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Ego measurement

Shahrukh Khan said that he is the most sellable property in IPL. That is some measurement for a man's ego. However, I came across a more accurate one when I was browsing through cricinfo. What say?

Aloo (f)or Brains (?)

This is the wickedest article I have come across. Noble as it may sound at the first read that it  informs users about a certain infected website (which, by the way, I may have never visited on my own in my lifetime), I cannot help satisfy myself with a reason as to why the person who wrote this chose to provide a link to the infected site. 

I am left to wonder if this is the web version of disaster tourism. Remember Vilasrao Deshmukh, Ram Gopal Varma, The Taj, and the 26/11 terrorist attacks in Mumbai? 

Delhi 6

I went for the 21:40 show yesterday and was a bit taken aback to see only the last row of the hall filled-up (on a Sunday night in Delhi). Sometime into the second half, the "Aha" moment occurred. Delhi 6 is not a feature film. It is a pantomime with some dialogues. The director has chosen to weave a story around deep characterisation supported by some mesmerizing music peppered with a few dialogues. One doesn't need a second guess to see the effect of this technique on the Indian audience. After being treated to seminal works like "Singh is Kin(n)g" and "Welcome", which require you to leave your brain at the popcorn counter, the average Indian audience just couldn't bear the "cognitive load" the movie placed on him.

The movie was exceptionally metaphorical. Be it the loose brick in the wall that estranged the brothers which the ladies of the house used for gossip or the clever twinning of Ramlila with the original story, right until climax where the mask of the "kala bandhar" burns with the effigy of the ten-headed Ravana, or the flight of the dove, Masakali to signify the ephemeral nature of human emotions, the director screamed at the audience to "look into" his movie, not just gloss over it. (It's another matter that the audience responded to him with the thundering silence of empty halls). He has displayed exception craft in handling his characters and their nuances. Each character has a part to play. No one hangs in loosely. (Let's give the Hero's performance a miss here, shall we?).

I especially liked the visualisation of the song "Dil mera...". It delicately and neatly captured the incoherence of dreams. It was a near-perfect anatomy of a dream - a motley mix of people, places and things one likes and wants; chaotic; all in one place, at once. I was awed by its quintessential realism. Frankly, I dream like that. I don't dream of Swiss Alps and Caribbean beaches filled with bikini-clad women dancing in lockstep to my two left feet.

On the whole, I liked the movie for the sheer respect the director gave his audience by treating them as thinking beings than hedonistic mortals. You do not have to be a connoisseur to love this piece. Just have your feet on the ground, eyes and ears wide open. Oh! Don't forget your brain at the counter, though. You'll need it.

Rags and Riches

Just why did Slumdog millionaire win 4 golden globes? 

May be I don't have a discerning taste for movies and can't tell the dregs from connoisseurs' delights. However IMHO, a good movie is one wherein you are at ease following the storyline. Movie is a medium where the director makes effective use of sound and light (audio and video) to convey his imagination to the audience. Now, when conveying his imagination, he needs to take care that there are no gaps; no assumptions left untold. The audience should make no "guesses" to fill the "gaps" the storyline. I think Boyle has failed on all these counts.

He made the movie in English, which handicaps it heavily given that in the social matrix he weaves, the knowledge of the language doesn't percolate to the bottom strata of the society. In fact, in India, one of the easiest signals into a man's education, career, and to an extent his social status is his proficiency in English. Exceptions to this rule do exist, especially with the profession that the protagonists in the movie take up (i.e., Tour guiding). However, the director made no attempt to educate us how the boys learnt the tongue. I just couldn't bring myself to believe that 2 fugitives jump out of a train and talk syllable-pure English with no formal education behind them. I later learnt that the book (Q&A on which the movie is based) offers a satisfactory explanation. Why this big gap?

I also thought that the "big brother" character (was his name Ajmal?) was very shallow. He turns a murderer one night, and turns a good man overnight again - as fast as you can turn a dosa over a tawa (Indian pancake over a shallow pan, for the uninitiated). Great movie stuff. But when somebody said that the character depictions were "raw" I was forced to look at the name of the movie he was referring to.

