Fun At The Movies

Carrying forward the movie thingie...

This is a good topic to chase away the writer's block blues. Plus, I discovered a few interesting picks via the movie/book memes floating around. Here's hoping someone finds something of interest here:

Last Movie I rented: Edward Scissorhands from the public library. I've seen the movie in parts on TV before, but I wanted to watch it whole. Tim Burton is a visual genius, and this movie re-inforced my view of filmmaking with a good story (he disappointed with the story in Sleepy Hollow, for instance). Johnny Depp's performance helped as well, and the satirical element was funny too.

Last Film I watched in the theater: Hayao Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle". He's been called the world's greatest living animator. He is a magician and he shows what great story-telling for children (and the child in all of us) is all about.

Which Five Fictional Characters in Hollywood do you have a crush on? Not five, but three will have to do:

Kim in Edward Scissorhands: I was still a teenager when I first saw the movie. Put this down to puppy love, but you have to admit, Winona Ryder is beautiful, though I prefer her brunette over blond.

Tricia Mcmillan/Trillian in H2G2: No reason why, just that she's pretty and a bit wack.

Helen Parr/Elastigirl in The Incredibles: I know - freaky, having a crush on a cartoon character and all, but she's smart, strong and sassy. Extremely classy.

Which Five Fictional Characters in Bollywood do you have a crush on? Again, not five, actually just two. I haven't found many female characters in movies all that interesting for some reason.

Madhuri Dixit in Hum Aapke Hain Kaun : Again, strong, sweet and incredibly good-looking. I liked the movie too.

Preity Zinta in Dil Se : I remember almost falling off my seat laughing when she asks SRK "Are you a virgin?". Those dimples...

Five Hollywood Movies That Mean A Lot To Me, Or I watch a lot:

The Matrix: The movie. Defines life, the universe and a lot for me. "Don't think you are. Know you are." The movie I've seen the most number of times, and am ready to watch again right now.

Good Will Hunting: I'll forgive Ben Affleck anything because he co-wrote this. It's probably the only Oscar he'll ever see.

Fight Club: A metaphor on wasted suburban existence as it stands today. Ed Norton's one of my favorite actors, and I think Brad Pitt was pretty good here.

Aladdin : Disney's magic at its best before it started to fade. A manic Robin Williams, a wisecracking parrot, and smart-alec humor before it became a cliche in animation.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: Again, probably a kid thing, but I find this movie a wild trip whenever I watch it. There are probably better films that could be here, but I don't watch them again and again. This is so much more fun!

Honorable Mentions: Rain Man, Dead Poets' Society, and Mr. Holland's Opus.

Five Bollywood Movies That Mean A Lot To Me, Or I watch a lot: What, only five?

Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron: I don't remember laughing till my insides hurt for a movie since this one. I say, we call it a cult classic now?

Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar: Ah, the wonders of the 'high school film'. Pehla Nasha. The adrenalin of the last bike race. Model .Rajput.

Sholay: 'nuff said.

Satya: For me, the Sholay of the '90s. RGV at his visceral best. Sandeep Chowta's haunting background score, and the on-location shots in B'bay.

Honorable mention: The Amol Palekar series of films ( Golmaal, Chhoti Si Baat...). Rangeela.Dil Chahta Hai. Kabhie Kabhie.

The Anti - Populism Brigade

I came across this interesting post via blog-crawling (the ajayvb web-spider at work on a bored afternoon). It links to this essay in Esquire (behind a wall, sorry- will need a pesky reg or something, bugmenot should have something) Quote:

"Every so often, I look at the condition of the world and suspect that our most widespread problem is the ever-growing sentiment of anti-intellectualism that seems to permeate everything, particularly politics (where intelligent candidates are attacked for being intelligent) and advertising (where everything is designed to convince smart people they'll be happier once they agree to become dumb). However, this is something I'm wrong about. Anti-intellectualism is a dangerous problem, but it's not as annoying as pretend intellectualism, which invariably manifests itself as antipopulism. "

Pretty well put. The media hype over popular things notwithstanding, liking something that the junta takes to, is somehow considered infra dig among the so-called 'elite' crowd. Govinda was that way in the late 80s- early 90s, till he suddenly turned acceptable. It is now cool to watch a Govinda film, a fact that leaves me in a minority, since I genuinely don't enjoy his films except for a few notable exceptions.

At this point, the favorite target for the anti-populism crowd I see is the Karan Johar/Yash Chopra school of film-making, and Shah Rukh Khan. It is cool to make jokes about Shah Rukh Khan or Karan Johar, even if the topic is totally unrelated. I saw a really funny one on a blog comment somewhere . To sum it up:

"they are banning everything starting with 'S' in Indian films. First sex, then smoking - it would be great if the next thing is Shah Rukh Khan." WTF? (Sorry ,cannot attribute it, don't remember where I read it)

I get weird looks when I say I like SRK as an actor and importantly, as a star. The funniest statement I've heard about that is "You're the first guy I know who likes SRK". I like him, so I like him. Period. He has the charisma and the intelligence to carry the aura of being a superstar. His interviews are refreshingly candid, unlike the pathetic sycophancy of most of the industry. Of course, his choice of films leaves a lot to be desired, but honestly, his experiments like "Swades" or "Asoka" didn't go down well at the box-office.

I don't like the Johar/Chopra school myself, but I find their movies reasonably enjoyable for a family outing, which is the exact audience they serve. My parents sure as hell are not going to watch "Kill Bill" with moi on a weekend when they want to escape it all. Escapist? Sure. Entertaining? Hell, Yeah.

Having said that, media hype is a genuine problem. Once a thing is accepted by the masses, it is increasingly difficult to escape it. Without even watching television either here or in India, it is difficult for me to escape the flavor of the moment Mallika Sherawat. She seems to have a new outrageous quote attributed to her every day on Rediff or on ExpressIndia. And yes, Tom Cruise marrying Katie Homes. Does this really merit frontpage mention on any news portal?

Karan Johar making a movie every other year is one thing, but seeing his mug once every week on "Koffee ..." with copious quotations everywhere is another. Liking Howie Day when he did the coffeehouse circuit and you listened to bootleg records of his live concerts is one thing, while listening to "Collide" (and getting half - sick of the song) on radio every morning is another. I think the bigger challenge for mainstream content is to remain alternative enough to be acceptable. Having no credible competition like in the case of the iPod helps.

So there you have it. I like SRK. I think Kal Ho Na Ho was an awesome movie. I don't like Govinda's movies mostly. I liked the few episodes of "Desperate Housewives" that I've seen. I can't wait to be skewered the next time any of this topics comes up in a social discussion.

Edit: Typo corrected.

Tags Gone Wild

As a reader, I am all over the place. There is no rhyme or good reason to what I read, and why I read it, other than the simple fact that it caught my fancy at that point in time. I do have a list of books that I'd love to read sometime and I'm slowly crossing off (and adding) books from it.

Anyway in keeping with the meme going around, here goes:

How Many Books I Own: Must be in the range of 20-30 including here and in India. Excludes books my parents and brother/sis-in-law own, and only includes books I bought on my own initiative. The rest I've read in India were all borrowed - thanks to friends and family. Here, the wonder of public libraries has kept me solvent and sane.

The Last Book I Read: The Best American Non-Required Reading 2003. - A delightful menagerie of short non-fiction pieces appearing in various places, including The New Yorker and Time on a variety of subjects ranging from meth abuse inThailand to sub-saharan African kids adopted to new lives in Minnesota. Picked it up off the ' paperback picks' at the library.

I tend to juggle more than one book at a time, and am presently reading Ten Things You Can't Say in America by libertarian talk show host Larry Elder (a $1 acquisition at a library sale), On Paradise Drive by NYT columnist David Brooks, and a project crawling-at-the-speed-of-my-brain - The Bhagwat Gita by Paramahansa Yogananda. I'll be happy if I finish (and understand) it before I die.

Books That Mean A Lot to Me:

The Fountainhead (sorry Sumedha :-)) by Ayn Rand - I personally like this more than Atlas Shrugged. Probably because it deals with the creative spirit more than the mercenary spirit, and it is mercifully shorter and less redundant. Reading this when I was around 18 shaped my beliefs as an individual more than all other books. I can still read Howard Roarke's monologue at the end over and over for his insights.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach - There is something inherently appealing about the loner who goes his own way to achieve something above and beyond him/herself and all of humankind (seagullkind in this case). Life's not about survival and this mundane, wasted existence that we lead. That's also the reason I love "Fight Club"...but I digress.

As The Crow Flies by Jeffrey Archer - I know this one springs a surprise - but I'd die to be able to write like Jeffrey Archer. He spins the most preposterous fictional epics in the most entertaining way, keeping you hooked all along. This one's in the saga mould with enough hairpin twists to give a Shyamalan movie competition.

