O Costs

Gaurav, Kunal and Harish will testify that I have now started pretending I'm a budding economist by asking them clarifications on opportunity cost problems [Smirking? See if you get this question right!] and slapping my head on failing to answer a question (in a "real quiz") on the invisible hand.

Incidentally, last week, I stumbled upon it in a very interesting context. This was from the Xooglers blog.

Sergey once asked a large assemblage of Googlers what our greatest corporate expense was. “Health insurance!” was one answer shouted back. “Salaries!” “Servers!” “Taxes!” “Electricity!” “Charlie’s grocery bills!,” came back others. “No,” said Sergey. “Opportunity cost.” He explained that the products we weren’t launching and the deals we weren’t doing threatened our economic stability more than any single line item in the budget. It became a regular call and response at staff meetings and added to the sense that no matter how hard we were working, success was slipping through our fingers. Rather than cause employees to feel defeated, however, it became a rallying cry to redouble their efforts.

Interesting mantra for a confirmed structured procrastinator like me.

Manjunath Trust

A trust has been set up in memory of Manjunath with several objectives in mind. Please do take a moment to read the details at Gaurav's blog here and contribute if you concur.

A Nightmare is ...

... an episode from the Zzzz Horror Show.

(If this has been done before, I claim refuge in independent re-discovery)

Veg Triple Mondae

It's uncanny how these three look the same - not just facially, but girthwise and in their cap-'n-beard-ness. And you thought Michael Madana KamaRajan was outrageous!

BTW, these three are Vikram Inamdar (this is from the film Iqbal - more famously Sanjeev from "Hyderabad Blues"), Himesh Reshammiya and of course, Inzy (IDuppazhagan?)

And also
* Saket's got a post in similar territory on how Conan O'Brien and the President of Finland got together (Daemon: I remember your theory-of-faces :-))
* And previously on this blog: Triple Schezwan Sundae

Here's a thought for the day

My biggest problem, nay complaint, with the day that is "today" is that you can't complain about anything today with most people ascribing it to "today". Instead, you've got to look like a benign Buddha (too much merriment also evokes comment). I like my complaints and I like to complain, so I'm not very happy with anyone taking that away from me in a blaze of innuendo. I'm fairly happy as a person right now (if you discount all the various complaints) and especially if you compare my lot to a whole set of people. I'd be complaining about the same things tomorrow as well, but suddenly tomorrow's complaint is much more mundane than today's. I resent that.

In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Joel rightly starts off saying that "Today is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap". And if you tell me this post was a classic example of a reaction from someone not having to make any purchases that make those greeting card companies fill their pockets, don't come near me or I'll give you something to complain about :-)

95 Run De Basanti*

Members of the ARR-SRT Fan Combine (there is usually a high degree of intersection between these two sets) breathe sighs of relief with two commercially successful scores recently. Though most of the followers had professed (atleast publicly) a continuation of faith and pointed to continued critical plaudits for immediately preceding records, these recent efforts would have provided a balm of relief and held at bay the wolf of doubt.

(*not to be confused as an exhortation to Hema Malini)

Night Fall

Just like Sud, I entered this effort in a short-story competition and didn't get any joy with it (weep, weep). Will hence splash it on these pages for all to see.

Night Fall

In the large chapel, he sees the priest hand over the crown to the emperor as the consort looks on, pleased. Everyone breaks out in applause. Cheers ring out as the king looks benevolently around. He reaches out and kisses the priest's (oh wait, he must be the archbishop) ring on his finger.

The ceremony is over. People start to file through the elegant staircase to the floor above. They're in the large open porch. On a turret above, the Royals emerge to the accompaniment of the clergy on either side. They wave and the guns below boom in august sonority, scattering the crows on the highest reaches of the castle. He feels extremely pleased, and strangely secure.

Below, the gathered soldiers transit into another formation. A hop across, one by one, strangely diagonal. Her Highness peers out, rather dangerously. It prompts the cautious King to look anxiously at her, much to the tittering amusement of the noblemen below (but he can only see deep meditation writ large on his face).

The cavalry file in offering their respects. The glittering standard leads them; the men on the majestic horses present a proud picture of authority. A collective gasp of wonderment is spontaneous.

Chestnut and dapple, charcoal and sorrel, these fine animals trot deferentially. But his heartbeat races. And lo! One of the black horses leaps up improbably onto the verandah scattering the dukes (he watches, horrified) and in another giant jump reaches the turret. She's dead and He will be soon. We will be powerless.

He woke up, sweating. Twice in two days.

*** "... lost the crown to the underdog. Despite the advantage of white pieces, the champion made an uncharacteristic error on his 38th move, leaving his opponent's Knight free to ..."

BCQC News feature

The BC quizzing gang got featured in a news article. More details here.

Talk and Mail - what's the difference?

Yet to have Talk enabled with my GMail, but it's quite exciting - for me, the most novel and lateral idea since GMail's conversations and labels in a Webmail service.

Never underestimate the predictability...

... of both stupidity and some ex-cricketers. If you want more reasons why Bishen Singh Bedi is the Indian equivalent of Fred Trueman (in making statements), some more popped out of this rather useless Rediff contribution of his.

First, the irony of him saying "He (Virender Sehwag) must shed a few pounds to look a competent athlete" is hard to ignore, even if there is any reason in that statement - I don't know. But defining the look of a competent athlete is perhaps best left to others. Then Bedi gets his facts horribly tied up as if mixing up an armball with a chinaman. He says:

The Pakistan coach was most familiar with the D/L method as he have been part of the South African team in a World Cup tie at Sydney when the Proteas were required 23 runs off one ball. Bob Woolmer was early and wise to keep his boys posted about the D/L method.

Now,

1. Bob Woolmer had no part to play with the SA team of 1992 in that World Cup (IIRC). He became coach sometime after 1994.
2. The Duckworth-Lewis method was not introduced until 1999.
3. The 1992 Cup was played under a rain rule suggested by Richie Benaud (and perhaps others), so they should be blamed (But then I'm sure Bedi has more respect for a great player than a bunch of "lousy mathematicians").

Finally, this infuriating statement: "the result had to be decided by that lousy mathematician duo of Duckworth and Lewis. What a pity that cricketers have to leave their unfinished work to the unknowns, who may have never played the game." Well, it comes back to asking whether playing the game at the highest level has anything to do with coming up with a rain rule system. D/L is perhaps not the best system, but it remains the fairest one known so far and its heart is definitely in the right place (I don't know about the alternative system some Indian suggested - however the same criticisms will be levelled against that as well). Even if some cricketer can't understand it, why does he have to bother - just follow the printout issued to you! What other way is possible to finish a match, Mr. Bedi?