For some reason, I think that western audience like a lot of shit about some alien society. If you depict India as a land of snake-charmers where people go to offices over their private elephants and say that this is the underbelly of the country which you have exposed, you will be nominated for the Oscars before you finish your prints. I agree I wouldn't be lying factually there; just statistically. So what do westerners rate a movie on?

Lastly, I am so happy that I am not Amitabh Bacchan (or anybody of any importance); that I can call what I think is a spade a spade and NOT retract the statement later on.

Played out

I feel a bit ashamed to say that, in my 29 years of existence, I watched my first play today (better late than never). I watched “Chaos Theory” by Rahul De Cunha.  I realised two things as I watched the play. I liked the play; I love performing arts. The very concept of seeing the actors performing live, so close to you, was something totally different.

I think the surreal world of a stage play is more realistic than that of a movie. Coined in a different way, a play is less surrealistic than a movie. (Depending on your point of view, the above two statements could be profound or pointless). Imagine. For once it was not the retaken, edited, mixed versions of the best, filtered performances of artists that were presented to me in a sequence of scenes called a movie, but things as they were played out (literally and figuratively) right before my eyes. What a dumb modern-day consumer of canned, recorded performances I have been so far! How different, exhilarating, and cathartic is this experience of consuming something as it is being delivered - Fresh! (Yeah. It is such a simple extension of freshly-made food tasting better, silly).

Though I am stating the blatantly obvious, performing arts need much more skill than movies just because of the fact that you do not have the backup of another "take". You face your audience directly. It is like an author penning down a thought-out story in a big book that everybody can read, as he writes it. Isn't it a bit shameful that writers cannot write live as actors act on stage? The actors practice before, yes but they perform in front of the audience. An author too thinks out the theme in solitude, but he cannot perform publicly. Actors should feel proud of their profession.

The New Car

This is my first attempt at blogging in my native language. I know that this would reduce my total readership to a tenth of the original (ok ok...you did your math right. One tenth of my original readership would come to a fraction less than one). Well read it to see how not to write a blog in Tam.

லதா காலிங் பெல்லை அழுத்திவிட்டு நின்றாள். ஒரு நிமிடத்திற்கு பின் கதவு திறக்கப்பட்டது. ரம்யா கதவின் மறுமுனையிலிருந்து புன்னகைத்தாள். "வா லதா. என்ன அங்கேயே நின்னிட்ட. உள்ள வா", என்றவள் சட்டென்று உள்ளே சென்று மின்விசிறியை ஓட விட்டாள். "என்ன ரெண்டு நாளா இந்த பக்கமே காணோம்"?

"இல்ல நேத்து இன்னொரு புதூ கார் வந்துது. அதான்..." என்று இழுத்தாள் லதா. "அடி சக்க. உன் புருஷன் பெரிய ஆளு தான் டீ. ஊருக்கு வந்து ஆறு மாசத்துல மூனாவது புதூ கார். Super போ".

"ஏதோ ஆண்டவன் புண்யம் அக்கா. இந்தாங்க கொஞ்சம் சக்கர பொங்கல் செய்தேன்" என்று அவளிடம் கொண்டு வந்த பாத்திரத்தை நீட்டினாள். "ரொம்ப சந்தோஷம். இனிமே குழைந்தைங்க பள்ளிக்கூடம் போவது கொஞ்சம் எளிதாகும், இல்ல?" கேட்டுக்கொண்டே பொங்கலை தன் வாயில் கொஞ்சம் போட்டு கொண்டால்.

"நிச்சயமா. இன்னும் இருநூறு ரூபாய். நெறையா செய்யலாம். ஒரு கார் அதிகமா தொடைக்க எவ்வளோ நேரம் ஆகா போவுது? ஏதோ அந்த colony-ல இந்த மாதிரி இன்னும் நாலு பேரு கார் வாங்கினா அவங்களுக்கு புண்ணியமா போகும்". அவள் குரலில் ஆவலுடன் ஒரு அவலமும் தெரிந்தது.

Reservations...

Never cease to amaze me. They have done some good to the society. But the latest is sweet: "Seats will be reserved for the socially backward classes in IIMs! Wait a doggone moment. If a guy needs to enter an IIM, he has to be a graduate already. If he is already a graduate, doesn't he cease to be a "socially backward" guy by virtue of his degree? Or is it our government's humble opinion that a person from a backward caste, irrespective of being a graduate, will continue to be deemed to socially backward? Why is it that I am not able to believe that this will remove casteism from the society?

