Pop goes NYT

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?

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

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 Minister1 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?

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

Feelin' Frisky

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

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

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.

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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

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

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

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

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

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?

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?

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

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

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

'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

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

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

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)

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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

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.