Haroun And The Sea Of Stories by Salman Rushdie - for the kid in me. That I read it when I was 21( then 22, 24, 25 and counting) counts for nothing. With colorful names like the Shah of Blah, and Mudra Abhinaya, Batcheat, and two fish named Goopy and Bagha (in a reference to Satyajit Ray's film) this one's utterly entertaining and brings a smile to the face more often than not. Also had some nasty puns on my last name in Pune due to a pesky character called Butt in the book.Take that, J K Rowling!

Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig - Goes into IP law territory now. Trying to understand why companies want to sue people who share files on P2P networks led me to the mother-lode. Well-written and balanced prose without hysterics or polemics. Larry Lessig makes a convincing case for a strong public domain. The book where Creative Commons is described in detail. (The link points to the free downloadable version of the book)

Fictional Characters That Have Influenced Me: This one's tough - Jonathan Livingston Seagull for one. Not many others. Dunno why, but have been my own person mostly - hehehe.

I don't know if there is anyone in the blog world left to be tagged - but if you already haven't been, Sumeet, and Alhad stand tagged. Anyone else who is reading this, please consider yourself tagged, and leave a comment, saying you're it!

Social Networking

Is social networking on its way back? In the initial frenzy, I registered on Orkut, like everyone I know - getting 'in' was a big deal - the hoopla for an Orkut invite being like that of GMail invites. However, after enthusiastically adding and inviting about a dozen or so friends, my enthusiasm fizzled out. I didn't quite see much value in it for me. The discussion forums I was interested in didn't seem to take off much, and it all seemed a bit lame. I am still not completely sure how I can use it, though I'd appreciate some pointers from ardent orkut-ians.

However, in the past couple of weeks, at least 4-5 people have added me to their Orkut friend lists. Since I stopped adding friends (somewhere around the time my friend list was in the late teens), my list has swelled to 50+ people - all through people adding me to their lists. Ironically, the people I invited to Orkut probably still have a list of friends in the single digits.

I'm reading too much into it - maybe the summer hols have made grad students dust off their orkut accounts and go friend-hunting. Maybe it's just a blip in the vast scheme of things - statistically insignificant. I was just surprised that I've had to log into Orkut so many times over the past fortnight.

Another interesting observation of this online junkie - none of my offline friends (people I consider good/very good friends) blog, except for Alhad (who is AWOL as he lives it up in India on vacation). And many friends of this blog (the small number of people visiting or at least commenting here) are people I've never met in meatspace, or have not met for more than 4 years, since back when I was last in college. While this kind of thing may make sense for bigger bloggers, for me it is nothing short of "Wow!". Amazing, this Internet thing is.

And, Sumedha's book-tagged me. Yikes. I thought I'd escape this madness spreading through the Indian blog circuit (though I'm secretly pleased that someone did tag me :-) - ahh...the social animal that man is, no escaping that - is there? ). More on that over the weekend.I'll do the movie thing as well.

Who Watches You, Pixar?*

So, a second viewing of The Incredibles was in order this weekend. A friend had the DVD from Netflix, and I wasn't going to let a chance to see the film again pass by. Incredibly (bad pun, sorry) I was let down.Which was extremely surprising.

You see, when I saw The Incredibles the first time around (in a movie hall), I was mesmerized by the imagery, the whiz-bang action and the clever script. Of course I read more into it than is good for me, but I was still bowled over by how ingenious it was.

Then I read Alan Moore's "The Watchmen" (movie version due soon) last month. While reading it, the inspiration for The Incredibles was obvious. The superheroes in hiding, living ordinary lives, and so on. What was more incredible (sorry again) was the number of smaller nuances from Watchmen used in the script. The perils of wearing a cape, the nefarious scheme adopted by Syndrome in the end, the character of Syndrome itself in some ways. Of course, the violence was toned down, and dastardly darkness of villains lightened to a PG-13 shade. Also, the blurry greyscale of do-gooder superheroes like Rorschach was passed through a high-pass filter to yield the pure B&W of Bob and Helen Parr. But the 'inspiration' was there for everyone to see.

Of course, no one creates in a vacuum. You always have some sort of creative license to move ideas across genres and mediums. But when the ideas are so obviously derivative like in this case, some acknowledgement or credit is generally in order.

While all of us as always went ga-ga over Pixar (I remember reading how 'ingenious' people thought the idea of superheroes in hiding was), the sad fact is that this movie has a lot of unattributed credit due. To Alan Moore. To Stan Lee (who created the Fantastic Four). And to the rest of us mere mortals, who think Pixar is awesomely original. And Incredible.

Update: In hindsight, this post is probably putting Pixar down a tad more than it should. I'd say that I was pretty incensed and disappointed when I wrote it, because Pixar seemed like a holdout in this era of focus group scripts and political correctness in films, and this threw them off a pedestal for a bit. (To think that I'd probably have ended up seeing Mr. and Mrs. Smith, with only two of us five guys being against watching it)

I still think the film is great and original, albeit with some caveats now. An important distinction for me is that Watchmen is uncompromisingly bleak, with a wry, ironic sense of humor at some places. I won't give much away, but The Incredibles is, well, a Disney film in comparison.

*"Who Watches the Watchmen" is a byline from Watchmen.

This post itself owes its idea to this post I found while on a search on the web for more material linking "The Incredibles" and "Watchmen". The post is 404 Not Found now - I have the google cache here .

Random Music Musings

* I pick up albums to listen to(and buy) mainly on gut feel, and upto an extent based on reviews, and occasionally recommendations from friends. A single or two on radio and the Internet give you a reasonable idea about whether the artiste is a one-hit wonder or if it is someone you want to plug your ears into.Great discoveries using this M.O. - not in the sense of their being unknown, but in the sense of their music being relevant to me - include Matchbox Twenty, Switchfoot and Dido. More here .

Add Sarah McLachlan to the list. I just happened to pick up the live concert DVD "Mirrorball" from the library for want of something to watch while hogging dinner at night. Being my second Sarah album, I thought I knew what to expect. Suffice it to say, I was pretty surprised. While her latest studio album Afterglow (another middling to good album) seems polished and introspective, this one harks back to an older and more effervescent time. While she was a pretty good songwriter even then, a different energy flows through this album. The overall instrumentation (great keyboards, aggressive percussions, guitaring with liberal use of distortion) of the concert performances, lined with old familiars ("Building a Mystery", "Sweet Surrender" "Possession", "I Will Remember You"), and some powerful vocals made this a great listen (and watch, since she's easy on the eye. Not that it matters - really). She goes from serious to sappy in minutes, yet retains her credibility (there aren't many singers who'd look good singing something like "Your love is better than ice cream"). Her incredible vocal power remains the highlight throughout. Songs that totally rock including an incredible rendering of "Building a Mystery" as well as "Possession".

Like all albums I really like, this has been on endless rotation for 3-4 days now, and seems like it will be on the list a few days more. Sadly, the CD album has only around half of the 23 songs on the DVD, and misses out on many of the songs I really liked. I've been reduced to ripping the DVD audio track so that I can listen to the songs that I won't be able to otherwise, since they aren't available anywhere else.

* This just in - her new live album Afterglow Live is equally compelling, though somewhat more subdued. The usual suspects reside here - with a few off the new record making an appearance as well, and of course, a goose-bump-inducing version of the Beatles' Blackbird. It's difficult to go up one up on the Fab Four, but there' s something about that voice... and the new track "Train Wreck" goes completely overboard with the metaphors.

Would your eyes like midnight fireflies
Light up the trenches where my heart lies
Until I can see again
to find my way back again

'Cause I'm a train wreck
Waiting to happen
Waiting for someone
to come pick me up off the tracks
A wild fire born of frustration
Born of the one love that gets me so high
I've no fear at all

If this effusive praise gets you interested in her music - go to her official website - there are downloads of mp3s or lossless tracks from her albums - no DRM crap.

* A perennial debate between the mix meisters that churn out remixes at the drop of a hat (or a turntable, or a mixer) in India revolves around the argument that classics are being 'desecrated' by the new generation, and the counter-argument is that this is one way for the new generation to be exposed to older songs. They didn't have to ruin my vacation last year by exposing me to the wonders of Meri Beri Ke Ber Mat Todo - that too two versions of it.

I don't subscribe to either school of thought - bad remixes are just that - bad. That doesn't mean there is any point to stopping them from being made. For every 10 "Dr. Phil" s (or whoever the latest expert on skewering Indian classics is), there is probably someone in India or UK or the US who is actually doing a good job of churning out these club favorites. Bally Sagoo is one of my personal favorites. Some of his remixes of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's stuff are amazing - Kinna Sona and Jhule Jhule Laal come to mind. And - they got me interested in listening to the pristine traditional versions. Khan saab's voice was cruelly cut short but the magic lingers on. Round one to the remixsters - they turned me on to NFAK. Doubt I'd have heard them but for Bally Sagoo.

