Living in India, I get a lot of opportunity to buy knock off goods, otherwise known as black market merchandise. That can include branded sports gear such as Nike, Reebok, Puma, for like Rs. 600... (That's about $12 US dollars!) the latest books for Rs 50..($1 US dollar!) or even Lacoste t-shirts for Rs 150....($3 US dollars) I could go on with this list, naming all the things I could buy off the black market for dirt cheap but I'll refrain...

Let's start with my favorite black market purchase: BOOKS!!! Counterfeit books are so made on the streets of India by street hawkers. They get their hands on original books which they then have illegal copies made by local printing shops.(Slip a couple hundred rupees under the table and the printing companies get their cut off this black market deal.) The books can then be bought off the street for 1/10th of the price. Famous author Jeffrey Archer gave an interview to the Pune Mirror when visiting Pune. He was pretty surprised when he was handed a counterfeit copy of his own book by one of the interviewers. I think he was more shocked at how efficiently his book was copied to be made into a pirated book. I dont have a very good picture but here's a small snap of the article in Pune Mirror with the headlines "Jeffrey Archer Stumped By His Pirated Thriller"



Now black market merchandise can ideally be categorized into 2 groups. There's the stuff that's real, which is usually made here in India itself or in countries like China by the brands themselves. When a surplus of merchandise is made and the brands don't need all of it, they have whatever they need shipped back to the good ol' USA or Europe or wherever they need it and the extras go into the black market to be sold. Then there's local "craftsman" who like to make imitation merchandise. It's not the real thing but some of them do a pretty damn good job of copying the real thing, that you end up liking the imitation better than the real thing! Below are some examples of counterfeit sneakers you DON'T wanna buy... Lol... yeah they have some goofy stuff out there. But you gotta know where to find the good stuff...



(These ones don't even look real...but believe you me there are the percentage of Indians who don't know any better and buy it just to wear something that says "Adidas"! Talk about brand starved people??!?)

 This photograph below shows one of the many stalls on the street where you can buy counterfeit clothing.As you can see at this stall they're selling boxers with brand names such as Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Hugo Boss, Emporio Armani, Reebok and much more... (You name it, they have it!)


My point is this. Why should I buy a pair of Pumas for $90 when I can get the same thing for $12? Generations today have become so obsessed with brands that they are willing to pay through their nose to have "Nike. Just Do It" pasted across their chest. Why should we be paying companies for advertising their brand names on our clothes? If anything WE should be getting paid for being their personal billboards.

The even more surprising bit is you'll probably get a better pair of branded sneakers off the street than by going to the actual store. Most of the actual stores in India dont take the effort of maintaining their merchandise. If you've ever been to India you'll know there's naturally a lot of dust in the air. The shoes they offer are so musty with the dust from around the store, they almost look used. You don't even get the joy of having squeaky white new shoes to wear, when you buy them brand new! But these street sellers? Theyre pros. They know people are going to buy something that looks nice. So even if they have their stall right next to an overflowing gutter of garbage and travel through the smog ridden city, they make sure their goods are nicely wrapped away in plastic to retain newness. Isn't this what we learned about in school? Supply and demand, competition? If you have a better product  you're going to get more people crazy about buying it! Is it our problem if the fakes are selling better and look more appealing than the originals? So why should we feel guilty for buying on the blackmarket?

Music,
Like love and lust, has roots in the soul.
You drive me mad with your A notes,
Making me wild like a staff with no lines.
Kisses placed randomly on paper as notes turn into high screams and low moans.
 
Love,
Like anger flows through my veins and burns me,
So does the fire produced by every key you hit.
Taking me higher into a world where there is no dissonance,
And every sound, from every voice, melts into one word:
 
Lust,
Dances to the sound produced as sweat drips tenderly off your skin.
Hands roaming gently; our hearts the bass, beat, and background.
Hit that note for me, touch me where everything makes sense and I become the star in your opera show. Make me the soprano you know I am while my Soul,
Is Infatuated and drowning in your...

Music.
  

So hmmm.... I've decided to have a special weekly post on every Thursday to showcase the things I really love. It's not gonna be some sappy shit. I'm talking websites, photographs, people, news, ideas, concepts...just something random I come across that I really really dig. I think part of the reason we have blogs is to let our inner emotions, thoughts and philosophies out. But we should take the time to focus on our external inspirations as well... I dont know bout you, but I feel my Things I Love Thursday posts will remind me to do that, to think about what inspires me from the outside, from other people's creativity, from things surrounding me... from life itself.. I will also count down the Thursdays each week... with 53 Thursdays in 2009 we are currently on the 25th Thursday of the year, so... I thought I would start my first Thursday post discussing a website i really loved.. I came across it a week or two ago. Since my field is internet marketing I come across a lot of interesting stuff every once in a while.


It's called Dream Grove...