Further suggested reading for him: The Duckworth Lewis Method and this article by Harsha Bhogle mentioning the topic. My problem with these sort of columns are that they are full of criticisms but not one bit of it is constructive and useful for anyone.

Anatomy of a human spam-collective

It was an ordinary evening until the following sequence of emails:

• 5 pm: Mail sent to all lists of a certain kind (reaching about 300 inboxes) announcing a programme (and a note on its history)
• 6:10 pm: Reply from someone objecting to certain interpretations of the history
• 6:15 pm: Same reply from someone objecting to certain interpretations of the history again
• 6:20 pm: Third copy of reply from someone objecting to certain interpretations of the history
• 7:10 pm: Response from originator of thread rebutting these objections
• 7:30 pm: Response from objector apologising for inadvertent triple sundae special earlier, but sticking to guns on version of history
• 8:05 pm: First mumblings of anger from person unconnected to the whole controversy asking above people to shut up
• 8:35 pm: Another reply condemning in no uncertain terms the washing in open of laundry
• 9:40 pm: First meta-spam condemnation asking spam-objectors to stop objecting so publicly
• 9:50 pm: Concurrence from another meta-spam object displeased at the modern tendency of people to first spam and of others to spam-spam
• 10:05 pm: Super-spam objector airdashes into fray and in no uncertain terms asks people to take a hike and stop (no points for guessing) sending unsolicited email to all
• 10:10 pm: First rat to desert ship: "please remove my email id/alias from this discussion" email
• 10:25 pm: "please remove my email id/alias from this discussion too" email
• 10:45 pm: "While you are at, why not remove mine too?" reply
• 11:05 pm: "Please please stop all this nonsense immediately" email
• 11:10 pm: The "yeah, I agree too" mail (in reality, didn't come).
  All times have been changed to protect temporal identity

  How I would like to see them hung upside down with cans of this preparation stuffed down (up?) their throats and end to end.

  [The "that's why I'm a misanthrope" collection]

Pyarelal's Cereal

I think Abhishek is getting his wish with this #me joke.

behN de Takke

Recent utterances have led me to draw a Thematic K-line between TarN Adarsh and Myuin KhaaN.

TarN says about the music of Rang De Basanti: A.R. Rahman’s music is ordinary. Barring Paathshala and the title track, Rahman’s score doesn’t stay with you after the screening has ended. Where was he when they were playing Ruubaruu ?

Myuin, in his turn, said: As a wicketkeeper, Sachin's controversial dismissal also reminded me of a few batsmen who preferred walking off the pitch on their legs rather than being carried away on stretchers when the great Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis were at their brilliant best. Was he thinking back to this ?

Pardon first my intolerance, and then my ignorance, but what exactly does "behN de Takke" mean? Mail me if you can't say it in public. (Reminds me of the other time I was looking for meanings of Punjabi phrases.)

Rang De Basanti anti-review

I finally feel like I'm a member of the blogosphere again. I watched "Rang De Basanti" yestreen, seemingly one of the last members of the human-race-that-blogs to do so. This is the 135492.32th review of the movie:
(Dire warning: no spoilers ahead, so read at your own peril)

So I watched RDB yesterday (have Pancham fans united to reclaim the cherished brand? - I see a WWF-WWE tussle emerging) and I thought it was. That was because of the acting and somewhat because of the. The story was, but still I couldn't help thinking that they were really. The dialogues were right out of the.

Aamir Khan was, well,. As usual Atul Kulkarni. Perhaps the rest were by it. It was an but ensemble cast, the likes of which usually don't. I disagree with some of the reviews that held that. It wasn't in the case of the Khers and Om Puri, you would have to say. What more can you say to that?

Incidentally, did anyone notice that there were many ? As has been discussed in detail elsewhere, the parallels were and so I'm still to make my mind up on whether. So overall, one would have to say that. The music was used in.

So in summary, my recommendation would be. I wonder if people disagree with any or all of the above?

Dedicated to all those web-writers who gloriously took us through frame-by-frame of the movie (despite which, like any good blogger, I still queued up to pay my Rs. 100-odd) without (and with justification) needing to insert in spoiler warnings. This is exactly what a guy needs to make his mind up. I wonder if anyone revealed the exact kind of pickle Aamir Khan eats along with his paraaThaas? (oops - despite myself, I seem to have let out an important plot hook - drat and damn.)

Previous anti-review: Swades

If I was casting for triplets

I don't remember what Rubens Barrichello's voice sounds like, but Kelsey Grammer does have a voice worthy of Orson Welles.

Opinions on M.K.Gandhi

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

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

Of Lord Kelvin and Aishwarya Rai

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

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

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

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

The day I went ROTFLMAO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gulzar and A.R.Rahman

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

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

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

Ave 'em

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

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

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

Platinum and Peroxide Playfulness

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

New look-kool Sportstar?

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

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

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

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

Ice breaker

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cuss ke baa.nDho

Mathematical taboo words:

---

---

---

If you don't see them, good for you

Penny Farthings for rent

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

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

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

An Atlantic Thought

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

If it sounds dangerously close to what Tyler Durden says

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

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

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

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

Teach a little computer today

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

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

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

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

Yawn sambandhii suuchanaa

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

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

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

The Indian fan today is also suffering

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

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

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

Finnegans Wake

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

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

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

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

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

Young Achievers

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

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

One me one two

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

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

Anatomy of a Murder

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

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

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

UmbarThaa Economics

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

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

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

If someone would care to comment?

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

Updates for those who valiantly volunteered to help me in this

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

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

To cap it all

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

Vacation in numbers

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

In the semester break of December 2005,

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

An e-sob drenches this page in memoriam.

Moodiness quotient rises

I'm attending Mood Indigo 2005, so if you're interested, you can catch semi-frequent (subjective) updates here.

Differing strokes

I'm a little nonplussed with this Ganguly affair, mainly concerning the various reactions. For long, the wishlist of Indian fans has been for the Indian Board to be more Australian-like. The Aussies showed no compunctions in dropping the likes of Healy or Mark Waugh (please correct me if I am wrong) when they felt their time was over and even denying them fond farewells at home. I think Steve Waugh got away with it because he'd made it clear he was going to retire.

In SCG's case, he is not going to retire (frankly, he is just 32 or 33 and surely he would feel he has a couple of years left), so I don't think what Gaurav suggests Dravid should have done in his post was feasible or even required (more on this post later).

