Opinions on M.K.Gandhi

For a while now, a long held personal view has been the following: One of the scales I judge the intelligence of a fellow Indian is from whether s/he has (or seems to have) a "considered" opinion on M. K. Gandhi. By "considered", I do not mean an opinion born out of some emotional response (which is usually derived from others in proximity) or created by our history textbooks. For the opinion to hold weight, it should hopefully have sprung from a number of sources. For instance, it could be influenced by the writings of the Gandhis and the Godses, from the expressions of Congressmen and RSS workers, from Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi" or Kamalhassan's "Hey! Ram", from the books of Louis Fischer or Rajni Bakshi. It should also ideally examine previous emotional responses, whatever be the source, instead of dismissing them outright.

Why is it necessary to hold an opinion about the man? I think if you do that, you will be naturally led to thinking about a lot of the other issues. You will also be led to thinking about other personages of times before, during and after his era, and all of this is a good way to be more aware, whatever be your depth of understanding. Irrespective of where we stand on the life and legacy of the man, we must concede he was a pivot of his times like few ever were.

Of Lord Kelvin and Aishwarya Rai

George (predictably ;-) ) thunders about the tactics used by Rediff to attract attention to their article on Jethro Tull. The article and the post make mention of Metallica's ads before and after the Grammy loss (Harish and I remember this from last year's VIT quiz).

Now the A Rai reference is actually ironic (or apt, depending on what was intended) for as many may remember, she actually lost after being heavily favoured a la the NDA's 300 seats in the last Lok Sabha election. An unprecedented tie (another little trivia nugget) and a silly question later, a certain Ms. Sen had scraped through.

All this brings me to another great (possibly apocryphal) story very germane to this discussion and justifying this post's title. Quoting from this Wikipedia article: Legend has it that (Lord) Kelvin was so confident that he had come top of the exam (for the Wrangler rank) that he asked his servant to run to the Senate House and check who the second [W]rangler was. The servant returned and informed him, "You, sir!

The following paragraph in that article has one example to show that cramming sometimes helps - kids watching this at home, don't imitate.)

The day I went ROTFLMAO

The expression "Rolling on the Floor Laughing my (anything with an A) off" was a mere IM emoticon and a over-used abbreviation until I saw Monty Python's Scott of the Antartic/Sahara sketch.

Some of Monty Python's sketches are so brilliant that you could save eighty-one with any of the stitches in your stomach. But the aforementioned Scott sketches hit me right in the solar plexus with the insanity of it all. The plot of the sketch is by itself not extraordinary given such past glories like the "Dead Parrot" sketch or "Spanish Inquisition" or "the Hungarian Phrasebook". It consists of a faux-"Making of" production of a "20th Century Vole" film called "Scott of the Antartic" on location. The location turns out to have some great sunshine and sand, so many people set out to paint the sands white and nail pieces of white rubber around. Eventually, they decide to call it "Scott of the Sahara" and paint the sands "yellow again".

Scott and gang (with sledges) are accosted by a "crazed desert lion", so Scott begins a deadly battle, described thus in the script I found online:

The four are walking along. Suddenly they stop, stare, and react in horror. Scott steps to the front to defend the others. Intercut, non-matching stock shot of lion running out of jungle and leaping at camera. Scott waits poised and is then struck by completely rigid stuffed lion. Montage of shots of him wrestling, firstly with the stuffed lion, then with an actor in a tatty lion suit. The lion picks up a chair, fends Scott off, smashes it over his head. Finally Scott kicks the lion on the shin. The lion leaps around on one leg and picks up a knife. Scott points, the lion looks, Scott kicks the knife out of the lion's paw. He advances on the lion, and socks him on the jaw. The lion collapses in slow motion. After a pause, phoney blood spurts out.

This paragraph does no justice to the mayhem on screen that Michael Palin and the lion get to. My screams of laughter brought everyone rushing to again verify my state of mental health. I was finally doing it. I was rolling on the floor surely laughing something beginning with an A off.

Pune BCL members will find this in one of the "Monty Python's Flying Circus" DVDs in that establishment. Just don't watch it after too heavy a meal.