* There's something about the wet, slightly cloudy Northwestern weather that is conducive to musical genius. I'm coming out with an album with my newly acquired musical skills.

Ha! Gotcha. In my dreams.Just checking if you were awake through what is probably the longest post I've ever written. Seattle has a throbbing indie music scene (that I only read of in the papers - I should actually go and see what the heck it is all about)

Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. Pearl Jam. Chris Cornell of Soundgarden and now of Audioslave .The Grunge Music movement (my generation's sad and depressing answer to 60's and 70s music).And the guru of all Guitar Gods - The Voodoo Child Jimi Hendrix all owe their birth to this fine piece of land called Washington state. If you want to be a musical genius, plan to be born here in your next janam .

Walkin' On

You leave all that you have to leave behind
Because you have to
Because you want to
Because you'd love to
Because it's too much to carry around
New beginnings get in the way of the old
That's a good thing for the most
Because it is the only way to be
The past burns in the fire of crimson regrets
Let it burn
As I move, freshly cleansed
Into a new dawn

'Tis Time For A Change

Big F*&ing Deal - is it only me who doesn't quite see what the hooha over Apple adopting Intel processors is? Apple has announced that they will be supporting OSX only on Apple hardware. So, any OSX or newer Apple OSes will not be that easily ported onto that shiny PC you got via a sweet deal on dell.com .

The noise seemed to emanate from two sources:

1. People who don't know much better, and think that this is a bold new move on Microsoft territory. It isn't. At least from what is visible till now. I am no 'visionary' (I never claim to be one). I cannot figure out how Apple can even come close to supporting the amount of hardware that Microsoft does before even trying to compete as an evenly matched competitor( and not as a niche player.) It's not like people were buying Windows because of the "Intel Inside" logo or the Blue Man Group, and they'll suddenly shift to Apple because the Blue Man group will be in silhouettes with white earbuds and silver Powerbooks.

2. People who should know better, are (as usual) hyping the world's classiest designer much beyond what its 2-3 % marketshare deserves. That generally includes "Apple fanboys" on Slashdot and elsewhere, who seem to drool over anything Apple. So far, it was "The PowerPC's better than your lame Intel" and now it will be "Ooo , Intel". These guys would be rubbing shoulders with Steve Jobs to pick up his dandruff.

Of course, Apple designs the coolest PCs around. An iPod' s still high on my long list of things-to-buy. I'd kill for a PC that looks and feels like the Powerbook. But to compare Apple's "my-way-or-the-highway" approach to computing (we ought to be thankful since their way is usually great. I hate to think of MS being that way - elegance doesn't come easily to the Redmond gang - the XBox is the best example) to the "I support a million manufacturers, and a bajillion OEMs" approach of Microsoft is an exercise in futility.


The sad truth is, Microsoft isn't exciting anymore to a lot of people who matter - the young people in colleges learning computer science. Having reached round middle age, the scrappy company isn't seen as cool by the media too (Leave the whole rabid anti-MS crowd over at the open-source end aside - they are dogmatix, not pragmatix, or even realistix, by Toutatis). A business model that relies heavily on two products, on execution over out-of-the-box innovation and a follower mentality in many markets (console gaming, search to name two) has led to Microsoft not being as cool as it should be. I mean, the product that I do development for will be used by approximately 90% of the computer-using population of the world. If that isn't cool, what is?

Apple and Google are the new darlings. Heck, as a student at grad school, I thought working at Apple or Google would be cooler than working at Microsoft, which through no fault of its own, came through as being a 'corporate'type to me than the 'maverick' type (Apple) or the 'hacker genius' type (Google). * And, I'm sure there are lots of people out there like me, who labor under similar assumptions.

That, IM(not so H)O is what is a challenge for Microsoft today. Not the change in processor by Apple. But a change in the way people look at it.

*Now that I've had the opportunity to work here (albeit only for a project, and not as an employee), my assumptions have been *ahem* altered.

So, Hirak talks about things to do before you die. I agree wholeheartedly - I've had a list of places to go, books to read, et al before this blog (before the term 'blogging' existed actually - it still lives in a diary that has traveled halfway across the world with me) .

I did one thing last week that wasn't on the list - jump off a cliff with a prayer on my lips and a parachute on my back. Paragliding wasn't all smooth sailing (it takes a while to get the hang of the controls and the harness, even with the instructor strapped along with you for the ride), but it was awesome all the way. There is a sense of freedom quite unlike any you've known. The feeling of not having the constraint of ground beneath your feet, and going pretty much anywhere you feel like it is liberating (to put it mildly)

Origin of terms

"So, I will be OOF for the next three days". OOF ? Out of Office? Um... isn't that supposed to be OOO? Or is it just too cumbersome to say? Why OOF ? Why not just OO?

As usual, there is a story behind every quirky acronym in the geek world. Be it GNU or OOF. Here it is, from the good ol' days of when Microsoft licensed and sold its own version of Unix (yes, they did.Hard to believe, isn't it?)

Go!

So, which will it be? As the light turns yellow, do you race through, hoping it won't turn red, saddling you with a ridiculous $150 ticket, or do you slow down, cursing your luck as the light turns red in front of your slowing vehicle?

Isn't it similar when it comes to life? You see some danger sign of something going wrong...you skid to a halt to re-evaluate, or maybe you push your way through, crossing your fingers as you are flooring the accelerator, hoping for the best.

Interesting analogy, ain't it? I find it pretty relevant. Seeing people overcome seemingly unsurmountable odds, when the only thing that made the overcoming possible was some sort of foolhardy(OK - brave, but only in hindsight) belief - the running of yellow lights in the belief that the timing is right, and the leaving of red lights behind.

Small victories. Small setbacks, like the occasional ticket. The game continues. Rev your engines.

It ends. Here. Now.

Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith, the much-awaited,much-hyped third movie of the second (rather, first) trilogy of the Star Wars saga made its way to theaters today. As I trudged into a screening at the unearthly hour of 8:30 AM (hey, the tickets were free - you think I'd pay to watch a movie this early?), the excitement was palpable. A colleague had come decked out as a Jedi, and we had a light saber fight in the aisles before the movie got underway.

This is the first Star Wars movie I saw in a movie hall. Episodes IV-VI and I were all seen on DVD, which kind of explains my previous opinion about it.

Not that I've revised it completely, but I'm less underwhelmed - especially since I saw it on the full screen. The plot does hold together, and George Lucas meticulously ties up all the threads of the past and the future. The audience has a reasonable amount of fun while that happens too. The movie is grimmer than Ep. I and IV-VI but that is to be expected. Also, since the denouement is known, you see every event in that light.

The first space dogfight is fun, but the light saber battles start getting to you by the end. The sets and effects rock though, as they have in all of the movies.

Ian McDiarmid who plays Chancellor Palpatine, is in sublime form as the scheming leader who takes over as the leader (for 'security'), and his ingratiating tempting of Anakin to the Dark Side is unnerving. The rest of the cast underperform or don't have much to do, as in all SFX bonanza blockbusters. Ewan McGregor's British accent gets more pronounced than in the previous movies, and Yoda rocks - always does as he . The comely Natalie Portman as well as Hayden Christensen seem slightly (or is it very?) wooden, which is surprising considering their acting credentials. R2D2 and C3PO seem to have better chemistry than they do (part of it is the bad dialog between them).

And whats with the flowery wording? Kids are kids, not 'younglings'. Kept reminding me of the beer brewed in Pennsylvania. "He killed the younglings" - sounds like someone chugged down a few beers back on the East Coast.

Verdict: Some moments make it worth the while, even if you are not a Jedi-in-training. The end with two suns rising on Tattooine gives you a feeling of anticipation - especially since you know what is coming next - A New Hope. The detail in the dogfight at the beginning leaves you breathless, and some of the stunts they pull are fairly ingenious. The sheer variety of characters leaves you stunned too. I never quite thought (in spite of seeing 4 Star Wars movies earlier) that one could think up so many different types of alien life-forms. Memorable characters always at hand are - Yoda, the two robots R2D2 and C3PO, and even Obi-Wan Kenobi's quiet dignity make them all characters worthy of the pop culture status they have today.

So, does it end here? Or will George Lucas go back on his word to make VII,VIII and IX? I hope not. He has the visual flair to tackle different ideas, and it'd be interesting to see him try.

But my initiation into geek pop culture is complete. I actually woke up early today to go to watch a Star Wars movie. And speak like Yoda I try to.

May the Force be with you.

A driver complains

- What's it with the big SUV and Altima/Accord/Taurus owners who park in the spots designated for "Compacts"? It's not enough that they own the roads. They have to own our parking spots as well.

Their cars barely fit in the spots, and when I am forced to park next to them in my small car, I have to open my door gingerly to ensure his* car does not get dented. Don't blame me if there's a nice scratch on your shiny passenger side door tomorrow.

