Top Ten Lists

When I first thought of it, it seemed a nifty idea. Why not create ten top ten lists?! Top Ten Lists always fascinate me, possibly because they reveal a lot about the person who created them. In that spirit, here are a few lists that I recently created. In the lists below, the order doesn�t imply anything. I felt that if I created 10 such lists, there�d be a 100 items, nice and square. So I got to work. But the problem is that real life is not nice and square. It is chaotic and the edges are jagged. I found that just to reach the mythical number 10 I was diluting my lists with entries. And so, rather than artificially pad the lists with entries to make it ten, I have kept 10 as the upper limit in my lists.

I. Ten South Indian Delicacies (That I Long For From Time To Time)
1. Vella Kozhukattai
2. Sojji Appam
3. Mor Kali
4. Kaanjeepuram Idli
5. Thavala Adai
6. Adhirsam
7. Kunukku
8. Kuzhi Paniyaram
9. UppAppam
10. Filter Coffee

II. Ten Words Which (I believe) Will Liven Any Sentence
1. Chutzpah
2. Hubris
3. Intermezzo
4. Suave
5. Zinger
6. Numinous
7. Paradox
8. Subtle
9. Resonate
10. Trampoline

III Things to Do When in a Hawaiian Island
1. Buy a shirt (or a sarong) with obscenely bold floral print
2. Snorkel to see the colored fish float by
3. Visit a macadamia nut factory
4. Eat taro chips
5. Catch a rainbow in the sky when it drizzles
6. Sample a fried banana dish
7. Watch a grass skirt hula dance
8. Spot a green tortoise in the ocean

IV Books That I am Recommending Without Having Read Them
1. Tuesdays with Morrie
2. An Equal Music
3. A Lesson before Dying
4. The World According to Garp
5. Absalom! Absalom!
6. The Hitchhiker�s Guide to the Galaxy
7. Cat�s Cradle
8. Riot: A Love Story

V (Some Not-so-well-known) Books I Wish Everyone Would Read
NonFiction
1. True Notebooks Mark Salzman
2. Hakkaido Highway Blues
3. The Ponds of Kalambayi
Fiction
4. One True Thing,
5. Peace Like A River
6. The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

VI Ten Websites I Would Miss The Most If They Disappeared
1. Google
2. The Week In Chess
3. Live365.com
4. Chess.FM
5. CNN.com
6. The Internet Movie DataBase
7. Amazon.com
8. Raaga.com
9. Chessbase
10. Geocities

VII Ten Cliched Expressions I Wish People At Work Would Stop Using
1. (We should) think outside the box
2. (to create) a straw man
3. To be perfectly honest
4. To tell you the truth
5. Due diligence
6. (My) plate is so full
7. (It�s an) issue of bandwidth
8. Let�s cut to the chase
9. I am 99.99% sure
� 10. Last, but not the least

VIII Ten Almost Forgotten Tamil Films (That I Haven�t Forgotten About)
1. Tic Tic Tic
2. Annai Oar Alayaam
3. (Jappanil) Kalyana Raman
4. Oru Kai Osai
5. Ilamai Oonjal Aaduthu
6. Varumaiyin Niram Sivappu
7. Vellai Roja
8. Nenjaththai Killathey
9. Parikshaikku Neramatchu
10. Veetukku Veedu Vasappadi

IX Music-Makers Who Made A Huge Impact The Very First Time I Heard Them
1. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
2. Eurythmics
3. Bob Marley
4. Jan Garbarek
5. Pankaj Udhas
6. Kalyi Jag
7. Kitaro
8. B-Tribe

X Ten Global Things That I Worry About In General
1. Population Explosion
2. Inefficiency in passing on knowledge to the next generation
3. Petroleum Resource Depletion
4. Food distribution costs (being more than production costs)
5. Hunger
6. Poverty
7. Nuclear Devices (falling into the hands of hotheads)
8. Meteor or Asteroid Collusions (that could wipe out entire countries)
9. People not realizing their full potential (�dying with the music still in them�)
10. Wars (which seem ridiculously primitive given that we are in 2004)

XI Events That I Would Absolutely Hate To Miss (Under Normal Circumstances)
1. World Chess Championships
2. Academy Awards on TV
3. World Cup Soccer Finals
4. Favorite Author Readings in my town
5. Travel slide shows
6. Used-Book Sales
7. Literary Festivals in Town

XII Movies So Different That They Re-defined Whole Genres
1. Fight Club
2. Truman Show
3. Being John Malkovich
4. Chungking Express
5. Fantasia
6. Adaptation
7. Memento
8. Winged Migration
9. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

And finally, one more, because no list of lists will be complete without a meta-list.

XIII Ten Ideas For Lists To Be Created In The Future
1. Top 10 Illayaraja Songs
2. Top 10 coolest lists that found on the Web
3. Top ten things to experience (before I die)
4. Top 10 Everyday miracles that we take for granted
5. Top 10 Things I cannot do but wish I could
6. The Ten Best Top-10 lists
7. Ten best cities in the world to settle down in
8. Ten people I would love to spend an evening with
9. Top ten (unvisited )places to see
10. Ten jobs I would love to have (if I didn�t have my current one)

Ram Prasad
April 2004