The scripts can be found all over the Web, but a good collection is here. One link for this sketch is here.

Gulzar and A.R.Rahman

Nice Gulzar interview in Filmfare talking about the first time he worked with A.R.Rahman (and surprise: it was not for Chaiyyaa.n Chaiyyaa.n).

I couldn't find the specific pages on Filmfare's site. So alternate links to scanned images of the pages, thanks to Gopal Srinivasan: Page 1, Page 2.

Vishal Bharadwaj also gets mentioned in the article, so there's three of my favourite music-men in two pages. The Gulzar interview is part of a larger series where he talks about his career. [Filmfare interview link - needs registration, and even then the site keeps asking me to sign in for each page - Spherical B***ards!. And one of the worst maintained search options.]

Ave 'em

Evam is a Madras-based "entertainment management company" (according to their Hindu interview reproduced on their blog) which aims to promote theatre in Madras and provide content in other media outlets too. All that I know about them is via indirect means. I first heard about them while visiting MICA a few months ago. The guys behind the group (Karthik and Sunil) studied at MICA and were performing on home turf once again.

It must take a lot of guts for them to have shunned more conventional paths, instead opting for a less charted course. I read their interviews in the Hindu and in the MICAnvas newsletters and was interested to know that they'd managed to rope in some big corporate names to be associated with them. Following dreams is all fine, but they often go stale too soon if not backed by a well-planned strategy. On the face of it, these guys seem to have one.

To remind, I haven't seen anything by these guys, so I don't know what they have to offer. But the whole premise seems interesting. While some of us sit back and idly daydream as to doing more adventurous things with a single life, these guys have hit the water already. Good luck to them. Read their blog for an insight into a theatre group's life. Karthik Kumar would be familiar to some people for his small roles in Alaipayuthe, Saathiya (same role reprised) and Yuva (must have been in Aazhtha Ezhuthu - I don't remember).

Platinum and Peroxide Playfulness

From Solzaire, this is quite simply the best blonde joke (link at the end of post) ever. (No S, it ain't old yet, methinks). Quite brilliant.

New look-kool Sportstar?

Three weeks ago, I decided that my "sports quotient" had dropped to alarming levels, especially when it came to non-televised sports and domestic tournaments. I have not read The Sportstar in a long, long time, so I began purchasing that great love of my childhood (when I would devour a lot of issues obtained from my father's office. The posters were the highlights of course).

The last two issues of the weekly did a lot to assuage any suspicions I had about its quality and coverage: articles by Brijnath (always a good sign), coverage of chess and swimming, photo features, tributes, old sporting encounters revisited - in short, excellent stuff that told me it was time to put in the 426/- for the annual sub. Until this week.

The editor-in-chief's note on the 2nd page popped up as a hidden speedbreaker. It says that from the next week, "the magazine will sport a new look as a tabloid... packaged neatly into the compact format". Apparently, the result of some redesigning exercise.

Why? My pulse races as I contemplate what a magazine in "tabloid" form must be like? It's supposed to have "a new typeface" that will be "young and bold" and "reader-friendly". Call me conservative and living in the past, but I can't see what is reader-unfriendly about the current look. The large font-ed, well-spaced out look on thick white paper always looked inviting. Unless, all this is a euphemism for cutting costs somewhere. They promise that the articles will continue to be the same, but I'm not shelling out my money unless I make sure of what it's going to be like for the next couple of issues.

Ice breaker

GMail's arrange-mails-by-conversation feature has always impressed me. In the normal case of a thread being involved (you reply to a mail, forward the mail without changing the subject etc), they seem to club together mails correctly. This is pretty easy to do of course.

But they also seem to doing more than just using the headers to figure out the conversation list. I think there's a temporal window involved as well. So today I simply sent a mail to myself with a subject line identical to another mail I sent out earlier the same day. GMail added this to the old conversation. I tried with a subject line identical to a much older mail (a gap of about 70 days) and it didn't put the new mail under that conversation.

