Chandan Arora's "Striker" - music

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

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

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

cross-posted on the Vishal blog

Three Idiots...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ghaas-phuus ke raste

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

(This TOI article has more.)

Going senti

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

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

Further he adds:

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

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

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

Foot-tapping

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

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

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

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

Michael Caine on being an actor

Lovely quote by Sir Michael Caine (read here)

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

A quizzing use case for Google Wave?

Got on to the surf board and lined up at the edge of the ocean, but not quite sure what to do - seems like a common Google Wave experience for people I know. Perhaps there's one thing we could do - remote quizzing.

It's never been easy to do a live/interactive quiz for people scattered across various locations. Setting up tele-conferences is not an option, which left conferencing on IM, never a stable and pleasant experience. Wave could well be the answer.

With a group of well-behaved participants (how hard will that be to find at a quiz :-)), a moderator should be able to conduct a quiz with people taking turns to answer. Media files can easily be shared, whether on Wave or elsewhere. Wave seems a natural environment to collaborate like this.

An interview in 'The Hindu' with Rekha Bhardwaj

Cross-posted on the Vishal blog

The amazingly talented Rekha Bhardwaj, who recently performed (riffed?) in the Rajasthan International Folk Festival, speaks of her singing, Vishal Bhardwaj's direction, singing "Namak", and how Vishal romanticises the fact that he took up music just to woo her in college. The full interview here.

An extract, in which she talks about singing "Namak" (from Omkara):

You know, I was not expected to sing the song. Vishal has this habit of singing his every composition to me. When ‘Namak’ was being composed he sang the first couple of lines to me. As always I insisted on some corrections and gave it a more folksy touch. As I sang to him, he said you are the right choice for the song. I agreed, but during the recording I realised what I had got into, because the antaras were too naughty for my comfort. Then Gulzar sahib came to my rescue, and I somehow sailed through.

From New York to New Guinea

Seems to me that, there are two ends to the spectrum of generating new ideas. In one, there's the cliched lone scientist messing about in a dingy underground lab under a bulb, trying to uncover the light. In the other, the innovator is in the middle of a teeming bazaar of smells and currents, a place full of distractions and opinions, where sometimes, there's just too much light.

It's like species evolving in New Guinea and New York. The former allows the relative isolation that allows nature to fork off into completely new directions in the presence of unconventional constraints . In the latter, species are constantly intermingling with each other, smashing into each other and producing new forms in response to more common constraints.

So the New Guinea innovation has more time to blossom, fewer people to nip it in the bud by being critical. But it could be less likely to survive when the more inhabited parts of Earth come visiting. New York innovations get brutally crushed down, but this happens early. The good ones sometimes cross-breed with other ideas from other people, and the ones that survive are hardy organisms, because they just have had to escape being crushed under so many feet.

However, New Guinean ideas are likely to be truly radical, while New Yorker ideas might just make a quick buck on the sidewalk to take advantage of the next flavour of the week. Ideas from New Guinea tend to remain unnoticed unless they are discovered by dashing explorers, while New Yorker ideas can be on TV and in your email.

Books on innovation suggest ideas from the melting pot of New York are more likely to succeed (or perhaps, more likely to fail early). That shouldn't mean there is no place for the life-forms of the remote island of New Guinea, but not everyone should be doing that, for the post-Victorian world has a lot less patience.

However, do most people expect innovations to come out of New Guinea, because it's so exotic? Most scientists would find it easier to live in New Guinea (as long as the pay cheque and the internet bandwidth is assured!), but fewer light bulbs have come out of New Guinea than New York. But if you are looking for a bird of paradise, head down to Oceania.

In the end, it could be comparing apples to oranges: scientists need New Guinea while innovators need New York. The first step to the right island would be to know who we really are.

Gandhi the sceptic

Suggested itself to me during today's BC session:

Why was M.K.Gandhi particularly sceptical during April 1930?
He insisted on taking everything with a pinch of salt.

