The Grateful Undead

Just to remind you how mindblowingly awesome I am

Greetings mortals,

I’m going to make this as painless as possible. This here’s to tell you I had an unbelievably insane time at Web18, but before that you have to know how ultra-cool you guys have been and how much Aditya Mehta respects that.

The day I announced to people around that I was going to quit this job, they looked at me like I had asked to be injected with HIV. The day I emailed my resignation they looked at me like it was my birthday. And now, till I walk out of this place, never to return, they’ll look at me like I have cancer. Every time I crack one of my crap jokes, they look at me like I’m laughing for one of the last few times and sigh as if to say, “Soon he’ll be gone.” I’m not passing away, y’know? Sorry, here’s some toilet paper … blow thy nose.

So, I’ve grown used to telling people on the phone and at events I’m “Aditya from Buzz18 and in.com” or “Aditya from in.com and Buzz18” depending on what makes me sound more important at the time.

Man, did I feel like a hotshot critic or what, praising great stuff and trashing rubbish, being welcomed at events and mooching the booze and starters and what not. Mazaa aa gaya, baap.

Before I launch into hysterical sobbing and ejaculating over the long list of people I love from this organisation, allow me to brag about what I think is my best work with Buzz18.

I’m totally proud of my reviews of Metallica’s Death Magnetic and Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy. They’ve been my heroes since I was very young, and I felt victorious getting to write about their comeback albums. The music of Dasvidaniya was the first in a long time from the Hindi film industry to blow me away, so writing about that was fun. Writing about Chhoti Si Baat as a DVD Recco felt really good. I was exhilarated when our boss gave me the go-ahead to write how I felt about Ram Gopal Varma and his Satya.

Without further ado, the thank-you list!

Bryce Desa (for not running away or hitting me), Karen (lovely girl), Bindi Mehta (for the food and conversations), Dhwani, Nicky, Shamit, Suresh and Kartika.

Elda, Khristina and everyone else who put up with my lame humour!!

Ankush Sohoni (I’m not grateful anymore; he turned out to be a sneaky “beta male” bastard), Siddharth Bhatia – great fun, fellas! Arjun Chatterjee, Rajat Dev – it’s been cool having you’ll around. Thank you everyone I’ve smoked tobacco or other things with, everyone who smokes cigarettes in patli galli (Deepti, haha!). The HTML guys, Systems, Kunal & SFF – double thumbs up! Everyone at Web18 – whether we’ve spoken or not, I’ll remember your faces! My new friends Soumya Sahadevan and Tarini Menezes!

Zeus Unwalla!!! Being around Zeus is a study in alpha male behaviour! I received a free lesson in manliness every time I interacted with him! Zeus, thank you for making my work at in.com breezy and fun!

My people at Buzz18!!! Reuben, Shweta, Sundari, Dhruv, Johnny (rock star of Web18), Sriradha, Anjana (psychobabble at music events)!

Abhishek Mande and Anand Vaishnav – the BEST film critics in the city, I’m a fan of your U/A series!

My hot favourites – Jaya & Suranjana – the toxic twins, the poison pair… nothing can separate you except a weekly off. I love you girls!

And now, the three women directly responsible for my having been in Buzz18, who have always encouraged my writing but have made no bones about their dislike of my showering gaali-garoch on unsuspecting celebs.

My mother Rupa – Thanks for getting me into reading, mom! No more angsty stuff, I promise!

My girlfriend Nikishka – Thanks for always shaking me out of my comfort zone, babe! No more angsty stuff, I promise! (Ex-girlfriend now, I’m not that grateful.)

My boss Chandrima Pal – Thank you for sharpening my writing skills, and thank you for putting me onto more challenging stuff. Right from writing balanced reviews and the importance of being unbiased to the art of crushing without using foul language, I have learned every thing from you, boss! No more angsty stuff, I promise!

That’s it, my beloved poseurs, lest you start weeping buckets like I’m dying or some shit like that. Don’t forget me, or I’ll kick your ass all the way back to Matunga Road. Okay, that’s enough… buzz right off!

Yours,
Aditya from Buzz18 and in.com 😉

Coming soon… Still Buzz In’

Send your hate to : mehtallica@gmail.com

ASS-RIVETING DISCLAIMER: The author knows all his friends, colleagues and soon to be ex-employers agree with him for a change. He also expects a hero’s farewell, with gun shots and all that.

(Parting shot from my Buzz18 blog  “Lashkar-E-Shaitan”)

The Greatest Pure Heavy Metal Album Ever

-by Devdutt Nawalkar

CRYSTAL LOGIC IS THE GREATEST PURE HEAVY METAL ALBUM EVER PUT TO TAPE.