If you want a professional board, you need to be able to take and swallow such "harsh" decisions - atleast in this case, there is a sufficient cricketing case rather than the lows of Noel David in the past. Whether this is any indication of a more professional selection committee, I don't know, but Test players have been dropped after doing much better in the past and it wasn't as if Ganguly was on top of the world.If you want a kinder board based on what a player has achieved in the past, then you need to devise severance/VRS packages and have a broad and kind HR policy :-)

Coming to Gaurav's post, I'm not very sure about Dravid being likened to Brutus. Let's examine the comments made by Dravid and Chappell. Their response to each question about Ganguly would have been (and was) examined under a microscope, perhaps even run through a voice processor for subtle tonal inflections! You expect the Indian captain (known for his political correctness) to say anything less than what he said about Ganguly's contributions in the match? Upto you to decide whether he was speaking the truth or willfully misleading everyone - he never said something on the lines of "oh, what a genius and how we missed him and if he hadn't been there, we'd have never won", did he? Also if Chappell says SCG is a "mentor", that thought should still hold in a professional setup - after all even if India's most successful captain is no longer among the top 6 batsmen in the team, he has a lot to offer off the field. Does he have to be in the playing 11 to provide these inputs? (could he have been in the 14? it's a call on how he'd respond to being in the squad without being in the 11 - perhaps they had just needed to leave him in the 14 and add another opener). At the same time, consider a selection meeting where Dravid is asked: who would you prefer, Ganguly or Yuvraj at 6? If his reply was Yuvraj, does that make him a Brutus-like figure. I think not. If Dravid had said "oh Ganguly made no worthwhile contribution in the Test", he'd have been crucified too. I don't think anyone is saying Yuvraj is the next Bradman, but it's a question of available resources and investments, ain't it? Instead of focussing on sorting out the opening problems, off we go on a tangent.

Whether Jaffar is the best option or not, I don't know - I haven't been following domestic cricket to that extent. The vacancy was in the opening slot, especially if you want to take 3 openers on a tour. But do you also want the Yuvrajs & Kaifs to get a run - of course. IMO too, Kaif could be a better Test player than Yuvraj, but so far Yuvraj has been preferred and I'm glad they haven't made an abrupt change. I don't understand what Gaurav and others mean by Ganguly having been denied a dignified exit - how do you decide this and how exactly do you ease a player out (who is not yet contemplating retirement)? Do you want to take him down in degrees?

Secondly, Gaurav wants Dravid to take a saner stand. He feels Dravid should have spoken his mind. But if the captain had spoken aloud and said "I don't want Ganguly at the cost of so and so player", he's a Brutus-like figure. If he'd said "Let's give him an honourable exit", then people would have been happier, but I think that would have shamed Ganguly more - being treated like an old family retainer people are too polite to speak the truth to. Let's cast our mind back to that famous declaration at 196* (at Multan, was it?). Dravid has shown this ruthless streak before and similarly caused a split in opinions. I refuse to believe yet that Dravid is anything less than a professional and like many of us who work in a professional setup, we must accept that such decisions have to be accepted without too much mollycoddling, for it's always going to come down to a question of subjective degrees. What does a phrase like "forced out" mean? Unless if a Test player voluntarily steps down (like one of those English captains once did - was it Mike Denness) or retires (like SRW), any player has to be "forced out" or "dropped" or "rested" depending on what turn of phrase catches your fancy. Why would it be any other way? Decorated Generals hopefully also need to know when their time is up - this general still feels (and why shouldn't he?) that he still has it in him. It's not time to make him a Field Marshal yet, is it? We need something like what they do in Britain to the annoying politicans - bump them up to the House of Lords! :-)

I guess my point is this: like most other people, I continue to be a Dravid fan, but unlike some of them, I don't want to be cynical of his motives.

The JaDe Project - 7

Category: Awards

There are awards and there are self-thumping awards, but none like the Star Parivaar Awards. I mean, what the heck? Take a look at last year's award winners here, but more importantly, at the categories: A Best collection of Pati, Patni, Naya Sadasya, Khalnayak, Devar/ani, Jethani, Yogya Bahu, Saas/Sasur. All these are merrily laughable, but I draw the line at Best Saut - ROTFL-saying-WTF.

{Are there no Best Jeth, Best Chach[a | i] et al? Shows you what the pecking order is. And question: Does a Saut actress with a Bahu and Saas of herself qualify for all these categories? The possibilities are endless}

These awards are supposed to be for the entire Star Plus channels (if I am not mistaken), but by having Saut-ern categories, aren't they constraining the competition? It is a giant K-ego massage at best (no pun intended). We haven't even hit "Best JoDi" - I would have voted for Amitabh and Computer-ji if I could.

IMHO, the only time such paarivaarik awards could have been cool would have been if the Corleones or the Sopranos were involved. Imagine "Best Consigliere" or "Best Capo Regime" or "Best Two-timing family member".

I would watch the * Parivaars if they had awards like "Most Numerologically Powerful Title" or "Most Gruesome Makeup for Khalnaaikas". Everything else is just down of Saut.

A little bash-fulness

Sunday, 11th Dec, The front pages of The Times of India. The top banner reads: "On December 11, 2004, Sachin Tendulkar equalled Sunil Gavaskar’s world record of 34 Test hundreds.A year later, on December 10, 2005, at 4:44 pm at the Ferozeshah Kotla in Delhi, he — literally (my emphasis) and metaphorically — elbowed out the original Little Master to create history".

I know someone had a post recently pointing out these literal errors, but can't find it. Hopefully, Gavaskar (who was reported to have been holidaying in Nepal when Sachin overtook (not literally of course) him - so it was one heck of a long-distance elbowing) did not catch any of those infectious diseases that the younger Mumbaikar has been carrying in that part of the body. What else do you say?

---

NDTV's news ticker had this under "Sports" yesterday: "Ronaldo wants to win a Nobel Prize". Sports news? Forget that. News?

Thoughts on the music of Rang De Basanti

A Sikh devotional hymn, a fast paced Punjabi number, a rap/pop "college" song, a very slow romantic duet, an Arabic style song, a contemplative melody , a recited version of "Sarfaroshi Ki Tamanna", a surprising mother-son duet and a rock-and-roll-ish carol to end - there is no shortage of variety in Rang De Basanti. Whatever credit accrues must go to the story/screenplay writer to provide a music director with such a range of situations, for it is that department (assuming no marketing interference) that holds the key to what a music director can make music for.

Now to the actual songs:

Ek OMkaar

From the minimal research I did, I found this hymn is known as the Sikh "muul mantra" and begins the Guru Granth Sahib [link]. Harshdeep Kaur sings this in a very crystal clear production. So now ARR has an album with a Sikh devotional presence, after Hindu, Islamic and Christian before. Interesting.