The Aussie way

I loved the way The Sydney Morning Herald concluded their article yesterday:

Australian captain Ricky Ponting admitted India outplayed them in the one-day finals. A more graceful captain would also have admitted that India had out-behaved Australia all summer.

Succinct punch indeed. It brings out several pertinent things such as:

1. The Aussies were outplayed (duh)
2. Ponting could be "more" graceful (though I agree that there might be slight disagreements over the extent of improvement possible - on a logarithmic scale, that is)
3. Ponting could have admitted something more (bracketed text from (2) to be repeated here)
4. India behaved much better than the Aussies

On a slightly tangential note, I have a nagging feeling that Hayden just didn't finish his sentence when talking to the radio station. May be had they asked him after the finals, he'dda said: (addtional quote italicized)

They are losing every game they are playing. Look at us. Since the year last, we decided that we only lose finals.

How ignorant!

CEO Talk

It is after a long time that I gave out a hearty laugh reading a serious post. This is to do with the recent axing of employees in the Yahoo! Bangalore office. Now, if a diplomat is one who makes you look forward to a trip to hell, I think CEOs are much more hideous on the "usher-to-hell" scale. Read this:

CEO Jerry Yang had mentioned a 1000 Targeted job cuts in an investors earnings call last month, and a strategic workforce realignment by mid-February, aimed at eliminating redundancies in bureaucracy and redeploying talent. (emphases by me)

Wow. Such clarity! I can bet my ESOP (It tells more about the ESOPs than my confidence. But never mind) that the release was written with one main objective and one side(y) objective. Main: Convey no useful information that investors do not know. Side(y): Confound the common man to the maximum extent possible through a 3-line press release. A normal person just doesn't comprehend anything out of these statements. If you are smart enough to comprehend what is exactly happening, well you wouldn't be listening to the bullcrap that CEOs spew out in the press meets. You just know. Period.

I think all CEOs must be made to have a few drinks before press conferences. May be then the stock market woud be an entirely different ball game:

Well. We are not doing so well these days and you know what's happening. So we thought we'd fire a few to keep the boat afloat.

Just imagine how much of print real estate, ink, hard disk space, technical analysis, internet bandwidth, and tape could have been saved if he had made that more concise and to-the-point statement. Few IBankers would lose their jobs, but then who cares?

Sigh. Straight talk and management never meet eye-to-eye. Bring on the lagers, somebody.

Nano car. Mega problems?

Even as Ratan Tata was getting down from his Nano for the first time before the eyes of the media, we could hear shouts of dissent and despair. The modern-day Indian Cassandras predicted doomsday for the average Indian. “Ban the Nano”, was their clamour. Clogged roads, traffic snarls, high pollution levels... list was long, believable, and intimidating to the half-asleep, coffee-in-the-hand-morning-paper-reading average Indian. Malthusian mindsets? One is left to wonder.

The argument put forward is pretty simple. "The price (of the Nano) would make ‘a lot’ of people buy the car and so would lead to congestion in our roads". Sounds…believable, ay? Try this then. "Providing universal education is dangerous since we'll have to contend with too many eligible kids fighting for a job". How about this? “Making too many people earn money would mean that we have ‘a lot’ of people empowered to buy things and will lead to supply shortages”. Same line of thought, ain't it? Accordingly then, we must remain an uneducated, poor nation, for any change from equilibrium is chaotic.

I think we still have remnants of the licence raj within us. We shun change. We shun free markets. We shun innovation. Well. Why is it that these naysayers do not think that there is a functioning government (though many think that it is an oxymoron) in India which ideally should rise up to providing the ecosystem for the industry to prosper? If that means constructing more roads for the people to get from point A to B faster, easier, safer, so be it. You can tax the car and fund the projects. That way each man contributes. The more the merrier. Why is it that people refuse to be taught from history – that necessity is the mother of all innovations? Tata found a necessity (demand) and created the Nano. If this creates the demand for more infrastructure, the government will have to yield to it. The point is not whether the government will react, but when.

Simple lessons. Complex mindsets?

