Clipboard Conversations

Dead Right, Pune

2012-01-25T15:23:00.003+05:30

This was saved in my drafts for over two months. I desisted from publishing it because I didn't know if this was a harsh over-reaction to everyday life in Pune. But today, after hearing this incident, I felt compelled to put it out. Yes, this was a unique case, one 'madman' causing damage at such a scale. But what we face each day is, IMO, just the same only at a smaller scale. Caused by us 'sane' people.

What would you say if I told you I was facing death threats? ("Lucky you" isn't the right answer.) That some persons outside, entirely unknown to me, represent a grave mortal danger to my well-being? Each day? And these numbered not in the ones or the tens, but in the hundreds?

I am not joking.

That's just how it is to go out on the streets these days. I don't think it's an exaggeration. I don't see a difference between sending these people into the city with a bunch of loaded guns with their safety catches off. Though, people with gun licenses are infinitely more responsible than with driving licences.

There are people who are blissfully unaware of most rules of traffic (don't insult the jungle by making a comparison - at least the jungle's rules are followed). There are people who will miss a turn, then reverse half a kilometer to avoid taking the next gap in the divider ahead. There are people who think flashing their lights at vehicles and passers-by automatically empties the road. There are people who will force you into a mistake by honking repeatedly. There are small people in big, ugly vehicles who think driving in a big box enables them to muscle another person off the planet. There are people who will ruin your day for you, for free.

These are people who can maim you. Or kill you. Or someone close to you.

There's nothing very funny about "that's the way we drive". You might not like it if I, like some Middle Eastern despot, shot off rounds randomly at you and said "that's the way we shoot here".

It's sickening to see anyone on foot, especially the elderly, having to scamper for their lives, each time they step out. Insensitively, I guess the problem is that somehow not enough people die in front of us. That the answer lies in mashing up Stalin's quote: one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. We need a million personal tragedies.

You may think it's more terrifying to live in Karachi, or Kandahar, or Karbala, where bombs go off each day, where people don't know if they'll make it through the next 24 hours. You might not think of it in these terms, but people who venture out each day don't know which idiot might run into them. A conscious culture of casual and opportunistic lawlessness prevails, where each one nudges the other to skip that signal, break that no-entry, burst through the wrong lane, and see these as the de facto rules. I bet more people die of road accidents in a year than in terrorist attacks. (Anyway, eventually, we don't do much about either.)

You might not have noticed, but it can be terrifying to go out there.

To tell you the truth, when I see people breaking the rules and putting others in danger, I wish something nasty happens to them during that very act. And only to them. I see them as a menace to society (even if society is busy being a menace to itself) and the only way to make the roads safer is to get them out off the way.

This is dangerous thinking. But sometimes, it's me or them.

I'm convinced that the only way to look at this is in black and white. To hammer in the bare-faced social and personal costs of bad driving. Realise this: we are an army of assassins-at-large.

And we'll get you eventually.

The Rahul Dravid of the year

2011-12-31T09:18:00.000+05:30

December 31st is the Rahul Dravid of the year - everyone is waiting eagerly for the next guy to come in, about whom everyone is exceptionally hopeful about, irrespective of how great Dec 31st was. (Eventually they'll blame that guy for practically everything in their life that year, instead of realising that the days are different, but they remained the same).

December 31st is always overshadowed by the promise of the next wicket.

(Previous December 31st commiserations. Have a super 2012, but have an even better Dec 31, 2011!)

"Pune's Rosy Winters" - a re-post

2011-12-30T12:00:00.002+05:30

The temperature across India has dipped as much as the Government's credibility, and Pune has slipped into trademark balmy-coolness. I wrote this article a couple of years ago for Jet Lite's in-flight magazine (no doubt, the first readers of this piece enjoyed considerably similar but totally artificial weather).

Thought I'd pull it out of the archives, to give you something to do when you're munching on kanda-bhajji and sipping a "speshal". Here it is.

Mood Indigo 2011 - India quiz questions

2011-12-26T10:07:00.000+05:30

This December, like last time, I conducted an India quiz as part of the quizzing festival at Mood Indigo at IIT BombayThe questions (from the prelims and the two main rounds in the final) have been uploaded to Slideshare:

Mood Indigo 2011 - India Quiz - Prelims with Answers

View more presentations from Ramanand J

Mood Indigo 2011 - India Quiz - Finals

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If you have a look at these questions and have any feedback, do let me know!

Paperback Raita

2011-12-22T15:47:00.000+05:30

Paperback Raita

Dear Sir or Madam, will you tell my cook?
It took me days to ferment, will you take a look?
Based on a lactobacillus named Lear
And I need a job, so I want to be a paperback raita,
Paperback raita.

It's the saucy story of a dahi pan
And his non-fat wife doesn't understand.
His son is working for the Mishti Doi,
It's a steady job but he wants to be a paperback raita,
Paperback raita.

Paperback raita

It's a thousand boondis, give or take a few,
I'll be culturing more in a week or two.
I can make it minty if you like the style,
I can chill it round and I want to be a paperback raita,
Paperback raita.

If you really like it you can have it white,
It could make the menu for you overnight.
If you must return it, you can send it here
But I need a break fast and I want to be a paperback raita,
Paperback raita.

With apologies to The Beatles, once again.

Previous Beatles apology is here ("All you need is Spam").

RMIM Puraskaar 2011 - Nominations open

2011-12-20T19:05:00.000+05:30

Vinay Jain and friends run the annual RMIM Puraskaar, an effort to rate the best Hindi film soundtracks and songs each year. It is 2011's turn, and the process of nominating songs has begun. If you'd like to suggest a few songs, go to this link and put them in.

Links to previous Puraskaar awards can be seen at the bottom of this page. It's a fun exercise and the results are certainly more interesting than commercial awards.

The nomination page will be open till the end of this year.

Legend Before Wicket

2011-11-28T20:02:00.001+05:30

If he was a character in the world of Asterix, Shane Warne's pseudonym could be "Climax" (no, not because of what you are thinking, even though this is Shane Warne we're talking about). I refer merely to his uncanny ability to, as they say, write his own scripts. Thanks to Gatting Ball, no one remembers the hiding he got at the hands of the Indians at home. He snatched World Cup glory in 1999, almost single-wristedly. Then came back from a dope scandal in Sri Lanka to take ten wickets, nose ahead of his great rival Murali to the 500 wicket mark, and eventually give Australia the series. Got a Test hat-trick. Made it to 600 wickets. Struck an appropriately purple patch leading a greenhorn side to the maiden IPL crown.

Hollywood, they called him for his blond locks and superstar attitude. Now, you could put it down to his irresistible sense of destiny. The Great Scorer above is in cahoots with the Great Scripter.

The other modern script-God was Brian Lara, what I call Lady Luck's own favourite love-child.

Meet Sachin Tendulkar, Mr. Anti-climax. No Hundred in his 100th Test. World Cup only in his 6th attempt. No Man of the Match in the final! No Chennai-Test-win.

I think what people demand of him and his guardian angels are the fairy-tales. He's done the long-suffering boy-on-the-burning-deck-act. But there's been a distinct lack of gold-dust, that ephemeral moment when destiny collides with opportunity, and bang! an aura that no amounts of botox or naughty-texts can mask.

That the gods would forget to sprinkle some love on the boy-genius seems strange, after the start he had in life: three consecutive first-class hundreds, that massive Shardashram partnership, and a bloody lip in his first Test.

Do you live like the Prince or as the King?

"Half Ticket" - my article on some children's films in India

2011-11-14T09:56:00.001+05:30

I have always felt that making films, writing stories, or composing songs for children is harder than many other creative endeavours. Think children's films and the Disney boilerplate animations is what comes to most people's mind, until Pixar tore that notion apart. Unfortunately, the genre of children's films in India has been criminally under-served so far. But a few have stood out.

I wrote an article two years ago on Children's Films in India, and thoroughly enjoyed revisiting some of these films. Today's a good day to point you to that:

1. Previous blog post with a scanned copy of the article (has images): at this link.

2. Plain text version:

"Half-Ticket" - Children's Films in India - Flylite magazine

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An archaeology of Pune Landmarks

2011-11-07T13:29:00.000+05:30

Human culture evolves in many ways, and is often more apparent than other forms of evolution. Trends in language, for instance, or fashion. This is also true of the culture of a place, and cities like Pune exemplify this evolution.

The Punekar has always been famous for his complaint/lament that "Pune was not like this earlier". Some of it can be blamed on the "Rosy Retrospection" effect, but much of it emerges from drastic (and tangible) change experienced within even a generation. Obvious markers of such changes are evident in population growth, traffic patterns, and the rise in cosmopolitanism. A subtle indication of these can be seen in what are perceived to be landmarks of the city.

Someone asks you where Manney's bookstore is. A decade ago, you'd say: "near West End or Dorabjee's". Today, you might say "opposite SGS Mall". Or you are issuing directions to Aundh. You suggest the driver "take the flyover above University Circle" only to be met with a puzzled stare. "What Circle?". At a school quiz, when trying to mentally place the statue of Rani Laxmibai on J.M. Road (the answer to a question), the nearest landmark that came to a participant's mind was the nearby Pizza Hut, and not Bal Gandharva Rang Mandir or Sambhaji Park.

Only time will tell if the likes of SGS Mall, Pizza Hut, or Wadeshwar on FC Road, will some day evoke the kind of nostalgia as some of the old places. Many of these 'landmarks' are eateries or retail outlets, so it is inevitable that the march of time and economics consumes and produces new winners. What's boring is the sameness of many of these new landmarks: they tend to be malls or franchise outlets. A city needs some character in its landmarks, which often comes from being remarkable for what it can offer or for its quirks. Pune's old city landmarks still retain most of these traits, while the newer, often posh-er areas, are maddeningly homogenous.

For the discerning and the inquisitive, there is perhaps much to gain from an archaelogy of landmarks in a city: a lot is happening below the facade, even if it isn't 'happening' by modern standards. So the next time you give out directions to help your newly migrated colleague, perhaps you should slip in the odd reference to an odd place. Then direct that puzzled stare into a meaningful insight about the city.

Some older and newer landmarks

University Road: Rahul Cinema vs E-Square

Nehru Memorial/Dorabjees/West End vs SGS Mall

University Circle vs the University Flyover

Cafe Goodluck vs Wadeshwar

Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige"

2011-10-31T19:18:00.000+05:30

Update (31 Oct 2011): The fine people behind WOGMA (a film review site that doesn't give - or lose - the plot away) are running a very tempting contest called the Reel-Life Bloggers contest on occasion of the site's 5th anniversary. Since I'm entering some of my reviews there (explaining the sudden excavation of some of these older posts), here's the requisite pointer and hat-tip to wogma and their partners reviewgang.

Anyway, The Prestige remains one of my most favourite films, and hopefully you'll enjoy this post written in the afterglow of that December day, 5 years ago.

I suppose reviewing a film about magic will inevitably call to mind Godard's famous "The cinema is truth 24 frames per second"¹. Not that statement per se, but an inversion of it, that cinema is illusion at that very rate. The movies are magic after all, a collection of static moments pieced together. We have got used to the fantastic nature of it all, rendering it mundane, but a viewing of Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige" revived my fascination for what is after all in essence the newest trick in the book.

The Prestige, sourced by Christopher Priest's novel of the same name, tells of a duo of warring conjurers, tied together in a double-helix of fabulous proportions. Scarcely have they met each other as budding magic-men that their fates become inextricably linked, in a maze of tragic death, petty violence, and mean machinations. Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman), or "The Great Danton", is the more accomplished showman, while Alfred "The Professor" Borden (Christian Bale) is the better creator. Michael Caine as "Cutter" ties them and us together providing the third wall to this drama. Three women and a girl form the husk of the men, and make significant impacts on the story's progress.

Starting from Angier baying for Borden's blood after a trick gone horribly wrong (and worse, the unpardonable loss of memory) to either man fixating upon a mirage of magnum-opus proportions, each man is obsessed with the other (Caine steps aside remarking "obsession is a young man's game"). Each is prepared to bend the very boundaries of magic, even reaching into science for aid in their battle. The story is, after all, set at a time, when science was still fairly magical - the only difference from superstition being that someone could explain it. But scientists like Nikola Tesla were the archetypes of mystifying inventors, and so in a brilliant weave, Tesla (a very hard to recognise David Bowie) and his toolbox of physics are part of the plot.

Let us pause at this point and contemplate the nature of magic-as-illusion. Jonathan Creek fans will be familiar with the required elaborateness of the great tricks, which when explained, invites a massive haemorrhage of allure. Also, magic tricks are never pure magic: just like Holmes said (he'd have been around the same time as these men would have), that if you have exhausted the impossible, that which remains must be true, however improbable it may seem. Every street magician knows that every trick can be explained, which makes it worse for the professional. The member of the audience can go away shaking her head in disbelief, but the pro has to deconstruct it. And what if it defies analysis? What if the mundane explanation is too poor to dot the points?

Returning to the film, the story is revealed in three overlapping narratives, which are placed at different points in time. As far as non-linearity goes, habits hard die old given Nolan's vintage (even though he is only 5-and-a-little films old²). Two of these narratives are mirror images of each other: each man reads the diary of the other to fill in his blanks (and in a bit of routine cinemagic, we can see in full splendour what they wrote about!). The brothers Nolan never let you be overly aware of the three-balls-in-air they're pulling off here, and as some of the best tricks go, you never notice 'em. The narratives are also a nod to the fundamental three-part-formula of any good magic trick³. The story is set in the late 19th century as it turns to the new, during the "Golden Age of Magic" as it was known (JC fans would remember posters of Maskelyne and Devant in Jonathan's home), which is the best time for any story about it to be placed in.

What makes this film wonderful, apart from the great acting (as usual by a mostly non-American cast!), is the peeling apart of revelations. You expect a bunch of twists when Nolan isn't making caped-crusader movies, and you will not be disappointed here (if you were, as the tagline says, watching this closely). In fact, while watching it, we twigged as to what was happening roughly 30 minutes before the end. We therefore experienced the strange sensation of watching the rest of movie as if it were a second viewing, with "ah!"s at some of the hinted touches. Memorably, smaller events foretell larger ones, which will no doubt become crystal-clear on repeated viewings - the story is a frac-tale, if you will, in this regard.

Technically, the film is a delight. The elaborate sets and apparatus, the make-up, the costumes, the lighting, the cinematography (though our first overhead shot of the train to Colorado seemed to be out of the storyboard for "Batman Begins") are top-notch. As is the acting. After Nolan's segue into big-time Hollywood, this film also marks a reunion of sorts of the old gang: David Julyan who scored all of Nolan's films except for the big one, and brother Jonathan, last remembered with "Memento", co-working on the screenplay here. Of course, if you peer hard enough, you can nitpick to your heart's content. But just to get this much off the air is outstanding.

The movie seems to pretty much have no marketing whatsoever in India, if a tiny paper ad and one show in the 'plexes in Bombay is anything to go by. So, if my recommendations are worth anything, go watch this little beauty before it vanishes (the illusory puns are unavoidable!). The movie was worth a 45-min delay and projection goof-ups at the local-blot-on-the-name-of-multiplexes⁴.

And finally. To Nolan. I know you can't see me stand up and applaud now - it's a little like you taking your bows below stage. But I went into raptures when I "got it" (and that too only somewhat⁵) - truly, I was a kid in front of something magical; seldom have I enjoyed myself in a movie theatre like this before. I really wish you could have seen my face⁶ :-)

1: The reference must have seeped in from Jim Emerson's review of The Illusionist, the other film this year to feature a battle of wits, this time only with one magcian though, also set in the same time frame.
2: Keeps my record of having seen all of Nolan's features intact (Following, Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins). Whither be Doodlebug?
3: Incidentally, Priest invented the pledge-turn-prestige terminology; it wasn't really trade lingo.
4: Huma Adlabs, Kanjur Marg, where no one but post-endsem IIT students go. Its biggest draw is that it is peacefully empty, so I shouldn't be complaining.
5: Or did I? The over-enthusiastic IMDB bulletin boards suggest several more possibilities than seemed necessary.
6: This last paragraph will make sense if you watch the film.
7: Image: Wikipedia

Manorama, six thumbs up - the sequel

2011-10-31T16:25:00.000+05:30

Update (31 Oct 2011): WOGMA, the film review site is running "The Reel-Life Bloggers contest" on occasion of the site's 5th anniversary. Since the prizes are tempting and it gets me to pseudo-update my long-forgotten blog, I'm entering some of my reviews there. WOGMA is organising this with Reviewgang. Go visit them, and if you are the reviewing type, send in an entry.

This is about the time I went to see the desi noir Manorama 6 Feet Under the evening India was playing Pakistan in the inaugural World Twenty20 Cup. That meant a near-empty hall, an eerie suspense drama, and listening to an old couple discussing the movie. Read on.

Instead of reviewing Manorama Six Feet Under in detail (as many have done on PFC with noble intentions) and giving away plot points that could distract you from the actual viewing, I thought I'd just write about the 3 hours before, during, and after the film.

Yesterday turned out to be an unintended holiday thanks to local traffic being allergic to local festivities. There was a long day ahead and it was time to catch a movie on what should have been a working day. Sweet. Ideally, I would have liked to see the film early in the morning (no crowds, cool mornings, total peace) but no shows existed in the pre-noon section. So 4:30 pm it was.

Turned up early, so had time to kill. I have been to this multiplex on weekday afternoons, but even by those standards, the place seemed deserted. The unfulfilled recurring nightmare came to mind: that they will pull the plug on the show because I'm the only one who bought a ticket. I overheard one staffer tell another that there were 17 people for the show, which seemed to scrape past the quorum, 'cos here came the show. Great seats for anyone who wanted one, of course.

The lack of people only seemed to further increase the possibility that the movie would be good - such is my taste in films, I suppose. A couple of students took up seats, Munna-in-Rangeela style, next to me. To the left, an elderly couple eased themselves in. The students pulled out a packet of chips. I'm slightly condescending towards those who have formed an unnecessary association between movies and food, but soon, the smell of the wafers just got to me. Just as the movie began, the uncle on the left pulled out a packet of chips of his own. Darn.

The ants and Yana Gupta later, here was a look at a new-look Abhay Deol. He has earned enough goodwill for us to watch movies based merely on his presence in it, such is his taste in movies too. In his desert glasses and stubble and once-proud moustache, he looks like a father of one. Is this the first time we have a dimpled couple on screen? I wonder. I also think I spotted a dimple on the little boy who very effectively plays their son - if that's true, then give a bonus to the casting director. Some matter-of-fact comments about nano-scale corruption later, here is Sarika, and off we go.

Now, I haven't really seen any noir films before, so this is it. I know the story is heavily inspired from the Polanski classic Chinatown, so I turned down an offer to watch that film before I watched this one. Just like that. And what is that? Abhay D is watching a movie on the telly featuring Jack Nicholson. That has got to be "Chinatown" (it was). Nice touch, with that acknowledgement. Some more points for writers Navdeep Singh and Devika Bhagat.

It's been an hour and I have completely enjoyed myself. Vinay Pathak is having a great time crunching out some terrific dialogues by Abhinav Kashyap (last seen by self in Yuva), and Manoj Tapadia. Of all the Miss Indias in the last 15 years, I think Gul Panag's put on the best acting performances. Quite a surprise packet - Nagesh Kukunoor has done a magic turnaround with her. Here comes pretty Raima Sen.

The uncle-aunty nearby belong to the old school of cinema-watchers, who get totally involved in proceedings. They "ooh" and "aah" when things happen. They react loudly to plot twists and character allegations (which means a noisy hall in a noir film). In short, they keep the soap operas in business. I have uncles and aunts like that, so I'm used to it. Then the aunty asks: "yeh Satyaveer Randhawa kaun hai?". The uncle patiently explains: "woh jo hero hai." Aunty says: "yeh sab apne liye naye hai.n, na? kabhi dekhaa nahii.n in logo.n ko." Yes, and the new kids are doing a fine job.