Out of Balance

Out of Balance

The phone rang. Once again, she gave it her most cold-blooded stare. It continued to ring.

"Answer it, S, answer it - just so that you can give that bastard what he deserves."

This time she agreed with her mind, so she pressed "Accept".

"Hi". His voice didn't have its usual confidence, which was a good sign - he had better be terrified of her right now.

She said nothing.

"Sweetsie? are you there? hello?"

Let him roast, that dungball.

"Sups - are you there?", he asked anxiously. She was loving every second of it.

She spoke carefully: "you are a slimy liar, you know that?"

"Yes, I know."

"No, you don't. I waited and waited outside the wedding hall. Where everyone could ask me: your fiance has not come?"

"I was tied up." His voice seemed to quiver.

"With what? Rope? Piano wire? You get here, and I'll tie you up, you see."

Despite himself, he seemed to chuckle at that. That should have maddened her even more. But it didn't.

She began to giggle and felt the angry mood wash away in its wake.

"You idiot", she continued, "have you any idea how I felt there, standing alone in that crowd? And you couldn't even call and let me know."

He started to say something, but didn't.

"I felt so miserable. Where were you? Don't ever do that to me, hmm?"

"I'm sorry Sweets". His voice had gained some of its characteristic solidity. "I didn't mean to. Some people had come and I had to attend to them. Business stuff. You wouldn't know."

"That's what you keep saying. Everytime, business this and business that. When will you stop and begin paying some attention to me? When I'm a hundred?"

"I didn't mean to keep you waiting like that, Sweetsie."

"But that's all you do, all the time, you do."

A white silence signaled the beginning of a truce.

"Listen, Sups - I just have about 5 minutes left on this - I'm almost out of balance. I don't want to hear you cry. Or shout."

The anger rose again at this - again, he was ordering her about - it was always about him.

"Your stupid connection - can't you change..."

He cut her mid-way.

"Really, sweets - just talk. C'mon babes, don't cry. Don't yell at me."

He sounded sincere. And sweet. He hadn't been like that in a long while.

So she talked to him (she could shout at him tomorrow?) about the wedding, how the horse licked the wedding cake (he laughed), how over-dressed the bride was (her cousin, she never liked her much), how lovely the moon looked (how do we get it that way on our day?).

At that point, the call ended abruptly.

The last thing she heard could just have been static, but (she thought) it was a peck on the cheek.

"Dumbass", she couldn't help thinking. "Wait till he gets here". She smiled as she wiped a tear away with the edge of her new sari.

*** "Very touching", sniggered one of the three men standing over him, who took the phone away from his bleeding ear.

"I would have just smoked a final cigarette", laughed the big bearded man behind, who continued to point the gun at him.

"That's because you don't have a girlfriend", said the first man before ducking the bearded man's lunge.

"Enough!" shouted the third man at them. He beckoned to him with a knife.

"Pity - looks like the girl's going to miss you. Get up."

Just like the last three hours, he had no choice but to obey. He didn't notice that as he got up, the phone fell to the ground and knocked itself out.

Next in line of succession: The glint in the milkman's eye

India loves its dynasties, doesn't it? Monarch or Politician, it doesn't matter. What does is lineage and the 'name'. This state of affairs always reminds me of the Blackadder episode 'Dish and Dishonesty' from the third edition of that superb series. In this, Edmund Blackadder (a remarkably caustic Rowan Atkinson) is butler to the dippy Prince Regent George (a remarkably asinine Hugh Laurie).