Switch

ReadWriteWeb, in one of its articles, abbreviated the pack of Indian services companies as SWITCH (Satyam, Wipro, Infy, TCS, CTS, HCL).

RWW has got too many erstwhile coders in their teams? ;) Looks too good to be coincidental otherwise!

The Angolan Shooting

It's been "some" time sice I blogged and there are quite a number of good reasons for it, beyond my increasing sloth and decreasing time availability (may be these two have a causal relationship), that is. However, this news piece made me break my silence:

Angolan actors 'killed by police'

Certainly, one of "Man bites dog" genre. I do not know if it is the actors who have to be posthumously honoured for 'acting naturally' (talk about Oxymorons) or the police which had to be 'winked at' for this state of excessive alertness. If only our Mumbai police department had been this vigilant, the entire race of villian-turned-heroes would have now been six feet under terra firma. Nevertheless, it is a case of human tragedy - lives lost unnecessarily. Too high a price to be paid for, well doing your job exceedingly well.

Indians Are Privately Smart and Publicly Dumb - V. Raghunathan

This piece about Indians and how they behave as a group is fantastic. The concept of “Indian crab” is well-known (documented and experienced), but this refreshing lowdown on the behavior of Indians backed by some sound theoretical arguments makes a good read.

I think we see this all around us. The title of the book says it all, doesn’t it? Agreed that democracy is a leveling doctrine. But the Romans who conceived it hoped that it would help raise the bar at every available opportunity. This duality of self-propelling governance which balances excellence and mediocrity but at the same time continues to raise the bar for definition of both is what ideally makes democracy an interesting concept. However, like all the medicines with side-effects, democracy comes with its own strings. I think this book will make people understand why democracy in India has actually managed to put India where it is – a good distance away from the MDGs as the half-time reviews show!

The Blue Umbrella

I watched two movies this month - “Chak De” and “The Blue Umbrella”. Of the former, I think enough publicity has been made and enough print(web) real(virtual)-estate devoted in the form of reviews, interviews, etc. Of the latter, I venture to write my thoughts.

At least by the time I went to see the movie, IMDB rated it a rare 9.4 (out of 70 votes). So I had high expectations and given that I walked out of the theater not disappointed, I should agree that the movie lived up to my expectations. I should also say that this review (if I can pass this piece as one) could have been different had I read Bond’s novel (on which the movie is based) before watching the movie.

The Movie: Firsts - The setting was fantastic and characterisation vivid. The lensman has captured the beauty of the Himalayas and stitched it into the story seamlessly. Somehow, I felt that the location complemented the characterisation. The story captures the dynamics of a small society of closely-knit people by following a thread of simple incidents predominantly revolving around an 11-year girl and a grumpy old man. What is so beautiful about it? The subtlety, of course. If you had read Conan Doyle, you’d appreciate how the author cleverly uses the character of Watson – a slightly slow-to-understand gentleman who, by asking pesky questions to (otherwise laconic) Holmes, makes the detective explain us his obscure schema. Out here, the author has used trivial incidents as a trigger to capture some complex human behaviors. You’ll observe that he has masterfully controlled the environment by choosing a small society and simple incidents and retained the focus on the depiction of human behavior in the context of the setting.

In all, I liked the movie very much, though I am not sure if I’d give it a 10. Only one mall in Noida runs the movie and runs that just once a day. Many of the audience in the theatre, for some reason seemed restless during the show. May be we need to train our people to accept a bit of reality on reels.

Shame

I felt so moved by reading this post that I thought I should put up a link from here so that at least a fraction of the people who stop by my blog read this.

CNN-IBN (along with other media channels/newspapers) has taken up the issue of the Srikrishna report - the way the contents of the report published circa ‘98 were brushed under the carpet, soon after Dutt's verdict. I smiled saying that the old 50's journalism (where media was a one-way, broadcasting tool) is giving way to a more participatory journalism (aka the User Generated Content in Web 2.0 parlance, if you prefer it that way). At last, people have started actively reacting to the news. The educated and the savvy have started asking the representatives elected by their illiterate and ignorant countrymen, who queued up in polling booths while the former were cooling their knees off in front of their TV sets watching the voter-turnout statistics. Good, isn’t it? But hang on. If Srikrishna report has indeed been brushed under the carpet, why didn't the media come up with its "awareness drive" any earlier? After all, neither the incident, nor the report is new.