Ra.Ng De Basa.nti

Punjabi number? Don't be afraid of listening to it - there is a complete absence of exhausted clichés like soNi kuDiyaa.N and gali de muNDe et al. This marks one in the merits column of the lyricist (Prasoon Joshi : Interview on the album) who provides a bhangra touch without sacrificing freshness. Sample this:
"Dhiimi aa.Nch pe tu/Zaraa ishq chaDhaa/thoDi jharne laa/thoDi nadii milaa"
Quite minty to me.

Daler Mehndi and Chitra in the same song - I would never have bet on that combination being credited together. This is a rocking good song, though I'm not very sure about its shelf life yet. However, the minor electronic touches here and there, the delightful contrast between the male and female voices and the lyrics (Joshi points out "The song describes the method to prepare basanti ka rang") make this the song the album will lead into the marketplaces with. More lyrics appreciation: I learnt words like "dhau.Nkanaa".

PaaThashaalaa

Supposed to be a rebellious college number, the kind we've heard in Kadhal Desam. The yells of "Lose Control" and "I'm a Rebel" were unappealing to me (too old? nope, generally sceptical of these specious sentiments :-) ). Still, just a couple of notable crumbs and slight irritation at the singers (Naresh Iyer, Aslam) saying "tiita" instead of "thiita" (Greek "theta" if you're wondering). Let's skip along. I have a feeling this would probably work better in a film situation than as a standalone song.

PaaThashaalaa - Be A Rebel

While we are at it, let's get the second version of this song out of the way. Blaaze back rapping (usually causing a little trepidation to me) - but must say, interesting mix of lyrics. "Zi.ndaabaad/zi.ndaa-good"? Still figuring out if I like that. More electronic jhingbang with a recurrent beep and a sort of chorus scat. Again, not my line of affections.

Tuu Bin Bataaye

This is the kind of Rahman song that needs several warnings of "this will probably grow on you, so give it time". Very, very, very slow tempo and quite spare in orchestration. I have heard it several times now and must confess that I find it a little conventional in its progress, with the bell chimes and the sax - the standard signs of a romantic duet. Naresh Iyer (of whom we hear a lot in the ARR scene these days after he got "spotted" in the Super Singer of course) sings another leisurely duet with Madhushree (Ah Aah being the earlier one). They do sing well and there's a lot of scope for them to exhibit. On the whole, worth a few listens actually - I realise I have a slightly poor threshold of acceptance for our slower-tempo traffic.

Khalbali

Experimentation time - in many ARR albums, you'd find one song that sounds quite weird and has these esoteric arrangements. This song is the representative here. Composed in the Arabic style (or what is commonly felt to be the Arabic style at any rate), for me it was torn between the strangeness of the singing (the music director taking on the burden with Aslam, and Nacim providing the Arabic chants) with the vibrating pronouncements of the words and the compelling rhythms (credit: Hossam Ramzy). If you can get both past and used to the singing (I don't know how successful it is, but it is attention-grabbing to say the least), then you'll probably want to listen to this again. I found that hearing it under the influence of the headphones helped and the "hone hone de nashaa/khone khone ko hai kyaa" bit helped matters. Atleast we have a version in a Hindi film that has not been ripped off from some CD. According to the Joshi interview, they've used an instrument called the chenda which is an integral part of kathakali performances - you do notice a good percussion during the second part of the song, but I wouldn't have known it was this.

Khuun Chalaa

Listen to this one with your headphones and turn the volume up, for the song is so mellow that I didn't catch a lot at the first batch of hearings. Mohit Chauhan (more famous for being the lead singer of the band "Silk Route") is a fitting choice for this quietly intense song mixed with sonorous violins and piano which could have fitted into one of our better subcontinental rock albums. It's a pity this is a small song, for we could have done with more of the anthemic lyrics. According to me, it's a pity they chose to follow this up with the rap "PaaThashaalaa" on the CD quite upsetting the mood set up by this song.

Lukkaa Chuppii

Lata M, A R Rahman and lyrics starting with "Lukka chuppii" - frankly I was dreading this song :-) and expecting it to turn out to be some soppy sentimental song with less than perfect singing. And then came the guitars.

There is some cool strumming on acoustic guitars to begin with and a melody, followed by the seniormost Mangeshkar (singing for Waheeda Rehman, I read) singing some very pleasant lyrics without any trace of incongruousness. Guitars continue as Rahman joins in (with highly Tamil accented Hindi! - I guess that despite knowing his pronounciation is not really there, he pencils himself in for these songs because he thinks only he can communicate the feeling behind it).

Then come the tabalaas in the a.ntaraas and even better, soon to be followed by a very well-utilised harmonium interspersed with bits of the trademark flute. The real surprise arrives towards the end featuring an extensive alaap flourish by both singers. One will be compelled to overlook the less than perfect pronounciation and Lata's sibilant singing for the overall emotional content produced by putting all these elements together.

Now, according to the interview I cited earlier, this song is set at the funeral of a son with the mother reminiscing. In that light, the lyrics (another thumbs up for you Mr. Joshi) with the kite metaphors do acquire further depth and it's quite commendable the powers that be chose to take this approach for such a situation.

Lalkaar

This is a recital by Aamir Khan, very much in the mould of Iruvar's "Unnodu naan iru.ndha ovvur.u maNi thuLiyum", of verses in the sentiment of Sarfaroshi Ki Tamanna. Obviously for one of those "inspirational" and "rebellious" situations.

Ruubaruu

Wow! I love this song. More guitar strumming, this time chased around by cooing backing vocals. Naresh Iyer and A.R.Rahman croon this one to the accompaniment of what could easily be your college band. This 60s kind of rock and roll song could easily be performed by a four person band and that is hopefully the kind of frothy and upbeat mood they wanted to evoke. Nice lyrics once again which gel wonderfully into the song structure (assuming Rahman composed it first). Good support from the yodellers in the background.

In summary, Rang De Basanti gives A.R.Rahman the chance to get out of the ponderous "period" film scene and return to contemporary tunes. The variety means that one would probably like atleast one or two of the songs, but could also mean less acceptance of a majority of them. However, like always, when I get a proper ARR album, there are several points of interest to go and read up and follow to. Personally, the biggest positive was to hear so many newer voices rather than the usual syndicates, for only with newer combinations will the Hindi film music scene go ahead.

Local - a review

A small review of the novel 'Local' on the Lit Blog.

Faux News - 9

Faux News bulletin

(You know it's time if it's faux pas nine!)

Next moon landing to be shot in India
By our Science correspondent

In a further sign of the increasing cooperation between India and the US in areas of science and technology, the next moon landing will involve an Indian location in addition to carrying an Indian astronaut among the crew.