I'm genuinely caught up in the suspense now. I cannot think of another Hindi film with such a good suspense plot, especially since "Ek Hasinaa Thi". The execution is impressive. Finally, it's come to end, all threads, old and 11th-hour, tied up nicely. Except for the last minute. I enjoyed 134 out of the 135 minutes - the last minute could have been different. Drat. Anyway, credits roll and I'm collecting my thoughts. Theatre empties soon and the vacuum guys are here. I stand in the aisle waiting for "The End". For such a small crowd, there is a lot of litter around. Shocking.

Out I emerge into the light. It had been slightly drizzling when I came, and it's been a cool, cloudy week. Perfect conditions for a film like this. I come home, and then the final thread is resolved. The Twenty20 final was not at night - it started at 5:30 pm, explaining why "things are not what they seem in the desert". Still, I only missed the uneventful Indian innings. It had already been a good day.

Ho yaa Huu!

2011-10-31T15:15:00.000+05:30

Update (31 Oct 2011): My last entry in WOGMA & Reviewgang's, two review sites who are organizing "The Reel-Life Bloggers contest" on occasion of the WOGMA's 5th anniversary. This is my last entry (for suffering readers' sake). Hope these posts do no harm to their Page Rank.

Khosla ka Ghosla is definitely a classic; if I may say so, in the Golmal league. Which is we will recommend it to the next generation and brush aside any objections they may provide as piffling trifles. A middle-class portrait of great quality.

Cut straight to the marble plaque: Khosla ka Ghosla is the most entertaining film I've seen in a long, long time. Only a second viewing will tell if it is a long-lasting film, but as a first time view, there's hardly been anything this good in ages.

I remember Outlook magazine had featured the movie in a list of movies to watch out for, about 18 months ago or so - probably it had started doing the film festival circuit. It took a while to get to the theatres, which is a pity, considering that - well, there is really no point lamenting the commerce as usual. Instead, best to sing praises of Dibakar Banerjee (director) and Jaideep Sahni (writer).

If the story had been any more "middle-class", most of us would be in it. The attitudes and the reactions are so incredibly familiar. And finally, for those of us who had been brainwashed into thinking Punjabis' only activities include dancing at weddings in silk "suits" and trace the paths of their mustard fields, well, finally we see a life in which rajma-chawal causes extreme flatulence and hair-nets keep the long beards in check on morning walks. It was the return of the world of Jaspal Bhatti.

You could, if you wished, tear the plot developments to pieces, but then you wouldn't appreciate the world of P. G. Wodehouse as well. This is a plot in the spirit of Jeevesian schemes to pull the troubled out of the muck. There were points where I felt really glum at the predicaments piling up, but the BGMs tell you (nice music, by the aptly associated Bapi-Tutul) - they'll make it. It was the same faith that Bertie Wooster always has in his guardian angel (name of Pelham Grenville, perhaps)

The acting ranges from the competent to the excellent. Anupam Kher (whom you are never sure about) recaptures rare old form as the uncertain householder; Boman Irani as the evil land shark with the disco paunch is good as usual; Kiran Juneja, Navin Nischol and Vinod Nagpal (seeing him after a long while) provide fine support; Ranvir Sheorey as the good-for-nothing elder son scintillates; Parvin Dabas is lucky to have a role that requires him to underplay; Vinay Pathak is dependable; Tara Sharma almost dubao-fies the luTiyaa (need to get the voice dubbed, lady) but not by too much; the sub-support cast is terrific ("munjaaaal" comes to mind).

So there you have it, jii: an unqualified recommendation for "Khosla ka Ghosla". Watch out for the cool title sequence, "deep breath inhale/breath out/breath inhale", and "chiraunjilaal", the best film name since "billo chaman bahaar", bhai.

Freshly "Pre-owned" stocks

2011-10-30T11:41:00.002+05:30

First it was "pre-owned cars". Now its "pre-owned video games" (seen at Landmark, Pune). Further proof that the world of marketing is often in bed with the dictionary of euphemisms (this last phrase was a metaphor, by the way).

Suddenly, no one wants to say it like it is: the car is second-hand, the game was sold to us by someone else, that is just something the previous diner threw up. "Pre-owned" simply sounds corny. Before it was owned, it was manufactured, assembled, retailed, distributed, displayed, packed, thrown-away-at-never-before-seen-rates-at-export-material-reject-sales.

But before it was owned, it was never owned.

Try saying: "Oh, this is my post-owned car. I've had it for three years now. I'm thinking of selling it to a new post-owner and become a proud owner of a pre-owned car".

Soon everything will achieve new pre-ownership. The raddi-wallah, previously mistaken for a mere recycler, is actually an enabler of pre-owned items, a mobile purveyor of modern antiques. If information from 'trusted sources' is first-hand then grapevine data is no longer rumour, but 'pre-owned' gossip.

Try saying: "Oh, these undies are not second-hand, they are merely pre-worn".

We have an old car at home - we are its 3rd owner. That makes it a pre-pre-owned vehicle. It also sounds like a spiritual guru.

I suppose there is no point in continuing these rants; after all this is the land that also gave "prepone" to the world. I will wait to recycle them another day. Maybe the day I see matrimonial ads for "second marriages" claiming:

"Dynamic, fair, 42 (looks 30) /5"8', IIT-IIM. Innocent, issueless pre-married."

Till then, this is just pre-post-erous.

Say no, Rita (a review of Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara ...)

2011-10-28T15:28:00.002+05:30

(...with brief cameos by DCH and Aranyer Din Ratri)

Zoya Akhtar's Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, on the face of it, trades similarities with her younger brother's debut film Dil Chahta Hai. Both are about three friends finding insights about their life and their dreams. One of the many things that is common to both is the idea of a road-trip; while in DCH, it is just a pleasure trip, a great way to introduce a good song that lays out the attitudes of its characters, in ZNMD, it is the entire film (i.e. "the journey", lit. and fig.)

ZNMD is everything people initially accused of DCH of being. We took offence to DCH's nonchalant in-your-face affluence and its carefully coordinated blue-white hues. But as sense and time have prevailed over strangely moral indignation, we recognised in it something deeper: that life can often be complicated; it's not just the poor that have a monopoly on loss, sadness, and the obligations of relationships; and that poor little salad-eating rich slacker boys are human after all. (And it had *that* misdial scene.)

I doubt sense or time will be that kind to ZNMD.

ZNMD is like watching 3 hurdlers preparing to run a race, jostling for position, unsure of whether their legs would be up for the straddle. And then finding all the hurdles missing and the race reduced to a stroll through a lovely park.

ZNMD is a "for loop" of simple computations; where each character is allowed to iterate through his choice of lit. and fig. adventure, with a 100% guarantee of meaningful insight (or the storyteller will refund the money for the trip). In DCH, everyone loses something in their gain: Akash his pride and self-assurance, Sid his lady love, Sameer (presumably) his less complicated self. In contrast, here things unravel themselves in such technicolor hunky-dory-ness that you think that had they continued in Spain or gone to Greece for another week, the Eurozone debt crisis would have resolved itself with a shower of gold from the heavens.

Great plots demand conflict; they demand that its characters suffer. By all means, fling resolutions at them in the end, but put those hapless story puppets through the wringer. In ZNMD, even the potentially embarassing and revelatory meeting with a lost dad ends up being highly underwhelming. Hearts are purged of fear all too easily, love is discovered and conquered with ease, embarassments dissolve at the first sight of daylight. In short, the day is short and begging to be seized without a fight. So why should that interest me?

ZNMD is a visit to the nearest convenience store, where distress turns out to be the inability to find fresh Shiitake mushrooms, conveniently resolved (or your money back, remember) by finding it in the hands of a pretty girl in the neighbouring aisle, who decides she is willing to walk with you into the sunset (or out to the parking lot) forever.

And there's not even a queue at the payment counter. Cease the day.

Post Script: Earlier the same week, I saw Satyajit Ray's "Aranyer Din Ratri". Strange as it sounds, there are parallels to be drawn between these two films. In both, a set of friends decide to escape into less familiar, more natural environs. There they have experiences that change them fundamentally. Both sets find and lose love, and both are principally character-driven plots.

But see how, in the hands of a master, the characters are deeply revealed to us, how life is revealed to be complex but worth engaging with, where loss is balanced with insight. All this without, IMO, being any less entertaining.

All images from Wikipedia

The Tamil Diwali - a SiNi-matic experience

2011-10-25T19:12:00.001+05:30

Many people ask me why is it that the Tamil Diwali (or Deepavali as it's more likely to be called in the land) starts at 4 am with an oil bath and ends at 6 am after some crackers. This is not the case and I will attempt to undefame this (possibly North Indian) defamy.

(image: Geetham.net)

The simple and practical purpose behind getting your Diwali chores out of the way is so that we can indulge in the Sun TV Deepavali 'sirappu nigazhchigal' (i.e. 'special programmes', as you unentangle your Northie tongue after an ill-advised attempt to pronounzh that). In fact, some dispassionate but misguided anthropologists have even been led to believe that this communal partaking of the dawn-to-dusk Sun TV feast is the true essence of the Tamil Diwali. (Some rascally fellow has also submitted a thesis saying Naragasuraa, was misheard on his deathbed: he wanted us to do 'videos', not 'vedis'. This is just more defamy.)

In reality, this is how things unfold. A week before Diwali, Sun TV will begin announcing its line-up of this year's SiNis (Ed.: carpal-friendly abbr.; its similarity to "Cine" is purely coincidental).To make sure each and every viewer of Sun TV is able to by-heart the schedule, the kind souls in charge of programming will show this lineup every 15 minutes. This often means that the 9 pm nightly soap will start the next day at 6 am, instead of 10 pm the same day.

One of Sun TV's core beliefs is eternal consistency ( which is why they only recently began accepting the helio-centric theory of the solar system), so each year, the SiNi line-up is the same:

Nadaswaram (a.k.a. Nagaswaram) performance
Devotional Carnatic song (preferably by siblings)
Spiritual guidance (depending on judicial status of seer's police cases)

At this point, Sun TV will lean heavily on our rich (5000+n)¹ year-old cultural heritage i.e. 21st century Kollywood. The schedule becomes:

Interview with Tamil Music Director
Interview with reigning Tamil comedy superstar (i.e. Vadivelu)
Interview with the super-talented cast of a about-to-be-super-hit Tamil film releasing today

At this point, we will have one hour of the 'paTTi manDram'.

The 'paTTi maNDram' is literally 'the debate forum' in which several Tamil professors will humourously discuss serious topics such as:

Who watches more 9 pm nightly soaps: daughter-in-laws or mother-in-laws?
Is the use of soap by daughter-in-laws antithetical to our (5000+n) year-old heritage?
Mother-in-laws are more likely to break-up the home after watching the 9 pm soap: True or False? Comment with references to 9 pm soaps (one 8 pm soap rebuttal allowed)
What is the correct spelling: mother-in-laws or mothers-in-law?

One hour of lively debate by the professors with humorous interruptions by the Chair (a gentleman called Solomon Pappaiah) ends with victory for the mother-in-law or the daughter-in-law (ever since records were kept, the scoreline has been 37-32 in favour of the m-i-ls). Just how wildly popular these debates are can be judged by shots of wild laughter from the audience in the debate hall (even after an ad break) and that the speakers and the Chair often get to have wild cameos in Rajnikanth films. (See example paTTi maNDram video

After such cerebral sparring, the rest of SiNis are:

Afternoon Film (from two years ago, which was aired last year)

Interview with star (not superstar, mind you)

Recitation by superstar poet (i.e. Vairamuthu)

Interview with reigning heroine (who speaks one of Punjabi, Tulu, Gujarati, Marwadi, Czech, or Dogri)

Evening Superhit Film (that flopped last year)

Interview with editor/sound recordist/art director (the South takes its technicians very seriously)

An important note about the film is that it is never just a film, but a <dramatic>"Film that is being telecast on TV for the first time in this universe or any of its parallel universes"</dramatic>

And there are two in a day. It really must be Diwali.

The great thing about Sun TV is, as we have already remarked, its remarkable and secular consistency. To ensure people aren't put off balance, it follows this same template for Pongal, for Vinayagar Chathurthi, for Christmas, and other festive days. For Tamil New Year day, it gets even special: by interviewing A.R.Rahman, Vijay, or Dhanush. Or if we are very, very lucky, Vadivelu twice.

And people say the Tamil Diwali ends at 6 am.

1. (the linguistic constant 'n' is introduced to ensure that Tamil remains older than Sanskrit or Proto-Aryan or Trans-Elvish).

"A cricketing theory of Indian quiz groups"

2011-10-13T19:15:00.001+05:30

In which I make unwarranted comparisons between two domains of personal interest. At the BCQC blog.

Might as well use the blank space on this blog to tell you that we at the BCQC quiz regularly at COEP (for whose Boat Club it is named). There are informal quizzes almost every weekend (such as this Saturday, at 1:30 pm) and formal quizzes once a month, to which there are no fees or major restrictions. We're on Twitter, on Facebook, on a blog, and are getting our site up back again from its Van Winkle slumber.

It's a good place to learn new things, revive old memories, watch some silly people talk, and have a weirdly interesting time without illegal stimulants (at least during the quiz; what happens afterwards is not official).

The 1Z Quiz

2011-10-02T19:15:00.001+05:30

As some of you may know, I've been running a daily quiz blog called "Infinite Zounds". It's been exactly a year since the blog began, and so, to mark this milestone, I'm also running a trivia contest for about a week.

If this sort of thing interests you, head here to know more.

Prelims questions from the Brand Equity Quiz 2011 Pune round

2011-09-23T09:41:00.003+05:30

Unlike last year, I was a professional spectator this time at the Pune round of this year's BEQ (results here). Questions (answers in a comment; Prabhakar has the finals ):

1. who owns a farmhouse in khadakwasla, sai service petrol pump
2. deutsche welle gives the BOBs awards. Best of?
3. longest reigning monarch, also has a large fortune
4. batata wada, what does batata mean in eng
5. which former employee of ad dept of GE worked with Al Ries for over 26 years
6. victorian author worked at warren blacking factory for 6 shillings a week -
7. bcos they were constantly touched by hands and feet of ppl, which mughal ruler did away with the quranic kalima from coins
8. which tight-fitting trousers and short riding boots shares its name with an indian city
9. which prog topped last week's TRPs on Indian TV
10. how many vincent van gogh sell in his lifetime
11. mark zuckerberg is on google+ (y/n)?
12. which org did gandhi praise as medium of unparallele
d immediacy, intimacy, and power
13. tax on which edible item did naoroji refer to as: most cruel revenue imposed in any civilised country
14. on a qwerty keyboard, the keys for typing which of these currencies (euro/yen/dollar) appear on the same row
15. in 2010 who earned the most among female tennis players (out of sharapova, li na, serena)
16. which refrigerator brand named after the person who developed the concept of absolute zero
17. which fruit is the 4th most valuable food after rice, wheat, milk? (choices: apple, banana, mango)
18. who painted his 1st cinema hoarding for v shantaram's prabhat studio
19. in which 2011 film does the air hostess Sonia agree to deliver a package for Vladimir Dragunsky
20. liverpool has an airport named after which Beatle
21. (v) identify the advertiser: 'passion to perform' tagline
22. (v) id the person
23. (v) logo for what ipl team
24. (a) which entertainment co's brand identity
25. (a) id the voice
26. the word ___ originates from goldsmith's hall in london where articles were tested and stamped with such a mark
27. on whose death on nov 29, 1993, was parliament adjourned for a day in India
28. 1874, a british bakery created which biscuit to celebrate marriage of Maria Alexandrovna to Duke of Edinburgh
29. which e-commerce co's logotype is an arrow leading from A to Z representing customer satisfaction
30. which painkiller also marketed as Panadol in other countries, is the leading paracetamol brand in India

Highest score by a team was 29, cut-off must have been 26 (after tiebreaks) or above.

Last year's prelims

Want more daily quizzing? Try Infinite Zounds, my daily quiz blog on events in the news

Yeh hai dungistan ka wow

2011-09-17T16:51:00.001+05:30

The only thing keeping pace with inflation is the sales in pet dogs. Each morning (and doubly so on weekends), the streets are filled with pooches attending to nature's urgent calls, while their masters (or more commonly their slaves) remain on call waiting. Observe these masters and you will realise that to them, the pet dog is a true member of the family. As the humorist Pu La wrote, they talk to them in intimate tones and adamantly claim the pets can understand them.

But I have never seen pet owners lead their kids or any other equally prized members of their family out to relieve them in the middle of the roads. The morning constitutional belongs not just to them, but to us as well, but we are forced to slalom past remains of their privileged motions. The yellow road is not one that leads to Oz, but to public nuisance.

Of course, one can claim that pets are merely following citizens in a country long used to treating outdoors as the natural repository of the insides. When can we expect that owners don't take our streets for granted and teach both pets and children the value of the commons? Perhaps it is time to raise an equal and opposing stink of some kind.

The last word belongs to that great philosopher of our age, Jerry Seinfeld, a citizen of a city where they make you clean up after your pet:

On my block, a lot of people walk their dogs, and I always see them walking along with their little poop bags, which to me is just the lowest function of human life. If aliens are watching this through telescopes, they're gonna think the dogs are the leaders. If you see two life forms, one of them's making a poop, the other one's carrying it for him, who would you assume was in charge?

Faaaast and slw

2011-09-16T12:13:00.000+05:30

From The Economist's column on language, an interesting pointer to a study paper in the "Language" Journal on why certain languages sound faster than others. Japanese is one of the fastest, and curiously Mandarin is on the slower side.

It's got to do with syllables, number of available sounds, and information density. Fascinating stuff. See The Economist for a summary and this TIME article for the details..

Be there, be square

2011-09-15T12:24:00.001+05:30

Each Saturday, when I receive my copy of the Indian Express, I turn, not to the sports pages or the Page 3 party news (this being the IE, there is none of course), but to read Mihir Sharma rip into the Indian TV news media. I derive a nasty form of pleasure from it, and I'm sure I'm not alone in it. In recent times, spurred by what we saw, heard, and winced during and after L'events D'Anna, his tone has become as militant and mocking as that of some Kejriwal-Bedi offspring. And this is one campaign I wholly support.

Take for instance Sharma's take on the ever increasing panel sizes of 'experts' on Times Now. There were days when the 9'O Clock show looked more like a set from Hollywood Squares: there were many boxes on screen and each box had someone answering questions, sometimes simultaneously. But unlike that TV show, the responses were not funny and the viewers never got any answers at the end.

Indeed, I call upon Mihir Sharma to go on an undeclared, unwarranted, infinite fast against such ~~news~~ programmes. For that is what the Nation Demands.

Incidentally, I have been on a zero-TV diet for the last 2 weeks. And realised it's very easy to achieve an immediate improvement in one's life.

"One Serving Moon" - a story

2011-08-18T05:50:00.001+05:30

A little story that I wrote last year. Thanks to Harish, George, Vinay, Aditya, and others for suggestions and criticisms.