This is their homepage. http://www.dreamgrove.org You must be wondering how I found a homepage with a picture of the mud in a garden with an open pomegranate fallen down appeals to me? Well...here's how it works.
Dream Grove is an interactive website where you can visit to record your dreams. Like an online portal that records anyone's dream from across the world. You click on the pomegranate and it will whisk you to their database of dreams which you can browse through... It looks pretty cool and you can read what other people have recorded. In this portal you can record an actual dream you had or something which you dream of as in wish for, desire.... Here's how all the dreams look... pretty neat huh? If you click on the hole to the left of the tree stump that's where you can record your dream. clicking on the tree stump takes you to a little writeup about the garden itself and the details involving the actual garden itself (I will explain more later on...) If you click on the worm to the right (I thought it was so cute how it wiggles and sways when you hover your mouse over it..!) that will show you information about the project  and the concept itself... Once you get on the website... its soo amazing... and surprises you how pretty the mud looks (they've used some animation to make the soil sparkle!)


This is the page you come to when you click on the pomegranate. Each dot represent someone who has visited this website and recorded their dream. Each dream is categorized by color of dot, mood, date, name, and number. The black toolbox on the left is how you can search for dreams. But honestly, I think if I had to mention something negative...needs to work on their search mechanism because when I tried to search for the dream I had recorded on here a couple weeks ago I couldn't find it when I searched for my name. but its still interesting to see what others had written..  Here's Dream 199 just to give you an example:




Now you're probably thinking, this is it? cooollll.... no it's not over yet.... !! Now what happens next is simply colossal!!! Now these dreams that everyone can record online are sent to a database in Greece I think it is... where there's a garden... a pomegrante garden. Like a realll garden... The garden is built in with strategically placed hidden speakers where these dreams are whispered out along with garden sounds... And people in Greece can actually visit the garden and if they listen carefully and quietly... they can walk around and listen to the dreams of people from across the world. How pretty is that?? According to the creator he defines the purpose of Dream Grove as the following:


"Dream Grove is about writing, then speaking, one’s innermost emotion, wish, or instinct; it makes public private memories that can never be fully owned.  Using technologies of exposure and representation it generates a surreal break in reality, and gives back to speaking, writing and drifting some of their long-lost aura."

I also found the site to be very humbling as the creator of this concept listed all his inspirations to do this project... and let me tell you it was not just a couple... It was a huge list of things... here they are... (Reading that Aristotle was one of his inspirations, took me back to my highschool days when I was studying Aristotle in a Humanities course I was doing. I really loved that class...



Inspirations of Dream Grove:
Aristotle, On Memory and Reminiscence
Aristotle, On Dreams
Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Polyphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
Andre Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism
Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel
Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths
Ingmar Bergman, Wild Strawberries
Frances Yates, The Art of Memory
John Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness
Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire:  a Plant’s Eye View of the World

Petros Babasikas is the creator of this concept Dimitris Doukas who helped engineer the concept and Lambros Pigounis was the sound artist.

As of the time being this concept is a temporary exhibition at a Athens Byzantine Museum but the creators are looking for a permanent location where they can continue to run Dream Grove...

If you decide to visit Dream Grove I'd love to hear what you thought of it (good or bad, I like unbiased opinions), and have you found any interesting websites that inspired you lately?

As promised i'll be posting up my poems sporadically in the next coming weeks... it took me a while to type them all out and find them and what not.... I found them when I had gone back to the US in March... It was a pleasant surprise because after not knowing where my poems were for the last 3 yrs and having no backup on the computer I had given up hope of ever finding them again. Anyways you'll probably find my poems pretty mundane. I've not written much lately. Most of these are from quite a while ago... But at least this blog will have a personal account of my poetry... hopefully it will also inspire me to write some new stuff... ok blah... Well today I feel a little more optimistic bout my day. I mean I was pretty alright by the end of yesterday.



I was so distressed wondering what I should do about getting an ipod (repair/replace the old one with an apple exchange costing 7 grand or going in for a brand new one...) so I've finally figured it out... I think most of our problems if we take the time to think we can solve on our own... I just dont think we realise so unless we are forced to and then we are surprised when we are able to...  Anyways Ipods suck and I hate Apple now but I've decided that I'll save up and still get another ipod inspite of hating them for life now..It would be around 10 to 13 grand... They dont make the 80 gb anymore but a lot of private stores in India still sell them. If I'm getting the one year warranty I'll definitely just buy that. I honestly dont want the 120 gb ipod. yeah u heard me. Just like phones I'm sure the same rule will apply with ipods. the more gb and memory you're dealing with, the more likely it will hang and slow down. Plus i really don't know what I'll do with 120 gb on my ipod??!! I had an 80 gb and I have never in my 2 yrs of having one, filled it up completely. Of course that was because I didnt have enough space on my computer to fill enough stuff to put on my ipod. but after getting a flash drive i now can! so wish me luck on that..... hmmmm...... ok I have to get back to work.... this light is turned off...