This is where capitalism speaks (to give you the answer). Mr. Sardesai* is too seasoned a journalist to know that raking up the Srikrishna report issue "just any fine day" would only make him look anti-Hindu. He needed bait to lure people, make them click their tongues and say, “Ooh! Yeah. We forgot about that report”. He sensed one in Dutt’s verdict, didn't he? They run the channel for money, not charity - mind you. Who said you cannot just wait for the opportune moment to bring up...eh, your TRP?

---

*or any other journalist who has started harping on the report in the past couple of days

Should I feel patriotic?

Looks like the Indian crowd is certainly making its presence felt in the netscape. Google Blogoscoped reports the 20 "top" search words in Google that lead to Reddit and one can easily see the Indian imprint. Here it goes:

1.reddit
2.sexycollegegirl
3.nude bollywood
4.nude bollywood actress
5.bollywood nude
6.nude actress
7.nude indian actress
8.sexy
9.reddit.com
10.redditt
11.buy viagra
12.aishwarya nude
13.bollywood nude actress
14.nude aishwarya
15.bollywood actress nude
16.oy kullanma (I have reasons to believe that this is a misspelt Tam swear-word)
17.nude indian actresses
18.couples having sex
19.actress nude
20.google

Wonder how "all" these searches lead to reddit. While this piece of news left me wondering about the "potential" of the Indians, this other piece from Amit verma's blog proved beyond any reasonable doubt we aren't the most accomplished beings on earth when it comes to libido.

By the way, If you are thinking why I preferred pasting the entire list instead of providing a hyperlink to the page, understand that I would definitely not mind a splurge in desi traffic to my blog. "Brain and digits" may not exactly be an aphrodisiac for the "needy" desi, but then, WTH? I have all the "Top 20 searches". One should see the counter racing slightly more frantically than the tampered Chennai-auto meter if reddit (and Google’s crawler) ought to be believed.

Delving Deep

Increasingly, I am lead to believe that the easiest way to enter the headlines and get famous in our country is to get yourself into a narrow pit. Deeper the pit, better the coverage. From municipal drainages to farmland bore-wells, the choice is wide. Just remember to have someone who will wake the police, call the media and find out the municipal authorities and you will have all the limelight (literally) on you. Wow! Time to "jump-in", I say.

Indian Railways

WTH? Isn't this a free country? Who are they to tell me what I can do with my machine? Grrr.

Pirates of the Caribbean – At Wit’s End

I do not know why this blog is turning into a movie review place. May be I am watching too many movies. May be I feel strongly about what I see that I sit down and write about them. May be I have no other work to do. May be…

G and I met an ISB colleague on Saturday night in the Centre Stage Mall. (The one in which they use room fresheners outside to keep the overflowing sewers from bothering the “upwardly mobile crowd” walking in). After making sure that we weren’t carrying any Anthrax packets or Kashalnikovs with a 2-inch swoosh of the apparatus resembling a metal detector that for some reason kept beeping constantly (I suspected low battery), the guards let us in. Over a cuppa and some banter, we decided to go for a movie. The only hall that had a show starting around that time was showing “Pirates of the Caribbean”.

Apart from discovering that Platinum lounges don’t serve you food, cost just 150 bucks a seat and usually never fill-up even on Saturday nights, I found the movie to be a bit too long, but bearable. It was boring till Johnny Depp entered and less boring afterwards. Nothing special or noteworthy, but normal PoC stuff. However, I was a bit annoyed with the way it dragged on in the last half hour. It looked more like those Indian mega-serials which never seem to end even after reaching three or four logical conclusions. Indian audience are trained to empty the remaining popcorn either into their bellies or onto the floor (whichever looks emptier) the moment you show them a zooming-out silhouette of a person waving hands or in a tight clasp with the lead-character of the opposite gender. Unfortunately, such scenes were woefully repeated three or four times and still the movie dragged on much to the annoyance of the crowd that decided to stay after the interval. However, after we braced ourselves several times saying, “this too shall end”, it did happen! There was one final long shot, surely the last one, for it was too long to be followed by another scene and the theater emptied at an alarming rate.

My Verdict: Can watch once.