Unlike the previous years, this year’s SITEX holds the credit of not going for typical mono-lingual bands (like Fossils, Prithibi etc.). Instead, we were given the promise that we will be given the chance to see the performance of ‘Underground Authority’, a newly formed band from Kolkata, the members of which like to call their genre as ‘Alternative Rap Rock / Protest Poetry’.

Band members:
Santhanam Srinivasan Iyer (alias/aka : Epr) – Vocalist
Adil Rashid (alias/aka : Iago – The Invincible) : Guitars and Backing
Kuntal De (alias/aka : Storm ) : Guitars, Effects and Backing
Soumyadeep Bhattacharya (alias/aka : Bubbla): Bass and Backing
Sourish Kumar (alias/aka : the Sheikh) : Drums and Backing



The effects of a gig as enjoyed as this one can only be evident when you sit down in front of your text editor to write a review. Underground Authority, as a piece of information, is quite a new band in the music scenario of the country, being formed in the earlier part of last year, i.e. 2010. And frankly speaking, that made us apprehensive enough regarding what actually we were going to enjoy (if at all).

To start off, these guys took an insane amount of time to set up the stage for themselves, including the sound-check et al. I remember many of the students complaining to us regarding the nearly-an-hour time the drummer himself took to check the sound. Leave alone the rest, followed by the guitarists, who surprisingly were fast enough for us hungry souls.



UA (as they fondly call themselves, I think from the ‘India’s got talent’ days itself) started with a bang, so to say. Good guitar-licking sounds, with the awesome DJ-ish guitar playing by one of their ‘Guitars and Backing’ guy. I was going through the Facebook page of this music group (they even took out some time to advertise to their prospective fans about their FB page), and was startled about how they tend to describe themselves. No wonder they are a new band, and hence, like to bring in some difference in the otherwise too-much-used cliches. Example? Their genre reads ‘Alternative Rap Rock / Protest Poetry’, their members’ credentials read ‘The Poet’ and also they have a well-defined off-stage and technical support group. All these were not much surprising to me, but I could already imagine the rather unequals who will be awestruck thinking how much ‘different’ this band is going to be, and how much ‘revolutionary music’ they are going to churn out for the audiences.

If only that actually happened! Sigh!
After all the near-to-two-hours performance that this band gave, reviews were pretty diverse, as expected. And I think the guys running the group also expect the same, given that they have very few original numbers (at least tonight they performed one only) and what all they do is to take up some popular Bollywood numbers (and that too the ones which are popular enough to be chartbusters) and mix and remix and again mix and remix those very numbers and give out something which they call a performance. Yeah, not everyone can do so. Certainly not the bands we normally see around these days, because these mixing and remixing needs a likeliness and deep understanding of the music they are going to churn out by themselves. And they are sure enough clear about the same. UA knows who their target audiences are, and am sure they will be elated to know that I can quote people watching their today’s performance saying that ‘this one may be one of the best performances ever seen by them’. Notice: I didn’t add the blah, blah after the quote.
UA tends to like A.R.Rehman much, and I like their using of ‘Mr. Rahman’ title in this context. I was surveying few of the attendees of the gig regarding what was common among the Bollywood numbers if they at all noticed? Few could not find anything common, and few made out that all of the Bollywood numbers covered by UA are the ones with A.R.Rehman’s name written under their ‘Music Director’ part. Such is their obsessiveness about the man, and this is one point that am too happy about!



They covered ‘Kabhi Kabhi Aditi’, ‘Maa Tujhe Salam’, ‘Urvashi UA version 3.98′ from A.R.Rehman’s numbers and ‘Dabangg UA-Scratch Demo’ and ‘Munni Badnaam’ from the others. Personally I liked few, did not much like the rest. but I can say that the audiences were all over the auditorium, dancing and headbanging like hell!

I liked the tempos and rhythm of their songs, and also how they mix-matched the rap introductions and middle fiddles among the songs. I liked their performance on stage – say it the vocalist, the drummer (who really was too good!), and the guitarists, UA gave power-packed performances through the entire long close-to-two-hours time.



The highlight of the gig will definitely be the power-packed performance by this band, about how impressively synchronized each of the members were with each other – gives out how well-managed and well-practiced music group they are.

Overall, they gave us extravagance during Extravaganza, which can never be forgotten.
As is expected in this age, this guys are also omnipresent all over the internet.

If you want to be a fan of their Facebook page, your destination is: Underground Authority (India)

For serious music lovers, find UA in Myspace here: Underground Authority India

In Reverbnation here: Underground Authority

In Purevolume here: Underground Authority


@Atulplayer

Well, I never thought I will be coming back with this post here. But you never know. And I had to come back, intending to clear one of the most common confusions that most of the internet users face these days – Which browser is better – Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox?

By reaction of common end-users and laymen, we exclude here other popular browsers like Opera, Safari and Netscape and will try to include our discussions between the pros and cons of the above said two only.
We will settle our discussions among some preconceived points of discussion and thereby will try to compare between Chrome and Firefox on the basis of their performances in that particular sector. I think that will be fair enough.