Don’t gawk at me, asshole, because it’s the ill-begotten bastard’s honest truth. There is absolutely no record that tickles me in all the right spots when I’m pissed three sheets to the wind like this thing. Mark Shelton is a fucking heavy metal GOD of the most elevated degree imaginable, and screw your ears if you think otherwise. In a way, this album is the ultimate proof of the implausibility of God’s existence. Because if he did exist, Crystal Logic would be ranked alongside the Master of Realitys, the Stained Classes, the Piece of Minds, the Master of Puppets, the fucking Reign in Bloods, etc of metaldom. But it doesn’t, and that’s how fate sucks you down the shithole called life.

What can one say about these songs? Mark Shelton innovated the whole fucking epic, power metal genre. Actually, calling it power metal is doing him a big fucking disservice because of the stigma that has come to be attached to most modern power metal. There is something utterly timeless about these songs. It doesn’t matter if you discovered Crystal Logic yesterday. There is a sort of musty, mildewy quality that will transport you back to a time when writing songs was worth a whit, when people knew how to walk the line between melody and attitude, and, most importantly, when there was a sense of adventure in exploring what lurked next to the obscure corners of a heady sound. “But, hey! There’s plenty bands who did that back in the day!”. Right, fucker. they did. That doesn’t excuse you from not caring about fucking Crystal Logic, does it?

Crystal Logic had a thin, tweedy guitar tone, cardboard drums, and Mark Shelton sang, with a nasal twang, about lost cities of the dead and old Norse legends. Not sound appealing? GO. FUCK. YOURSELF.

The music business is a bitch of monumental proportions. They play whore to accessibility and yet they fail to take notice of a ridiculously catchy yet completely balls-to-the-wall classic like this. Look at the opening 1-2-3 on here for chrissakes! Has there ever been a greater, more singable opener than ‘Necropolis’?

Through the Jungle by the River Styx

I’ve journeyed far and long this day

Lurking Shadows by the parapets

They’ll never make me turn away!

Holy shit I see the wraiths! They glide along in serpentine form with palms beggared forth for my soul! Away, ghouls! Away to the festering depths of putrefying filth from whence you sprang!

A-C-B-A-F… blah blah. SIMPLE and yet so elegantly METAL as all hell! (I’m trying to sound cool because that’s the first Manilla Road song I ever learnt) Mark Shelton proved just what he could do with a simple minor scale right here; the solo here is one of the most perfectly placed and concise breaks in all metal. Lots of trilled notes and an ingeniously individualistic style of playing the guitar, rooted in the basics yet reaching for the ether. He’s got to be a wet dream for an underground jam room; I’ve always had the feeling that he can take his playing to wherever the heck he wants over the course of extended wankathon.

I’m just going to throw out thoughts as they coalesce because this is precisely how a drunk sounds two quarts down the stretch. Hey, you learn something new everyday! Going back to the obvious infectiousness of these songs, the 80s was obviously a time for the radiosluts. You know, the Ratts and the Crues and the like. Shelton even chose to toss a freebie like ‘Feeling Free Again’ to lure in the ADD-addled junta. Too bad he succeeded in making the song so kickass. Seriously, if the whole pop-metal fad sounded half as good as this thing, I’d as gladly don permed hair as munch down on a nun’s slit. Admittedly, it’s weird to hear Shelton sing “Hey baby” in his Uncle Scrooge-on-roids-voice. I think that’s what drove the chicks away towards ‘Cherry Pie’.

But then ‘The Riddle Master’ comes along to plunge you into the morose depths of misery. And what joyous Sabbath-influenced despair it is! Road fans, heed my cry ” aaaaaaargh Nooo Noo Noo Noooo!” Motherfuck, bang, thrash, destroy! God, I’m an ageing uncle and I do this.. FUCK YOU! Sweet immaturity, don’t deign desert me! Let your Shaolin Cymbals rain down thunder of frivolous rage upon my balding head oh yes!

The Veils of Negative Existence! Oh shit, I’ve come! In gasping, throbbing spurts, I squirt the fluid of life! Do you smell the lead? God, “I sail the seas of negativity to banish evil from this place!……I will never put my sword down! I will never run away! In the Veils of Negative Existence, I am the Master Here to Stay!”. Oh Christ, if you know metal like I do, you will feel the chills break on your skin, you will feel weak in the knee, and you will feel something twist and break inside.

