Several Things

August 22 is Madras Day, the (368th) 'birthday' of the city of Chennai, which was called Madras for almost all of its previous birthdays. Kutcheribuzz has a Madras Day website, and Chennai Metroblogging has a number of posts connected to the city and the day.


Going through newspapers that had piled up in our absence, I found an extremely interesting article about professional mourners in the Tamil fishing community. Their art, of wailing and singing songs for men who have died, is called oppari. I Googled oppari, and found this article: Professional Weeping: Music, Affect, and Hierarchy in a South Indian Folk Performance Art.


This looks very cool (via Lifehacker): a free yoga class delivered each day by podcast, from Yoga Today. Unfortunately, you have to have really broad broadband, and unlimited downloads, to benefit from it: I've been trying to download one hour-long program for hours, and it's coming very slowly. The site suggests that if you choose the higher-res download (1 GB), you leave your computer on all night, so that it will be ready for you in the morning.