No sooner had the car left to take its owner to his early morning tennis session that a buggy rolled to a halt outside the house. The driver, a pale and sweaty man, peered outside. He was blessed with a natural talent in looking like the kind of person you did not want appearing outside your house, especially early in the morning. This was fortunate for Kato, for it contributed to his successful career as legal summons executive (recently promoted and now on overseas assignment).
Kato was not a morning person himself, but he had a long list of people to confront that day. This town of plagiarists, copyright-violators, and inspiration-thugs slept late into the day and was most likely to be at home at dawn. It was also a good idea to let the young intern with him know that in this job, comforts such as a leisurely start to the day did not exist. But there were compensations: for instance, the satisfaction of personally delivering bad news to the doorsteps of reprobates.
"This seems to be the house of 'Singh, S', said Kato, looking around. "You got the papers, kid?"
Aftab, the intern, nodded. He pulled out some papers from a cream envelope, and appeared to be checking that he had everything. But he continued to fiddle with them, unwilling to step out.
Kato had seen this before. One of the perils of seniority was being saddled with namby-pambies, of having to "show them the ropes". Such phrases always made Kato feel like a master executioner. He found himself drifting into a daydream involving a pair of gallows and some unknotted nooses, but snapped himself out of it. It was the heat, he reminded himself. He longed for some tranquility instead of this noisy, sun-lit city.
"See, kid, it's just as they tell you in training. You walk up, you knock, you ask for the guy - in this case, Mr. Singh. You serve him the papers. If he has any questions, you tell him the answers are in them. If they press on, you point to the toll-free helpline number. If they begin to sob, you simply walk back, without leaving yourself vulnerable to an attack from the rear."
Yeah, the agency had got it down to a business process.
"I've heard other agents have had things thrown at them. Just last week..."
Kato cut in. "That happens, yes. But these war stories are often exaggerated. Get going kid, we got lots of other places to go to."
He watched Aftab reluctantly pull himself out of the buggy, and drag himself down the walkway past the gate, and to the front door. Kato looked at the print-out in his hand, trying to figure out the route to the next villain in fake-town.
Even before he could finish, he heard footsteps and looked up to see a relieved Aftab.
"Done already? Good start, mister."
"No, no", said Aftab, trying to catch his breath. He's fled back, thought Kato. There were no signs of blood, so perhaps whatever was thrown at him had missed its target.
"I couldn't deliver the notice - he wasn't there. Mr. Singh, I mean. Oh, he's not Mr. Singh. Gulzar sir has gone to play tennis. I mean he must be Mr. Singh, but he's not there."
The scaffolds, the blindfolds, the last meals...the images came flooding back into Kato's head. The guillotines and electric chairs patiently awaited their turn.
"Rubbish! What are you talking? - sober up, fella. Explain yourself."
Aftab was a roly-poly law school graduate whose fifteen-plus years of formal education had rendered him unskilled in presenting a cogent explanation of anything outside the syllabus. Yet he tried.
"Sir, what I am trying to say is like this. Gulzar sir lives in this house. I saw a photo of him inside. In the living room, behind the person who answered the door. That person who told me 'sir is not there, he has gone for tennis'."

The rest of the story continues (on page 3) below:

"One Serving Moon"

Can't access the document above? Download a pdf from here.

Mood Indigo India Quiz questions

2011-08-08T19:54:00.000+05:30

Last December, I conducted an India quiz as part of the quizzing festival at Mood Indigo (IIT Bombay's annual college fest, for those not in the know). The questions (from the prelims and the two main rounds in the final) have been uploaded to Slideshare:

Mood Indigo India Quiz Prelims

View more presentations from Ramanand J

Mood Indigo India Quiz Finals - I

View more presentations from Ramanand J

Mood Indigo India Quiz Finals - II

View more presentations from Ramanand J

I also have another quiz of mine (called "Balls, Ballots, Bollywood") in the same account. It can be accessed here.

If you have a look at these questions and have any comments, do let me know!

A review of "Biz World" - a book for business quizzers

2011-07-10T19:35:00.000+05:30

Disclosure: I was sent a copy of this book gratis with a request from one of the authors to review this book.

Nothing divides the Indian quizzing community as much as the wedge of "Business Quizzing". This genre emerged in the last decade to become the most lucrative of quizzing sub-cultures and perhaps its most controversial. People who can't stand it claim that most business quizzes (and in particular the ones with the highest profiles) are boring and mundane, encourage cramming, have very fixed templates, and very little to offer in terms of intellectual entertainment. Clearly, that has not dented the allure of the biz quizzing scene, which continues to flourish, and each year a new batch of participants, especially from B-schools, try their luck at challenging some of the well-knowns in the field.

So it helps to know what your quizzing sensibilities are before considering "Biz World". The book is very clear on who most of its likely readers are: candidates preparing for B-school entrance tests and those taking part in business quizzes. As a result, the book centres around providing the usual suspects: prominent facts about well-known firms, etymologies of names and terms, and a miscellany of other trivia that is likely to show up in your average biz quiz. There is a short section with more traditional Q&As at the end. Think of a Malayala Manorama yearbook for common business trivia and this book is it.

If you're the kind that looks down upon such collections of data, you might not want to pick this book up. However, if you're a pragmatic preparer for such events (especially a newbie), this book might work for you. It may not be comprehensive in coverage (I couldn't see a geographical spread beyond India, the US, Japan and Western Europe) and it certainly could have benefited by breaking the monotony of lists that dominates the first half of the book for more engaging content. The authors do provide a fair number of tips (no doubt gained from their experiences as participants and tutors) on dealing with both business quizzes and entrance exams. The quizzing romantic will point to this as being evidence of the commodification of what should be a pursuit of pure knowledge, but it is debatable if such a utopian state of affairs ever existed.

I'm not a biz quizzing enthusiast myself but I can see the utility of this book to a certain segment of Indian quizzers. If you're one of them, it's very likely that this is a book you'd want to try out.

Why sum ppl rite lyk this

2011-06-16T18:41:00.000+05:30

Are more people engaged in writing today than they did a decade ago? Definitely more than they did two decades ago, right? Let's see now.

Earlier (i.e. when I was a teenager), the most common or important reasons to write were:

Academic: Exams, notes, reports
Official: applications, memos, forms, files etc.
Personal letters, letters to newspapers
Creative and professional writing (fiction and non-fiction)

But in recent times, with digital devices and sites, we add:

SMS texts
Social media posts and comments (blogs, tweets, comments etc.)
Online forums

I can't think of anything significant in the original list that has died out; some have just been replaced by a digital alternative, and the likes of "letters to editors" were always a fringe activity. Also, note that the new additions are mostly of the casual writing variety.

If my thesis is right, then it may explain why so many people publicly use "modern" spellings (i.e. sms-ese) even on channels that don't call for it. So you have people going "u hv ppl gng" even on Facebook when you might expect only a tweet or an sms to undergo that treatment. Two factors seem to be at play here:

1. A common observation in computational linguistics is Zipf's Law which says that if you order words by their frequency (in any reasonably sized collection of documents), and plot a graph of its rank against its frequencey, you'll see a graph like the one on the right (taken from here). The first few words (the top seeds) have the most frequencies, and this rapidly dies out to give a long tailed distribution.

It is empirically observed that the rank of a word in this ordering will be inversely proportional to its frequency and this proportion is constant (allowing some leeway here).

Many words in language (let's exclude "function words" like "the", "of" etc.) are "homonyms" i.e. they are used to represent more than one concept (e.g. "fan", which could be an instrument providing artificial breeze, or a supporter). There are words like "set" and "run" whose different meanings are estimated to run into the hundreds.

The explanation for Zipf's law is (I don't know if this has been scientifically proven) that since speakers want to conserve energy, they want to use smaller words and want to reuse words (listeners would prefer the opposite: they'd want to hear unambiguous words).

The point of discussing this is that people are inherently energy conscious (read lazy) and would want to reduce the amount of work that they have to put in to create something. So writers would prefer smaller codes (i.e. shorter spellings) and let the reader figure out what they meant to say ¹. You may have encountered the meme about how you could leave out (usually vowels) or jumble a lot of characters in a word or sentence and people would still figure out what you meant (works for "rspnsblty"; also see this post). So in many cases, a energy-conservant writer would be able to use this to his advntg (notice that I can't leave out "a" in that word).

With time, trial and error, and some form of community editing would leave us with a new set of acceptable lexemes (i.e. word forms) which seem to also have the desirable property of annoying older sections of literate society.

I believe spellings are arbitrary conventions, and there's nothing particularly sacrosanct about one specific code set. But that doesn't mean that "as u lyk it" wouldn't irritate the hell out of me, just as I'm sure Geoffrey Chaucer would find it hard to navigate the English spellings I take to be correct.

2. So far, I've conjectured that casual, off-hand writing has increased and that writers inherently prefer to expend as little energy in accomplishing their task as possible. There is one more factor at play: the permissiveness of the readers.

We are taught (correct) writing at school and we were expected to keep that up when we wrote for official or public purposes. We would get a clip in the ear for writing "Delhi wz da capital of India" (indeed, it would not even occur to us to write that way), and people would snigger if office memos or personal letters went that way. They probably still would. However, the modern increase in casual writing, where correspondents want to primarily exchange information without regards to form, it is incredibly easy to write shorthand and get away with it. Older fogeys may insist that anything you write to them be less insulting, but most people who cared about their spellings would just gnash their teeth in private and think of you as a whippersnapper of no merit.

This lack of censorship freely allows these forms of spelling to spread in the community unhindered. Soon, this spills over to other, more formal mediums as well.

In fact, I'm convinced that lexicographically, we are in the middle of a great and visible shift (I don't know if it qualifies to be a "Great Shift"). Usually, such changes happen over a large period of time, and aren't readily apparent. In this case, it is exploding under our noses.

What is worrying though is that in addition to a (somewhat) logical compression of a word ("you" -> "u", "people" -> "ppl"), young writers indiscriminately drop characters. I see "awsome". I see "wats need of raincoat,enjoy d rain". And I see "rememeber u ask me to to bring the...". There isn't enough 'sic'-ness in the world to cover this ailment. Is there an excuse for lack of attention to your writing?²

We as readers now encounter more text than we did before, which means some of us spend a lot more energy in comprehension than we used to. Do we now appreciate good writing more than ever? Should we be grateful that perhaps a Zipfian Law of appreciation has now kicked in?

1. I realise this argument fails if you ask why do writers ramble on, instead of choosing to write smaller texts? I'd argue that here ((just like in not paying attention to your spellings), the energy saved is in not having to edit. It takes effort to be succinct and so the rambling approach suits a "stream of consciousness" approach. Result: the reader is left to navigate endless verbal meanderings. I'll take the hint and stop here.

2. A related post from the past: What's your excuse for writing badly?

String theory

2011-06-15T19:41:00.001+05:30

IBN Live quotes Extreme Tech, a technology website, as saying:

The innovative doodle that Google put up for the country and jazz guitarist, songwriter and inventor Les Paul resulted in $268 million in lost productivity.

The calculations are basically a house of cards made of slabs of back-of-the-envelope calculations built on a foundation of assumptions. Still, even if I ignore the number or method, the exercise annoys me. Consider the positives:

Several million+ people, who may not have heard of the pioneer Les Paul, now know who he was.
Instead of muddling 5 minutes on Facebook or Powerpoint or thinking about what they'd do after work, they spent time with a new toy, and some of their neurons (especially on the right hand side of the brain) welcomed the change.
They marveled at the current state of web technology and some of them resolved that day to learn to build such cool things.
By listening to what others had done with the audio-doodle, they figured out that great music can be made even from humble instruments. Some dusted off their old guitars and others made appointments with musically-inclined friends and teachers.

I wouldn't know how to calculate it, but I guess that whatever the loss to numerical productivity and annoyance to neighbours, the contribution to human knowledge and creativity was firmly in the black.

And if you want to pluck a few strings again, here you go.

"The Myths of Innovation" by Scott Berkun (O'Reilly Media)

2011-06-14T08:20:00.000+05:30

Scott Berkun is an author and blogger, a former Microsoft man. I began reading his blog a couple of years ago, and have found most of his posts interesting and even provocative. In fact, he makes a point of being strident in his views about management, public speaking, and thinking.

"Myths of Innovation" is his second book (the first was about project management, and the third is about public speaking). Ordinarily, I'm wary of anything with the I-word in the title because most people use "innovation" to indicate a vague sense of novelty and as synonyms for invention or creativity. They've either never thought what they mean by it or use it just like they use most other verbose polysyllabic words. However, Berkun has often suggested that perhaps it would be good (for our collective mental health no doubt) if people could stop using the word "innovation", I was reasonably sure of being spared the fertiliser.

I'm not saying that the expressed need for (more) innovation is hollow or just a fad. Most industries and societies at some point in their lifecycles need to change (indeed, are compelled to), in order to survive, flourish, grow, or just to avoid dying of boredom. Doing new and useful things is immensely challenging and interesting, and some people are going to be very inclined to try their hand at it. If they are also of the reading type, then "The Myths of Innovation" will be a useful book for them.

These myths are obviously not in the mould of hand-me-down stories. They are better understood as being assumptions, unspoken ideas that take insidious home in minds. Take, for instance, the idea that some of history's greatest inventors were hermits, working in wooden cottages bouncing ideas off the house cat. Okay, not so much that, but the notion of the solitary innovator, having to single-handedly fight off the status quo, has always been great material for long-lived stories and trivia questions. Any reading of history easily debunks many of these stories. Edison, the archetypal inventor, had an army of researchers and technologists. Steve Jobs, innovator extraordinaire, needed to find his Woz, his Ive, and many more. Yes, they had to fight the proverbial systems, but they had cohorts. The revision history of any innovation, to use a software engineering term, will show the grubby fingerprints of many, with several increments and roll-backs. One thing will be certain: the more the longevity of the innovation, the more it would have evolved and the more the people involved.

Berkun tackles this and other such myths, including some counter-intuitive ones such as "Innovation is always good". Anyone forced to listen to an annoying ring-tone in a public space would know that isn't quite true. The book is engaging (and well-referenced) with a variety of anecdotes and discussions, and there are no homilies.

Towards the end, moving away from the negative tone, the book turns into a checklist of various suggestions, "hacks" of interest to the creative innovator. Perhaps Berkun didn't want to limit the book to a list of things you shouldn't assume or avoid doing. It's by no means comprehensive, but useful nevertheless. He also encloses an excellent bibliography. Sure, you can spend time reading them all, but to me, the message of the book is that if you think you want to innovate, what you should do is: just go ahead.

I reviewed this book as part of O'Reilly's Blogger Review Program. This is the first time I've done so, and it was mostly motivated by being able to read this particular book for free. Sorry Scott :-)

Alain de Botton and "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work"

2011-06-06T23:40:00.016+05:30

That I am a little reluctant to describe Alain de Botton as a modern philosopher probably reflects more on my self-image and the image I want to portray to the world. In this post, I will be describing a book of his that I quite enjoyed and since, in the minds of my friends, modern-age philosophy is often bolted to the shelf of professionally vague self-help bestsellers, I worry about what they may think.

But Alain de Botton himself (or rather his website) comes to the rescue, describing him as "a writer of essayistic books that have been described as a 'philosophy of everyday life.'". That's a reasonable description. de Botton is not a prescriptive writer, but one who seems to possess both the leisure as well as a unintrusive acumen to write about us humans and the worlds we inhabit. Without telling us what to do next.

I heard of de Botton via Dhammo (thus giving me a chance to pay the favour back). I first read "The Architecture of Happiness", a quaint book about different spaces of the constructed variety, lowly office buildings and grand cathedrals alike. But this post is about "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work".

Perhaps I am taking the easy way out, but I don't have as much to say as much as I have to quote from the book. We spend a significant portion of our adult lives at "work", says de Botton, but we don't discuss it very much. This is perhaps not so true any more - blogs and tweets are devoted to dissecting our work-lives in detail or making throwaway comments during the day; but it is true that we do not compare our experience across professions: art curators do not break commiserative bread with brain surgeons, cricket umpires do not swap notes with database administrators.

Apart from being a lurking presence during the day and a quiescent ghost in the hours between work, what is so special about work? Our ancestors (including our parents) probably never made so much of it, the way we charge so much of our potential happiness to it.

"...the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy."

In the book, de Botton follows people to work, talks to a wide variety of people going about their daily business, observes, and makes conjectures, even about himself. It is fascinating, an unexpected kind of voyeurism, watching rocket scientists prepare for a routine launch, shaking your head at a power engineer whose weekend hobby is to trace the paths of power lines, ride up and down elevators with business consultants. Satisfyingly (and sadistically), their lives are as interesting (or boring) as ours.

Perhaps the most interesting and poignant encounter is with a career counselor. He deals with mid-career clients who can no longer keep up the facade of knowing what they want to do and students about to plunge into the depths that plague all of us, while dealing with his own professional anxieties. Like a dentist with a vague sense of dread about the pain in his molars.

de Botton notices that the counselor has a notice pinned to a door containing:

"a quote from Motivation and Personality, by the psychologist Abraham Maslow [...]: 'It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.'"

He observes the counselor helping a woman deal with the attempt to discover what she really "wants to do" (familiar question at any age?), by attempting cathartic writing sessions not just about what these people like, but also what they envy. What else can you do in that short span of time, in the rapidly falling sunlight of life?

A de B takes an aptitude test; when its results come back:

"I recognized my desire to submit to the report’s conclusions in the hope of quelling my doubts about my future. At the same time, the report failed to inspire any real degree of confidence and indeed, the more I dwelt on it, the more it seemed to signal some of the limits of career counseling as a while.
It struck me a strange and regrettable that in our society something as prospectively life-altering as the determination of a person’s vocation had for the most part been abandoned to marginalized therapists practicing their trade from garden extensions. What should have been one of the most admired professions on earth was struggling to attain the status open to a travel agent.
...
But perhaps this neglect was only an appropriate reflection of how little therapists can in the end make sense of human nature."

He ends the book by noting that “If we could witness the eventual fate of every one of our projects, we would have no choice but to succumb to immediate paralysis." However,

"Our work will at least have distracted us, it will have provided a perfect bubble in which to invest our hopes for perfection, it will have focused our immeasurable anxieties on a relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it will have given us a sense of mastery, it will have made us respectably tired, it will have put food on the table. It will have kept us out of greater trouble."

A Christopher Nolan movie quiz

2011-05-18T16:09:00.002+05:30

I had set these questions as part of a theme round at Abhimanyu 2011 (COEP's internal quiz).

Tarantella and Larceny of two of Nolan's earliest short films. Which short featured Jeremy Theobald, who would appear in Nolan's first feature film?
What is the name of the burglar played by Alex Haw in Following, which is shared by a leading character in another Nolan movie?
The Pledge, the ____, the Prestige - What's in the middle?
Who plays the role of Nikola Tesla in The Prestige?
In which American state do the events of the film Insomnia take place?
This character in Greek mythology was the daughter of King Minos, and helps Theseus in defeating the Minotaur and finding out his way from the Labyrinth. Also the name of a character in a Nolan movie. What?
What geeky book did Hans Zimmer read as part of his preparation for creating the score for Inception, because he wanted to study "the idea of playfulness in mathematics and playfulness in music".
In Batman Begins, what is the name of the Batmobile used (based on a military prototype by Lucius Fox)?
Costumes of which comic characters do the bank robbers use at the beginning of The Dark Knight as part of their disguise?
The official website of Memento had only one word in its url. What word?
What Academy Award distinction links the Sidney Lumet film Network and The Dark Knight (and only these two films)?
Of his seven releases, Nolan has worked with composer Hans Zimmer in 3 films. Who is the other music collaborator who made music for Following, Memento, Insomnia, and the Prestige?
Retrograde amnesia is when a person forgets all memories before the loss event occurs. (i.e. the garden variety amnesia seen in Hindi films). What is the name of the other type of amnesia that Leonard Shelby in Memento suffers from?
Which former Batman is one of the producers of Insomnia?
Who will be playing the role of Catwoman in the next Batman movie?

[update]
Answers have been posted in the comments.

Where Trolls come from

2011-05-10T10:24:00.000+05:30

(not to mention their stand-bys)

If you've ever been beset by trolls, and wondered where they came from and conjectured it would have to be some kind of dark, stinky place, well, you might be right.

"Mother's Day" - a story

2011-05-09T09:15:00.001+05:30

I believe it was Mother's Day yesterday? Here's a story I wrote a couple of years ago.

~~Mother's Day~~ She woke up as if stung by a red ant. That abrupt start to the day was not at all unusual for her. Each day, it was always accompanied by a vague sense of dread: of overnight tasks forgotten, of three meals to cook, of the hypochondriac maid-servant, of the pressure cooker blowing up just as the schoolbus honked for the last time, just to spite her.

But not today. It was Mother's Day. She had forgotten to inform the poor alarm clock, who was the only one apart from her to uncomplainingly perform its unpleasant duties. She drooped back in a way she had not known in a decade. In fact she lowered herself as slowly as she could, savouring this rare chance. She sighed, turned to her side, and went back to sleep. It was only 5:45 A.M.

When she woke at 7, she opened her eyes and stared up at the ceiling. Her eyes, usually burdened under sleep and fatigue, had never been this wide open in a long time. She shrugged her sheets off and sat up. There was a mirror right opposite her. Usually, she would be terrified to look at her reflection, scared of what it would reveal about her. But today she had acquired the strength to stare back. Guided by the mirror, she fingered her black circles and smoothed her hair back. She was several dollars short of looking like a million bucks but today she felt great. On her way up.