1.Reliability: Mozilla Firefox was in its 3.1 version when Google released Chrome for the first time. And Mozilla already took enough pain to make Firefox have a good fan following already. And it turned out that Firefox served better in market than Mozilla’s another well-known product, Thunderbird. Reliability was never an issue with Firefox, and it already took its time to grow steadily when there was no other competitions in the market other than Internet Explorer, which already people had started ditching for it.
Chrome had the best advantage being a Google product itself. So, it never took much time to become well-known among users. Chrome took the advantage of the huge computing and hardware power that is Google and turned out to one of the most reliable browser ever. The whole credit goes to the multi processing system that it avails. This multi processor architecture helps a bad web page not to take down the whole browser, and thus, makes it reliable enough.

2.Speed: Although Firefox already had a steady fan base when Chrome came, it was never known for its speed. Rather, I have heard people say bad and critics criticize about the slow surfing in case of Firefox. With version 3.5 and 3.6, things have changed though, and Firefox has been much better these days. And one of the plugins, namely “FastestFirefox” it can perform faster. You can get the plugin here: Also with Tracemonkey Javascript platform, Firefox is much faster now.
Speed was always Chrome’s USP among the browsers, as I have already mentioned in my previous post. And with days things have been looking up. So, if you need fast page-loading, you know to which to turn your face.

3.Simplicity: When the term ‘simplicity’ comes into discussion in any Tech-Talk, Google is the answer. That day I was going through Google’s history and even in times like late 1990s (say 1998, when Google was in nascent state) Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders, made it a point to make the front page of Google clutter free and pure white, unlike most of the other websites of that time. Although things is better these days with CSS and Web 2.0, but still the benchmark of simplicity in design has always carried example as Google. Chrome is JUST another example of a simple and beautiful interface and user-friendly Google product.
In matters of simplicity in design and usage, Firefox can NEVER be better than Chrome. Period.

4.Searching: Now, what to say about searching when all you get in both the cases is none other than Google replying to your searches. :)

5.Privacy: A subtle point of discussion indeed. Since the advent of internet, a concern was always there that why should users be comfortable using it for all of their works if not they know that they are perfectly secure with their personal information and data online.
Some studies (funnily, those are being funded by Microsoft) have shown that Firefox, with many new versions is much susceptible to privacy threats than any other options. And with not-so-powerful processor it is a browser with a huge crash potential. With rogue pages, it can be the case that the whole browser can fall down.
Chrome was initially much susceptible to regular crashes too, specifically if you happen to use few of its beta versions. And one thing has always been told against Google is that they tend to monitor and collect user data, sometimes even before you hit enter. On the other hand, the advantage is that Chrome enjoys an ‘incognito’ mode(not sure how many of you know about this) that lets you leave no footprints on any of the pages you have ever been to. To use ‘incognito’ mode, go to options -> click ‘New incognito window’ or hit Ctrl+Shift+N.

6.Extensions/Plug-ins: Extensibility is always the option to get better. If USP of Chrome is Speed and reliability, USP of Firefox indeed are the v-a-s-t array of plugins that it offers. If you don’t know already, Mozilla has been a consistent Open Source giant, and Firefox is one of the most well-known Open Source softwares. So little wonder that it will have a huge support from a big community of developers from all over the world and provide its users with much options.
For Firefox plug-in directory, visit: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
Google is this aspect showed some immaturity in the previous years by not letting developers make extensions for it. One such incident:

“Google rejected Easy YouTube Downloader which was developed by Deepesh Agarwal. All he did was to port this popular Firefox add-on to Chrome.
Google clearly mentions that they will now allow such extensions, in their TOS they state:
4.4.1 You agree that you will not engage in any activity with the Gallery, including the development or publication of Products or other materials, that [.….] enables the unauthorized download of streaming content or media.

So what does this all mean? Google is not so open after all.”
But that was way before. Now you can get as many extensions and plugins for Chrome too as you want. But specifically I need to complain about the absence of a good enough ‘YouTube Video Downloader’ for Chrome, which is well available in case of Firefox. Whereas, for any other needs, Google Chrome extensions are as good as Firefox plug-ins, if not as varied and huge in number.
For Google Chrome extensions directory, visit: https://chrome.google.com/extensions and http://www.chromeextensions.org. Both of the sources are good, but personally I prefer the previous one, it being the official one.

And the fight goes on and on. For every positive reason for supporting one you give, its inevitable that you will get a negative one for the same. I think am not being particularly biased towards any of the above browsers. If really I had to become, I would have been for Firefox, myself being a Firefox Ambassador. So, I think I will not be hearing talks about my supporting Chrome too much! Just a thought! :) And I think the huge fan base of each of the browsers will agree with me more or less. And if you don’t, please don’t hesitate to comment your point of views below this post. That way things will be more transparent.
We all are owners of our own choices. After all what we think and is comfortable with will suit us the best.

@atulplayer