Now interestingly, a couple of months ago, two mails from two different people with the same subject line but apart by 3 days ended up together. So the algorithm is a little naive, for even a simple similarity match between the bodies of the two emails would have told them apart. Perhaps the mails fell in some boundary condition.

This was the first time this happened to me, so was wondering if anyone else had seen something like this in their GMail inboxes.

And elsewhere, more GMail news (link via Ajay).

Update: Useful link on the topic thanks to a comment from IndianPad.

Cuss ke baa.nDho

Mathematical taboo words:

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If you don't see them, good for you

Penny Farthings for rent

The SETI Project is well known, especially its @home effort which essentially is a huge distributed computing effort that aims to make effective use by stealing some CPU cycles from temporarily unused computers to do bits of computation.

There is yet another extremely large pool of processing power of which only about (or so we're told by shady books on the subject) 10-20% is used. That's obviously the collective brains of adult humans (we'll leave out children for they seem to putting it to use by playing and learning).

Perhaps our brains could be tapped from time to time while we're gossiping, watching inane programmes or films, staring at visuals and consequently not doing any conscious work. Maybe they could be used even while we are working, if it could be non-intrusive. Surely, this thought isn't practical today and will easily be controversial ;-) (don't want you peeking into my neurons & synapses, thank you). But the worst scenario of all would be if statistics about what we do with all the power available at our disposal thanks to our massive mom's-womb-endangering brains were made available. D'oh!

An Atlantic Thought

Is it possible for a generation to go through life without experiencing "war"? In a sense, people of my age have already experienced the Gulf war(s), a bunch of attritional conflicts and tense moments, all distant enough to be a television series. But if you're an Indian of my age, then we have never experienced conflict that deeply affected us. The Kargil battle/war/conflict was localised and sorry to say, did not affect my daily life in any significant way.

If it sounds dangerously close to what Tyler Durden says

We are the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no great war, or great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.

then probably he was speaking for me, for us as well.

The Americans were scarred by Vietnam; the Europeans by WW2. So they talked about it in their movies, their music, their books. We still refuse to talk much about the Partition or our other wounds. As a generation, we aren't collectively cauterized by much.

Do we need large, pointless, personal confrontations to provide our lives with meaning and to turn us further into cynical wrecks? Perhaps by the law of averages, things will not remain so rosy (am I feeling guilty about prosperity?). Perhaps we will live in interesting times, even when we grow old enough to have formed a long and comfortable marriage with the placid.

Teach a little computer today

Want to teach? Bored with mindless browsing on the web? Why not help educate a computer today?

There are quite a few research projects these days where you can help increase the world of "knowledge" that can be recorded and used in AI, IR, Knowledge Management tasks. One of these is the Open Mind Commonsense Project at MIT. This consists of people contributing various everyday facts that are taken for granted, used commonly to establish context and hence never usually articulated explicitly. For e.g., if you saw a statement "the batsman scored a century", implicit information such as "this is about the game of cricket" or "a century refers to 100 runs" are never expressed openly. But a simple computer would never know the mass of such "commonsense" learnt by experience. This project aims to collect as many such facts as it can, and the collection is used by several research efforts and tools for various nefarious ends.

To contribute, one needs to sign up and can plunge into various actions like describing a picture in simple words, elaborating a few things that a particular verb is used to describe, filling in context for an event and so on. It's a lot of fun and definitely recommended if you have 15 minutes to kill.

More information about the project at Ray Kurzweil's website here and a sample of contributions.

Yawn sambandhii suuchanaa

Gaurav feels (and not without justification) that the commentary panel covering the current India-Pakistan series should come with a "Don't watch while operating heavy machinery" sign, but even the commentary panel has met its match on the tedium-podium. The winner? The exceedingly painful cricket on a wicket as flat as Baby B's voice (sorry Abhishek bhai!).

The teams would win a lot of hearts if India declared right now, both teams forfeited their 2nd innings and they played an exhibition ODI or even Twenty-20 match. These are the days when we miss Hansie!