She sat there for some more time. It stayed quiet. On the table beside the bed was her sole perfume bottle and three of her husband's deodorants. He always smelt artificial. She realised today that she didn't know any of his real smells. Strange. She knew the deos were empty, so she reached out for the perfume bottle and sprayed a little on her fingers. As she raised them to her nose, the phone in the living room began to ring. Her heart leapt but his voice asking her to pick that bloody thing did not come. Instead, the ringing stopped. Once again, she marvelled at the magic of Mother's Day.

What will I do today? she wondered. Of course, there was all that cleaning to do. But that could wait. What about a meal? Perhaps scrambled eggs? He never liked eggs, and the brats always demanded chocolate frosted cereals. But today she could have her own way.

She sat on the dinner table, swinging her legs as she bit into an apple. What will I do next? Should I take a vacation? Last night, her husband had told her exactly that - why don't you go somewhere? He had suggested her father's house. But that was so stereotypical. She tried to think of all those friends from college who now lived in places worth visiting. She wondered if Pushpa still lived in Dehradun. The hills might be a good place to lie low and have some time just to oneself. But it had been about seven years since she last corresponded with Pushpa, so this might be an imposition. Going home alone was fraught with the usual inconveniences: did you have a fight? are the boys better behaved these days? should you have come without the children? who is feeding them?

She found herself withdrawing into familiar whirlpools, so she leapt gently to the floor and vigorously shrugged her head. She needed to get cheerful, otherwise how would today be any different from yesterday? She decided to tackle the cutlery left by the sink. Washing the knives made her feel better. She inspected the edge of the big knife carefully - it definitely needed sharpening. Perhaps it was time to indulge in a new set - one of these which came with a resting block with slots that you could insert each knive into. She had seen photos of that in a mail order catalogue. The angle of the knives in the slots had reminded her of that famous photo of the Marines planting the flag at Iwo Jima. When she had made that droll observation to her husband, he said he didn't know what she was talking about.

The doorbell rang. She hesitated, partly hoping the ringing would be stopped, just like the telephone. But it did not. She grabbed an apron and wiped her hands on it. She walked to the front door, drawing the curtains that shielded the rest of the house. The 'eye-hole' showed her nearest neighbour holding a newspaper.

"Hello, aunty."

"Hello beta. You were busy?"

"No, just housework."

"I wanted to check if your paper had come today. That fellow seems to have forgotten to put it again. But looks like he has put yours. It looks like even you have forgotten to pick it up today."

The neighbour thrust the daily out, chuckling.

"Oh, um, I don't think I heard the bell. Would you like to take the paper?"

"No, no, won't Ravi want the paper? Or is he not there?"

"Uh, he is..., he and the children are planning to go somewhere in the morning. So I don't think he will have the time now. I'll send one of the boys to collect it in the afternoon."

"That is so nice of you." The neighbour looked intently at her. "Beta, have you cut your finger?"

They both looked at her left index finger which was wrapped in a brown stained cloth.

She smiled: "Oh nothing, just was peeling potatoes yesterday."

"Oh, poor girl. What you do is - to get rid of the stains on your dress I mean - you take some lemon - oh, there is your uncle calling - I think Mohan's call has come. These children go to America and they start celebrating all this Father-Mother day there and then think of their parents - and when they were here, they wouldn't bother about poor mummy at all. Ok beta, just send someone to pick up the paper later."

She shut the door and looked down at her dress. She'd have to get down to all that cleaning at some point. Might as well have a look and decide where to begin.

She drew the curtains open and walked into the big bedroom. It was a mess: clothes strewn around and her suitcase open, where her husband had tried to shout her into going away the next day. Also, there were ice-cream smears all over her favourite wall-hangings that her younger sister had made for her - the brats had fought over who would get the last scoop from the pack. But most of the stains were that of clotted blood, from the large knife wound in her husband's stomach and some from the slit necks of her two boys, who had blabbered in the last moments, the ice-cream melting away, adding to the mess.

Thankfully, the fragrance of musk from the deodorants was still in the air. Which now no longer belonged to her husband. She decided she liked the smell of Mother's Day.

Babies, Babas, Bappis, and Bas Karo

2011-04-12T12:14:00.003+05:30

Outgoing Kerala CM V.S.Achutanandan called Rahul Gandhi an "Amul Baby" a few days ago, in a desperate attempt to remind us that much of the country is in the midst of assembly elections. Predictably, the Congress and its minions have seen red (ha!) , and dismissed this as being uncivilised and disrespectful.

I don't think there's anything wrong in being called an "Amul Baby". Assuming the usually bombastic VS was referring to the chubby "Amul Girl" and kids who've been reared on butter, Rahul Gandhi (who has previously been described as heading the "babalog") is being compared to an iconic figure says more clever things in a week than many of our politicians manage in years.

Of course, Kerala has lots of Babys of its own - none more prominent than the current Kerala Minister of Education M.A.Baby.

Apparently, Bappi Lahiri is some sort of an official cheerleader for the Pune Warriors IPL team. That team has the least amount of golden colour on its uniforms, so perhaps Bappi-da has been roped (though no lasso is big enough to...) into lending his auric presence to the proceedings.

Speaking of the Sonar Fella, here's an extract from a recent book about the making and impact of "Disco Dancer". Writer Anuvab Pal goes to Bappi Lahiri's house, where:

Now, during the walk, on either side of me, what I saw could be best described as gnomes. [...] It was a garden gnome, a little sculpture in ceramic.
But not of a random old white man but of Bappi Lahiri himself, wearing tuxedoes of different colours, almost as if fourteen midget marble versions of him, or a series of oversized tiled Bappi Lahiri action figures, we[r]e welcoming you into a room whose central decoration you were manipulated into observing -- a wall with two roman columns on either side. The wall had a huge framed photograph. In the photo were three people -- Mr Lahiri, Sonia Gandhi and Jay Z.

The article is here.

Speaking of gold and IPL, we're into the fourth year of the annual parade of extreme colour clashing combinations. The addition of the Kochi Tuskers and a revamped Bangalore outfit has taken the discolorations to stratospheric heights. Watching an overhead shot of the players during their match reminded me of some of the worst Powerpoint slides I've seen. And this supreme example of this website of a Japanese children's hospital (who must be undoubtedly, just to spite me, doing great humanitarian service during the current crisis).

(It has become exceedingly difficult to make pithy observations such as the above at home. As soon as they are made, the reluctant smile on people's faces gives way to grave concern. "You are going to tweet about this, aren't you?")

A Google a Day

2011-04-11T20:32:00.000+05:30

A Google a Day is a new trivia game by Google. Apart from the fact that is neatly designed and fun to play, I'm guessing it helps Google collect data about how people would use web search to answer questions.

I've always thought search engines and Q&A sites (this seems to be where the action is these days) could harness the power of quizzing. Google seems to have designed the whole process nicely. Judging by how they have taken the pains to make these questions relative un-google-able via answers to these exact questions elsewhere by people trying to solve them, a lot of thought has gone into the design.

As someone who runs a daily quiz blog himself (and has a similar in-built "show answer" design), I wonder how easily the scalability-conscious Google generates these questions. The questions seem to have a human hand in them, judging by the framing.

There's always place for one more daily quiz site, I guess :-)

Fast and Future

2011-04-09T17:19:00.000+05:30

"Civil Society"
A tendency to wince each time this phrase is heard has now turned into a full-blown case of shuddering unease, with the events of the last week. Does this universally mean what it represents in India today? A cursory web search is evasive on the answer, but it appears to principally (and ironically) serve as a label for anyone excluded out of formal social or political dialogue.

So what makes this particular collection 'civil society'? Can it only be defined by what one is not? For instance, anyone in the military is not 'civil society' (and serve us indisciplined civilians right). Anyone in politics (i.e. not in a position to rule today or tomorrow) is not 'civil society', perhaps because it is hard to be 'civil' in that society.

I don't know what it is about 'civil society' that riles me. Perhaps 'civic society' might work for me. Given the strength of this class of people is in their ordinariness, perhaps "ordinary people" is good enough. Or "Rest of India".

The God of News Channels
There is a God of News Channels, who looks and protects them. Realizing the inevitable hollowness of soul that would succeed the euphoria of an Indian World Cup win, He provides with an event that would allow them to remain on the side of the masses. Something you could cover all day, and whose result was going to take more than a few days to emerge. There were clear heroes and villains too. Essentially, something like a gripping Test match between India and Australia. This makes a good change from the usual battles, once in a while.

It also meant that reporters could continue to interview the ordinary citizen, while keeping the experts talking. Words like "Victory" and "standoff" could still remain relevant to headlines. And there were scenes of street celebrations to round it all off.

Less ironically
I actually heard some interesting and thoughtful comments by ordinary people. The politicians sound so out of touch, and so unwilling to engage in meaningful debate. Any young politician could easily have seized the day by simply talking to and with ordinary people, in many of the hundreds of gatherings around the country. There were no reports of any major 'young' political leader doing that. It was both an opportunity lost for the established lot and the briefest of sparks for the Rest of India.

And Then There Were Ten

2011-03-31T11:04:00.000+05:30

I've been a fan of Agatha Christie's books since childhood, and have written up a Top Ten list of her books for Tender Leaves, as part of their "Must Read" section. Here's the list.

(Yes, there's even mention of Tommy and Tuppence :-) ).

"Sherlock"

2011-03-25T19:51:00.006+05:30

It was Tejaswi who first mentioned the words to me. They have never failed to inspire trepidation in me. "Sherlock Holmes Adaptation" - I'd rather face Col. Moran with only a feather for defence. He qualified it by saying it was a rather "creative adaptation" and that he was "happy". That, and the fact that Steven Moffat was involved in the writing, calmed the nerves a bit.

The venerable Holmes has been portrayed on TV and the DD generation knows well the Sunday morning series starring Jeremy Brett. The Holmes enthusiasts among us have the books, are steeped in trivia, and have enjoyed the references in pop culture(such as "House MD", which often drops many an allusion for the discerning fan to drool over, or Neil Gaiman's absolutely mindblowing short story "A Study in Emerald"). Beyond this, we never felt the need for anything more.

Especially with the manic Guy Ritchie film version a couple of years ago. I haven't seen it (lack of courage, mostly), but I have had it contemptuously described as "Holmes for the Americans" (ouch). But Moffat wrote (and brilliantly at that) "Coupling" - the FRIENDS -like sitcom that you can openly admit to enjoying even in your late-20s. So here was reason to look forward to "Sherlock" (no "Holmes", my dear W).

More recommendations followed (from Ajay and Keya) and so the game was afoot. I watched it last year, and was quite "happy" too. It's a bunch of surprises, right from the first episode (the wonderfully titled "A Study in Pink"). There was a lot of reference-dropping (for the fan) but a lot of plot as well. The writing (Moffat, Mark Gattis, and Stephen Thompson wrote one episode each) is unencumbered by the weight of what it is trying to be - a truly modern adaptation of a character that is more than a hundred years old.

The immediate reason for this post is to bring to your attention the fact that these three Sherlock episodes will be aired in India for the first ever time (see end of post for details). In the great British TV tradition, only a limited number of stories per season were filmed, but each is 1:30 hours long. I don't want to spoil your pleasure, so I won't tell you what I thought of episodes 2 and 3, but will mention that "A Study in Pink" was satisfying, even as a detective puzzle. Rich in texture and well-portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch ("Sherlock") and the familiar Martin Freeman ("The Office", the H2G2 film) as the blogging Doctor. Don't miss the beginning.

"Sherlock" will air on BBC Entertainment on Sat at 8 pm, with repeats at 2 am and 2 pm the next day.

(image: BBC)

Iyers around the World

2011-03-23T10:20:00.002+05:30

South India : Iyer
North India : Madrasi
Punjab : Oye Yaar
Sweden : Ijer
Spain : Iller
Germany : Iër
Ireland: O'Eire
England : 'yer
America: Oh yeah
African-America: Yo!
Australia: Oi-yah
North Africa: Iyah
Central Africa: Oiyo
Japan: Iyo
Russia: Iy
France: Àixer
Iceland: Ambisson
Netherlands: Iyeer
Italy: Ambiino
Brazil: Da ãer
Pakistan : Iyengar
China: "aiyo! no meat or eggs, please"

Sleeping with the fishes

2011-03-20T17:23:00.002+05:30

You have had a long day ascending the hills. You see the hotel-cum-safehouse approach. You begin to relax. You think you are safe.

You trust the bellhop with your bags. He leads you to the room. You walk in. It's quiet all around. You hand him a fiver. He leaves.

You make the mistake of plonking down on the comfy chair. Then you look at the bed. The towels are made in a familiar form.

You recognise it instantly. The brief gulp of air that escapes your mouth isn't hidden from her. You explain about the towels; the fish on the bed. You wonder if you'll be sleeping with the fishes tonight.

The alarm on her face is unmistakeable. Yes, you have had a fatal dose of the movies.

Backs to the Future

2011-03-06T21:23:00.000+05:30

The other day Harsh pointed out the immense increase in the numbers of pre-schools (and nurseries, unless they are all the same), measured purely by the number of vehicles carrying children to these pre-schools. This was further underlined by an ad in the ToI for an exhibition on pre-schools.

That's right. A pre-school Expo (termed "Future Kids" - which seems wrong. The kids are already present, aren't they?). Cars, real estate, pots and pans, handlooms, and even plant fibre have had such shows dedicated to them. But this is the first time I've heard of a pre-school expo.

Of course, children are going out of the house much earlier than their parents used to (some of their grandparents never even left the house). I'm sure that as a result, they will grow up to be better informed and more socially confident than us (err, than me). Kind of Virat Kohli vs. Venkatapathy Raju. There's no contest, really.

Calculating using the current rate of acceleration, by 2030, pre-schools will also begin offering IIT-JEE coaching. It's not that absurd - this is the land of Abhimanyu after all, and perhaps Kota's famed coaching classes will have auxiliary maternity rooms where the immortal words of Halliday and Resnick will echo throughout the day.

And remember kids, unlike in Abhimanyu's case, the answers to equations involving concentric circles will be available at the end of the book.

Eats, Reads, and Tender Leaves

2011-02-24T13:05:00.004+05:30

Tender Leaves is a new book rental service in Pune. This being the post-Netflix Age, the service not only delivers books to your homes and offices for free, but also does away with annoying late-fee penalties and lets you read a book at your own pace, rather than insisting you return it within a fixed time-period. Of course, if you (like me) polish off books at an alarming get-a-life rate, they will replenish stocks when you ask them to, based on your wishlist.

To those familiar with the business, though these kind of services in India are relatively new, they are no longer unique. There are a couple of other book rental services that also have sprung up in Pune, so then what's special about Tender Leaves? Before I try answering that, I should state an important disclaimer.

Both founders of the service (Sudarshan and Harish) are former colleagues, quizzing cohorts, and good friends of mine; so I'm quite likely to be biased about Tender Leaves. But the association also helps me understand why they are well-placed to offer this service. For instance, both are very passionate about the world of books. Sud knows a lot more about books than most in my circle (no mean feat, given the many quizzers and readers in that social radius). His tastes are wide-ranging (and sometimes off the charts): he is as comfortable talking serious Nabokov as he is discussing riveting Hadley Chase. He writes about and reviews books, and has even translated into English from the original Hindi, a couple of books by popular genre writer Surendra Mohan Pathak. Harish has relatively more plebian tastes, but 'even he' has his authoritative niches: politics and sports , in particular.

Most importantly, both of them love being around books.

Back to the main thread. So why Tender Leaves?

Good Selections
I already have a membership at a reputed city library, and also have access to my company's library. I occasionally buy books, but physical space and costs are always at odds with the temptation of owning a book, so I only spend on the ones I 'must absolutely have'. Tender Leaves' catalogue seems well-stocked, especially in the areas of my interest (which are General Fiction, Comics, Non-Fiction, Humour, Biographies, Innovation etc.). I also occasionally venture into Sports and Indian Politics. TL's collection allows me to extend my reading range. Some of the TL books that I've issued (it's been about 3 months since I joined):

"A Case of Exploding Mangoes", several Asterix books, a graphic novel based on Terry Pratchett's first two books, a book on Indian cricket in the 60s and 70s by Raju Bharatan, "Scoop!" by Kuldip Nayyar, Amit Varma's "My Friend Sancho", a collection of Jerry Seinfelds's material, and "SWITCH" (a book on making change happen).

Among my three current books is Ruskin Bond's "When Darkness Falls" (I took Sud's advice!)

Great Recommendations
Which brings me to the next and perhaps most significant point. Even if you have access to a great library, how do you choose what to read? There are some who are incredibly well-informed about books, and know all about the classics right down to the latest bestsellers. But most of us are not like them. At best, we have our areas of interest, and we stick to them. But how do you venture beyond them?

TL has something known as Must-Read Lists - recommendations on various themes by people who can claim a certain authority or years of interest in that area. Want to read something about cinema? Writer and reviewer Jai Arjun Singh has a list. Planning a journey from your armchair? Shamanth's got a fabulous list of books to take you around the world. There's Business, Humour, and even Swedish Crime! I expect that, as the service grows, TL will invite more readers to contribute these kinds of lists (I hope I will have one soon ;-) )

Or you can ignore these know-it-alls and make your own pick ;-)

(Incidentally, TL has been setting up drop-boxes around the city; thanks to these, I came to know of two new eating places that they recommend. Which explains the first part of this post's heading.)

"More than just a library"
That's what TL wants to be, and they've got it in bold letters as their tag-line. They have already begun proving this. Last year, they began working with a Pune school in the Teach for India campaign. They have promised book readings and quizzes. I look forward to these and a lot more.

I didn't talk much about the actual delivery service, the pricing plans, and the other commercial aspects. The service is just as you'd expect (and would demand), the prices are for you to consider (you could even write to TL and see if there are any special offers available), and the website is still evolving. But a new venture is like a little plant and needs a lot of "tender loving care". The service comes from two passionate creators, and you can see that in what they've done so far.

By the time I come around to considering a renewal of my subscription, I will be looking at my choices purely from the value it gives me, and for the price it does so. But for now, I have no qualms in whole-heartedly recommending Tender Leaves. Voracious reader or occasional book-flirt, give it a shot, I say!

On the WWW, Tender Leaves is here. Here on Facebook, and here on Twitter.

The 404s of life

2011-02-23T15:55:00.000+05:30

A few days ago, a door in a cafeteria sported this sign:

It is true, wisdom is all around us.

Prepositional Proposals

2011-02-15T09:48:00.004+05:30

In India, boys (or "youths") often "propose a girl", instead of "proposing to a girl". Exactly to which post they are proposing her for is not very clear, but in their fragile state (esp. on days like yesterday), it must be for high offices such as "Dictator of my Life for Life" or "Plenipotentiary Extraordinary to my Anatomy". But who seconds the proposal? It must be the ubiquitous "friend", a staple presence of the Indian youth's life, as illustrated by Indian rom-com-dishum-films.

Such language gladdens the hearts of those that previously thought constitutional thought among Indians would never take firm root. Even though political parties have become increasingly autocratic, here are young men keeping alive the democratic game of proposing a name, seconding it, all the way through to unanimity, via consensus junction. The High Command approves.

One way for the lad to propose a girl is to write to her. If you were in American parts of the world, this expression is sometimes rendered as "write her a letter". This used to confuse me earlier. If you were allowed only one letter, which letter do you pick? "X" is perhaps safest.

Anyway, democratic or not, boys will be boys, and Indian lads will remain youths for life (ask the Youth Congress). V-Days will come and go, and girls will be nominated and impeached from tall towers of the heart. All we can say to them is "Best Luck".

The malli-puu revolution was here

2011-02-02T07:57:00.002+05:30

Further proof that Tamil Nadu seceded a long while back and we didn't really know.

this is a screen grab from a News X TV Channel news ticker that said 'Karunanidhi on a 3-day visit to India' - on Sunday, 30th Jan. He was in Delhi on coalition business. 'malli-puu' is 'jasmine' in Tamil.