- Will gas prices ever go down? I bleed through every pore daily, and regret the day I rented a place so far away that I cannot walk to work. A bike (as in bicycle) seems more and more tempting by the day. Maybe I'll buy a Segway.

- You. On the cellphone. Get off it. Nothing you are talking about is so important that you take one hand off the steering for that. Especially considering that you are right now taking an extremely sharp turn with that other hand, and are coming dangerously close to me in the facing lane. Just because it isn't legislation here doesn't mean you have to do it. You aren't the only one who is busy, you know.

* It may very well be a she. Written that way for simplicity. Also, in a software company like the one I work at, it is less probable - skewed ratios and all that.

Every day is a winding road

Lunch at a Korean place (with exactly one vegetarian dish on the menu) with a Chinese colleague. A bewildering array of side dishes in addition to the main course. Seaweed sounds icky, but it tastes pretty good. Actually, I don't know if it was seaweed, but it looked suspiciously like a more solid version of the algae you see in cess-pools in the rainy season in India. I was too preoccupied with eating to ask. (I did manage to ask for some dish on the menu with 'no meat and no seafood').

My clumsy efforts at using chopsticks were viewed with bemusement by Tao (that's his name). I was making a valiant effort nonetheless. After all, that was how I mastered eating the proper way with a knife and fork - eating uttappams and masala dosas at the local Udipi that way. Taking pity on me, he finally showed me the right way of holding the chopsticks. My finger-joints protested. They'd never quite been asked to move that way, leave alone lift morsels of food.

Unfortunately, the food wasn't all that great. I've eaten better Asian food - I am partial to Thai food, though there's this awesome Sichuanese place in Bellevue. But I did have the great satisfaction of learning the Tao of eating with chopsticks from the master - Tao himself.

Sorry. Couldn't resist that.

How does the fact that you listen to bands who are more introspective or have songs that are kind of depressing reflect on you? Does listening to Pink Floyd and loving "Time" mean that you wasted a lifetime and relate to it, or only that you really love the writing?

It's a question that was driven home a couple of years back, when a friend (who wasn't into much western music at all) asked me if all rock songs were depressing (This was after she'd heard "Comfortably Numb")

There was a small problem with the question - I find a lot of Pink Floyd absolutely uplifting. Maybe it is just due to memories of hostel afternoons playing "Coming Back to Life" or Another Brick in the Wall" full blast. Another problem: I see songwriting for quality, and don't particularly care if it is 'happy' or 'sad' or anywhere in between. Good music helps, of course.

Of course, if there's something in the songwriting you relate to, that hits home much harder. Yes, I thought "Time" was written with me (and a few million other people maybe) in mind when Waters sang -

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in the relative way, but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

However, irrespective of whether I relate with it or not, it is a great piece of writing.

Among contemporary artists, one songwriter whose stuff I really like is Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty. His sizzling solo number with Carlos Santana "Smooth" probably gave him way more visibility than you'd expect (and a couple of Grammys), but the group albums "Yourself or Someone Like You" and "Mad Season" are absolute rockers. ( haven't heard their third effort - "More Than You Think You Are") There is enough musical variety to hook you, and some amazing songwriting to keep you listening. One of my favorite songs, "Rest Stop" appears on Mad Season - it describes a breakup where the girlfriend throws the singer out of her car on the highway - "three miles from the rest stop".

She said - while you were sleeping
I was listening to the radio
And wondering what you're dreaming when
It came to mind that I didn't care
So I thought - hell if it's over
I had better end it quick
Or I could lose my nerve

And no, none of my girlfriends(!) ever threw me out on the road that way.

And: if you listen to Britney Spears or Jessica Simpson, it still reflects badly on you.

Monuments to Patriotism

While doing the usual tourist rounds, there are times when you are blase, and times when you are moved overwhelmingly. Depends on where you are and whom you are with. Being with a bunch of gregarious jocks making PJs every other minute means you are probably having too much fun to really pay attention. I am also wary of tourist guidebook hype, as buying into it even partially means that you may be underwhelmed. However, there are places that move you irrespective of that. Some of these moments are achingly simple - on a trip to Ground Zero (the WTC site in NYC) in the winter of 2003, I saw bouquets stuck into the chain link fencing surrounding the site. 2 1/2 years after the incident, it was a touching gesture of remembrance from some people for their loved ones.

There are other monuments that affect you with the sheer power of imagery. One of them is: The sculpture commemorating Gandhiji's Dandi March. This sculpture, located in Delhi feels alive, and is evocative of the fact that the Mahatma was able to make millions of Indians follow his path of non-violence to freedom. It is one of those things that invokes a sense of patriotism in my mind. (other things include hearing a military band playing the Indian national anthem, and watching A R Rahman's Vande Mataram video)

Photograph here


Another great monument in the US is the Vietnam War memorial. All it is , is a simple black marble wall with the names of every soldier who died in the War. The difference between this, and say, India Gate which too has the names of soldiers inscribed on it is the fact that this is accessible. You see people looking for former war buddies, parents and siblings. Tears are not uncommon, and there is a respectful silence if someone like that comes by.

However, my favorite of the War memorials in Washington DC is the Marine Corps Memorial across the Potomac in Arlington,VA. The memorial is based on the Pulitzer award winning photograph of the raising of the US flag in Iwo Jima in Japan. The sculpture itself is amazing and it is one of those that makes your heart swell with pride at the achievement of the soldiers. It is part of an important epoch in this century's history, and the sculpture sure does it justice.

There's a photograph here

Edit: Inline image links going bad on me. Added direct links to the images.

A place for my head

The first thing that impressed me about the US when I came here first was the highways. The roads were wide, well-maintained and very systematic. Exits were clearly marked and numbered with warnings coming from a couple of miles before so that you could move lanes safely. Not surprisingly, this country has built itself around the availability of easy access via road. (This leads to its own set of challenges and problems, but that's for a different time).

Over time, another thing that has blown me away to a much greater extent is the public library system. The availability of books even in relatively modest-sized town libraries is impressive. Even relatively new books are pretty easily available, and the systems in place are extremely convenient - online catalogs, hold notifications via email, extended borrowing privileges across libraries (i.e. inter-library loans within the same area), extended hours (the Redmond one runs all seven days - weekdays from 10-9 and shorter hours on weekends) all make reading books much cheaper as one doesn't have to buy every book one needs to read. As an added plus, many libraries have a good selection of audio books, music and movies as well.

Libraries also provide more facilities - reading rooms and magazines (of course) and importantly, well-qualified librarians can help with research - something school children will find useful - especially with the wealth of encyclopaedias available both in paper and online format. Most libraries provide internet access as well as meeting rooms for activities.

While denizens of Pune or Mumbai might think what the big deal is about, these are facilities smaller towns in India would kill for. There are local libraries, of course, but my experience in the local library at Baramati (even with dusty library cards and not online lookups) were nowhere as good as the ones here - especially in terms of the availability of really new books.

Enough rhapsodizing though. William Gibson beckons - Neuromancer is just getting interesting.

Mavericks all

An interesting look behind the scenes at the one tech company that's a noun, verb and indispensible for almost all Internet users today. The article talks about the much storied start of Google, and gives more details on how VC legends Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins almost didn't make it to the A-list of VCs investing in Google. Reason? Each wanted Google all to itself. They were made to 'share' by a pair of upstart graduate students at Stanford. Equally interesting is the set of conditions Page and Brin had for the CEO - that is, when they decided they had to have one from outside. It's no coincidence that Eric Schmidt is a PhD and earned his chops in serious technology (Sun and Novell).

All in all, Google has led its young life on its own terms so far. This about sums it up:

" The character they instilled in Google could be summed up in three phrases: Technology matters. We make our own rules. We’ll grow up when we’re damn good and ready. "

Now begins the second phase - as Google grows post-IPO with the heavies(Yahoo!, Microsoft) bringing their might into search , will it remain the media (and geek crowd) darling, or will, like Microsoft, it's power over the Internet cause it to grow to be feared and disliked? It's happened with Microsoft, and with Wal-Mart (it wasn't like they weren't doing 'evil' things earlier. It was just that they were being overlooked Everyone loves the underdog, don't they?)

And, there is at least one person who has the opinion that Google is the new Microsoft in the making.

Youve Got Mail!

The paper mail had been insipid lately. My subscriptions have moved over, but nothing new in the past few days. Mundane bank statements (I wish they'd just put them online, and not add to the dead trees) and regular utility bills.

Today, a most unusual item in the mailbox. A letter from, of all places, the state of New Jersey. It had the typical packing of a check (tear off two sides and the top portion etc.). I am not even expecting a refund on my state taxes, so what could it be? Turns out, it is a refund! Neato...woo hoo! The government isn't so bad after all. At least until I remember that interest rates on my floating rate student loan went up 25 points. Death, taxes and debt are inevitable.