The first set of Apollo missions in the late 60s and early 70s were widely believed to have been staged in a studio lot set up in Alaska and Iceland given the very authentic moonscapes available. However, sources in NASA and in the Department of Science and Technology in the GoI told this website that advances in terrain engineering have now enabled several Indian cities to put forward their candidature for this prestigious project. This also stems from the personal interest taken by top officials in the United States administration who would like to encourage greater cooperation as envisaged in the joint declaration earlier this year.

Ms. Ada Mantine, chief of the Amsterdam based Sharon's Rock Monthly, told Faux News that in the last two years Indian roads have deteriorated to just the right consistency and texture to closely approximate the required geological conditions. D.A.Gadde of the Indian Geological Association also pointed out the strict quality checks introduced by the Indian Road Congress in retaining the composition of the shale and mud in the surrounding topographical regions, for the audiences would now expect a higher video quality as opposed to the days of Armstrong and co.

However, this decision to move the shooting of this latest gigantic technological step has already run into trouble in the US Senate. Senator Al Luvium has opposed the move saying that it was further indication that the current US administration did not have the interests of US labour and technicians in mind. Additionally, it has also been reported that the Pakistani lobby is behind the Senator. The Pakistani government is unhappy with this growing collaboration and claim that this honour had been promised to them over a decade ago, which is why they had left untar-nished all major roads in the country.

Despite these hiccups, both governments are determined to make this the most authentic moon mission till date. Bids have been sought for city municipal corporations and from the surface of it, cities like Pune and Bangalore could be the frontrunners.

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Click here for a free look at the earlier editions.

Woe kaun thi

Two events that have had a catastrophic influence on our collective Bollywood experience:

1. I know people loved Hera Pheri (I didn't to the same extent having seen the same plot in 2 other languages before, so kindly excuse), but if only that movie had not done well at all, we wouldn't as a society be subject to attempt after attempt by Priyan to assembly-line-remake all his Malayalam movies and the human equivalent Zyclon-B team of Akshay Kumar-Paresh Rawal-Sunie[0-n]l Shetty-/ would not have shown up as frequently as cyclones this year.

2. (this is even more dismal) I don't have any objections to Mallika S pursuing her own line of fashion, but did she have to do it in a film starring Emraan #mi? If only she'd picked another film and made that a success, we wouldn't have been seeing the eh? boy in every 2nd trailer these days (I counted today). This seems to be the final push from agnosticism to atheism, a secular sign if you wish. OTOH, my eyesight has improved from not watching much TV. Beethoven : Alex (post-treatment) :: #mi : moi. Would I be happier with Ashmit Patel in every other film? Yuss! Scream bloody murder.

And I'm not trying to be funny.

Sawai Gandharva

First time at Sawai Gandharva yesterday. I decided to finally sample the biggest music programme of the year in Pune as part of increasing my consciousness of Hindustani classical music. I don't have any formal knowledge and have been slowly dipping myself in the aural offerings.

When Nikhil and I got to the venue, we had missed Shrinivas Joshi (Bhimsen Joshi's son) but entered to Kala Ramnath's violin performance. This was followed by a disciple of Shobha Gurtu's, Rajshri Pathak. The big name for the night was Pandit Jasraj, accompanied by Appa Jalgaonkar on the harmonium and the seemingly ubiquitous Vijay Ghate on the tabla.

One thing I've always observed is that on most occasions, the big names do have that something extra that distinguishes them from the second rung of performers. Pt. Jasraj was no different and you didn't have to know too many technicalities to get involved. This was also true of Appa Jalgaonkar's harmonium playing - I can't tell if any musician is making mistakes or what is the purity of his performance, but I can tell you if this was different and special. There were some breathtaking moments even for a layperson.

Pt. Jasraj ended with an appeal to listeners to promote Indian classical and raised the bogey of the music channels and the pop scene - this always makes me uncomfortable. There are some issues involved here - is interest in such art forms flagging below a critical level, if these channels weren't there, would their patrons necessarily switch to classical music, what can musicians and patrons do more than simply lament the passage of time, etc. Such issues are true of many genres, and though people think preservation is important and can't be left to the ravages of commercial interests, the blanket blaming of commerce isn't the best option, methinks.

I was happily surprised at the proficient organisation at the venue - the additional screens and the TVs at appropriate distance intervals made it quite comfortable even for us in the "bhaaratiya baiThak"s.

Update: Harish's experiences

Loud and clear

Last Tuesday, I went to listen to Simon Singh talk about the subject of his latest book Big Bang. I had read part of his most famous book Fermat's Last Theorem, so I expected quite an informative talk. It was quite entertaining too. Singh put on a very interesting slideshow going over the key elements of the Big Bang theory in the last 50 years, though for anyone who has read the relevant sections in Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, it was not unfamiliar.

As had been promised in the publicity flyers, Led Zeppelin ("Stairway to Heaven" played in reverse and words sounding like a hymn to Satan, to illustrate the human mind's penchant for sometimes contriving patterns out of nothing and) why the Teletubbies are evil showed up. He also started the evening by acknowledging the existence of a book with the same title but dealing with the kinds of issues that Eccentrica Gallumbits was known to have written about according to "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe".

Slightly ironic about the evening was the fact that the venue for this event was at the IUCAA whose head Jayant Narlikar's guru, Fred Hoyle, was the foremost opponent of the "Big Bang" theory. It was quite a decent 101 to the theory. Coincidentally, I even found a copy of this book at the British Library today, so let's see how that turns out.

Armstrong tactics

It's not about the bike is simply the toughest book I've read in a long, long time - perhaps of all time. It really was not about the bike. If I didn't know it had such a well-chronicled happy ending, I would have found it hard to stomach all of it. I have read a lot of lives with worse things happening, but it was something about the Texan and the candidness with which he talks of things before and after. I don't know what. It's not very easy to make a gist in a paragraph, so I'm not going to even try.

Over the last 5 years, each of the biographies I have read add weight to that great quote I read somewhere (paraphrased): "What's the difference between fiction and reality? (sometimes) Fiction has to make sense".

European Film Festival - Hotel Rwanda and Enduring Love

Hotel Rwanda
So you've seen films about humans in conflicts, how some of them with rare courage end up saving the lives of many around them despite faltering along the way. These stories have been set among warring Bosnians and Serbs, Hindus and Muslims, Indians and Pakistanis, Jews and Nazis, Russians and Germans, etc. etc. - the appellations change but we've seen it all before. So why should we watch a film like most of these set in Rwanda?