Up the garden path

2011-02-01T08:26:00.004+05:30

The headline of this Rediff article (about a tragic event) has at least four different parses, leading to four different conclusions: The headline:

"Maharashtra CM visits killed IAS officer's family"

This is an example of a garden path sentence. (A previous example, from The Simpsons)

Baradwaj on Bhardwaj

2011-01-31T14:53:00.003+05:30

With "7 Khoon Maaf" around the corner, ace film critic Baradwaj Rangan explores Vishal Bhardwaj's fascination with and ability to render interesting female characters in a piece for Caravan Magazine aptly titled "Blood Sisters".

Warning: the essay contains spoilers about most of the films mentioned.

Would you like kanda-pohe or murrukku-chiidai with your filter coffee?

2011-01-17T08:47:00.002+05:30

Today is as good a day as any to record a personal anecdote that was recounted in a Twitter conversation by Shamanth yesterday.

In mid-2006, we were organising a quiz along with a well-known Pune school, so Salil and I hopped over to meet the teachers involved. Eventually, I met the teacher who would be doubling up as compere for the event, who had been handed a lengthy bio (thanks, world wide web) and wanted to know how my name was pronounced etc. (i.e. she wanted to separate the meagre facts from unqualified fiction). From my full name, it's easy to guess the region I hail from, and so the conversation proceeded thus (excerpts from my sieve-like memory):

T: So are you a Tamilian?
Me: Yes, I am.
T: Oh, I am too. So you are studying now?
Me: Yes. So you've been in Pune a while?
T: Yes, my husband has been working here for sometime.
Me: I see

Then the fun part:

T: I have two daughters. [beat] One of them is married.

(ok, it might not have been so abrupt to begin and end, and the good lady may not have insinuated anything, but real 'reality' just ruins a good story, doesn't it?)

7 Khoon Maaf - Vishal Bhardwaj's latest

2010-12-25T11:01:00.000+05:30

Read about it on George's blog or see the trailer at the VB blog.

"Choose your own adventure"

2010-11-26T16:42:00.006+05:30

Why do 25 men (15 on active duty) cause so much disruption in the lives of some grown men and women? Some of the stories sent in to The Guardian's over-by-over coverage(OBO) of the 2nd day of the first Ashes Test in Brisbane:

"Choose your own adventure" says Jay Buckley, "You are at work, somewhere in Sydney. Everyone is watching the cricket. Australia are fighting back. A gripping encounter is unfolding before your eyes. Your wife is waiting downstairs for you to drive her into the city for a drinks function where no-one will be watching, nor listening to the cricket. Do you (a) be a good husband, go downstairs and talk to her about her day; or (b) man-up and watch the rest of the session?"

A Pom, clearly too lilly livered to use his own name, writes: "Live and work in Melbourne. To my eternal shame I dodged cricket training last night for fear of the repercussions of Siddle's hat-trick, combined with my pre-series arrogance. A happy Saturday depends on this last session – otherwise an afternoon of sharp wit and piercing, astute sarcasm from my Aussie teammates awaits...Cough cough."

At 168-5, England are in good shape" says Darren Paterson. "As is the lass sitting opposite me who jumps and jiggles in all the right places every time the Aussies score a four. So I am in two minds: I want to see wickets, but I love to "watch" the fours." Good grief.

I"'m in Brisbane, sadly at work, reading your commentary," says Will Straw. "Although I've been caught several times reading 'cause I keep yelling out "NOO!" everytime Australia loses a wicket. Sadly this has happened five times today." That's a schoolboy OBO error Will, though I appreciate that sometimes a man just can't help himself.

"As I excitedly shimmied out of bed this morning at 5am my missus squeaked 'you're obsessed'," says Stuart Wilson, another one like Millings. "She is, as always, correct, but she doesn't understand. Watching England play is an obsession, a rollercoaster ride and at the same time the most the most special and painful (clean) experience a man can have. I wouldn't have it any other way. Enjoy the coming weeks, Rob!" Actually, re: your use of missus, why don't women refer to 'my mister'? Maybe they do, and have the same jokey conversations with their friends. "Look, girls, I'd love to stay out and nail 12 pinot grigios, but I haven't got a pass out from the mister," and so on. Maybe not. I don't know what I'm talking about. It's been a long night.

TEA Andy is on now. Please send your emails to him at andy.bull@guardian.co.uk. Honestly, a man slogs through two all-but-fruitless hours and then Smyth waltzes in and sees four wickets in a session. It's enough to make you sick.

"It's 7.55am in Dubai and a clear, crisp 24 degrees," says Sarah Bacon. "Am watching the Channel 9 coverage via OSN Arabia but couldn't enjoy this properly without the OBO." Awwww. Actually, I am fascinated by people who have lots of different coverage on at the same time. I don't know how you manage it. The last I heard Naylor had TMS, Sky, Test Match Sofa, the Guardian Ashes blog, seven different OBOs and Channel 9 on the go - and he was doing unpaid work for all of them.

"I really thought the hat trick on day one and the duck from Strauss meant this series was set to unfold like most Ashes Down Under," says Jacob Geiger. "But seeing the Aussies collapse after lunch here has reminded me that maybe all their pre-series troubles were not a fluke. Thank goodness this is a cracker of a match, because I'm in a turkey-induced food coma here after celebrating America's Thanksgiving holiday here in Virginia. Cricket is a salve after a long day with the in-laws."

"My mate's Sky service failed a last-minute fitness test (who knew that interference from the alarm on the shop next door would render Sky Sports useless post-midnight?) scuppering our plans to watch all night," says Lee Rodwell. "I've ended up in the Shepherd's Bush Walkabout instead though which I think might be the only public space in London with all-night coverage? The atmosphere is surprisingly serene and civilised. Or at least it was... Some guy just got thrown out by the weary-looking staff.

"Evening, Rob," says Alan Cooper. "Following along from the USA. The BBC forgot to block TMS yesterday so I had a lovely time listening to the commentary. Today they remembered. I wish someone would explain why they do it — it's not as if anyone else is offering commentary, and I would gladly pay a reasonable fee to listen. Bah! Still, I always have you!! Sorry, did I ruin the moment there?" It's the most moving paean to the OBO I've ever heard.

"Unfortunately, I don't have a TV so it's illegal feeds all the way. What with TMS being banned in Canada (bastards) the only coverage I can get is apparently from India and I am getting insane advertising throughout. The pick of the bunch though, if you'll pardon the pun, is for Mango frooti juice drink (can you have a bunch of mangoes? Whatever). Here it is. It's like the Prisoner with fruit. Is that not some f****d up idea? What a way to scare the bejesus out of someone. Bit like a bouncer from Broad."

Test cricket, will you marry me? This is true love. It's just a perfect thing, the most magnificent, nuanced sporting format, and still with (for the most part) an oldfangled integrity at odds with almost everything else in top-level sport. A classical, elegant beauty. I adore the thing. And that's even before you factor in that special, sexy little outfit we call the Ashes. It's looking particularly good just now, because Australia are just starting to fight back after that traumatic half-hour. Finn is a bit too short again and Hussey swivel-pulls behind square for four. This is such good cricket. Hussey is a fiercely tough bugger. I don't trust his bad form at all. Even if he'd gone binary for 17 innings in a row, I'd half expect him to get runs. "Millings is indeed a phony," says Phil Sawyer. "I sit here divorced, alone, and in a flat full of comics (the printed variety - I'm not hosting Live At The Apollo). Now that's proper OBO credentials." When can you start?

Hallelujah! Up goes the finger. Katich is given out LBW. But the batsmen consult and decide to refer it. Oh mercy me. What have we done to deserve this? The replays show the ball was going over the top and the decision is overturned. Katich bats on. What a kick in the guts. And it gets worse. Katich flicks the next ball away for four to fine leg. I've opened the Moster Munch after all. They taste like defeat. "Over here in France I'm quite keen to go to bed," says Michael Plevin, "Can you manufacture me a wicket (or two) in the next couple of minutes? I've got a busy(ish) day tomorrow and it's getting a little late. I really have to go to bed soon." Would it be better if I just lied to you about all this?

While talking about cricket, the Indians squabble noisily, the Sri Lankans beat some drums, the West Indians are sarcastically blasé, the Aussies tell you how good they are, but only the English *suffer*, in the best traditions of true love.

Simplicity through Complexity: great information visualisation approach to problems

2010-11-22T19:53:00.000+05:30

Eric Berlow, an ecologist, has a fine TED talk (or micro-talk) where he takes an example of how we could use information visualisation to get to grips with seemingly complex (and perhaps complicated) problems. The example features the notorious Afghanistan graphic that came in for great scorn (rather unfairly, I thought) and as an easy means of Powerpoint bashing.

The video is only about 3-4 minutes long, and Berlow makes his point very succintly.

Run Out at the Asian Games

2010-11-21T19:44:00.000+05:30

Read today that Preeja Sreedharan and Sudha Singh won golds (10000m and steeplechase) with Kavita Raut finishing behind Preeja for a silver at the Asian Games. This news made the sports fan in me very happy - it's been a while since individual women athletes scooped up some medals at a major tournament. Not yet close to the 80s of course, but that these hard-working athletes could do it in an era of general Chinese domination is particularly heart-warming. (BTW, where are all the post-Ma Junren Chinese long-distance runners?)

Contrast this with the BCCI opting not to send any cricket teams to the event. This is particularly galling on the women's side: the team is ranked much higher than any of the two eventual finalists (Pakistan and Bangladesh) and a gold medal should have been as easy as taking a single after the ball was hit between Arjuna Ranatunga and Sourav Ganguly.

For the Indians, coming by gold at the 2010 Asian Games have been more difficult than looking for it in Bappi Lahiri's bank locker. The women's team say they were keen to go to Guangzhou (as it is, they have very few sporting engagements each year) but the BCCI didn't choose to send a team. Perhaps the BCCI is busy with the various IPL and WADA litigations. It is also too busy to understand that, after the various IPL fiascos and the match-fixing scandals to have hit the world of cricket, it has a PR standing just above the likes of A.Raja. A cricket gold medal could have been just the happy boost that the game could have done with in India. It is hard to spot any logic in the BCCI's actions unless this is part of a large conspiracy to undermine the inclusion of the sport in future Asian or Olympic Games. Very absurd, but seems very BCCI.

Or is it just that for wise-old-BCCI, all that is gold does not glitter?

Facebook's new messages system

2010-11-16T08:43:00.000+05:30

I've always wondered why, in the age of online handles and content-based routing and web identities, do we still need to have 8+ digit numbers for phones. Since it's painful to remember more than a handful of these numbers, we end up giving them useful aliases on our mobile devices or address books. Instead, why can't we simply have something like a "name telecom provider" interface?

Which is why I was intrigued to see that very same point being made in Facebook's announcement of its Facebook Messages revamp. It's very clever, it's very social, and it is likely to take Facebook to people who didn't care to be part of that ecosystem. When GMail brought in a fresh look at e-mail, it was typically Google: fast, usable, but geeky (tags instead of folders, email classification, attachment reminders). This, in comparison, is social-like-hell (for us not-so-social types) - separate inboxes for friends vs others (v. simple - why didn't others implement this?), the promise of replaying your interactions with a person over a lifetime, and convergence of email/IM/sms.

The announcement also suggests that they spoke to high-schoolers to understand what they thought about messaging, which is interesting. So Twitter is for the 30+ crowd and the hare-brained-celebs, GMail for those who discovered Google in their twenties, but FB will evolve with teens.

I don't use FB very much, but it looks like it's just arrived on my online doorstep. Especially if this is the vision:

Relatively soon, we'll probably all stop using arbitrary ten digit numbers and bizarre sequences of characters to contact each other. We will just select friends by name and be able to share with them instantly. We aren't there yet, but the changes today are a small first step.

Zuckerberg's Social Network keeps getting wider.

(just a bunch of thoughts that struck me when I read the announcement)

Couple-springi premises

2010-10-20T19:37:00.001+05:30

Such notices can be seen all around Chaturshringi Temple in Pune. Roughly translated:

Couples should not sit and indulge in indecent activities; otherwise they will be photographed and the photos will be handed over to the police.
By Order

Obviously, I have failed to capture the 'snappiness' of the original lines.

It's hard to say if there were sincere volunteers, armed with a camera, lurking around in the bushes, waiting for a chance to spring upon amorous pairs. It's easy to ask what I was doing there in the first place, but I shall not dignify that with an answer.

You, Me, aur We

2010-10-03T17:25:00.003+05:30

I know a lot of people who watch football on TV. Usually, they watch the English Premier League, which is perfectly timed to give them their weekend excuse for not going out to meet relatives (at least the non-football-ones). The even more committed will stay up to watch La Liga and Serie A. The absolutely crazy ones will perhaps even watch Dempo vs Salgaocar on a Thursday afternoon.

But it is the first lot that I want to talk about - the ones that watch 20 English clubs in one of the world's most commercialised sporting leagues. Talk to some of them, and a curious linguistic-social oddity will strike you: they refer to their teams with pronouns such as "us" and "we". People have attained a curious level of self-identification that lets them attach a part of themselves with a team based in a place most of them would struggle to pick out on a map. Mind you, only the top clubs, nay marketing wonders, have managed these psychological feats - I have never met someone in my local circle who would use a "we" for Sunderland or West Bromwich Albion.

I recently stumbled upon a fabulous satire on the dependably hilarious show That Mitchell and Webb Look - to me, the definite summary of the nonsensical nature of this kind of feeling among some fans. Watch it even if you aren't a football buff:

"Infinite Zounds" - a new quiz blog

2010-10-02T18:40:00.000+05:30

I've started Infinite Zounds - a new blog that features (at least) one new question each day. There are quite a few quiz blogs around, but what's different about this blog is that the underlying theme is what is usually known as "Current Affairs". Each question is about something that was in the news recently and is contemporary in attention. So no questions about the Harappan civilisation, film noir from the 50s, the books of Raymond Chandler, or the performances of Kumar Sanu - unless they were in the news recently for some reason.

(In fact, it is highly unlikely that the blog will have any questions on Sanu - you can stop hyperventilating now.).

If you visit the blog, you will see that each post also contains the answer below in addition to the question. The answer is hidden, to let you hazard a guess in your head if you so choose to. I don't like going back to a blog the next day to find the answer, which is why I've done this.

You can subscribe to the blog via its feed. Unfortunately, this feed may contain the answer as well - that's something I haven't managed to solve, despite setting the feed to publish partially. Based on how things go, I might change the feed to full. Until then, if you subscribe via the default feed, consider a general spoiler alert to be in issuance.

An alternative is to follow the blog via Twitter or Google Buzz (or use the email id 'infinitezounds[at]gmail').

So, inviting you to take a look at Infinite Zounds, and see if the questions take your fancy. Let me know if it does.

The music of Udaan

2010-08-24T10:34:00.004+05:30

The soundtrack of Udaan should be properly introduced as being created by Amitabh Bhattacharya (lyrics) and Amit Trivedi (music). The duo, in their first full-length album since Dev.D, are clearly masters at exploring themes of angst. This collection of songs has a cohesion rare in most film soundtracks, with the tracks complementing each other in mood and thought. Restlessness and the optimistic desire to escape current orbits suffuse the songs.

Kahaani establishes the mood of Udaan with its whispered beginning slowly developing into a electric guitar-fuelled rock piece. The title song is more conventional, with a catchy riff and words of quiet rebellion. It is a little weak though, in comparison to the songs that follow. Geet... is wonderful - somehow the Amits manage to perfectly capture a sunbeam of naive optimism. The mood is upbeat and there's some very nice use of harmony and guitars. The two also have an interesting singing partnership - this is as far removed from Bandmasters Rangila and Rasila as you can get.

For me, Naav is the standout song from the album. I'm assuming Mohan (I don't know who he is!) is the lead singer. Though the diction is a little odd, the delivery is wonderful. The thought is age-old: a call to overcoming impediments, but the metaphor (of a boat struggling for breath) was new to me. You will scarcely find a more rousing song to listen to when you are sinking to the dumps. Compositions like these put the 'rock' in rock. (Here's a link to the lyrics for this song.)

Aazaadiyaan reminds me a lot of a previous Amit Trivedi song - "Ik Lau" (Aamir) - it has the same lingering start and perhaps the openings of are similar too, though the tempo is different. The sitar riff is very pleasing, and serves as a springboard for the rest of the song to take off (almost literally).

In contrast, Motumaster is quite out of place. To be fair, it has been designed as an 'arbit' ad-hoc kind of song (Anurag Kashyap's official debut as lyricist?) and is quite hilarious in parts ('kamar to naapte hai magar hum kamraa kaise naape?"). But it might have been better off being just in the film and not on the album. The concluding instrumental piece is reflective and appropriate.

One reason why Udaan's soundtrack works is because the story and treatment seem to be tailormade for the Amits. Amit Trivedi is very good at the rock-folk milieu and is able to bring his own bag of tricks to it. I wonder how he will deal with more commercial ventures. One of the pleasures of listening to his albums is to hear very new voices. Who are these Neuman Pinto/Joi Barua/Mohan/Nikhil D'Souza? Now we've heard them and of them. But if he goes more mainstream, how will this work out for them? But I do wish Amit Trivedi didn't feature on every other song s- he's got a raspy voice suited only for certain types, and he might be overdoing it a tad.

In short, listen to Udaan.

Image created using Wordle

Lamenting convocation speeches

2010-08-20T16:29:00.001+05:30

Why don't we have good speakers at convocation ceremonies in India? Each year, a commencement speech or two from a US university will do the email rounds. Usually by a leading figure, the speech will be amusing, inspiring, interesting, and even personal. It's quite a good way to sign off a graduating year's stint in that academic institution. And some may finally learn something useful there!

In contrast, most convocation ceremonies at Indian institutions are boring affairs, with the chief guest's speech crowning the insipid cake with the dullest cherry of the day. It doesn't help that chief guests are often politicians, called to the ceremony because they are ultimately influential patrons of the educational system, or because the powers-that-be get a chance to rub noses with the ruling elites. On occasion, figures from business are invited, which is usually an improvement on the politicos. But oratory may not really be their strong suit. Forget diction or command, even the content is mundane and in danger of adding decades to Kumbhakarna's slumber.

The three convocation speeches that coincided with my stint at IIT Bombay were largely uninspiring. The first was the then HRD Minister, Arjun Singh (2005), incidentally in the middle of his reservations controversy. Montek Singh Ahluwahlia (2006) followed - decent, but I can't think of anything memorable that he said. Invited to preside over the convocation ceremony of 2007 was industrialist L.N.Mittal. On paper, it seemed a decent choice - he was riding several waves of fame. But the hour-long speech was, sadly, one of the most boring that it has been my fate to sit through. If it wasn't the small matter of picking up a degree certificate, I might have succumbed to that most primal of social urges: of escaping from a boring colloquium, by hook or crook. What made it worse was that he repeatedly referred to the hallowed institution as "double-I-T" or even on occasion "double-I-I-T". Depending on which rules of association one applied to the latter, we wondered if we were taking leave from "I²IT" or even "I⁴T". (Incidentally, earlier that year, his namesake Sunil Bharti Mittal had delivered a guest lecture in the nearby School of Management, which was quite impressive in content and delivery.)

I note that this year's IIT Bombay convocation featured more science-oriented individuals: Dr. Kiran Majumdar Shaw and Prof. Roddam Narasimha as chief guests. (I was even more intrigued to find out that the convocation had been split into two sessions over two days - apparently, too many people graduating! The Convocation Hall is huge, so the space overflow must have been considerable.) I don't know how their speeches went, and it's not a good idea to automatically assume people like these will be any more inspirational than their predecessors.

It's a pity that most public function speeches in India are so poorly delivered, and that everyone involved has come to expect nothing more. The speakers don't do us listeners the honour of diligent practice, and the listeners in turn, do the listeners no favours of attention.

Some of the more famous commencement speeches alluded to in the opening of this post:

* Steve Jobs at Stanford, 2005: video, transcript - probably the most famous of the lot
* J. K. Rowling at Harvard, 2008: video, transcript - titled "the fringe benefits of failure"
* Jon Stewart at The College of William and Mary, 2004: transcript - quite hilarious
* Atul Gawande at Stanford School of Medicine, 2010: transcript - interesting, cautionary, and thought-provoking thoughts for a graduating class of doctors

The inevitable top ten list is here.

