget that had Raj scratching his head in confusion. Raj was even more confused when we finally settled on our hotel for the night: The Imperial. Well, with a name like that….

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