Hack on

MIT is at it again. "I know, geeks" is what people will say and shrug it off. But this thingie seems really cool, although it is one of the more serious ones MIT's done.

If you want to look at some serious pranks, try MIT hacks. MIT has the reputation for pulling some of the most awesome pranks ever, and the most surprising thing is that they manage to find time for it in spite of their crazy schedules. What, they don't sleep, you say? Ah. Now it makes sense.

Update - two days after I wrote a draft of this post:

Another addition to the MIT repertoire. A few grad students went ahead and wrote code to automatically generate a technical paper. It was even accepted in a conference. I find this absolutely hilarious, considering how cool I thought it would be to get a paper published as a graduate student.

Additions to the Blogroll

Microsoft-followers and developers have their favorite blog to counter Slashdot's rabid zealots. It is Channel9, populated by MS developers and run by the good folks at the company. The nomenclature is interesting - Channel 9 is the audio channel on a flight on which you can hear the pilots communicating. So, Channel 9 on MSDN is presumably where you get the dirt on Microsoft's offerings from the guys at Microsoft itself. Also, I add Robert Scoble, Microsoft evangelist, who also says that the Apple Powerbook is cool.

A couple of other blogs to add to the list, just as shameless self-promotion - the Web Transports group that I work with, and IE . Watch out for IE7, expected out by the end of this year. That will be interesting. The browser wars will be back, I promise.

And to top it off, an Alhad pick, Larry Osterman. Pure geek. Writes about software, and stuff. Fun to read, very insightful on programming stuff.

News for me

In the age of RSS syndications and content personalized to you, it is easy to get greedy. One does. I've started following many websites, esp. blogs just on the feeds, and it's great. No annoying popups, no ads hurting your eyes, and plain text reading. However, one always looks for more. It would be great if one could have feeds on websites for each columnist. The Indian Express has a set of columnists writing about issues that interest me, and these are brilliant writers. The same goes for the NYT as well. It would be great to have feeds so that I could read articles only by these people, bypassing the rest of the information. Just a thought. You end up missing a few articles if you forget to go to the website often enough.

State of Fear, or clever marketing ploy?

Michael Crichton's book "State of Fear" has generated its share of controversy. I know there are people out there who believe global warming is a bunch of hokum, and the book plays into their hands. I haven' t read the book yet, but the armchair critic that I am, it makes for some compelling observations.

Firstly, the vast majority (almost all of them agree on climate change, in fact) of climate theorists cannot be in a vast conspiracy to keep their jobs. Researchers tend to get into it for the love of the hunt (for knowledge) and not for world domination or whatever he claims is going on there. Secondly, there is of course the whole credibility issue. I happened to chance upon an article by someone whom Crichton interviewed while 'research'ing his book, and I didn't like reading his account of it. Crichton seems too ready to selectively quote from literature and interviews to fit his point of view better. Another interesting article referenced here.

A good counterpoint is here, to give a balanced perspective on the issue.

After reading "Prey", I am slightly skeptical of Mr. Crichton. It raised enough of a hoo-ha over nanotech for no reason. Climate change, the Kyoto Protocol and such matters of importance shouldn't be left to bestselling authors to trivialize.

What's cool

What's cool on TV this week:

Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" ( rock song of 2004, IMO) selling Sony's PSP. The PSP looks like a winner to me right now. The new iPod in the making? It has all the marks of one. It has proprietary media formats (the UMD, and a Sony proprietary memory stick). That's a gamble that'll pay big bucks if it works. If it doesn't, bummer.

Graphic novel meets big screen in Sin City. The previews look very interesting, and the star cast (Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Elijah Wood, Josh Hartnett, Brittany Murphy, Jessica Alba....) is as big as it can reasonably get.

Seattle on TV in new medical drama "Gray's Anatomy". Obligatory Space Needle shot and Seattle skyline shot. Intense medical graduate school drama. I see no dramas on engineers yet while medicine gets ER, Jordan's crossing and now this one.

When engineers work, lives don't hang in the balance. And admit it, math formulas don't have heart-in-mouth moments like a vial of intravenous fluids and grand mal seizures do. Which might be why Numb3rs isn't half as compelling as ER is.

Not cool this week:

India lose. Again.Breaks the heart when the team plays this way. And could people get off Ganguly's back? He's going through a bad patch. Sachin gets so much support when he's doing badly. Ganguly gets booed. Give him a break. He's not on a decline. He's just hit a trough and will bounce back. If he gets a chance, that is.

Last night in the Garden State. Onwards to the Evergreen State, where new challenges beckon, and a new life awaits. Can't say am unhappy leaving here and moving on. But more than that, I am looking forward to going to the North-West. It is the most breath-takingly beautiful area I've seen in the US. Evergreen means that it doesn't lose its beauty in winter, unlike here, where the trees have all gone dry. Some more observations here.

Things I'll miss? The vicinity of the Big Apple for sure. I never went there as often as I should have and a million things about the city have been left unexplored.Little Italy, Chinatown. Greenwich village. Didn't watch a single Broadway musical in my time here, and I haven't yet been to the Statue of Liberty (I did take the tour on the ferry and saw it from up close in the water).

Other things I'll miss - the famed Oak Tree Road locality in Edison/Iselin - a feast for Indian food lovers. Specialty Punjabi, South Indian, Chaat and (believe it or not) Gujarati food in a 2 mile radius. All this 15 minutes from my house.

Things I did do here? The Times Square on New Year's Day (I saw the ball drop from two blocks away). The top of the Empire State Building. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. And stuff.

5 hours. 3 time zones. A new world awaits.

Modi-fied Policy?

Disclosure: I hate the guts of the man.

However, this article makes a good point about the fact that the US is being hypocritical and using a different set of policies by denying him a visa while people with equivalent or worse misdemeanors to their name come and go as they please. In fact, Larry Pressler makes a similar point in the NYT when he states that the US foreign policy has it all wrong- it is courting religious dictators (of the benevolent and malevolent kind) and not giving a religion-neutral('secular 'is so cliched) elected democracy with one-sixth of the world's population the respect it deserves. (I can almost see the twin jellyfish in Shark Tale going "Respect!").

I disagree with the article partially though. It doesn't state up-front that Modi is guilty. (The judicial enquiry is one thing - the rhetoric of the man itself tells us enough). And there is another problem. Just because most guilty people go scot-free and that the US visa issuing system is being selective in its enforcement of rules, doesn't mean anything. If he was in breach of a US rule or law, he better shut his trap and get a life. There are other diaspora to please. The pot can call the kettle black. Especially when the pot is the one issuing the visa, and the kettle is interested in the pot's dollars in FDI.

Apparently, the Indian radio station (1680 AM in Central New Jersey for those who are interested) in the area was fielding calls on the issue. Most calls were in support of Mr. Modi. When one man called up in support of the denial, his call was cut short. "We lost him" was all they had to say. How convenient.

Scratch n' loop

Hip-hop and rap, unlike other genres of popular music, are quite heavily dependent on a producer's skill. While a good (my emphasis on good, not the Spears and Simpsons of the world) pop-rock singer/group can generally get by with instruments without any electronics, (except the instruments themselves), hip-hop with its use of samples and loops of sounds from various sources lends itself to the skill of a completely different beast - one who is comfortable with computers and complex equipment with a bewildering range of knobs and weird lights. I'd go so far as to say that the genre doesn't exist without the producer.

However, that's not entirely true. Hip-hop started out on the streets, and it is the crass commercialization of today that has reduced it to merely being commercially successful with lyrical gems like "It's getting hot in herre, so take off all your clothes".Bleh.

Eminem and Jay-Z are notable exceptions (I really like a lot of Eminem's work, and I haven't heard the Grammy-award winner Kanye West), and there are great singles out occasionally that get your attention, but the rap genre is a great dance-floor (and album sale) mover with nothing much to say. Rock may be dead, but I still take some of today's rock bands over rap.

QOTD

Quote of the Day (or month or year):

" Most of the time you are neither as good nor as bad as people write and say you are"

- Rahul Dravid

Warning...fragile mind

A wonderful article at Cricinfo about one of Australia's most exciting batsmen at the time, Michael Slater.

The mind is notoriously fragile. Slater isn't the first genius to be bedeviled by an illness of the mind, and he certainly won't be the last. Genius seems to breed this, almost as if a great mind cannot bear the burden it places on itself (or the burden of expectations of others). What people (whether geniuses or not) need is genuine care and understanding. It is not easy for the normal person to understand completely the goings-on in an ill mind, but making fun is definitely not the way out.

What surprised me more was the fact that Slater's Australian team-mates had such an unsympathetic attitude towards him. Maybe it was just that they were uncomfortable with Slater's behavior, but you'd expect more from team-mates.

Indian society has traditionally taken a much dimmer view of mental illnesses, and a trip to the shrink, not that uncommon in western society is almost unheard of in India( maybe people do go, but we never hear of it). We need some of those blinders to come off.