Bus Ek Pal

2010-08-18T09:09:00.001+05:30

I take the company bus to work in the morning and return by it in the evening. I am convinced these buses have bombs on them that will go off within 30 seconds of the bus reaching its destination.

What else explains the mad rush for fellow passengers to alight? As the bus nears its stop, people from the back storm to the front. As the bus stops, others will get up and into the aisle. The line to get down is clogged. But they don't mind standing uncomfortably, rubbing more than shoulders with people in front and behind them. All they care is that they be out into the open, where presumably, they will be saved (yet again) from the poisonous gas slowly filling their empty seats.

Me? I sit down defiantly. Some kind of sit-in protest that is doomed because, well, I do also have to get down at some point. Sometimes, I swing my legs out into the aisle. It announces to the hyenas behind me that yes, I want to get down too, but can't you see that people seated ahead of us must be allowed to get down first? And where are your manners? And do you have to get down in a group? Clearly, the signal is too subtle and packed with too much information, because they rush past me, stumbling and saying "sorry" without meaning it. I must be acquiring a criminal education in sparking off stampedes.

It's funny, this urge to dismount at the earliest. There's no visible advantage in having to wait for 2 more seconds. People who are supposed to get down don't stand in the middle of the bus discussing the Kashmir issue or whether P is not equal to NP. So what are the rushers afraid of?

That leaves only one explanation. But it can wait - it's time to go.

Stalk show

2010-08-10T16:52:00.001+05:30

I've started receiving Twitter's suggestions for people I should 'follow'. I wish it wouldn't. For the most part, these are celebrities that I have deliberately chosen to stay far away from (the likes of Shah Rukh Khan, Chetan Bhagat, Lalit Modi). The suggestions seem to be deduced from my current social graph on twitter and popular Indian celebrities (probably based on number of followers or a list). Apart from these being shallow dimensions to suggest 'interesting people', shouldn't such an algorithm consider this: if I have been on Twitter for a couple of years and these people have been around for over 3 months, I would in all likelihood have heard of them? (if they are indeed popular enough to be tweeted about) Thus, if I have not followed them so far, it is out of choice and not of ignorance.

Probably they should stick to picking friends-of-a-friends and minor celebs (not in the top 100, say). Or just leave us alone to stumble in the jungle. Even better, is there someway to indicate (proudly) under a "Who Not to Follow" section, that I choose not to follow these people?

Lost in Austen -

2010-08-08T19:44:00.006+05:30

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that any article about Pride and Prejudice must begin with the line It is a truth universally acknowledged. But more pertinently to this blog post, it is a truth universally acknowledged that any schoolgirl who reads Pride and Prejudice, particularly in the company of fellow convent schoolgirls, must fall hopelessly in love with the plot, the milieu, and most importantly, with Darcy¹. Even Hugh Grant (ex-floppy-haired-bookshop-owner and cor-blimey-was-he-PM-of-Britain-too?) couldn't unseat that juciest of all snooty Darcies, Colin Firth. And he tried.

The 2008 ITV Lost in Austen is a very interesting adaptation of the tale, which takes these very principles to heart. Amanda Price, 21st century Brit girl, looking for true love, is an ardent fan of P&P. One day, she finds Elisabeth Bennett, standing in her salle de bains, mysteriously transported from the world of Austen. They swap places, and the rest of the story is Amanda's 'sojourn' through that world.

Thanks to her presence, there are inevitable complications, such as pre-ordained partnerships going awry. Amanda soon finds herself trying to clear waters that get muddier with every passing day. In a sense, she assumes the role of that other famous Austen girl, Emma, having to steer relationships in the way they are supposed to, and miserably failing at them.

The series has its comic highs, especially in the first episode, but tends to go all sentimental as it heads into the second half of the four-part series. The ending is a little rushed, but overall, it's an entertaining excursion over well-known literary territory. The actors, being British and all, are quite good.

Coincidentally, this viewing comes the same week that India's (probably) first cinematic adaptation of Jane Austen released. I don't understand why people should remake a well-known classic faithfully, and would find the likes of Lost in Austen more appealing. But only if, as this New Yorker mention of Aisha remarked, it came without "zombies or sea-monsters". Or Gurinder Chadha. Brr.

1: applying induction from domestic evidence

A truth of inconvenience

2010-08-04T09:55:00.003+05:30

I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that

Talking to people in professional contexts, particularly in customer service, often makes you feel like you are Dave, trying to reason with a cold non-human (eventually, a bad idea). Neither do these people possess a super-brain like HAL 9000, nor (and this is worse) can they be bypassed or turned off. The idea of taking an axe to them to check for frontal lobe absence becomes more appealing by the minute.

Author Dan Pink writes about the use of 'professionalese' in this Telegraph article, calling it "a renter’s language". Talking about sentences like We apologise for any inconvenience, he says:

It doesn’t expect to be around for very long and has no stake in the long-term prospects of the neighbourhood.

Pink argues that people and businesses need not think of personal language as being weak and unsuitable in the arena of carrying out business. That people should try being more open and honest, and this is more likely to get customers to view you as being trustworthy and human.

I know this sounds right, but I really doubt this will happen on a sufficiently large scale. Working in a large company and living in a country famed for its bureaucratic attitudes, I encounter insensitive, uncaring, and non-human behaviour on a regular basis. The renter-owner comparison perfectly captures the problem. But I also blame such behaviour on individual laziness, the ability of an existing system to warp the minds of the average person working in it, and an inability to think independently. Look at workplace-verbiage such as "please reach out to me" or the infamous "touch base" (can I reach out to you to touch base?) rather than a simpler, more commonplace "please let me know"/"please contact me". Is this verbal camouflage? Do people learn to talk this way so as to meld into the ecosystem and not stick out too much?

Or, as I often suspect, they are just being idiots?

(from the archives: Billshot Bungle)

That's a wrap, Mr. Baswani

2010-08-02T08:47:00.006+05:30

From what I can tell, the actor Ravi Baswani did not have a fan club or a Facebook page. And why wouldn't that be? IMDB lists fewer than 30 movies in his filmography, over a thirty year film career. Most of those movies never amounted to anything much. Some were nothing more than complete duds. Even his last public performance seems to be for a very unamusing ad for Mirinda.

Yet, to film-people and viewers of certain vintages and tastes, Ravi Baswani is a name that evokes several happy memories. Of chasing and being chased by Duryodhana. Of being turned into a chauffeur by Winnie Paranjape. Of losing a newly bought handkerchief in a girl-wooing scheme promoted by Amitabh Bachchan. Of being partly responsible for an entire generation both eating their cake and throwing it out of the window. And of being in a fabulous parody/tribute of ye olde hindi film songs.

You will notice that Baswani's reputation was built largely on his appearance in two movies. One is the much loved and much feted Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro. The other is Chasme Buddoor, which according to me, has been the least watched of all the great Hindi films of the last 40 years. In both, he is in danger of being thought of a comic sidekick and a weakling. But it was never his place in the grand scheme of things to play the hero. To his credit, he always held his own: in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, trying to keep the moral compass in shape in a deeply immoral setting, while exhibiting shiftiness, jealousy and pusillanimity in Chasme Buddoor. In both senses, he was the guy next door - someone certain to lose out¹.

As it often happens, we learned more about Ravi Baswani after news of his death (from a heart attack, after looking for locations for his directorial debut) came in (see 2). He was 64 - which meant his acting debut in 1980 was at the ripe old age of 34. That he was a highly regarded theatre actor (as most of these can-really-act Delhi-wallahs are). That he was straight-talking, even caustic at times, and said such things about movies like Jodhaa Akbar such as: It's like [Ashutosh Gowariker] said, "Bring me all the bad actors. I’m going to make cinema out of that.".. (And even that he was probably living a couple of kms away from my house in Santacruz (E), long ago!)

On one hand, Ravi Baswani never did much else that rivalled his two most famous films in terms of attention. On the other, in those, he achieved much more than many in Bollywood ever do in an entire life. The length of a career is never a good measure of anyone's work, and there are several people both inside and outside film industries that this could apply to. Perhaps he was too hemmed in by the nature of his comic success, the inevitably stereotyping, and for being a thoughtful person in a time and place that made such people go extinct very soon.

Still, as with most obits, this made me evaluate the place such a person had in my life, and I'm surprised to know that it was significant, even if brief. And what better excuse to pull out Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro and Chasme Buddoor once again, to marvel at the writing and the little touches, and the people that chipped in to make our little lives worth living.

More
* His last known interview; another interesting interview (from 2003)
* Ravi Baswani played the moderator on an Indian version of Whose Line is it Anyway. He also did a fair bit of TV during the heydays of DD, and perhaps his last major TV role was in the slightly offbeat Just Mohabbat
* The latest film I've seen him in was in Naseeruddin Shah's debut directorial venture.
* I've read obits mention that his name in Chasme Buddoor was "Jai Lakhanpal". They might be wrong. One, to my ears, he says 'J. Lakhanpal' ("brother of B.A.Lakhanpal") and not "Jai". Second, I always thought he was making the whole thing up, because it was obvious he had no such brother. (Incidentally, a man named Dinesh Lakhanpal was an assistant director on the film in real life.)

The wonderful parody/tribute song sequence from Chasme Buddoor:

Parody, Chashme Buddoor - Hindi Song - Deepti Naval , Ravi baswani @ Yahoo! Video

footnotes
[1]: In a post called Who's playing the lead, I used Jomu's un-heroic inability to start his motorcycle to wonder if we would be the heroes of our films. It seems strangely appropriate to RB's life.

[2]: See an interviews with Kundan Shah and a post by Sudhir Mishra

The software has nothing to do with it

2010-08-01T20:47:00.002+05:30

It's an old ploy - newspapers put out headlines or take angles in a story just to grab our attention, but without considering the facts. And who does it better than The Times of India? Today's newspaper reports the unfortunate murder of Darshana Tongare, a recent COEP grad and IBM trainee, who was stabbed by an unknown figure. Apparently she wasn't robbed, so the motives aren't entirely clear yet.

The Times of India takes the view that "The safety of women techies in Pune has come into sharp focus once again". So far, nothing suggests that the profession of the victim had anything to do with the incident. The safety of every woman in the city, professional or not, traveling at night could be called into question. In fact, the general safety of the populace at large. What's more shocking was the lack of response from the police control rooms, when passer-bys tried to report the incident. The ToI buries that deep into the report.

Many newspaper articles, particularly in headlines, report incidents of crime with the profession of the victim embedded. In most cases, this is incidental. "Techie" is now a cliched and obnoxious word - and not everyone working in a software company is a technologist. Cases of suicide caused by overwork may qualify. But to papers, just 'man robbed' isn't sufficiently eye-catching, I suppose.

In fact, the same ToI report lists 7 other cases from the last 2.5 years where Pune women associated with the world of IT-BPO have been assaulted. In four of these cases, the suspects/assailants were known to the victims, and were crimes involving personal disputes. Nothing to do with being in the software profession. But yes, at least two of the remaining three could be said to be directly related to the nature of the industry, involving late working hours and being situated in poorly connected/lit/policed areas of Pune.

Such a lack of perspective affects the city and the industry as a whole, and dilutes the focus away from such issues such as better policing and systems that could both prevent and solve such issues. Incidentally, the ToI's sister publication (to my mind, the more reliable and less hypocritical of the two) Pune Mirror takes the angle of the emergency number "100" being unmanned. The Indian Express report is expectedly sober. From a non-Pune-paper view, The Hindu largely report the facts, editorialising only in the end (which is their prerogative), quoting the appropriate earlier cases.

One hopes the case is swiftly solved and that the right lessons are learnt by the police. Might we dare to hope for the same for India's most selling newspaper?

Re-versioning 'revert'

2010-07-23T16:37:00.000+05:30

I had previously written about my aversion for the reversion i.e. the use of 'revert' in e-mails to mean 'reply'. But the inevitable march of the very forces that make language fluid and nimble have had their first major victory in this matter. Linguist Ben Zimmer (he replaced William Safire in the New York Times' popular 'On Language' column) wrote on the topic, noting that this sense of the word has finally made it to a dictionary.

The 8th edition of the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary notes the (still obnoxious) usage, marking it as having originated in Indian-English. We are seeing, at first-hand, an example of the mutation of language, and some part of me wants to celebrate that. So I suppose it is time to put the pitchforks down, but that doesn't mean a change in my conservative attitude. The likelihood of me embracing this word-meaning combination is the same as that of a Khap panchayat sending a gift certificate and greeting card to the latest set of Jat elopers.

Aren't you glad that the madmen of Indian villages didn't spent as much time protecting language?

Kodos and Kang's World Cup of Horror

2010-07-09T08:56:00.004+05:30

(original Kodos & Kang image from Wikipedia)

Coraline

2010-07-04T11:14:00.004+05:30

Neil Gaiman wrote Coraline for his little daughter Holly who liked scary stories about little girls getting mixed up with witches. The book can even give a mild shiver or two - well, let me confess here - and make them check the back of their closets and their eyes. Just once. Just to make sure. Especially when things are too good to be true.

Everyone loves a good scare from time to time, especially when conjuring up the scarescape in our own heads. Gaiman's wonderfully paced writing and characteristic fancies gives us all the help we need. The story is set in England where, as everyone knows, ghosts play cricket in the autumn dusk and witches go shopping at the neighbourhood Castle Tesco. Besides being doughty in the best traditions of 'oh well, let's not make a fuss now and set about battling the dragon', Coraline, the young heroine of the tale, has an active curiosity and imagination that literally opens doors for her. Among the neighbours, the humans are batty and the animals are wise. The others are just plain sinister.

I enjoyed this book thoroughly. If you dismiss this book merely as children's fiction, think again. Like some great writing, this works for everyone. And if you are a parent who thinks they can fob off their children with distractions so that they'll let you work, you must read this book before something happens. To you.

Coraline was made into a well-received stop motion animation film in 2009 by Henry Selick. There are a few changes to the characters and settings (sadly, perhaps keeping the box office in mind, the story moves to the USA). But the movie is lovingly made, and the translation from word to image is magical. The animation is seamless and it's hard to pick out the fact that the movie is a stop-motion one.

And after you've seen the film, go back to the opening credits.

image courtesy: http://vindicated13.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/coraline.jpg

The Accidental Click

2010-07-01T16:59:00.007+05:30

You're busy. Or you've been on vacation. You're depressed. You are detoxing from information overload.

Result? The little unread monsters pile up. One by one, they show up at your door - the door you left open for them (well, you did feed them that invitation in big, bold 'blog' letters). And they wait in your living room (they are polite) for you to have a look at them.

They are like the Squeeze Toy Aliens from Toy Story - they are irritating in their eternal gratitude that you showed some tiny long-forgotten interest in them. Even before they were created.

When you finally have the strength to look at your RSS feed reader, you realise the slow poison that's accumulated in there. You can't read the group with 100+ unread posts, so you resolutely look at the ones with just 1 new post. Soon, the law of exponential unreadness kicks in, multiplying like rabbits descended from Gandhaari. It's outta control already.

You tip-toe around the reader, trying not to set off a minefield of will-read-ness. Here a click, there a click, everywhere a click-click.

And one day, when you are not paying attention it happens. It's like visiting the Tomatina festival. You click on a folder by mistake. Blast! All the feeds open. But one ohnosecond later, it's the best thing that happened to you. You know you can't read all of these posts, and there was probably nothing useful in them anyway.

As you sip sour wine from these grapes, you close the browser tab.

Images courtesy: Squeeze Toy Aliens, Tomatina

One rule to ring them all

2010-06-10T20:25:00.004+05:30

“Why on Earth,” said JK, “would any sane person do something like that?”

MX wiggled his shoulderoodles in a gesture of dismissive revulsion. “You know how thae people here on Earth are like. It doesn’t surprise mae much. There is nay no sanity here, if yae ask mae.”

“No, Iae believe there must be some good in thame. But what utter waste of time. A sub-optimal solution such as this makes nay no sense to mae. And then there’s the inconvenience to everaeone participating, on and off the action-fields.”

“Well, those were the parameters thae play by. Asked mae minions on the outside.”

JK got up and surfed to the vista, where he could see the usual bustle around the Embassy fe Celestra buildings. Earthers were busy at work, mowing the lawns, taking their buggies to work, manning the inter-rues, causing routine commotion.

“This is nay no good. MX, get mae a official copy of all the parameters. Then get mae thae President fe Association.”

The decision to relocate JK from Celestra to Earth for three years (at least) had been unanimous. The Cabinet had charged him with envisaging a comprehensive re-education programme for Earth, providing the best policies that Celestra could offer. But the truth was that they were fed up with his constant meddling as Minister fe Recreational. Messing around with the two thousand year old pastime of slaying dinotaurs by making the animals wear armour had been the last straw.

They soon agreed with each other in private that their weekends were at risk. For a society deeply wedded to the idea of the double-solar-siesta, this had gone too far. So the Emperor’s eighth son by marriage (also his third son by ritual adoption) found himself Celestral Overseer on Earth. The itch to modify, optimize, and butt in, had lain dormant due to shuttlelag. But it was well rested and had gently begun to resume work on its most promising host.

The rule changes were made in time for the tournament. JK and MX felt the implementation had gone reasonably well. There had been only three Earth-wide riots, and the five teams that left the association to begin a rebel league on Sirius were swiftly replaced by some more provinces from the British Isles.

Thus it came to be that every football match in the 31st World Cup began with a penalty shootout. As rightly predicted by JK, 9 out of 10 matches ended in the first fifteen minutes, allowing the hard-working (though under-productive) Earthers to learn the match results without having to wait for two hours. Sometimes, by accident (some claimed it was the glorious uncertainty of the beautiful game), the match remained tied after penalties and went into extra-time. The astral configurations had to really be crisscrossed in unfortunate ways if a match ever went as far as to reach normal play.

JK proudly gazed outside his vista, basking in the cheap glow of the local sun that illuminated his first success. A dispatch had already been waved to Celestra, where unknown to him, it had been promptly erased by relieved Cabinet mandarins. MX stood beside him, and emptied his gillophagus.

“Maistre, are yae aware of this monstrous recreation that takes five days to conduct, sometimes without decisive resolution?”

JK let out a Celestral sigh and turned towards his newest task. An efficient administrator’s job was never done, especially among such naifs.

His itch sent out fresh pleasure sensations to his encephalic-centres.

written using a Caferati Fiction Fixation month cue (more here)

Three men of the stage from B.J.Medical College

2010-05-30T20:17:00.000+05:30

Until I saw an interview of his today, I didn't know Dr. Shreeram Lagoo was an alumnus of B.J.Medical College, Pune. This means that the college has produced three of the most renowned Marathi names of the stage - Shreeram Lagoo, Jabbar Patel, and Mohan Agashe (who also taught at the same institution).

Given this, one wonders what the college did (or does) to provide an ecosystem for such people to emerge. The Pune college circuit for plays is rich and well-established with theatre groups and competitions such as Purushottam Karandak and Firodiya. COEP too had a couple of students who later turned pro - Ravindra Mankani and Girish Joshi, for instance, but no one of the heights of the BJ trio.

Why Zen monks don't use Twitter

2010-05-29T12:19:00.003+05:30

There are no Zen monks on Twitter - have you noticed that? You would have thought it was the ideal place for them - literally minimalistic, encouraging of pithiness, and an inbuilt set of organic metaphors about birds and cetaceans. Despite that, there aren't any twittering Zen-izens.

It isn't difficult to see why. In the wired world, a zen monk can orally issue a koan or two without worrying about how many times he gets re-koaned. His followers have come from far and wide, casting away their social nets to listen to a wise man who often doesn't make any sense. His followers repeat what he says without prefacing it with snide comments. The Zen Master never has to block anyone even when they are caught asking each other 'youprefer padme hum or padme lakshme?'.

On Twitter, alas, many a distraction exists. Thanks to incessant tweets, it is difficult to devote yourself fully to the construction of mindful, yet funny, sutras in response to a hashtag (despite its fundamentally ephemeral nature). During meditation time, an itinerant bee in the form of that perfect rejoinder to @buddydharma's latest pun buzzes in the otherwise silent garden of the mind.