I laid myself down into bed

To sleep away the night

A vision from inside my head

A sun with no sunlight

Oh, mommy! Tears, fucking tears well up inside these eyes. Ducts befouled, keep you shit to yourselves! In time, I’ve come to appreciate ‘Dreams of Eschaton’ as THE alpha-male of all heavy metal songs. The softly mumbled intro over humble acoustic strains, the aggressive, neck-snapping theme that leads into the EPIC “Before the Gods of Hell sentence you to die:…yeah? you know it, don’t you? “When Ragnarok Comes Down, We’ll All Run Out of Time”!

6:34, and the solo starts. Go to bed, honey, ‘cuz you could never dream of coming up with anything as simple yet as breathtakingly legendary and thriving with emotion as this. People look four corners when I mention Mark Shelton – all I need do is point them to this bit. How does someone come up with something so leviathanic, if that’s even a word, with something so basic? I wish I knew, I really do. It’s total alchemy to my ears.

I’m a pretty hard guy, but Crystal Logic makes me cry. I think it’s hard for most folks to comprehend the way I feel about heavy metal, especially at times of heightened sensory cognition like these. I’d only like to paraphrase the signature of a certain Nolan Lewis of Kryptos fame – “If it’s not within you, thou wilt never understand.” Get Crystal Logic – it’s mandatory.

5 Indian Alpha Males You Should Know About

Yesterday was International Men’s Day, and that’s when this list would’ve been published had not the manliest and most alpha male of them all been busy razing a shitty Italian restaurant to the ground. Here’s the other four Indian alpha males you must know about, and I’ll get the obvious out of the way first.

Ram Gopal Varma

Laugh all you want, RGV has made the most kickass movies and continues to do so without giving a shit about what any of you think. When his superhit film Satya finished its terrific run at the box office, someone from the underworld called and threatened to fuck all the cinema hall owners off if they stopped screening the greatest Hindi movie ever made and showed anything lesser in its place. Ram Gopal Varma drinks, lifts weights, works with Amitabh Bachchan, has made Satya, Company, Shiva, Sarkar and Raat, and from what I hear, bangs a different hot chick everyday. MAN.

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Amitabh Bachchan

If there’s anybody who claims to have never heard of this man, please crawl out of your mother’s womb, I say. As if playing the ‘hero’ and ‘anti-hero’ in countless Hindi movies wasn’t enough, this superior male still crushes every other person alive by just being himself. Continues to send ALL the other male movie stars flying and still makes countless women across the world cream their panties. The only man alive who can pip everyone from James Bond to James Hetfield. Here’s a line from RGV’s masterpiece Satya, which is very similar to what any Indian will tell you if you are a male who happens to be displaying aggression. “Ay, Amitabh Bachchan.” MAN.

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Emile Jerome Mathew

Remember the guy who killed Neeraj Grover and cut his body in 300 pieces? Emile Jerome Mathew represents the modern caveman who won’t take shit from inferior males. EJM flew down from wherever the fuck he was as he suspected Neeraj Grover of trying to get into EJM’s girlfriend Maria Susairaj’s pants, which she seemed eager to jump out of anyway. So EJM barged into Maria’s flat, where a naked Neeraj Grover shat his pants (which he wasn’t wearing then). Navy Officer Emile Jerome Mathew stabbed the living crap out of Neeraj Grover, fucked his girlfriend TWICE, and then chopped Grover’s corpse into 300 neat little bits. You may call it cold-blooded murder, I call it honour killing. MAN.

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Tiger Memon

Portrayed brilliantly by Pavan Malhotra in Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday, Ibrahim Abdul Razak Memon isn’t known as Tigerbhai for nothing. Pissed off at Hindu faggots for tormenting Muslims and setting his shop on fire  during the anti-Muslim riots in 1992, Tiger Memon screamed, “Aakha Mahim jala dalega main!”, but ended up burning a lot more than Mahim with his rage. Here’s to Tigerbhai, the MAN who makes the bus-burning, pebble-throwing Shiv Sainiks and MNS ghaatis look like little girls in frocks. Till ’93, it’d be laughable to think anyone could knock Dawood Ibrahim off the ‘most wanted’ lists, but Tiger Memon raced ahead of him by ass-fucking India and fingering the rest of the world by rocking Bombay with a few explosions. “Inshallah, iss saal dhamaka hoga!” MAN.

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As for the 5^th and most alpha of all males, man among men, king of all kings, father of my nation, I was bragging endlessly about myself as usual to a friend and told her that even International Men’s Day happens to fall on my birthday. She was quick to point out that November 19^th is also World Toilet Day.

LIST: Indian Musicians You Didn’t Know Were Vegan