Go West!

'tis time. This long hiatus is attributed to my trip out west (north-west, actually) to the famed land of Redmond, WA where the world's largest software company resides. An interesting time - a few observations:

Washington state is beautiful. Forget the rain, and the general cloudy-gloominess that seems to infest the air. The mountains that graze the skyline and the evergreens lend the area a character that is entirely its own.

Microsoft is big. Quite like a Tata Steel would have defined the ecosystem of a place like Tatanagar in Jamshedpur, the company defines an ecosystem for the area it surrounds, albeit on a smaller scale.

The company knows its employees are important and takes care of them. It is easy to see that geeks started the company and run it to the greatest extent. The only suits who are part of it are those who talk to the clients.

It is a company I've always grudgingly respected. The 'respected' part got a big fillip after meeting people there. Smart and committed. Willing to accept that they need to work harder to put out better products.

This is possibly the last I'll be talking about that on this blog. No work chatter here.

City woes

Dilip D'Souza is a fine writer. I don't always agree with what he says, but he is rarely uninteresting. In the past few months, he has written extensively on the slum demolitions in Mumbai, ostensibly to beautify the city and make it the new Shanghai.

Why Mumbai would want to be like a pretty-looking city in a repressive communist regime is beyond me. However, this post is one of his best so far. In addition to detailing what has been wrong in the urban planning in the past, it details some really nice ideas of what is important in the future for the development of the city. A point lost on our dear civil servants. Looking at the way New York City is evolving, and where Mumbai has stood over the past n years with respect to a lot of things, the potential for Mumbai to be better is breathtaking. If only someone were to do something about it.

A Google Approach to Email

The funny thing about great products (be it hardware or software) is that you never really get to appreciate them until you start using them more and more. It is power users who appreciate the finer points of software, rather than the regular Joe, for whom most of the functions will be similar in competing products.

Take GMail for instance. I shifted a lot of my mailing lists to it to start using and testing it(My family emails are still off it). As I started using it, I didn't like the paradigm of labels, since I make use of folders for record-keeping. I am also of a delete-dispose mentality, and I delete emails I don't feel the need to keep.

However, as time passes by, I find Gmail more and more useful. The conversation threading feature is of course a killer. As is the auto-fill for email addresses. I've gotten used to labels over folders, and funnily, it is even more useful. For instance, I have a category of emails, say X. Now, the category is important, but has grown big, and what is also important to me are emails from people of company Y. All of the emails from Y may/may not be in category X, and are all from different people within company Y. Of course, searching makes things easy, but if you categorize the emails with labels, you achieve an amazing amount of flexibility. Folders are hierarchical, labels are semantic, and the difference in ease-of-use is phenomenal.

Another such application is Firefox. While tabbed browsing is an obvious advantage, the search box with built-in Google search (I've added IMDB and CDDB to the list myself) adds ease of use that is visible only on repeated and highly intensive use. That I believe is great UI design. Achieving it is so hard, that when things work the way you'd instinctively want them to, it is almost magical.

As Arthur C. Clarke said - "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Snow is white. Blinding white. It is #0xFFFFFF. All the colors of the rainbow, put together and powdered into crystals, all of them unique. It rains down on a whim, rendering the area around it completely white and reflective. Going out on a day like this, with snow around and bright sunlight, means that you are wearing warm clothing and sunglasses. I, raised in the land of gulabi thandi - literally " the cold that makes your cheeks rosy" and mellow winter mornings (with the sun only making a friendly guest appearance), find it extremely ironic.

Winter days, drifting away, but, oh, those winter nights*. Sodium vapor streetlamps and yellow bulbs on doorways reflecting off snow make for the eeriest sight ever. The light is ghostly and surreal. Half-light with the promise of adventure. Adventure that should be manifested in the snowball fights of the carefree kids from the colony. Only, I don't see any. It isn't even a weekday. The tyranny of homework. Has anyone ever escaped it?

*shamelessly paraphrasing Grease

Time for a change

I've read some interesting books in the last few months, including Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, two of Lawrence Lessig's books on technology and law (Free Culture and The Future of Ideas) and a graphic novel (The Road to Perdition, the one on which the movie was based).

A genre of books left undiscovered so far is the modern science fiction genre better known as cyberpunk. While a couple of books I've heard a lot about (Neuromancer, Snow Patrol) weren't easily available in the library, Cryptonomicon was. The jacket decription looked interesting enough, so down the rabbit hole we go.

Note: Technically, Neal Stephenson is postcyberpunk. And talking of rabbit holes, Alice in Wonderland is a trip unlike any I've ever had. I'd love to know what Lewis Carroll was smoking when he wrote that book.

Adam Penenberg writes in Wired about how he feels that the WSJ is in danger of losing relevance online. Actually, this is a conundrum that I'm sure many respected paper publications face right now. The Wall Street Journal charges for everything. The NYT grants you access to the latest stuff with a free login, but archives more than a week old cost you money.

In the case of news, isn't the value chain exactly the reverse? The latest news is the most valuable, while the not-so-latest news is possibly not. Wouldn't it make more economic sense to actually charge for latest, to-the-minute access, and gradually make it free for everyone to access?

Not everyone can afford the prices these papers charge for online access, and that puts them in a bit of a spot. And as the article states, the blog ecosystem has no place for paid access, and a shift of power to increasingly influential bloggers means that these publications are losing out on potential customers.

Also, in this age with the markets being so wired, the potential customer for the WSJ or the NYT is not just in New York or the suburbs. He may be anywhere in the world.

The way forward for them would be to use ads, and the print edition to somehow creatively monetize their content to make money off it, and open access to older content. Maybe newer content (say: breaking news, today's edition) could be available for paid customers.

There may be better, more value-added things that they may provide for paid access. The Internet was meant to be a disintermediary - something that would remove the middleman. With the information glut we have now, we need intermediaries to process information again. (Look at the number of subscribers Hoovers.com has, when you can get a lot of the same information in raw form on EDGAR . Ditto for all the travel sites).

The WSJ of all publications is in the best possible position to be an intermediary to people negotiating the minefield that is business today. The NYT may not be as well positioned in this regard, but I'm sure they'll have some ideas.

Strike 1 for candor

The Indian at the Oscars has this to say about Bollywood:

"I think we should all accept that Bollywood just doesn't work there. There's all this talk of crossover films. Lagaan came close to being a crossover, but really, we've come nowhere on the scale of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. That was a huge commercial success, but we aren't even close to critical praise, with films like Y Tu Mama Tambien, or Amores Perros."

Attaboy. If all our papers and our media stopped the fawning publicity, we'd *maybe* get to a point where we are realistic about this. Let's accept the fact that mainstream Bollywood fare is a niche audience, and will appeal mainly to Indians, either at home or abroad. Ramanand also made a good point about how Indian(read: hindi) cinema is changing, but it's change from the outside by people who are considered outsiders. While SLB making Black without songs is a big deal for many people, wasn't it over 5 years ago that RGV made Kaun without songs?

And the killer:

"(Chadha's Bend It Like) Beckham was a British film, with some characters of Indian origin. It's not an Indian film. Why must we always appropriate? Why do we suddenly start claiming (M Night) Shyamalan as one of ours (laughs) when the poor man hasn't had anything to do with India for most of his life? Why do we want to bask in their glory?"

Tell it like it is, Ashvin Kumar. We need more of your type in the industry, to make some real hatke films.

Take it Easy

An observation about ads in the US: they seem to make everything so easy. The whole concept of "buyer beware" takes a new dimension in the US, because believing the ads means you better be extremely gullible.

Want to lose weight? Just take three pills of this at night before sleeping, and you'll lose weight. Work out using the new gizmo designed by the Baywatch lifeguard-lookalike babe and her hunky companion, and you'll be looking like one of them too. Just 15 minutes a day! As seen on TV! Of course there's the nutritional law-defying Atkins diet. Eat no carbohydrates -only proteins, and lose weight. Carb-counting made it seem like it would finally make the Americans excel at math again.

And, is there a limit to leveraging? Or do individuals with a debt-equity ratio of 5:1 at usurious rates simply emulate the government that taxes less and spends more? You've heard of a home loan(a mortgage, as it is more commonly known in the US) , but how about a home equity loan? You take another loan with your home as collateral, ostensibly to improve it, or to pay off credit card bills or simply to take that vacation you've always dreamed of! In India, having to put your house up as collateral is heresy( family izzat at stake and all that), but it seems to work here.

Need to buy furniture? Pay NOTHING for the whole of 2005! *

*Fine print: Pay 25% interest over the next 3 years after 2005. If you can't, nasty-sounding men will send you threatening letters asking you to pay up. Then if you still can't pay, nasty-looking men in overalls will come and take your furniture away.

Yeah, life in the US is easy.