Sourav Ganguly couldn't have had a better opportunity to open a Test innings. I think the real discussion behind the opening morning's "frenzied" discussion between Chappell, Dravid and Ganguly was not Ganguly complaining he was informed too late about having to open but Chappell insisting on coming out of retirement to bat one more time. Spare a thought for Sunil Gavaskar - he asked for three openers and got only one. Massive popat, really.

The Indian fan today is also suffering

Rahul Dravid, in his usual wonderful articulate style, said to Shekhar Gupta in an interview on "Walk The Talk" that 'The Indian fan today is running world cricket, make no mistake about that’ Sigh. I only wish his hyperbolic optimism extended to more than a bunch of Ganguly supporters managing to make their displeasure felt in the public and hence adding to "public opinion".

The Indian fan is hardly running anything, but a bunch of people ruling in proxy sure have this largest of national support base to justify their many decisions. Just a preliminary, off-the-cuff wishlist to the cricketing mai-baaps would be: enable the average fan to watch live Test and ODI cricket on television at a reasonable price; provide stadium facilities that justify the high prices of tickets that fans pay and stop dishing out a high percentage of "complimentary" tickets; make domestic cricket more attractive for viewers; for the sake of the players and even fans, don't OD on the number of matches in a year like you want to.

We're not even asking for better commentators as a basic demand or to be entitled to "a fully consummated (girlie) pash" (though those would be "nice-to-haves"). We'll watch and discuss the game fiercely all the same.

Finnegans Wake

Finished reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves (by Lynne Truss) and found it delectable. I did manage (or so I thought) to find an opening round bracket without its pair. Of course, I didn't want (actually, I wouldn't have been able to) to shred it apart like The New Yorker did, though one suspects just a case of sophisticated name-calling (she called it "famously punctilious" and the magazine suspected the book "might be a hoax").

The New Yorker's view that Truss was hedging her bets by not insisting on perfect correctness while unable to get a lot of pedantic grammar right may not be without reason. But the book is a great read for most of us who're in the middle ground with a decent but flawed grammar basis, who at the same time are fighting off the tendency to write proper while texting (I don't mind lapsing into consonant-ese there because my phone's text interface sucks and the less I key in, the better for my fingers). I do try and correct my mistakes wherever possible in normal writing.

Whether I want to be a vigilante as Truss cheerily asks us to (with markers in our quivers ready to pounce on offensive typos), I don't know, but I do feel the itch to correct the commonly seen misplacement of apostrophes which is to be seen prominently outside DVD & Video lending libraries. There is a notice in the Mechanical Department here announcing "Duties for TA's" (sic). So far I have fought off the urge to correct it. Perhaps this repression isn't such a good idea, so the next time I walk past it, I think I'll summon up the courage to join the Panda and wipe out an excess grammatical character.

{P.S.: If you're wondering what the title of this post has got to do with this article, then it means you haven't seen the Jonathan Creek episode called "Ghosts Forge" and you should read this.}

{P.P.S: I don't want to know about the grammatical (or any other) errors in this post, thank you}

Young Achievers

Pardon my {impertinence | ignorance | intolerance}, but isn't it a little too early (read: presumptuous) to be awarding Lifetime Achievement awards in any blogging community, leave along from among Indian blogging?

Atleast let the guy who originated the WWW get a few posts in :-)

One me one two

I have always been an Abhishek Bachchan fan for reasons never clear to me (written proof ;-) ). But even then I must say what no one else seems to: that his "singing" is probably one of the worst ever heard (and this even in an industry where Anu Malik and The Silken Himesh are hit playback singers).

I know it's his time and everyone likes to back the horse in form, but by virtue of being one of the early supporters, I must appeal to him to cease and desist from the "hip-hop" (for me just a "rip-hop" - in style, in choreography et al) number used (very effectively, must concede) in Bluffmaster. Sorry, even your dad's better (with or w/o Sudesh Bho(n?)sle)). Even the Panchgani tableland could not be as flat as your singing voice. Hopefully you're doing the following: Engagement to a Kapoor - check, Item song - check, singing a song - check - and won't be doing them again. For your fans.