One, because however jaded the theme can get, these stories need to be told. We need to learn about the Hutus and Tutsis as well, precisely because these are so easily transplanted elsewhere. They can plant a seedling of caution. It also helps that the film has been made well, with some good performances from the likes of Don Cheadle in the main role as the hotel manager whose conscience forces him to abandon his me-and-my-family-only stance to (reluctantly at first) care for as many as he could. These tales apart from being about uncommon bravery amidst all too common stories of woe are also a reminder of the fortuitousness, the random arbitrary hand of chance and the occasional inability of the powerful to be fully evil. This may have happened a decade ago, but that the world saw most of it and still couldn't or wouldn't do much is not something I knew.

If you have been watching movies for a while, there'd have been one film that shook you out of your naive belief that they all have happy endings. Mine was "Von Ryan's Express" where I found it extremely hard to believe that they'd kill Frank Sinatra after all the trouble he went to getting those soldiers out of the Nazi clutches - I became a little suspicious of stories from then on. The reason why I'm talking about it here is that the way the film has been narrated is not always the most predictable - they've left in the little snatches of humour and sadness that makes up life as we usually know it.

Enduring Love
This isn't the greatest psychological thriller you'll ever see, but I will remember this for a long time for I was brilliantly set up for this movie.

So you're in a lush green field in one of those made-for-cinematography bright English days with your girlfriend. An out of control hot air balloon punctures this picture of serenity. It has a small boy in it. You rush to help as do a few other passersby. A few spectacular shots later, one of them is dead - dead by plunging to his fall. You were among those who let go. It begins to haunt you. You're Joe.

Or you were one of the others. When you saw the body, you knelt to pray. And coerced Joe to do the same. And when he did, you felt a strange kinship spring between both of you. And you continued to see meaning in everything he did from then on. How harmless are you really? You're Jed.

You're Claire and you continue to be puzzled at what Joe's been thinking - why does he blame himself so? It's come to a point where one of you has to make a decision.

Enduring Love doesn't lift into a higher gear at any specific point, not even when it could have - but I found the meandering more menacing, more irritable, more intriguing. Throw in neo-Darwinian discussions on the ethics of love, the quest for meaning when none probably existed, on finding it complicated to keep it simple - the adaptation of a Ian McEwan novel had all this to offer. In the end analysis, it comes up a little short, but if you're in the right (or wrong) frame of mind, you might really like it.

That the film was directed by the man who made "Notting Hill" will explain the presence of actors like Rhys Ifans (Hugh Grant's Welsh roommate) and Bill Nighy (the wannabe banker). Samantha Morton, I've seen in similar scenes of psychological trauma in an episode of "Cracker", while this was my first glimpse of the new Bond, Daniel Craig.

KM
I sort of lost enthusiasm for the rest of the festival, but will be heading to watch Mani Ratnam's "Kannathil Muthamittal" on the big screen for the first time. There were a couple of minor factual errors in the brochure regarding the plot - wonder who ctrl-c/ctrl-v-ed that from where.

Ah Aah, The Rising, Water

{As usual, not a review - just a place to jot down thoughts - long overdue}

Ah Aah
Those Rahman fans who thought the bag of fast, pacy songs had dried out, should give the title track a listen - some fans have gone as far as to lament its presence in this film, for according to them, it was good enough to be a Rajnikanth intro song :-) - high praise indeed. I didn't fancy too much of the rest of the album, but there were snatches that I really liked. Shreya Ghoshal gets better each year and I have to follow her work more seriously. She's done a good job (and I haven't heard her sing such songs before) with "Nazhuvuthu" which also presented a few interesting bits. OTOH, I would really implore ARR to stop using Madhushree - her recent efforts have been huge dampeners. So I didn't like "Mazhilazhage" much. The faster version of the same song (different lyrics - interesting that) in "Maramkothiye" is a touch better, but no great shakes. "Thigu Thigu" for some reason reminds me of Ilayaraja in the early/mid 90s - not sure why. More non-Tamil female singing credits - this time Sadhana Sargam. Hugely annoying male voice - Blaaze? - aargh. "Varugirai" - didn't care much for this too, sadly - but atleast Hariharan and Chitra don't suck in the singing dept. Rewind then, back to "Anbe Aaruyire" and hear the music director croon soulfully.

(BTW, "Ah Aah" is really the name of the film - no joking.)

The Rising
This album was understandably not a hit - understandably, because in the ultimate analysis, it wasn't all that great, and plus it would have demanded some more patience from its listeners. Since I was anyway going to invest that kind of time, I did come away with some positives than the average listeners.

There are three variations of the title track. It took me some time to figure out that the first was actually not about Mangal Pandey, but a general evocation to the beginning of a day and let everything be good. I liked this one and the last one which digs out defiance from despair (I seem to be a sucker for these). If I can forget about the annoying nasal twangs of Madhushree again, the Holi song - especially, the spoken part towards the end - had me interested. "Mai.n vaari vaari" also caught my fancy as did the seductive, gypsy "Rasiyaa" tune, which I found quite fresh. I'm glad ARR has decided to stop doing these "period" films for it's taking its toll and I'm tired of the by now ubiquituous Muslim devotional ("Al-Madath Maulaa" in this one). "Takey Takey" is more of a situational song - I didn't think much of it. Trivia note is that Rahman's kids have now registered their voices on an official soundtrack with this song.

Water
I'm not going to write much about this unless I hear a full CD quality album, but reactions are that it's obviously quite spare in arrangements and I don't think it's going to be a crowd-pleaser by a mile. I think the reason Rahman rates it highly must be because of the challenge it must have posed personally - requires a completely different set of gears.

Ping

The brief interlude is over - I'm back to finding anonymous concealment in books, movies, music and writing, just like it used to be.

*** I have a long vacation and it has been repeatedly impressed that such days will not show up too often in the rest of my life. So feeling a little like being out on the Rockefeller laws or a final Shwaas-like parole before the guillotine drops, I'm trying to do many of those "things". It reminds me of actor Chris England in his book "From Balham to Bollywood" who writes about how he finds himself succumbing to the desperate fever of squeezing in that extra moment in the holiday. I'm a fan of sleep, but sometimes the pressure is such that even to me, 6+ hours of the zzzs seems to be wasteful.

Plans include catching on some lesser known films at a "European Film Festival" at NFAI, at least one session at Sawai Gandharva and more books than films this time.

*** TV is back and have been catching up on a favourite pastime - movie trailers. Mr. ya Miss is arguably the worst Factory trailer ever and is despairing considering the more creative efforts before. Antara Mali as director? So she cops blame both for screaming too much and making it the focus of the trailers. OTOH, smart work as usual from Sanjay Gupta who has been given credit only by George methinks. And this time, some brownie melting fudge points from me for opting to go for a quieter adjunct song by roping in Strings to do "Yeh Hai Meri Kahani" with a distinctive video featuring the Pakistani rockers along with Sanjay Dutt and John Abraham. Good work. Most of the rest remain good test cases to test the reflexes of the fingers in hitting the remote control buttons. But good visuals from another of the Gupta tribe - Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's Rang De Basanti showing up with title track racing through.