Technology, plus markets

Reams (or is it megabytes? ) have been written on the drop in quality of content on the TOI, and it is impressively tiresome for me to go and dig up links for these again. If you landed on my blog accidentally, sorry. If you haven't, you in all likelihood have seen the 'raging' debate on the issue. At a micro level, I couldn't care less, honestly. I don't read the TOI, and they can shove their yellow rag exactly where you think I mean.

What is more interesting is the solution to this problem. The free-market-apologists say the market sorts itself out. Yes, it does, but quality suffers anyway. PBS isn't doing all that great in the US, and is in danger of being squeezed out of existence. The trigger being a dowdy-looking lesbian couple with a kid in Vermont on a show with an animated rabbit. But I digress. Fox News, of course,is going from strength to strength.

As a geek, I present the solution: the Internet! Voila! I, unlike Al Gore (sounds like an Kokanastha Brahmin Middle Eastern Terrorist outfit doesn't it? Al Gore, Al Kale... sorry) do not claim to have invented anything new. But the Internet gives a new medium for all of us to publish. Some of it is utter drivel, like this blog, and a few million other blogs which populate the blogosphere. Some of them are good. They even make money, via their Ad Sense, their Amazon referral codes in links, maybe even a PayPal account. I'll set up one. You pay me enough, I'll stop writing. I'll tell you how much is enough when we get there. Till that happens, keep the money flowing... I digress again. Sorry

An Indian short film at the Oscars. The Little Terrorist. You can watch it on WahIndia. Just under $2 to rent, under $5 to buy. Will this not at least make a bit of money for the film-maker, where earlier he would have had his documentary shown on DD on Saturday afternoon, with precisely 2.4 people to see it, and all interested people being unable to do so?

That should make us geeks and free-marketeers happy as can be. Interesting content, and no bowing to shareholders or LCDs. The HCF of "money for intelligence". Technology ensures a win-win. Again.

More information on long tail distribution (my favorite nightmare from network theory classes. Never thought it'd be so interesting in a real world, non-networking application)

Will the Engineer step into the light?

Finally, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn win the Turing Award.

For those who come in late, the Turing Award is the equivalent of the Nobel prize in Computer Science. It is the accolade for a computer scientist to win.

Cerf and Kahn are well-known in networking circles for having been the inventors of the TCP and IP protocols, the plumbing on which this Internet of today runs. What is most remarkable is that the underlying design of the protocols is still the same, almost 25 years later. No major changes in the protocols have been needed to make them work for an ever-increasing number of systems. Of course, it has undergone changes ( look at TCP Tahoe, Reno, or New Reno on Google or CiteSeer or somewhere), but the underlying design is still the same.

The Turing award has historically had a bias towards theory and algorithms (though the inventors of Unix and the RSA algorithm have been among winners). It's great to see some real-world engineering get recognition. As this NYT article says, the Internet does have many fathers, but IMO, these are a pair that deserve all the accolades they get. Try writing something technical that's still useful for a billion people after over 20 years.

For the uber-geek, RFC 791 and 793 .

Yesterday is a wrinkle on your forehead
Yesterday is a promise that you've broken
Don't close your eyes, don't close your eyes
This is your life and today is all you've got now
Yeah, and today is all you'll ever have
This is your life, are you who you want to be ?

- Switchfoot, This is your life

Are you living your dream? If yes, this isn't for you. If not, step back for a minute. Is there a reason why not? What compromise did a pragmatic mind take at some point in your life, which lead you here? Are you who you want to be? Or do you read the lines above, and wistfully think of what could have been?

What is the appeal of all those high school football and basketball movies? Of American Graffiti ? Of Remember the Titans?

The fact that the world in those movies seems alive. The stars still seem within your grasp. That elusive dream is just a leap of faith away. As time passes by, have we grown too cynical? Do responsibilities bind us down so much that a leap of faith now seems well nigh impossible? And, is being so practical really fun? Is life fun? Do you get up in the morning and still look forward to going to work/school/whatever it is that you do? Or are you a slave, a drone in a world of drones, no. E-133461 , not a name anymore, just a service ticket waiting in line to be resolved?

Is it really like Linkin Park says (albeit in a different context):

But in the end,
It doesn't even matter?

Grammy peeves

Is it me, or do the Grammys this year really suck? I don't know my R from my B, but did Ray Charles win because he died this year, or because his album was really good? Is Norah Jones' Sunrise really the best female vocal performance this year? Was Los Lonely Boys' Heaven really the best song by a duo or group?

Why is it, that every song that makes me change the radio station, or at worst makes me cringe go on to be great on Grammy night? John Mayer's done better than Daughters on his latest album. But the sappy song wins song of the year (erm..did the judges listen to Bigger Than My Body or to Clarity?) Maybe I'll understand when I have kids...but I don't think I care anymore

Or is it that songs with more..you know balls are only nominated in the rock and hip-hop/rap category? Maybe Eminem is the only one who can be politically incorrect, yet win by the truckloads?

Me i.e. the jury still out on Green Day - listening to American Idiot just now. I love U2 and all that, but Vertigo is no Where the Streets Have No Name. Maybe the judges got carried away in the iPod craze too.

And yes, the new artist of the year - Maroon5. I kind of like a lot of their songs. But I feel there has to be a law about radio stations playing a song repeatedly for more than a month or so. There's only so much one can listen to "She will be loved" before the hands starts itching to break something.

And yes, lower your head for the non-acknowledgement of anything from across the pond. No Joss Stone, no Keane, no Franz Ferdinand.

To the Seven Islands

Of course everyone knows that New York City has five boroughs. For those who don't, they are:
Manhattan( the most well known and yet the smallest) , Queens, Brooklyn, The Bronx, and Staten Island.

But, but, but, did you know the seven islands that comprised Mumbai? (aka Bombay, aka Bambai, Bombai ...). There are different versions, but this is one that states the answer with enough authority.

Of course, acknowledgements are due. I owe this sudden intellectual curiosity as regards the history of one of my favorite cities to Salman Rushdie's seminal Midnight's Children. The mention of the seven islands there set me off. Blimey, I know the five boroughs of NYC off the tip of my tongue, but what about the seven islands ? So, I engage in trivial pursuit, in this case a trivial firing off of a Google query.

So, to Colaba, Old (Wo)Man's Island, Bombay, Mazagaon, Worli,Parel and Mahim. To all the islands that were added later. To the City of Dreams. To Bombay (or Mumbai, or whatever they call it now...)

Satire rulez!

I mean...the rules of satire:

Rule #1 : The only rule that really matters. Know your subject really, really well. If you do, whether it (the satire) works or not is strictly a function of your skill.

America, The Book succeeds at many levels on that front. The book by media's favorite liberal (no, not Michael Moore) and his cohorts over at The Daily Show is the classic coffee table book, the kind I'd never spend money on (this came from the library). Organized as a high school civics textbook complete with graphs and diagrams and class exercises, which include gems like "Disenfranchise a black voter in your class", this is classic comic relief for these troubled times. And, the writers know their American democracy from their apple pie and recounts.

The book's humor ranges from sharp and sarcastic to completely immature and sophomoric "South Park" type jokes (NAMBLA makes an appearance too). No Republicans or Democrats are spared, and a couple of pages take care of the third parties through the ages. One of my favorite cartoons shows the graves of all the third parties,with brief timelines and one-liners on the headstones. The one on the libertarian party's headstone says "Ahhh... we should've worn our seatbelts". Ouch.(I'm not a libertarian, but many blogs I am reading seem to go that way)

What amazes me about the US is how seriously people here take the freedom of speech thing. Any book with this many jokes about India's founding fathers and leaders would have been burnt on the streets by both the Congress and the saffron brigade. Now that would have been an achievement.

Great software options

I just tried AbiWord on my desktop PC as an option to Microsoft Word. It was functioning as a web browser/music PC without Office forever, and I kind of preferred not to put MS Office on it. It (AbiWord) rocks. No questions. The .doc format is not the easiest to reverse engineer, but AbiWord does a great job of it. It opened a particularly messy document (lots of font size changes, hand-formatted bullets) without breaking a sweat. I haven't tried editing any fancy table stuff yet, but the portents are good.

Next on the agenda: OpenOffice.

No Objective history?

A very interesting interview with historian Romila Thapar. There are three parts to this interview, with the third one yet to be published. But an insightful view on what drives the teaching of history. A lesson lies there in how our sense of history is shaped by those in power.

In the US of course, even science is not being spared.

Talking of ideologues, MSNBC won' t render a page correctly in Firefox. Copy-pasting the same URL in IE works perfectly. Not done, Bill. Well, we've been saying that for years. Fat lot of help it's been.

From the Archives

I wrote this sometime in 2002, when I was still in Pune, and the US of A was a million miles away. I somehow stumbled on this (I've misplaced a lot of my writing from my pre-Blogger days). Thought it makes for interesting reading, especially because of the last line. There was a column called "Good Morning Pune" in the Pune TOI then. This was of course before its extreme makeover.