Anatomy of a Murder

At home, there's a set-top box (whose killer feature for me is that it shows, wherever available, the name of the current show and also further schedules) and as a result, we're seeing a free-to-air Emirates movie channel called MBC2. It seemed like the other movie channels beaming in, until last Saturday when they were airing a B&W film which turned out to be Otto Preminger's "Anatomy of a Murder".

Ever since the TNT channel departed from the Indian air, we have rarely seen any B&W classics from Hollywood. If they are being aired, then it's not during primetime. Coming back to this film, I missed a bit from the first quarter of the film, but saw every moment of the rest. I think this film had the most natural courtroom scenes I have ever seen on screen. James Stewart and a young George C. Scott are the opposing counsel and being such fine actors, they hardly put a foot wrong. The judge (played by Joseph Welch, a lawyer in real life) had some excellent dialogues ("Just answer the questions, Mr. Paquette. The attorneys will provide the wisecracks"). What was different here was that I found the questions and objections so plausible and logical that I was nodding in accordance to the judge's rulings on these interruptions.

The movie was controversial for its contents when it was released and from a screenplay pov, it eschewed dramatic cliches like the final summings-up by the attorneys etc. Very ambiguous and very interesting in content, this is a true classic. I wish these kinds of films were aired more often on our channels.

UmbarThaa Economics

What I know about Economics will disappoint an icecream cone hoping to brim over with the cream of that knowledge. So, unable to figure this out myself, I solicit the knowledge (O! Hail ye!) of the economist-bloggers around. My question being thus:

(Almost) Each weekend I travel from Bombay to Pune and then back. The mode of transport is a Volvo bus. Now, what puzzles me is why is the cost of a seat from Bombay to Pune (usually 160/- or 180/-) much lesser than a seat from Pune to Bombay (usually 220/-)? (Both costs are within the "weekend window" i.e. Sat morning to Mon morning, in which costs are higher than on a weekday).

I can't understand the asymmetry in costs in each of the directions because the conditions seem to be the same. Toll tax should be the same. Demand is likely to be similar, for how would you have more people coming in to Pune than going out to Bombay, unless there is some non-intuitive scenario that the excess people travelled to Bombay on weekdays! Do people coming from Bombay to Pune have more options than in the other direction?

If someone would care to comment?

{BTW, the title is obviously useless and the gag is surely known around these parts to anyone who has heard of the author and the Marathi word/film :-)}

Updates for those who valiantly volunteered to help me in this

* Weekday rates are typically lower by the same %age in both directions
* I use the same company (or equivalent, by which I mean that I use private operators who have same fares) both ways
* I do board and get down at both places. However, in my experience so far, the fare is flat irrespective of which stop you plan to get down
* Last point: I think Hirak (supported by Ajay) hits the nail on the head when he says that it could be related to the drops. We would agree that the inbound Pune bus would have lesser distances to travel in the city (standard route: stops at Wakad, Aundh, Univ, S'nagar, Station/Swargate), while a Bombay bus would go to a lot more places in the city (btw, I forgot to mention this was the Dadar bound bus; Borivali destined buses cost even more) and spend about an hour or more inside the city

I guess I forgot about the interiors because I usually get down at the periphery. Thanks very much, guys!

To cap it all

There are a few monkeys (or a monkey family?) around the department where I study, and whenever I have reason to walk past them (like it happened today), I usually un-cap my head lest any of them feels tempted to do the same. Perhaps the old hatseller-vs-monkey algorithm can be used to retrieve it back, but then these are IIT monkeys (we're not talking MTech students here, of course) and there's no telling how educated they really are and what their level of folktale-awareness really is.

Vacation in numbers

This post isn't motivated by a desire to tom-tom the size of the recently demised holidays and make yellow those who haven't had a similar outlet in a long time, but to remind me in the future of these times and make me weep!

In the semester break of December 2005,

2: Number of quizzes won
4: Number of days spent down some of the Western districts of Maharashtra
6: Number of distinct British TV serials viewed via DVD
8: Number of movies watched
10: Number of books read

An e-sob drenches this page in memoriam.