my mother is -so weird-. i was being a little off, forgetting whether "program" or "programme" was right in our asian former-british-colony-learning-the-queen's-english context, and she asked if i have "magnesia, amnesia or lysistrata". and my dad said that i should've called my character 'roti prata'. well, yeah.. if we'd gone with a singapore context thing that might've been vaguely funny. my parents are warped beings.

anyway, last night went off well, i think. energy high, projection better than the previous night, 8 out of 10 rather than friday's 6 out of 10 according to jireh, scene transitions looked much better from what i could see behind the black curtain. although i flubbed a couple of times, came in a bit too early on the line at joshua's entrance, somehow the "superannuated cow" got flubbed again, and choon hwee fell flat on her arse! but we salvaged that fairly decently i think, and wiggy got a video of the entire thing. only thing is, i didn't have time to check the tape before, so i probably erased something. i hope it wasn't dramafest. i don't really care about china/mexico/newzealand videos. the super-extra dramafest videos... which i still need to transfer onto cd somehow. i don't know how to connect my videocam to my computer! yes i am a technological neanderthal (or something.)

post-production, off to holland v. was craving a good bowl of pasta but everywhere pasta-able was packed, and we were left with kfc so i had a scoop of haagen dazs, a drink from starbucks and a burger and whipped potato from kfc. a very odd dinner, and then a surprisingly intellectual conversation about the templar revelation - a book which i now have to acquire, along with 'a home at the end of the world' and 'angels and demons'. dan brown is quite fantastic, although i have to agree with (someone, can't remember if it was tim or mike.. or someone else?) that plot-wise the da vinci code disappointed towards the end. but the factual side of it, the actual revelation, that was fantastic. but credibility is an issue, being that dan brown is obviously anti-Church. Or to be precise, anti-Vatican, anti-ChristianEstablishment. Something like that. but yes, i have books to read. currently reading zadie smith's 'the autograph man', less than 50 pages in and it isn't particularly fascinating (yet, i hope, because i have great respect for zadie smith's writing.) but come to think of it, 'white teeth' wasn't the most enthralling read either, but it was good all the same. hmm. renewed, or new-found respect for certain intelligent life-forms.

talking about religion and stuff, my mom just forwarded me something immensely interesting and that i largely agree with.
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Writer Shashi Tharoor's views on Hinduism and his reasoning of why he would like to stick to his faith:

'I grew up in a Hindu household. Our home (and my father moved a dozen times in his working life) always had a prayer room, where paintings and portraits of assorted divinities jostled for shelf and wall space with fading photographs of departed ancestors, all stained by ash scattered from the incence burned daily by my devout parents. Every morning, after his bath, my father would stand in front of the prayer room wrapped in his towel, his wet hair still uncombed, and chant his Sanskrit mantras. But he never obliged me to join him, he exemplified the Hindu idea that religion is an intensely personal matter, that prayer is between you and whatever image of your maker you choose to worship.

In the Indian way, I was to find my own truth. Like most Hindus, I think I have. I am a believer, despite a brief period of schoolboy atheism (of the kind that comes with the discovery of rationality and goes with an acknowledgement of its limitations - and with the realization that the world offers too many wondrous mysteries for which science has no answers). And I am happy to describe myself as a believing Hindu, not just because it is the faith into which I was born, but for a string of other reasons, though faith requires no reason.

One is cultural, as a Hindu I belong to a faith that expresses the ancient genius of my own people. Another is, for lack of a better phrase, its intellectual 'fit' : I am more comfortable with the belief structures of Hinduism than I would be with those of the other faiths of which I know. As a Hindu, I claim adherence to a religion without an established church or priestly papacy, a religion whose rituals and customs I am free to reject, a religion that does not oblige me to demonstrate my faith by any visible sign, by subsuming my identity in any collectivity, not even by a specific day or time or frequency of worship. As a Hindu, I subscribe to a creed that is free of the restrictive dogmas of holy writ, that refuses to be shackled to the limitations of a single holy book. Above all, as a Hindu I belong to the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. I find it immensely congenial to be able to face my fellow human beings of other faiths without being burdened by the conviction that I am embarked upon a "true path" that they have missed. This dogma lies at the core of Christianity, Islam and Judaism - "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, no man cometh unto the Father (God), but by me" (John 14:6), says the Bible. "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet," declares the Koran - denying unbelievers all possibility of redemption, let alone of salvation or paradise. Hinduism however, asserts that all ways of belief are equally valid, and Hindus readily venerate the saints, and the sacred objects, of other faiths. How can such a religion lend itself to fundamentalism?

Large, eclectic, agglomerative, the Hinduism that I know understands that faith is a matter of hearts and minds, not of bricks and stone. " Build Ram in your heart, "the Hindu is enjoined, and if Ram is in your heart, it will little matter where else he is or is not.'
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Ok the article sort of indirectly implies that Hinduism is a better religion than others, and it isn't true that Hindus 'readily venerate the saints, and the sacred objects, of other faiths' - I know my mother wouldn't, and neither would my grandfather. My dad does however have an aunt who's extremely Hinduly religious but has a statue of the infant Jesus prominently on display in her prayer room. In fact that's a common thing in Bangalore. There are lots of Hindus there who worship the infant Jesus, for some reason. It's quite a cool phenomenon. I must find out the reason for it sometime. But anyway, I liked the article so much because it perfectly describes why I like being a Hindu despite all my questioning of and cynicism about religion. why, probably, a lot of modern Hindus like being Hindu. What do you say, Vaish?

ok now i have a lot of work to do. i have to find a lot of stuff in my dumping-ground of a desk, and i have to do three history essays, one literature essay, three math assignments and what else. and i have to join my parents for dinner tonight at someone's place, after fine arts. how annoying is that. i hate going for parents' dinner parties. they're the most boring things ever. ugh.