*** I seem to have become an emotionally driven consumer like many others - truth, despite my cringing at this admission. For a reaction to having made a fool of myself was to go and buy Lance Armstrong's It's not about the bike and others - books are so overpriced these days :-( - got a decent haul at BCL, so there's enough to read.

*** Looking forward to the music of Rang De Basanti - less than a week.

One way street

All signs point to a one-way street,
the kind that ends in a blind mirror;
Knowing I can only see myself in it,
all I wish is for you to do the same;

Just a hint of your fleeting glance,
and the storm-clouds regroup;
Reminders that at the end of the trance,
pearls will dissolve into tears of rain.

{Please don't read any "meaning" into this - an attempt from the archives on something I can't do well - write poetry}

Food for thought

{Pardon pun above; danger signal goes up ahead on another silly theory of life}

Does the speed at which you eat tell us something about you? This was something that struck me today. A friend's placid pace was commented upon, at which I remembered that once I was a top-ranked player on the slow-consumption charts but these days things have gone horribly wrong.

In among a pack of exceptionally slow-eating cousins, I was the slowest. The crown kept returning home after the showpiece marriage lunches with the next pa.ngat (cycle of serving) on my row being held up on account of my cole-slow impressions. Did it (like some art filmmaker might opine) mirror an internal state of mind? These days, I am wolfing down my food like a hare-on-paranoid-steroids. In the last couple of years at the office lunch table, I was no competition to the usual bottlenecks, unless if it was some discussion or storytelling that needed a lot of contribution from me. What kind of a disrespectful gastronomical speed-fiend have I turned into?

I am stilling waiting for the magic food pill - the one that gives you all the vitamins and other stuff that MSc Nutrition courses are often telling the deaf world about, in addition to deluding your stomach into contented fullness with an optional Capital of Senegal to boot. This has been a childhood dream which provided much mental chewing gum while going about the mundane business of eating. The dream still lurks in the subconscious these days, but the attendant mental tranquillity seems to have ducked under too.

All the people I know who are lazy eaters also seem to be more relaxed in life. I used to have it and I want it back. To my friend I can only say: stay that way and wait for me - we'll munch our way while the sun sets in the yonder desserts.

The JaDe Project - 6

{a.k.a the return of the JaDe Project}

This would have languished in the netherlands of latenight television among the many "scary" tales of crime in our cities, if it hadn't been for Gaurav having some spare time of late (further giving us cause, like Shaw, to praise idleness). Chai.n se sonaa hai to (pause, take in breath in preparation for dramatic effect, let loose while twirling wrist) JAAG JAAO! is quite simply the most amazing dialogue delivered in the history of news television. It was first "exposed" to us by Gaurav in this befitting piece of sensationalism.

Inspite of making an effort, I could not remember the presenter's name, the throat behind the words. (Contrary to Gaurav's recollection, I thought it was "Siddharth" or something - I was too lost in appreciation to remember the name.) It was worth staying up till 11:00 p.m. (I'm no night-owl) to catch this. I really wish I had a tape-recorder or more correctly, a movie cam to capture the moment. When Gaurav first told us about this, he acted it out, and I must say that sometimes Gaurav was better than the original - so GS, why not record it and upload it? Like many of its fellow JaDe Hall of Famers, no amount of hype can stultify the essence of the moment, so don't worry about expecting too much.

The post ends here abruptly as I have run out of words.

Set theory, assumptions and the whodunit

As we know (and love), the whole idea behind a "whodunit" is to find out who does the crime. I have read quite a bit of the classic detective fiction stuff and prefer the old-fashioned and sanitised crime world of Doyle, Poe, Christie et al. The thought came to my mind that in some sense, in many of these, the reader is nominally invited to take a guess at who the culprit was (and if the butler really did it). The success of these plots (films/plays/TV serials all included) depends on presenting us with a choice of people.

Take a typical Christie. A whole array of characters will be presented to us and the sleuth will eventually figure out who was the criminal in question. We can guess that as with any evolving genre of plot, initially the criminal was the most villainous of the lot (this is especially true of films - the audience will, with their experience of the movies, identify very early who the villain of the piece was, and it remained for the narrative to provide the links). There was a straightforward translation of the good-vs-evil template.

Holmes stories were not like Christie formats, in the sense that we did not see all the pieces at the same time the detective did. We would eventually marvel at Holmes unravelling a very mystifying set of items, but we travelled with Watson and Holmes hardly told him anything :-). We were usually meant to drop our jaws in awe. The Christie version was more of a jigsaw puzzle, where usually one was given several important pieces of information at the same time as the problem-solver was. The unlikeliness of the person was very central to her success and this didn't require her popular and geriatric detectives to bound about unlike Holmes, whose legwork was a vital part of his triumphs (which many a time excluded Watson and hence us).

So essentially, in the classic whodunit of the Agatha Christie variety, it came down to a set of choices. Method was secondary to this. As you read her books, your mind opened up to the possibilities - she cleverly manipulated our naivété & biases. Soon, she churned out an array of unlikeliest criminals and tried almost everything possible with rearranging the set. One can only guess, but it is not hard to imagine the Dame beginning with a group of characters and wondering "what if XYZ did it? How would one weave a story with that ending". At any rate, that is what I would do :-)

I'll avoid spoilers and instead recommend the following Christies as great examples of what I've just talked about. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is of course her most famous work, and something that justifiably caused a lot of ripples in those days. Hercule Poirot's Christmas, Murder on the Orient Express, Ten Little Niggers, Evil Under The Sun and Crooked House are other examples where our inherent assumptions are cleverly challenged. As a finale, Curtain: Poirot's Last Case is also recommended.

From making several variations on individuals in a set, authors then moved on to even making it a subset of people - this, again, would have been very novel then. We have seen several examples on screen and page since, so it may not seem so new to us. So to maintain the twist that gives the whodunit its lastpage turning spice, some enterprising authors even increased the subset size to be almost as same as the complete set!

A day came when all this became very predictable, so creators again shook off the burden of making everything available to the viewer/reader. Now, sudden twists came in by the addition of characters midway through the plot or ingeniously reviving forgotten characters. An examples of movie in these cases would be certain David Fincher films. Certain Ed Norton films also had this element - and again, they challenge some assumptions we're led to making. This makes it a lot of fun. Occasionally, you lose the ability to predict the twist by gaining such a lot of "experience" - it happened with Identity and sadly, with the The Usual Suspects. Perhaps I heard about the latter elsewhere without actually making an explicit association. But the kick of the first realisation - that was lost.