Some practitioners have argued that since Twitter's stream of thought is paradoxical to the 'live in the moment' philosophy, it is in fact the perfect spiritual vehicle for the practice of localised mindfulness. Attention hops-skips-jumps the waves of onrushing tweets, without leaving any kind of neurological imprint. If there is no trace of tweetrivia, argued the pro-twitter camp, could we even say there was any tweetrivia to begin with? Unfortunately, this was whispered deep within the Lotus Forest, where no one heard it, thus rendering the point unsaid.

The Zendarmerie of the Shaolin Temples must have forbidden monks from onefortying, fearing failure on an epic scale. They have observed the corruption among secular members of society, who prefer to talk of facing their palms and not their books. They silently wonder why people talk so much, where they invent the time to be addicted thus, and why it takes 140 when it could take just 40.

On these, the masters contemplate, which often keeps them from paying their broadband bills on time.

फूल खिले थे गुलशन गुलशन

2010-05-18T16:01:00.004+05:30

Why do florists love this blog? I ask this question each time I get comments from some of my most loyal readers. These are people like "Rony M", "Raya Manna", "Tanmoy Sarkar", "Soni', and "Poulami". Sometimes, like 'expressflowersmumbai', they are just too shy to reveal their real name.

They usually tell me that they liked reading the content of this website, that it was very informative, and now would I like to show my kindness and appreciation for my special ones in places ranging from Antananarivo to Znamensky by sending them stuff? The interesting thing is that they are usually florists. They also have cakes and other gifts, but they always begin with flowers.

I am not really in a position to really take advantage of their services, which makes me feel bad. So I have tried telling Google & Blogger several times not to let them waste their time telling me how much they love my blog. But Google doesn't seem to be sympathetic to their plight. Therefore, I'm writing to "Rony M", "Raya Manna", "Tanmoy Sarkar", "Soni', and "Poulami" via this blog (which they so obviously relish and hopefully will read) to visit other meadows where other drones may be more sympathetic, unlike me.

Also that, in an attempt to (for want of a better term) 'de-flower' my blog, I've enabled comment moderation. So from now on, your paeans to me will remain strictly private. Wink, wink.

"Half Ticket": My FlyLite article on Children's Films in India

2010-05-17T19:30:00.006+05:30

Last November, FlyLite, JetLite's in-flight magazine, brought out a "Children's special" issue commemorating Children's Day. For this, I wrote an article on Indian films made for or featuring children. You can read a scanned version here on Google Docs (it's a .pdf file, ~1.2 MB).

It is by no means a comprehensive history of the topic :-), so if you see any notable omissions, do tell!

(The magazine is produced by Spenta Multimedia)

Prelims questions of the Pune Brand Equity Quiz 2010

2010-05-16T11:40:00.001+05:30

Questions (highly 'data compressed'!) from the prelims to the Pune Brand Equity Quiz (Answers will be posted in a comment below.)

1. An industrial township completing 100 years this year
2. Chairman of Afras Ventures in 2007
3. Saris that take their patterns from the Ajanta caves
4. Biggest charitable donations in history
5. Howard Shultz worked as a Xerox salesman, later moved to another company, which he ended up buying after 4 years. Which co?
6. What did Chef Caesar Cardini create
7. Brothers in Arms in 1985 - first album of which group
8. Properties for the 1st UK edition of this was decided by the MD who sent his secretary on a tour of London in a bus. What?
9. Nokia's Hindi SMS version is called: Saral message ___
10. Hierarchy of what has things such as underboss, soldiers, capodecima, associates
11. Andras Graf better known as?
12. Two pronouns in the Rasna ad campaign tagline from the 80s
13. Fellini's La Dolce Vita gave which term
14. In Firozabad, what do Gulliwalas & Belanwalas make
15. NY Governor David Paterson proposed a tax on downloaded music, calling it an __ tax.
16. Products made in Ulhasnagar have what tagline
17. Warren Buffet said the secret to good investing is: a. Luck b. Temperament c. Intellect
18. V. Anand sports whose logo on his shirt
19. "Tired of Politics" Party created by
20. First rupee introduced in 1540-1605 by
21. visual (ad with the word 'mammogram')
22. Indian one Rupee from the 80s - signature of Fin Min Secretary:
23. visual of a crop
24. Automobile logo
25. A seafood dish
26. what term originated after a spontaneous parade in NY City to welcome the Statue of Liberty?
27. what word originates from oikonomia (household management)
28. Biblical apple is from which garden?
29. In Apr, India Post recently introduced a stamp series on a. months b. Tagore c. Astro signs
30. 1st postal mail from St. Louis to Chicago

Answers will be posted in a comment below.

Om-no-science

2010-05-14T15:00:00.005+05:30

From The Language Log and The Guardian, a magnificent specimen of a 2008 'journal paper' about the sound that is "Om". Titled Time-Frequency Analysis of Chanting Sanskrit Divine Sound "OM" Mantra , the paper 'proves' that the mind is calm and peace to the human subject and its principal conclusion is that steadiness in the mind is achieved by chanting OM.

You will find a rousing (and ROTFL-ing) discussion of the paper's scientific content (or lack thereof) at The Language Log, which writes:

"The first step seems fair enough: ommmmmm chants are analyzed using standard transform techniques, that represent signals as superpositions of wavelet forms. The second step is… well, there is no second step."
"Perhaps the pictures mean more to the enlightened than they do to me. The article is so bad that I can't see it as anything other than a spoof. And the premise is amusing enough. But I don't know enough about the IJCSNS article genre to really get the joke. If there is one."

Given the details in the paper, I fear it isn't a parody. The original Guardian article (written by one of the organisers of the Ig Nobel prize) says:

"The important technical fact is that no matter what form of Om one chants at whatever speed, there is always a basic Omness to it."
"No one has explained the biophysical processes that underlie this fetching of calm and taking away of thoughts. Gurjar and Ladhake's time-frequency analysis is a tiny step along that hitherto little-taken branch of the path of enlightenment.

(I have no stand on the significance or lack thereof of "Om". But I do stand laughing at 'science' so bad that it seems to have emerged of Rajkumar Kohli's 'consciousness'.)

Scientific pot-shots apart, there are several linguistic gems (or maNiis, in keeping with the theme). Such as this runaway adverb-adjective train:

"Highly sensitive expressive experienced people are more probable to be satisfied and efficient in their life in recent days."

Or you could wonder at this buffet of a scripting language, a proposal, and a quest:

People have been heading for their gawk inwards in propose to attain peace of mind, since they are not capable to locate steadiness in the external world.

And finally, eventually, at-the-endly:

As a final point, we have confirmed scientifically the accomplishments of OM chanting in reducing the stress from the human mind.

Or not.

(image courtesy Philip Lutgendorf)

General Synod's Life of Christ

2010-05-13T19:06:00.000+05:30

"Not the Nine O'Clock News" was an early 80s BBC satire about news and tv programmes in Britain, featuring among others, the talents of Rowan Atkinson, David Renwick, Howard Goodall, and Richard Curtis. Many of the sketches are still funny to watch.

My favourite of the lot is "General Synod's Life of Christ", a debate on 'a controversial and scurrilous film' that seems to mirror the 'Pythonist religion' and has far too many parallels with 'The Comic Messiah'. Monty Python fans should find this quite brilliant:

While you are there, also look at Gerald the Gorilla:

Pop goes NYT

2010-05-12T20:00:00.006+05:30

If you visit any article page on the New York Times recently, you would have noticed a relatively new navigation 'pop out'. Let's say you were reading this news article. As you get towards the end, this is what you are probably seeing at the bottom of the page: Now, when you get to the end of the article text, a box springs out from the right (quite disconcertingly, I found, since the appearance is quite swift and abrupt). The box points to another related article in the same site category: From a web design point of view, this is interesting - a tiny addition that tries to keep the reader on the site. It attempts to catch your attention by appearing out of nowhere. But it can give you a surprise (a slight spike on the fright-o-meter), which is perhaps why I wonder if they would have been better off with something that fades-in instead of the horizontal jack-in-the-box. Incidentally, Forbes India's Business.in site also has the very same navigation pop out, albeit one that grows diagonally. However, the site gets it very wrong on paginated articles (see this article for example). Even if you are coming to the end of page 1 of an article (and not the end of the article itself), you still get a link suggestion box. Surely they don't want me to leave this article by the wayside? NYT doesn't make this elementary error.

India's Got Tortured Genius?

2010-05-05T20:43:00.002+05:30

There's no formal classification of talent, but biographies often throw up phrases to describe their subjects. One of the most intriguing ones is the notion of the "tortured genius". A tortured genius is one whose talents are far beyond our understanding, of the sublime and the ridiculously easy, coupled with self-destructive tendencies that often derails said genius' own talents. Kind of like a woodcutter so talented that when he cuts down the branch on which he's perched, the resulting pattern causes crop circles below. (This didn't make sense? Ah, you mere mortal, you).

Despite its rarity, there are enough examples of tortured genius, the most visible being from sport or the arts. Vincent van Gogh was the epitome of the phrase. Diego Maradona or George Best of Paul Gascoigne. The bizarre Howard Hughes or the tortured souls housed in John Nash Jr. Ronnie O' Sullivan. (The British seem to produce an excess of sporting TGs - or perhaps they are just very good at spotting and anointing them as such.) Gregory House, of course. With genius, can drugs, sex, music, alcohol, and psychedelic teddy bears be far behind?

But the thing is - I can't really think of any TGs from India. Our sportsmen have been an endless series of nice boys or just muscled morons. Our filmstars just got old and fat, or began blogs. If only Salman Khan was a half-decent actor. After a lot of thinking, the only ones that come to mind are the likes of Mukul Shivputra or Ritwik Ghatak. But where're our pill-popping, fisticuff-flying, call-the-curfew-on-your-child's-senses assaulting genius who can do magical things during the day to have his every sin erased off the charts?

There's many a show with a genius for torturing the masochistic bunch of viewers that can't peel their eyes off them. But finding our own tortured genius? - now that ought to be a talent show waiting to happen.

By other means, minus the shooting

2010-05-04T20:13:00.005+05:30

Do students of the Political Sciences study sports federations? They should. To my mind, these associations exhibit a purer form of politics than that seen in conventional politics of state governance.

Several limiting constraints are eliminated in such an arena. Chief among these is no longer having to adhere to a delineated ideology, which allows free rein to individual preferences. One is therefore not restricted in choosing partners just to remain on the right (or left) side of a House. There are no whip-py actions which ease the process of floor-crossing. There is no need to publish a manifesto with manifestly unattainable goals of progress. A "horses for courses" policy can be applied to trading of allegiances. In fact, you could think of it as a market free of any artificial friction.

This state of affairs is not restricted to India. For long, the conduct of FIFA's top echelon has come under fire, with the likes of Sepp Blatter having demonstrated a slipperiness and an appeasement policy of certain federations (in return for voting support) that mirrors some of our best coalition tactics.

I have long felt that the members of the BCCI are best equipped at the sport of sport administration, rather than the sport of cricket. Politicians of all hues mix there to form a kaleidoscope of changing alliances that are trickier to sort out than the holdings of an IPL team. Perhaps there could be an upper limit of say, 50, to be a BCCI office-bearer, and the gentlemen currently in charge could use the BCCI as a sort of a junior (under-19?) league to groom their 'scions'?

The Sports Minister 1 has set about putting in barriers to people being BDPLs. (Ironically, the Minister is a man of a vintage higher than the retirement age he has proposed for heads of sports federations.) Not surprisingly, the various presidents have spoken in unison against the move, which restricted their tenure to twelve years. That's right, twelve years. That's Six Olympics, Three Football World Cups, Twelve IPLs, and at the current rate, 12 World T20s. Clearly, these guys are insatiable.

Expressing gratitude to the sporting gods (who have otherwise clearly abdicated all responsibilities and are partying in one of Allen Stanford's beach resorts) for the lack of a Quizzing Federation of India (no, this isn't the one) we end with a trivia question:

Which pair of brothers respectively head the Federations of the largely unrelated sports of Table Tennis and Boxing?

1: To his credit though, M.S.Gill has been a keen mountaineer and patronised that sport in India

Feelin' Frisky

2010-05-03T19:46:00.003+05:30

Almost every large hotel or shopping complex in Pune has installed metal detectors at its entrance and has security personnel carry out body and baggage checks (usually very perfunctory and ineffective). This is yet another aspect to our outdoor lives that we have slowly come to accept. Despite the 'nobility' of the aim, this only causes minor annoyances to the 99.999% of the populace that seeks to demolish nothing but a three-course meal.

Last week, I was at the Landmark store in Pune. Visitors to the store will know the first display after the security checks and bag deposit is that of the latest music & movie releases. I was standing there, when a couple and their son, who must have been about five, walked in. I looked up because the son began to cry.

The father asked him what he wanted and the child pointed outside. It seemed as if he wanted to go elsewhere and not spend a morning in a big bookstore. The father didn't protest and took him towards the exit. Where he spoke to the guard there who smiled and bent down.

The guard then proceeded to give the kid a once-over with his metal detector, immediately at which the boy stopped sobbing as if obeying the PMC water supply regulations for the day.

One could wonder if the guard had been amiss earlier not treating a kid without the complete suspicion that should be his professional stock-in-trade, or to begin with, whether the trio had not been frisked properly because they were white foreigners (for that they were). Or just realise that there well could be two sides to each bomb detector experience.

Nut Rang

2010-05-01T19:36:00.001+05:30

I cannot help but feel that these dry fruit makers missed out on the opportunity for a pun in their brand name.

On the loss of sleep and the sleep of loss

2010-04-28T19:47:00.003+05:30

All Nighters is a collection of vignettes at the NY Times site on the subject of insomnia. The articles in this section are often thought-provoking, and the ailment seems to afflict too many people than seems tolerable.

Fortunately, I don't suffer from sleeplessness, but have had fleeting brushes with it during periods of illness. Those among us who sleep like careless infants perhaps do not know how fortunate they are. The whole cliché of realising what we have taken for granted when it is taken away from us is of no solace if you are up at night, tossing about after having numbered the entire sheep population of New Zealand.

The latest installment in All Nighters was particularly moving. Bill Hayes, a writer (of even a book on insomnia, called Sleep Demons: An Insomniac's Memoir¹), writes about losing his partner who passed away, nay 'disappeared', in his sleep. In a grave irony, Hayes, a life-long insomniac, slept through it thanks to sleeping pills.

The blog post isn't just for insomniacs - it is for anyone who has lost someone or (dare I say it?) for everyone who will. Hayes writes:

[...] it was a long time before I was able to take his pillow from his side of the bed. I did not dare. The night after he died, I found that a sliver of light from a streetlamp shone through the blinds just so and cast a single yellowy tendril across his pillow. It was the opposite of a shadow. Which is as clear a definition as I can come up with for the soul.
With morning, the light was gone, and I found the days empty and agonizing. It would take about three years for this feeling to pass — a thousand days, give or take — people who had been through this told me. As it turns out, they were right. What no one said is something I discovered on my own: A thousand days is a thousand nights is a thousand chances to dream about him.

1: Hayes has also written a book on the two men behind Gray's Anatomy, which from what little I know of it, is an interesting story.

Death by Bulletin

2010-04-27T20:21:00.002+05:30

They say it is evil. They say it can be put to macabre ends. They say the Devil uses it in his daily briefings to the hapless denizens of the Elysian Fields (ok, I made this up).

Yes, that's how much people hate Powerpoint.

This image, from a Pentagon press briefing, has been doing the rounds in the interweb (is there a unified term for the blogosphere and the twitterverse, btw?). This NY Times article describes the surrounding peals of cynical mirth, as people tell each other - I told you, Powerpoint sucks - before going back to making their next 'deck' (need to brush harder tonight to get the taste of that word out!).

The problem has never been with Powerpoint as with the people using it. Even Edward Tufte, the Grand Duke of all things visual and a man who never hesitates in throwing his punches, criticizes the cognitive style of making slideware more than the tool itself. That the software makes it easy to throw out verbose texts and incoherent fragments in no time does not mean it has been spawned by Beelzebub himself during one of his ghoulish afternoons. This is one case where you should shoot the messenger (preferably with bullet points), and not the medium.

Take the above image. For one the resultant spaghetti has nothing to do with Powerpoint - it is at worst, a failure of depicting the information. In fact, one could even argue the image brilliantly depicts the hopelessly tangled web that is the Afghan situation! The choice of colours & clustering makes it a lot more palatable than some of the simpler images I have had the misfortune of seeing in several business presentations. We do not know how this slide was used and whether it was used to make a larger point of the complications, followed by diving into specific regions of this dense map.

The basic problem is that people gravitate towards using slideware as a communication medium even when it is not required. Hence, ppts show up in routine meetings merely as a visual notebook substitute for the presenter. Or they are used as means to document information. Hardly any presenter is taught effective use of a tool by way of the right techniques for narration, outline, slide & chart design, or using it as a complement to the presenter rather than a body double.

Fortunately, there's a ton of material available these days from which to learn. Garr Reynold's Presentation Zen is an excellent place to begin; there are many examples & contests on sites such as SlideShare; TED contains a wide ranging collection of different presentation styles; these are just a sample of resource map of people, ideas, and content devoted to telling better stories and sharing information effectively. If you are really serious about exploring an alternative to the entire philosophy of Powerpoint, try the awesomeness of Prezi. It provides a non-linear way of arranging your content, backed by some very pleasing frameworks for transition and narrative structure. In fact, this is so cool that it forces you to completely alter your way of thinking about presenting.

So put down the pitchfork, take your mouse away from the Add/Remove Programs, and take a deep look inside your slides before you get booked for cognitive murder.

A babel fish for irritating voices

2010-04-20T20:01:00.000+05:30

My office workspace is, unfortunately, in some proximity to people who make a lot of telephone calls. They (and there is no nice way to put this) have very irritating voices or patterns of speech. Various options present themselves: I can choose tinnitus leading to some form of deafness, do a van Gogh (but I wouldn't know any ladies of the night to give the item to :-)) , or just take the easy way out and retire to a Trappist monastery.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a device that could either filter out certain voices, or perhaps transform them into more pleasing sounds? So suddenly you have someone saying "so, shall we touch base on Monday as regards the scheduling?" in the voice of say, George Clooney. (Some people think Clooney is the only person who could make you want him to do that to you.)

Jaspal Sandhu haazir ho

2010-04-18T20:25:00.004+05:30

Lalit Modi may look like Ravi Baswani, but his actions have always smelt of Tarneja. Both Tharoor & Modi are two high-flying, speed-racing individuals whose words and actions are just wonderfully designed to evoke jealousy and annoyance in many, and as can be seen right now, there's no dearth of people queuing up to yank them down.

Meanwhile, some lament the future of cricket as a sport and business, fears which I find unfounded. Like in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, someone will whisk it off saying: न पान्डव द्रौपदी के लायक है, न कौरव| इस लिए द्रौपदी हमारे साथ जाएगी|

हम होंगे कामयाब एक दिन?

Re-creative thinking

2010-04-15T10:08:00.000+05:30

A couple of weeks ago, Scott Berkun tweeted something that I found quite interesting:

Many adults haven't *made* anything in yrs - giving them legos/crayons would help more than reading books on creativity

I wonder if this state of affairs is by unconscious design - reading creativity books seems like a proxy for action to its readers. It is immensely easier than picking up lego blocks or crayons. Children are not (yet) intimidated by a blank canvas or a vacuum, and not so scared about being told off for colouring outside the lines. So to those who want to be more creative, especially to those who know that there are answers in books, the first instinct may be to read about how to be creative, than to practise being creative. It makes you feel you are planning your steps towards that cherished goal without having to dip your toes in the cold water.

And sometimes (who knows) it might not turn out to be that cold!

Save our saves

2010-04-13T19:48:00.001+05:30

I have been using Tomboy, a note-taking application (based on a recommendation by Harsh. (I'm not quite sure why it has that name.) It is simple to use. There is a tiny problem - it is excessively simple to use.