William Pitt, The Younger has just became Prime Minister and is determined to bring legislation to provide "a right royal kick up the Prince's backside". Trouble is, the PM is a mere schoolboy elected in the middle of his exams. Soon, both Blackadder (E) & Pitt (P) find themselves plotting to win a Parliamentary seat, which provides the following scene and dialogues (the PM has come to meet the Prince Regent (G), and as usual Blackadder has to intervene in the interests of maintaining sanity):

At Prince's House

E: Your Highness; Pitt the Younger.
G: Why, hello there, young sabre, m'lad! I say, here's one: I've a shiny sixpence here and for the clever fellow who can tell me which hand it's in.
(Pitt just stares.)
G: Hmm? Oh, school, school! On half hols, is it? Yeah, I bet you can't wait to get back and get that bat in your hand and give those balls a good walloping, eh?
E: Mr. Pitt is the Prime Minister, sir.
G: Oh, go on! Is he? What, young Snotty here?
P: I'd rather have a runny nose than a runny brain.
G: Eh?
E: Umm, excuse me, Prime Minister, but we do have some lovely jelly in the pantry, I don't know if you'd be interested at all...?
P: Don't patronise me, you lower middle class yobbo! (aside) What flavour is it?
E: Blackcurrant.
P: eeeeuuuuuaaaghhhh!

Pleasantries aside, they get down to the dirty work of accusing each other:

P: You will regret this, gentlemen. You think you can thwart my plans to bank- rupt the Prince by fixing the Dunny-on-the-Wold bye-election, but you will be thrashed! I intend to put up my own brother as a candidate against you.

E: Oh, and which Pitt would this be: Pitt the Toddler? Pitt the Embryo? Pitt the Glint in the Milkman's Eye?

So, sometimes, to know who will be the next CM of a state, you just have to ask the milkman.

Script text from here.

Steam funk

Some weeks ago, I was sitting in the evening bus back home when it began to rain. The conditions were sufficiently heavy for condensation to appear on the window panes. As is inevitable when presented with a damp canvas, doodles began to materialise, literally out of thick air.

This reminded me of two movie sequences that used the drawing board of the window-pane (not considering shower doors or other glass panes merely providing 'steamy' vistas). One is in Kill Bill: Vol. 1, where a suddenly serious Hattori Hanzo, confronted by 'The Bride', writes the name of their arch-enemy. The condensation doesn't drip, perhaps suggesting a fog created by means other than water or just multiple takes. It's a little too perfectly etched, though.

The second, however, is more naturally crooked. This is the opening scene of a film. The first shot opens on a blurred background, bluish in colour. A dull noise accompanies the frame, which you realise is the sound of rain. The Bombay rain. A hand reaches out behind what turns out to be glass, and there is cackling.

The hand proceeds to draw a scraggly line to our left, and begins to fill out a rectangle. Followed by diagonals and two more. lines. It's a horoscope. Of Mumbai's. This a police van, and inside it are Sadik Chikna and the Inspectors Pandit & Purohit.

Thus brilliantly, in a haze of condensed air, in the jungle of Mumbai, does "Maqbool" unveil.

Flu Attack!

The world and its uncle, the uncle's extra-terrestrial abductor, the abductor's milkman have all seen Kaminey. Except for a little pocket in Pune and Bombay. But I'm used to waiting for Vishal Bhardwaj's music and movies to land up here. Especially the music, which I always have to hunt for days to find. So patience is something I have.

But Kaminey seems to have been extraordinarily well-distributed, which means the usual fist-shaking Bollyphiles in the USA have for once seen a Vishal film as early as any one else on the mainland.

Even a patient Vishal fan has his boundaries. Here's a paean to the wait:

with a million apologies to Gulzar-saab, Vishal, and to readers/listeners

Flu Attack!

ke kaminaa kaminaa aayaa re...
ke kaminaa kaminaa aayaa re... flu'tack

ke kaminaa kaminaa aayaa re... flu'tack
dhan te nan kartaa aayaa re... flu'tack

ke k-k-kaminaa aayaa re,
##gun##-van letaa aayaa re,
dhan dhan kartaa galiyo.n se,
ab tak yahaa.n na chaayaa re
flu'tack, flu'tack...