well i got back from California a while back... exactly a month to the tee.... I had planned on writing lots while I was in california but I think I just absorbed in all the lolling around and laziness and just enjoying myself, my time with my family. doing nothing that I just didn't write in here all this time... Lots happened of course. Like a fellow blogger once wrote which I liked very much... " It always means life is good when I'm not writing in here" loll.. the good thing is that i got to do a lot of thinking while i was there.... and in turn it has affected the way i look at life and i've made the necessary changes to make it go in the direction where I'm happy with myself and my life. One major change I made was I got out of the damaging relationship I was in. I think I stuck on much longer than necessary because I was scared of being alone. Its kinda sad, it's like I would rather be unhappy with myself and my relationship and the direction my life was going in than be alone and that said a lot about my independence. Every time I brought up the issues with my boyfriend at the time (now my ex) he stopped caring about what those issues were because he knew sooner or later even though I said I wanted to break up or if i was upset or mad at him he knew Id take him back. He had become used to taking me for granted. He laid a hand on me more times than I can count on my fingers. It was all eating me up inside. I had the courage and the time to take a look at my life and what I had in it when chilling at home in California. I think that time and space of being away from my ex helped me get the confidence to tell him to F*ck off. When I finally got back I told him I had had enough and I broke up with him... 2 weeks into my vacation I got an email from my boss that the process went back and we had been laid off. In his terms we hadn't technically been laid off since he was offering jobs in another process taking calls. But no way was I going back to those damn night shifts and taking calls.. The devil couldn't drag me there.. So he asked me whether I wanted to put down my papers or what I wanted to do... I told him without a doubt put my papers down... My boss tried to tempt me with false promises or as i like to call it "give the monkey a banana" but I had heard his promises plenty of times and seen them fall through. In fact I wanted to leave 6 months earlier and I realized with the recession it would be smarter to stick on than to switch jobs...so I stayed even though I hated the management and job itself because there was no work... It was kind of stressful to be at home trying to enjoy a nice relaxed holiday after what a bajillion years??? only to find out that suddenly I had no job...It was kind of unnerving but I knew Id always been resourceful and lucky bout finding a job so I was keen to get back to Pune soon and start my job hunting.. Id also realized my break into the internet marketing field was a god send and I wanted to continue working in the SEO (Search engine optimization) field because I really learned a lot and was genuinely interested in this career. When i got back I had to deal with the ugliness of ending a relationship where my ex just didn't want to end it, or couldn't come to terms that I was ending it... In many ways it wasn't fair because i had a whole month to come to terms that I didn't want this relationship anymore and that I was done with his abuse and his overpowering nature and then I came back to Pune and just shocked the hell out of him by telling him its over... but then that's life. And he deserved it for the way he treated me... I was so busy trying to convince myself that everything was fine and perfect I had even camouflaged the parts of my relationship that should have had me running... When i stepped back to analyze the whole relationship I had with my ex and what it had evolved into and all the warning signs along the way I just felt so foolish for letting it roll on this long.. I guess I deserved it because exactly 2 yrs ago I was in a relationship with a guy. A very special guy... I told everyone I had met him in college when I was in NY but the truth was I had met him in a chatroom online. We were both 18 back then. young and stupid and I was madly in love with this stranger that i had never met...To cut a long story short I moved to India to do my college degree and lost touch with him. In 2007 I bumped into him online and I found out he was in Mumbai and we finally met for the first time...He was getting out of a bad relationship.. I had just been seperated from my ex husband who had kicked me out and abandoned me...It was love at first click...We had a relationship for 7 months i think before he had to go back to Kuwait after his oracle studies were finished.. I thought Id never see him again. I never thought he was serious about me so I dumped him when I met a college friend who was interested in dating me... It was the ugliest meanest thing Ive ever done to anyone... if you knew me Im usually the person who gets dumped so this was a real first for me... I felt so horrible but I thought it was the right thing to do... I was unintentionally crueler than necessary because I didnt have the balls to tell him that i was dating someone else and he saw those pics on orkut... it mustve been a bitchy thing... ugh... anyways we kinda talked once in a blue moon.. but since then that guy from college turned out to be a bastard and then i got stuck with this guy whos now my ex for the past year trying to convince myself it was meant to be.... and then by chance while i was at the end of my trip in california i happened to send him a wallpaper of this band he got me into... i never even expected him to respond... and if anything prolly something mean and bitter for the way that i had left him heartbroken.. but instead it was his pouring out of feelings for the way his life has been since i left him.. and how he missed those days of hanging out with me... and how his parents want him to settle down...and he cant picture settling down with just any chick... but he wanted someone like me.... so since that day... we havent committed committed... we're sorta kinda back together but we wanna see where this takes us... he wants to come back and see how things are with me.. and if he still feels the vibe then i guess we're planning on getting married. i just feel blessed that im getting a second chance with him... i hope and pray that it works out... since then everything has been going right for me... i got this super amazing job in pune doing internet marketing and im learning so much and i love my boss. Im so excited... I just hope everything goes as planned... because im getting too old to deal with anymore mistakes int he relationship department... anywho.... i think this is a long ramble enough.... will write more next time... maybe continue the story or tell u whats up currently... either way... it feels good to be back and bloggging... hmmmmm.... this light is turned offf...