In essence, I have only one problem. Thanks to instant and automatic saving, I don't have to hit CTRL-s or its equivalent here. But I am so used to saving my work while working on a text editor that I end up doing that often in Tomboy. Unfortunately, that's a shortcut to turn the 'strike out' formatting option. Which means I begin to cancel all my forthcoming words (yes, that does allow me the happiness of hitting CTRL-s again to toggle :-))

It's like the story (not sure how true) of how phone service providers had to add a little background noise during a call even though they can completely eliminate it. It feels correct, since we're used to it, and habituated to using it as reassurance of the call being live.

So, though I know my work is being saved, I miss the comfort of having tactile proof of that fact. Just another example of how we get so used to something and that even the tiniest of things can matter to a wholesome interface-experience.

More terrible than terrific: do we have more negative words than positive ones in English?

2010-04-12T20:06:00.000+05:30

One of the common approaches to the problem of sentiment analysis (a field under text mining & natural language processing (NLP), where programs try to detect opinion in natural language texts) is to build a dictionary of 'opinion' words. The words are classified as negative & positive. Given words from a sentence, a program can look up the dictionary to see if any of these words appear in dictionary, and then use the positive or negative category as an input in detecting sentiment for that sentence. (Of course, this is a simplified explanation of what actually happens.)

We work in this field and so, in one of our approaches, have built such a lexicon. Our's is a small list and hence not comprehensive, but sufficient for our purposes. Now, I noticed that I had a lot more words tagged as negative rather than as positive. Stated in numbers, there were 434 words marked positive, and 1348 marked negative. I had initially built a much smaller list by hand, and then expanded the lexicon automatically by (partially) using an approach (pdf) described by Italian researchers Andrea Esuli and Fabrizio Sebastiani.

They had also created SentiWordNet. This extends WordNet, which is a popular language resource used in natural lanuage processing and in essence, is a dictionary-thesaurus on steroids (the good kind :-)). WordNet contains over 150,000 words and arranges them 'conceptually', by grouping together synonyms that make up unique 'senses' (these groups are called 'synsets') (it may be obvious why I didn't the word 'sensually' to describe the arrangement). SentiWordNet augments this by attaching a positive and a negative score to each synset. (Here, I won't discuss why a synset can have both a positive & negative score.) Words like 'horrible' or bad have a high negative score, while awesome and pleasant are very positive.

Coming back to our question. Seeing the difference in my list, I wondered if this was a possibly valid observation, or if my lexicon was just poorly constructed, or a consequence of applying the expansion technique in part. So I counted the number of positive & negative synsets in SentiWordNet (again, not going into details here). I found 14134 negative synsets and 12720 positive ones. Perhaps not a significant difference, but still the negative side is a little greater in number (and I haven't actually counted words, only sense groups). So it could just be that I chose or generated more negative words.

This is all anecdotal and perhaps some fun for language geeks to talk about when they're stuck in a long queue and haven't brought a book along :-)

How many cancer patients will it take?

2010-04-11T18:36:00.001+05:30

How many cancer patients will it take for us to be fully inspired? And stay that way? You could read about the ones that died, like Randy Pausch, or the ones that survived, like Lance Armstrong. Is there now a full-fledged market in cancer stories (sort of like with death row inmates)? Do publishers & movie-makers sift through them, rating cancer stories, so that we may remain inspired? Is testicular or brain cancer better than lung or skin cancer? Is a bald patient with better than one who's still got a fair crop? Are readers recommending these to others based on how much they cringed during the accounts of IV drips, chemo sessions, and supportive wives?

The essential difference between the inspired and the need-to-be-inspired is that the former did, or at least tried to. While the latter read and forgot and went back to not doing. And then came back to be re-inspired, like tyres needing more hot air even after days of inactivity. But these wheels don't spin too much. Pity. If those that inspire us with their real deeds had even a fraction of the lives that we waste, they'd probably have become even more inspirational.

But it might have all been wasted on us, anyway. Put down that book, stop being merely inspired and go do something.

Glengarry Glen Ross & Frost/Nixon

2010-04-10T19:22:00.003+05:30

By coincidence, the last two movies that I saw were both adapted from plays. Both films were highly spoken of, but both didn't satisfy me entirely.

Glengarry Glen Ross is (roughly) 24 hours in the lives of four real estate salesmen whose already tough professional existences become threatened by a sales contest that will result in half of them being fired. How this drives them in different ways is the plot. It takes very little time for desperation, capitulation, changes in fortune, and even crime to show up.

This is a story told using a firehose of dialogues and reaction. The opening acting credits spill over with a massive overdose of acting prowess which help translate this to screen. Jack Lemmon in particular is put through the blender. Sometimes, I wonder if its worth seeing even fictional characters stripped down to their basic forms, bereft of any respect.

However, the film never shrugs off its dramatic origins, and is infuriatingly static in location. The atmospheric stuffiness caused by the rain is both useful and distracting. The high profanity rate may put some off (Wikipedia notes that the film was jokingly titled "Death of a F***in' Salesman" :-)).

Recently, a memo written by David Mamet (the playwright and screenwriter for this movie) has been doing the rounds (and reached me thanks to Sud). An interesting viewpoint on the construction of a dramatic piece of writing, it finally made me get hold of Glengarry Glen Ross, probably his most famous work.

Frost/Nixon is a peeling away of a different kind - of one of the most controversial politicians of the last 40 years. Richard Nixon, a tricky customer of the highest order, disappeared into Air Force One after a defiant wave that left many Americans annoyed. Through a conjunction of commerce and contrivance, British TV presenter David Frost (perhaps only seen on Indian TV as the host of The Guinness Book of World Records once upon a time, and now suitably snow-haired and knighted) interviewed the man who never showed any regret for the Watergate Affair.

The movie prefers to focus on the personalities of the two 'adversaries' rather than treat it as the cross-examination it supposedly was. Frost comes across as a pop-presenter desperately wanting to be taken seriously, while Nixon is a lumbering old man whose self-inflicted guilt weighs down his shoulders. Therein lie the problems with an otherwise engaging movie about just a bunch of interviews.

My own perception of Nixon, even post-Watergate, was of a man who never grew out of being a canny politician who knew that people were out to get him. Towards the end, Frank Langella (playing Nixon), with his excessively deep rendition of the Nixon baritone, reminded me of Martin Landau's portrayal of Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood - a once-great performer who had finally accepted it was all over. Michael Sheen's Frost is that of a lightweight who has to be taught how to control his intellectually superior interviewee, which is at odds with whatever little I have seen of the real David Frost. Perhaps years of television imaging has permanently and irreparably imprinted their respective brands inside my head!

Wikipedia and some clips of the actual interviews online remind us to view the movie as a piece of creative content that may not entirely coincide with reality. But there is much in the movie to watch. A favourite moment was when Nixon tells Frost that given the need of politicians to be liked by people, it would have made more sense for Frost to have been the politican. Of course, Michael Sheen - the man who seems to glide with ridiculous ease into parts calling for a charming Englishman in crisis - played slick Tony Blair in The Queen. Tony Blair, who was everything Nixon wasn't, and ironically, found himself in a similar sort of pickle at the end of his career at the top.

e-ntroductions

2010-03-23T19:17:00.001+05:30

When you 'meet' someone for the first time over something as anti-septic as email, how much are you allowed to judge them? I seem to pay attention to their speed of response, their level of apology if they have taken time to reply, the attention they give your email's content (assuming you have taken every care not o intrude on their time and energy), and the thin line that divides curtness from concision.

However, the first time recipient of an email may not even be aware of being judged in this way. Being conscious that your writing styles evokes intangible qualities such as gentleness, enthusiasm, interest, annoyance, bite, and engagement would help. Eventually, treating one as you would expect to be treated by another is the easiest of thumb-rules to apply.

Fool's Paradise

2010-03-22T19:12:00.004+05:30

'tis "better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt" said someone. Presumably, he was not a fool, or perhaps just brave enough to attempt using his mouth to make this utterance. But what of those who have opened their oral orifices, widely and gapingly, to show that there is truth in such an aphorism? Nothing happens to them. In fact, it might be profitable to be considered a fool.

So we think of cricket presenters and television anchors and stock market analysts and tweeters and radio jockeys as fools. They continue to prosper, write columns, get quoted, fill up frequencies, wallow in verbiage (such as this?).

While the meek inherit the world, the silent merely sit quietly. Where they are considered potential fool-material!

Jet Wings article on the COEP Boat Club

2010-03-20T16:22:00.004+05:30

January's edition of "Jet Wings", Jet Airways' in-flight magazine, was a "City Secrets" special, and with newer people flooding into Pune each month, the presence of COEP's Boat Club may well be a secret for some of them. The BC isn't really a tourist haunt or 'a place to be' or (importantly), 'a place to be seen at'. In essence, it's 'a place to do', where "do" can range from boating to reading to performing to quizzing or just sitting.

I wrote a small piece on the BC, which appeared in this edition. You can read it online at the JetWings site (pages 63 to 66) or read a scanned version here (it's a .pdf file, ~1.3 MB).

Tomorrow is COEP's Annual Regatta, its 82nd edition (in step with the Oscars, as this trivially-minded author keeps reminding people). If you are not attending the BCQC March Open Quizzes (yes, that's how we get the BC in our name), you should attend the show in the evening!

(The magazine is produced by Spenta Multimedia; the photos for this article are by Parikshit Rao)

Abhay Deol, Movie Compass

2010-03-04T19:51:00.003+05:30

Abhay Deol's greatest talent in films, on the evidence of his seven releases so far, is by no means his acting. (He is what people call a 'sincere' actor - often a euphemism for 'tries hard, succeeds sometimes, and doesn't annoy', though he is getting noticeably better with each outing). Instead, his talent (and it's a rare one in our films) is that of making excellent choices. In turn, to reasonable film watchers, that means Abhay Deol is a very reliable recommendation engine, whose very presence in a movie signals that it is worth a watch.

Of course, crew-based recommendations is a matter of personal choice. For me, Christopher Nolan and Vishal Bhardwaj still remain the two other people whose mere association with a movie (as writers or directors) is sufficient to invest time and money in the result. What's interesting with Deol is that unlike Nolan or Vishal, he has very little control over the ultimate destiny of his films. Therefore, this uni-dimensional algorithm is likely to SEGFAULT ("crash", let's say, for you non-geeks) sooner than later. But seven interesting movies, with an eighth releasing tomorrow, is not a bad sequence to have.

So far:

1. Socha Na Tha: a romantic comedy that asked the question "what happens if a fellow falls in a love with a girl after he's gone to 'see her' and told everyone he doesn't like her". In his debut, Imtiaz Ali showed his penchant for finding unusual twists out of typical situations. Deol plays a rich kid with too many loves on his mind.

2. Ahistaa Ahistaa: Imtiaz Ali wrote this for friend and debutant Shivam Nair, the tale of a marriage witness-for-hire who takes care of a girl who's been stood up at the registrar's office. The unnecessary insertion of Himesh's songs (at an all time peak then) didn't help this little film.

3. Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd: a bunch of tales so light that they escaped into the sky on release. The Abhay Deol-Minissha Lambaa segment was easily the most surreal. Anurag Kashyap turned Deol into the first ever Parsi superhero (spoiler alert, select to read!). Who would have thought?

4. Ek Chalis Ki Last Local: another variation on the "man falls into the night" theme, this time with lots of purple lungis thrown in. Funny without being special

5. Manorama Six Feet Under: In this Rajasthani version of Chinatown, Deol is mediocre at most things: writing, leading a family, even at being corrupt. A brave choice for a Hindi cinema leading man and probably the best film he's been in.

6. Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!: a movie that had the colossal misfortune of being released the same week as India's most audacious terrorist attack. His most complex character, that of a loveless con artist, marked further progress.

7. Dev.D: in which he created the concept, played it with the haze, and even strapped on a camera. This film about a spoilt brat was ultimately spoilt because its writer-director found love. Drat.

Road, Movie is up next.

The Colour Khusro

2010-03-01T20:13:00.003+05:30

Today of course is Holi, a day for adults to do some fingerpainting of their own. There is hardly a non-contact version of the festival, no wall where you can guiltlessly fling paint at, as young 'uns do in a chic urban Hindi film in a slow motion sequence.

A year or two ago, I saw an interesting documentary on NDTV (their weekend documentary show is often worth a watch) which must centred around Holi and colours, I'm sure. It featured Ustad Sultan Khan who began singing "aaj rang hai" which, until then in my vast ignorance, I only knew as lines appearing in the Maqbool soundtrack's Jhin Min Jhini.

The same album has a longer version of the same song, which begins with "khusro rain suhaag ki, jaage pii ke sa.ng/tan mero man piyuu ko/dono bhaye ek ra.ng". The programme explained the Sufi concept of "rang", which is more than just the literal meaning of "colour". It refers to a kind of "luminescence" of God¹, a divine colour, the oneness that the Sufi wants to achieve with his beloved Lord. Phrases like "mujhe rang de" are well known to us via Hindi film songs. In Sufi thought, there seems to be this treatment of the Lord and the devotee as beloveds, with the devotee seeking union with his God, which is why the use of romantic vocabulary of words like "prem", "suhaag", "piyaa".

Returning to "aaj rang hai", whose writer was (if you haven't guessed already) Amir Khusro. This post by Sheetal Vyas describes a popular version of the story behind the verses. Khusro meets Hazrat Nizammudin Aulia, and having found his mentor, is over the moon and runs home to tell his mother. So he writes:

aaj ra.ng hai
aye maa ra.ng hai ri
mere mehbuub ke ghar ra.ng hai ri

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Abida Parveen, and the Sabri Brothers have famous recitals of "aaj rang hai".

Incidentally, looks like Gulzar who wove these verses in "Jhin Min Jhini" made another reference to Khusro in a song for "Saathiya" by using the phrase "nainaa milaaike". It's a coincidence that I watched Gulaal last week, but perhaps a separate post on it another day. Some more links
1. An article on Amir Khusro
2. A few Khusro poems (with translations)

1. I'm sure my interpretations are lacking in depth and meaning, since they are based on recollections of a TV show and half an evening's reading.

Esquire on Roger Ebert

2010-02-17T19:47:00.005+05:30

The article is titled "Roger Ebert: The Essential Man", and just like the man, the article is pretty astonishing. A few years ago, I remember reading about how Roger Ebert was in surgery (multiple times) and had to suspend both his popular show (he can't speak any more) and his writing (he was in hospital a lot).

Then, the RSS feed of his Chicago Sun-Times website began to show new items once again, regularly and prolifically. Then Ebert's journal came into being. I then forgot about his disabilities (brought about by his almost fatal jousts with cancer), for you do not associate that with a man producing a thousand words a day.

Until I read this Esquire piece on Ebert. Read it. It's fascinating, in the way fiction never can be, simply because all this happened to someone whose existence isn't questionable.

Dying men have many homilies to share, but Ebert is such a fine writer (however much you disagree with his views) that this paragraph is worth highlighting:

I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

Chandan Arora's "Striker" - music

2010-01-14T18:26:00.004+05:30

"Striker", a film directed by Chandan Arora and starring Siddharth (probably the first Hindi film to feature carrom as its central theme?), recently released its music album. Among the many music directors to write songs for the album is Vishal.

The song is called Yun Hua, is penned by Gulzar, and is sung by Vishal himself.

(see the Wikipedia article on 'Striker' for more.)

cross-posted on the Vishal blog

Three Idiots...

2010-01-13T08:28:00.004+05:30

...Aamir Khan has now kissed both Kapoor sisters.

...a film so designed to be 'feel-good' that it's almost obscene in how 'good' the audience is made to 'feel' - solicitation of pleasure laws should apply, for aren't people paying for this?

...if you want to make movies with 80s sensibilities, then you should have made them in the 80s.

...the lack of attention to detail is often insulting, that this is almost a sci-fi film. Predicts mass use of futuristic tech in the late 90s (calculating for an engg. student born in '78) such as cell-phones, webcams, broadband.

...in addition to Chetan Bhagat, the writers did not prominently credit those who write the jokes that eventually become email forwards.

...funny that a film whose story consistently praises 'innovation' over the 'formulaic system' uses a mix of old Bollywood techniques, with only the occasional meta-film references that we are used to from modern Bollywood films.

...the best 2-3 sequences or one-liners in the film went largely unnoticed in the audience; occasional sparks of originality glimmered anonymously.

...Engineering education might need a positive PR exercise in India.

...after vamps, kisses, and revealing costumes went mainstream, certain hindi words that were solely the preserve of Ranjeet & co. have ceased to be embarrassing in family films.

...life isn't worth living if one isn't a hero of one's film, i.e. if your life has an Aamir Khan and you are not him (one more coin in the doesn't-Aamir-Khan-do-the-same-characters? fund)

...and finally, we're in serious trouble if such a large quantity of people in the audience need to be given hope and reassurance (but ultimately, you've got to take the hard decisions about what you want; watching it vicariously is no use)

Alternatives: read Richard Feynman's "Surely, You're Joking Mr. Feynman", get a copy of "In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones", or try a more honest, though raw rendition of the same themes in "Silicon Jungle", a film by Rabi Kisku, an IIT Madras student.

ghaas-phuus ke raste

2010-01-09T14:42:00.002+05:30

The next time you walk down Fergusson College Road, do look up at the trees that (still) dot much of the road. (Be sure to keep half-an-eye out for the monstrous traffic bearing down upon you too.) A month or so ago, two botany students (Apoorva Gaikwad and Sunita Chougule) from Modern College painstakingly attached labels to each tree (mentioning its common and botanical name). Like in this picture: This is a great idea. If we measured naturalist illiteracy, I'd be at the top of the list, so hopefully, soon I'll be able to tell my 'sonemohars' from my 'gulmohars' just by walking down FC Road (when I'm not dodging the one-way traffic).

(This TOI article has more.)

Going senti

2010-01-08T10:00:00.000+05:30

Paul Greenberg is an analyst in the world of CRM tools, with a book on the topic, to his credit. In a recent ZDNet blog post, he added Cognizant's Social CRM ventures to his annual CRM watchlist, saying:

This is one of my most out-of-place and yet most appropriate picks for 2010.[...]The fact that they have a practice is well and good but they back the practice up with content and that makes a huge difference. They are actually developing a Social CRM framework for both technology and strategy and investing resources in products that can support them.

Further he adds:

For example, they have a sentiment analyzer that I saw not too long ago that is a solid entry into the tool belt. This is not a commercial product, but a tool for their work and their clients to use. Honestly, with not much more work, it could be a very salable sentiment analysis tool - competitive in most ways.

I quote these lines because my group is responsible for creating the Sentiment Analyzer quoted above. I've been working on this for the last couple of years and it is interesting to finally see some non-traditional applications of sentiment analysis come to the fore. (Usually, they have revolved around brand monitoring and reputation analysis.)

The jury is still out on what constitutes Social CRM and its benefits beyond simply adding another set of channels to existing CRM systems. People like Cognizant's A. Prem have been writing and talking about this fledgling area, but as someone involved in text analytics , I am interested in seeing how this evolves in the future.

Foot-tapping

2010-01-07T21:11:00.003+05:30

Mavalli Tiffin Rooms is quite a Bangalore institution, with its silver coffee tumblers and khaaraa bhaats. 11 took me there one Saturday morning after a walk through Lalbagh. The most interesting thing about the experience came at the very end, when I went to wash my hands.

I don't know who came up with it, but the idea is brilliant: the washbasin has a foot-operated tap. This allows you to rinse your hands without touching the tap with your sambaar-chutnified fingers. Moreover, you don't need to remember to close the tap when done, a common problem in public washbasins. Regulation of flow is fairly intuitive and corresponds directly to foot pressure rather than turning a tap in circles.

Why don't we have more foot-controlled taps? Why is MTR the only place where I've seen this? And why, despite having a phone with a camera, did I not take a photo for this blog?

Update (16 Feb 2010): Saurabh clicked a photo of the tap which can be seen here (you may have to use your imagination a little :-) )

Michael Caine on being an actor

2009-10-29T21:33:00.001+05:30

Lovely quote by Sir Michael Caine (read here)

"I became a movie actor. The difference between a movie star and a movie actor is that a movie star looks at a script and says how can I change this to suit me and a movie actor says how can I change me to suit this."