pikchar dikhe bareily mei.n,
par na saje hai pune mei.n (kaminaa aayaa re...)
dhai baje hai amroli mei.n,
par na saje kahin pune mei.n
kaan mei.n gulzaar ka gaanaa re

flu'tack, flu'tack,
flu'tack, dhan te nan on the ground
flu'tack, dhan te nan on the ground

ginti na karnaa din ke aane ka
awaraa ghume gaalii hoto.n ka
ye swine flu hamesha daraayegaa
na bhaagegaa, sab ko bhagaayegaa

##bore## hue hai.n khabro.n se
gilahari khaaye maTar, ke khaayaa, ke khaayaa,
ke khaayaa aur rulaayaa re,
flu'tack, flu'tack...

jitnaa bhi ruuTh-roye.n thoDaa hai
kiiDon ki mastii ka natiijaa hai
khaasi aur ##'tishoo## to aayegaa
zeharila hai ya sirf sardii aam-saa

darwaazon ko khulne do
dafaa karo ye aandhi
ye tuufan ke mausam ko
flu'tack, flu'tack...

ke k-k-kaminaa aayaa re,
##gun##-van letaa aayaa re,
dhan dhan kartaa galiyo.n se,
ab tak yahaa.n na chaayaa re

ye ishq nahi aasaa.n
aji flu ka khatraa hai
rumaal pehan jaanaa
yeh mask ka hauvvaa hai

ke pardaah uTh jaaye
kaminaa dikh jaaye
kaminaa dikh jaaye
ke pardaah uTh jaaye...

flu'tack!

Sparked off while talking to George, whose personal Kaminey gush is up here (I'm yet to read it)
With no insensitivity implied to people affected by swine flu in the city :-)

Important: Updates to our BCQC August Open Quizzes

If you are planning to participate in Sunday's BCQC open quizzes, please see this update.

"Questionable Intelligence" - a Quiz!

It's that time of the year when I do a quiz in full contravention of the Geneva Convention. But hopefully, it will be fun.

Anand will be doing a Literature Quiz, the first for a BCQC Open.

Read this link for all the details.

Monsoon Mania

This year, the monsoons in Pune have been part of a massive tease. It's not like those old films where the weary peasant looks up to see a sky reflect the barrenness of his unploughed field. Instead, the sky is full of dark clouds with just one catch: they aren't ready to spill the beans yet.

A set of more celibate clouds couldn't be glimpsed - they could easily trounce a bunch of champion-quality austere monks at being masters of their domain. While the Great Indian Monsoon has presumably touched Maharashtra (though in Bombay, it is as muted as Maria Sharapova with laryngitis), there's hardly been a drop in Pune. It is starting to get scary.

With the situation getting desparate, monsoon yagnas have broken out in parts of the country. Here's another idea, so madcap, it might just work. Most TV reality shows are unreal: for them, 'reality' occurs when people cry on screen while cameras zoom into their skin pores. Dunno if India has talent, but it sure has judges in packs-of-three in abundance. Reality is usually much more boring than all this, and TV is roundly criticised for denying its existence. But here's a chance for TV to be both meaningful and real, unlike the 'Rakhi' Picture Horror Show, which is quite the opposite. I refer, of course, to the Great Mian Tansen Manhunt.

The great Tansen, it is told, could bring water down in big coloured plastic buckets full of pet animals if he sung the raag Megh Malhar. If only a modern version could be unearthed? Is it not worth millions to find this person, even if s/he could only promise water every two days? (thus outperforming most municipal corporations.)

That my mind is functioning like an Indian TV executive can be blamed on the skies above. Out, out, damned spots. But it's not going to be hilarious in a couple of weeks. In fact, it'll be downright scary when I'm staring up the barrel, waiting for a drop.