TV serials like Columbo eschewed the whodunit path for a different "howdunit" approach (there was a Hindi remake of this concept featuring Anita Kanwar). But still, the whodunit holds sway. Jonathan Creek (will be writing about this extensively some day :-) ) was hence a rarity - it had both the whodunit and the howdunit given equal prominence. In several (would this be an example of "post-modern" consciousness?) cases, we now have reality and fiction overlapping - take a Hey Ram for example.

So what are the tiny variations left for writers of creative fiction to exploit? This is an interesting exercise for people like me who like the "puzzle" nature of whodunits rather than the more realistic American styles involving Marlowe, Spade etc. Perry Mason, the ubiquituous paperback, was a more classic British style than of the noir variety. Poirot stories didn't have any unnecessary subterranean complications and they lived in a less grey world, but I liked that a lot more. Jonathan Creek was, for me, very much in that mould with its tongue-in-cheek humour and a slightly unrealistic world, where the crime will be solved by our detective. There is a certain reassurance in all that :-)

{For some hilarious thoughts on the whodunit genre, read some of the Jeeves-and-Wooster stories by PGW, where Bertie usually has a whodunit at hand, but events prevent him from immersing himself in them. He also consults them with fervent interest with the usual imbroglios resulting. As a result of watching these British serials over the last one year and having read several British detective books over the last 20 years, I really envy the range of plots they have explored.}

I'm going to end this piece with one version of a "twist" that I had employed (so I'm cleverly using this opportunity to re-plug an old attempt of mine: A Head For Red). And perhaps the last movie whose ending totally surprised me and shook some assumptions was The Others.

MICAndescense

Was at MICA this weekend to do a General quiz for them. Ended up meeting some of the known and unknown quizzers-and-bloggers and some other friends and acquaintances. Words of kudos for the hardworking and pleasant MICAns, who kept their cool amidst some of the worst puns involving the word "MICA" being hurled at them relentlessly.

Kunal has some more jottings on the trip and I would like to add to his "friskiness", the fact that I was stopped and baggage searched at Dadar station this morning (despite having only a 2 day old stubble unlike the comparatively more hippier Kunal). I wonder if there has been any increase in "threat perception" in these parts or it is just routine in the times of Diwali-Id. Since there was no unpleasantness, was ok with the lawmen doing their random sampling.

Of "Ambi Valleys"

Nice article on some of the everyday nomenclatural occurences among Tam-Brahms (link thanks to Amit V and Harish).

I don't have any "Ambi mama" myself, so I can't rejoice in the festivities (having a "ambi periappa" instead), but some of my cousins do. For the record, we even have "chinnambi"s around :-) (translation: small 'ambi's)

A Quizzer's epitaph

The gravestone would probably read:

Don't pass me by - atleast take a guess!

If there is one golden rule in quizzing, it is "Never Pass!" {unless if you are against some negative scoring beast}. In the past, having lost atleast two quizzes I desperately wanted to win by the simple act of not taking that shot in the dark that was eventually right, I've learnt it the hard way. Now, does the "Die but don't pass" dictum hold in life? Is it a good enough metaphor for "give it a try"?

When you make a wild guess for a question, you have to fight back the sane voice that says that people will laugh at you for saying that - even if you know that moment of embarassment, the finger that points at your ignorance, is a mere moment, nothing in the long collection of jiffies in your life. So is taking the wild shot in real life even harder?

The choice is between the egg waiting to colour your face yellow and a golden sunrise.

Nothing special

Nice "Idea! Cellular" campaign for Maharashtra - good use of 4 of the most prominent Marathi actors today (prominent outside Maharastra too; these are Mrunal Kulkarni, Atul Kulkarni, Milind Gunaji and Sachin Khedekar) dressed up in traditional Marathi attire with the ad copy consisting of some of the most well-known fragments from Marathi songs/literature.

Very emotionally appealing, no doubt, to the MaraThii maaNus (correct spelling? or is it maaNuus?) Good example of locally targeted advertising. It is a high profile & high budget campaign judging by the locations of the hoardings in Pune, so curious to know if it translates into an increase in business.

The Volvo rides to Pune on most Saturday mornings and the return on Monday mornings have seldom disappointed in terms of the climes and the views. The whiff of Bombay in the mornings, the misty ghats and the gentle cold in Pune - make up for the lack of sleep in having to make those rides.

TV snippets from Sat. Films starring two of the least successful (and probably the two most interesting) of the Kapoor third generation. Vijeta and Hero Hiralal. The former was a pretty decent effort at inner angst and the air force (probably still the only decent IAF film from the Hindi world) and the latter was another schizophrenic effort from Ketan Mehta, which still offered some interesting moments. "PhaTaa Poster, Nikalaa Hero", another Amitabh cameo in a Gul Anand production and the ensemble cast. You didn't mind Naseer overdoing things or Sanjna Kapoor not getting the hang of acting but looking like a dearie. I'm sure the third sibling Karan Kapoor had a life in the films (not to be confused with Bombay Dyeing), but not sure which one.

How is it that an entire generation of Malayalam film singers sound so much K.J.Yesudas. I know he's been a towering presence in that region (and elsewhere), but such a lot of impact? (Listen to the likes of Unni Menon and you'll agree.) A recurring mystery. I can understand all Pakistani offspinners bowling the duusra and getting called for throwing a la Saqi, but this bit of influence from our South-Westernmost state is too much.

Among the usual ROTFLs from the Rajnikanth starrer "Phool Bane Angaarey" was the fact that it stars Tamil comedian Senthil. Which is quite extraordinary because one never thought that any of the supreme slapstickers from Kollywood had made these excursions up state. What's better, he seemed to be doing a decent job at attempting to speak the dialogues (it was dubbed, but the lips weren't slurring over the unfamiliar Hindi). Pity it didn't catch on - the viewers up there hardly know what they missed.

Some cricket thoughts

Some new posts from me on the quiet cricket blog run by Harish and me. Here and Here.

Impressive

Update

A result of this episode (and conversations I've had with friends whose opinions I respect) has been to reflect on content that we put out on our blogs. The tone, the insinuations, the critiques, the praises, the ignorance, the insight, the guesswork, the unfamiliarity with the inferences etc. I'm sure we all have had an emotional reaction to all this, but it should also be followed up by some serious thinking to pick out the learnings. I'm being vague here because the conclusions one reaches will be personal, and can't be over-generalised. If that kind of introspection doesn't happen, this would have been a waste for other bloggers.

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Earlier

Meet my brave friend.

[P.S.: I hope it's safe to criticise the films certain production houses have made or will make in the future. There isn't enough money to pay out for that kind of stuff.]