For some reason, as I wrote this piece, ending it in a way similar to the way thebengali@indiatimes.com did made eminent sense. I don't know anymore, since I am hardly ever objective about my writing. Anyway, here goes:

Have you ever felt you were part of a big chess game? I mean, that there are too many things happening that you are not in control of, factors beyond your control, unexplainable things that take away your very sense of security nay your sense of well-being or even your sense of being by itself? I do. All the time. I have reached a stage in life where I feel that for every move I make, there are a thousand ramifications and implications that I am barely aware of( forget
comprehending them). Richard Bach's "One" makes sense in more ways than one. The hazaar possibilities and "what If?" s that cross my mind, are all too confusing for me to make out.

It wasn't always like this. There was a time when I thought that my life is influenced solely by my actions. I mean I believed in God and all that. But it was more of a inherited thing (my parents are very religious, God bless them) than due to my own self-belief. But adversity and a long tortuous process of self-discovery (which included a brief period of atheism) has brought me here, a middle path where you claim control of your whole life without discounting for external factors. I find some people's beliefs that they control the strings of their destiny (favorite quote - "I make my own luck") to be a bit ludicrous. Maybe they can even predict that they wont be run over by a truck the next time they cross the road (after all, it doesn't fit in with their plans) .

The Truth (as I see it) , is that you can at least control your reactions to the circumstances around you. Account for the fact that things may not work out the way you want them to. God forbid, if they don't, you can take a decision to take life's hard punches on the chin and move on. Or maybe wallow in self-pity - although it will take you nowhere. In this age of layoffs and uncertainty though, the best thing one can do is have a back-up plan (maybe two) for the future in case one goes wrong. Because, as has been famously quoted, "Shit Happens".

Good Morning, Pune (or now, should I say "Piscataway"?) . All I say is, hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst.

PS - I hope there is no copyright on the phrase "Good Morning, Pune". If there is, I acknowledge it.

Waxing Nostalgic

It is incredibly peaceful to be up at night with you being the only one up for a long distance around. An occurrence common during P.L.s in India. The TV on low volume, set to one of the two western music channels serving as background music, propping my feet on the sofa, I'd be up trying to understand the inner working of the transistor (a two-semester torment), or some nifty Fourier transform fu. Fourier, of course, being a favorite of the time-frequency warp came back to haunt us quite often in both continuous and discrete forms quite frequently (pun very strictly unintended, though Alhad would be proud).

Times have changed. I am still sitting with my feet propped up, albeit with a laptop. The music channel still runs in the background. A bit older, a bit less worried about subjecting myself to the vagaries of the University exam. A bit more mature, knowing that this, too , shall pass. That maybe the best is around the corner. Maybe it isn't, but I'll believe it is. After all, what is life, but your perception of it?

Indian sports roundup

BCCI says "We are in it for the money". We agreed all along.

"The ICC is toothless" says rediff. ICC agrees.

After trying her hand at editing the TOI, Sania Mirza sings on rediff radio.

What next, Hrithik cavorts with Sania, singing "you are my Sania"?

And yes, a spot of cheer in the midst of this media circus - the fastest Indian gets his spot in the sun against the world's fastest.

Un-f'ing-believable. The Tata logo on a F1 car? The Indian tricolor at Indy this year? Gotta make it there baby.Never thought I'd ever root for Jordan.

Yay!

COEP is back.

Ramanand reports from the trenches.

AwAz kuNAchA ? COEP chA

Correction thanks to Ramanand again

Apple, Google and a few million 'jobless' techies

I use 'jobless' here in the typical way most people from Bangalore or thereabouts use it - someone who is 'vela' or has nothing better to do.

Tech forums like Slashdot, and respected tech columnists from all major news portals have nothing better to do, but follow Google and Apple like fanatics.

Google recruiting fiber/backbone specialists? Maybe they are entering VoIP. Apple will enter the Video-On-Demand business next, since the Mini is their answer to the Media Center PC. The iPod Video is definitely next on the agenda. Google hired Firefox's leading developer? Get ready for GBrowser. Google hired Rob Pike, one of the original UNIX team from AT&T? Get ready for the Google OS.

Give me a break. Apple is secretive enough to shame the CIA. The only speculation from last year that worked was the flash-based iPod shuffle. This was based on real information that Apple was lapping up flash memory in semiconductor markets in Taiwan and elsewhere. The Mini of course was subject to a leak, and no smart guessing helped with that.

If just hiring a person with great programming, design and engineering skills causes a splash, it's extremely tiring. Of course Google registered GBrowser. They don't want someone squatting and causing them a copyright headache later that they pay thousands of dollars in lawyeer fees to settle. A few dollars a year to VeriSign takes care of the domain for them. Maybe they will come out with a browser. Doesn't make sense to me, but then I thought that 1 Gig of email space was a hoax.

This quote in the NYT left me reeling.

"Yahoo says, 'Where is the mountain? Let's climb it,' " Mr. Sullivan said. "Google says, 'Maybe we want to go up the mountain and maybe we want to go surfing.' "

Like Google got to be the biggest thing in search by employing surfer dudes with a bad attitude. They've surprised the market and upped the ante once in the past year with e-mail, prompting the storage glut we have now. They recently doubled the number of pages they serve, and are probably working on a bajillion different things right now, but just keeping it quiet. They managed an extremely complicated IPO recently, and more people, not less seem to be using AdSense every day.

I'm happy Yahoo and MSN are working on search, as we need more and more innovation, and it would be great to have more and better search options. But stop hounding Google. They are too busy working hard and having fun to really care.

And yes, I am waiting for the next big thing from Google to shake up the market too. Only, I am not speculating what it would be.

Update: I wrote this yesterday, but put off posting it. Google obliged: They are now a domain registrar, and they plan to give stock as reward to their best employees. Of course, they had to announce record results too.

Felt I had to react to Gaurav's post.

I get his point about TOI changing the media landscape in India considerably. Their diversifications are pretty impressive. They have been successful at it as well.

I still feel that a drop in editorial standards need not accompany it. Everything need not be an 'either-or' compromise. The TOI has survived for over 150 years. Editorial policies change, but not as drastically as this decade has seen.

"Adapting to the times"? Do we mean to say that we as a generation are less intelligent than what we used to be? There is a concept of market segmentation, that I'm sure Gaurav knows more about that than me.

Fortune is your regular business magazine. They probably cover a lot more technology or rather New Economy stories now, but they have a separate magazine (Business 2.0) to deal with it. While dealing with the leading edge of technology there are different requirements and a different audience, and the Fortune format was not flexible enough for both. If you read both the difference in format, and the target audience is obvious.

A newspaper has the flexibility of adding glossy supplements, or additional segments to meet specific audiences. The TOI was doing this pretty well with the suburban sections in B'bay and specific sections for cities like Pune and Ahmedabad catering to different audiences. There is no reason they cannot meet the LCD (lowest common denominator) crowd's expectations with this.

In fact, on fortune.com (or was it on forbes.com? I forget), the website wanted to monetize keywords so that they could link keywords in article text to advertiser websites. You can see annoying examples on some websites even now. Finding that it took away from the reader experience, they decided to do away with it, though it would have made them buckets of money.

If, in the TOI today, one cannot make out the difference between content and advertising, then is there a point left at all?

Isn't full disclosure something Indian publishers (read:TOI) understand? Many journalists writing about stocks actually disclose if they own stocks they are discussing in their columns. Is it unreasonable to expect that TOI disclose if an article or any publicity was paid for?

Admitted, a company's primary responsibility is its shareholders. Read my post on this issue a few months back. But don't most companies have a mission statement, which includes something about the quality of their products and customer satisfaction? By customer, I mean the intelligent reader, at one time the mainstay of the paper.

"Giving users what they want" is a slightly complicated thing when it comes to content. If a generation of readers is raised on a lower standard of journalism (as they are right now), they'll expect it to be normal. Witness Fox News' definition of news in the US. A whole lot of Fox News viewers have very interesting ideas of the Iraq War and the (non)discovery of WMD among other things.

I find the use of Ayn Rand's essay as an example frightening. 'Selfishness' and 'Greed' have been reduced to their basest expressions by other Ayn Rand readers I know too. If you are giving an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, you better have read "The Fountainhead", (a better book IMO) especially Howard Roarke's closing argument in the end. Is the TOI today closer to the first-hander Howard Roarke, or the second-hander Peter Keating? Isn't life about finding your highest ideal (to paraphrase Richard Bach?). And, isn't good journalism a journalist's highest ideal, if not that of his moneybag boss?

In the interest of full disclosure: I don't read the TOI. Unless someone specifically links to a TOI article, I vote with my mouse.

Geek Yoda

do() || do_not(); // try();

As seen in the signature of a Slashdot user.