What's in a name? Count for yourself

With the inauguration of yet another Rajiv Gandhi-named thingy, a look at the overall thingy leaderboard:

Rajiv Gandhi: 138
Chhatrapati Shivaji: 137
M.K.Gandhi: 68
Shakespeare: 1

With this, Rajiv Gandhi has taken a slender lead in the standings. With the Congress set to enjoy a full five year term at the Centre, he is likely to further strengthen his lead.

In the interest of keeping the drama in the race alive, certain people request you to vote for the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance in Maharashtra.

---

Suggested supplementary reading:
* A New Indian Express article on Gandhi, Gandhi everywhere,
* Atanu Dey on this practice: 1, 2

Given this, one wonders if Mayawati's double-handed backhand of playing 'statue' is just another variant of this game of iconography. If so, she seems to get greater flak for merely not mastering the nuances of the game.

Growing big in Kolkata

Prof. Soumen Chakrabarti is a faculty member at IIT Bombay's Computer Science department (and one of the top researchers in his field in the world). Like several professors in such institutes, he gets emails from wannabe interns/project seekers. Perhaps some are of the 'academic hunger' type, but a few are just looking for CV embellishments & recommendations for higher studies.

Prof. Chakrabarti's webpage carries a prominent notice stating:

At the moment I am not offering short-term projects to students not enrolled in a regular program at IIT Bombay.

Despite that, he seems to receive correspondence hoping for the opposite, some of which is painfully delightful. He has a sample on his blog (here), under the heading: "Can't read but will apply". Such as:

[...]I am an International Rifle Shooter of India and I was a member of an INDIAN AIR RIFLE SHOOTING TEAM FOR YEAR 2006. I am a presently studding in a 7th semester of B.E. Information Technology at LLLL DDDD Engineering College, AAAA, GGGG. [...] I am sending my Resume with this. I am sure that you would kindly cooperate and oblige.

Soumen Chakrabarti comments:

How could I possibly refuse from the wrong end of a Remington?

It gets even more interesting. Quoting from the entry:

Then there is in-your-face dishonesty:
"I have gone through your research activities given on your homepage. I am looking for a challenging opportunity for summer internship for the period of May-July 2007."

When I pointed out that anyone reading my homepage would notice my statement (that I do not take external students), I got a response like this:
"it's fine if u donot want to work with me ,but such words don't suit a proff of ur standards"

Clearly there is no dearth of entitlement, just good sense.

The exchanges seem to have become more hostile in recent times, with Soumen Chakrabarti receiving email that criticises him for either his hiring policy or for making these instances public (see end of the post).

He ends with this statement that really pinches:

It's hard to overstress the liability of a nation of a billion people out of which 700 million are functionally illiterate and the rest have no wish to follow instructions, even when they are asking for a favor.

These accounts are both hilarious and depressing. We need to satisfy the demand for higher-quality education, get more good professors teaching, have fewer people attempting to bull-doze their way into cosmetic achievements on paper, and for someone to tell these people that the simplest way to stand out is to use the bits of grey matter bestowed by nature on them in a fit of pure chance.

Link to the post here

I'm anal-ytical like that

Each morning, for the last couple of years, I have made a little health log in a journal about the previous day. This record comprises of any colds or niggles, exercise, weather, amount of sleep, medicines taken, and ends with a 'discomfort' & 'mood' rating (on a 1-5 scale).

(It sounds unbelievably anal-retentive, but I've always been a list maker: of normal things like books read & movies watched, and of stranger things like 'coincidences'.)

Harish, knowing of such heavy logging, pointed me to this Wired article about how many people seem to be doing this, and are using the Web to record & share such information. I began noting this info so as to better understand what influences my health and to spot & prepare for seasonal & other factors. I have a large mass of data now, but perhaps not a lot of insights.

Still, I continue to do so largely because I think I like recording information. Leading a trivia-monger's life smooths away any objections to pointlessness - why, someday, all of this may come in handy.

I'd really like to get my hands on some of the tools mentioned in the article - when, with each step I take, a bean counter wriggles in ecstacy.