ScreenAct

Drive

2011-10-23T14:13:00.003-04:00

The unsmiling no-name no-nonsense protagonist who talks 3 words per minute, keeps going about his business until fate intervenes and a makes mighty mess his way. Then there are sudden bursts of extreme violence, which leave him mostly unruffled, that add depth, maybe charisma too, to his personality. We've seen Clint Eastwood don some of these in the 60s. Drive, starring Ryan Gosling directed by Nicolas Refn is a mature 21st century reimagining of that genre. While this is undoubtedly more mature and satisfying than the buttered popcorn action flicks that pop out of Hollywood studios, there's nothing for deep introspection here.

Consider this scene: the Driver (the protagonist is unnamed) is taking his neighbor Irene (in a wonderfully understated performance by Carey Mulligan) out on a date. Before they leave we hear the phone ringing. And in the car she says "That's my husband's lawyer. He says my husband will be out next week". A long silence ensues. The husband is in the prison. There's something blooming between the driver and the neighbor. The husband's return is obviously going to complicate things. I hate to use the word 'art' here, but usually in cinemas that allow for long pauses between conversations, like... er, arthouse productions, the director is giving the audience enough time to grasp and absorb what had just happened on the screen - a death or a divorce or an infidelity. Here, it doesn't even take two seconds after Irene's uttering - the audience know beforehand that the husband will be out of prison and the status quo will be disturbed. Why the long pause? This cinema has probably half the number of words compared with any other movie of similar running length. And I admit that the silence is soothing, mostly because it's better than filler dialogues. But it's important to distinguish between this soothing silence and a meditative silence where what transpires on the scene is deep.

The laconic and cold driver makes money as a get-away driver for the robbers who either don't have their own transportation facility or lack the skill to evade L.A.P.D on L.A roads. His rule is to just wait for 5 minutes outside the event, pickup the party and drop them off at a safe place. So when he realizes his pseudo-girlfriend's husband is in trouble to pay off his prison debts, a matter of few thousands, he steps in to help - the husband will steal and the driver will drive. There's no ulterior motive: not to send him to prison again; the help seems genuine. Makes one wonder what would have happened if the heist had gone right and their neighbors lived happily ever after. After all, the driver is, in more than one sense of the word, a hero. But shit hits the fan spectacularly. The husband is killed and the driver is on the run. We learn that it's no job for a small-time crook. A lot of money is involved and the mafia is behind it. Needless to say, some heads ~~roll~~ are pulped.

This film has got style - Ryan Gosling's minimalism, not just words, but expressions, Carey Mulligan's vulnerability as a single mother, the terrific score helping the noirish photography, non-commercial violence, enjoyable silence and more. But at the core, even though Refn has invested enough time in developing his primary characters, I really didn't care if they got together in the end. Now, I don't want a climax where the hero/heroine race through the airport and one of the people in the background say something romantic. But, even by the standards of neo-noir I had the least bit interested in the driver starting a new life with Irene. The objective here seems to be excellent filmmaking, not making an excellent film.

Thorrible

2011-05-15T14:06:00.004-04:00

It's hard to get the take-me-not-serious tone. Just not taking the writing & production values seriously doesn't provide the tone. Most of the dialogues are horrible. Sample this supposedly funny line:

Our dear friend is banished to Earth! Loki sits on the throne of Asgard as our King! And all you have done is eat two boars, six pheasants a side of beef and drink two barrels of ale! Shame on you!

Shame indeed. This happens when Thor is getting to know the Earth people and their way of life: after gulping down a cup of coffee in a diner he smashes the cup asking for more. When he's politely reprimanded by the girlfriend that Earth people order in a more gentle way, he nods in an understanding manner. Wow! I've seen superhero movies where the guy comes to our planet and does funny things not knowing how stuff works. But this writing is scraping the bottom of the barrel. This is stuff rejected in a screen-writing convention in Peoria.

When Thor, the god of thunder is stripped of his superpowers and pushed down to Earth, he faces a giant robot sent to kill him. It slaps him and he falls down unconscious. His girlfriend swoops him and cries not knowing if he's still alive. And at this moment, allow me to remark on the range of expressions she exhibits - played by Oscar winning Natalie Portman, she doesn't invest a quarter of the emotional sincerity expected of an actor for such a scene. She plays it like a high school drama and director knows that the audience know it's a tongue-in-cheek outing and doesn't bother to re-shoot the scene. This laxity, a sense "y'all here to chill" awareness on the part of creators works on a good script. But the script is fractured, childish, immature. Ironman nailed it in letting the viewer take a break in a charmingly intelligent way. With 'Thor', the break is a bit long, about 110 minutes.

The Black Swan

2011-02-19T00:20:00.002-05:00

Warning: Spoilers.

Aronofsky likes to study characters cracking under pressure. In 'Black Swan' it's the beautiful, timid, perfect, frigid, fragile ballerina Nina Sayers played with exquisite control by Natalie Portman. Her personality makes her a great fit for playing the white swan in Tchaikovsky's 'Swan Lake', but to play the black swan, she needs to loosen up, get a bit out of the rigid boundaries she has set herself to excel as a performer. Lily, a laid back dancer who naturally embodies black swan in her gracious but beguiling movements threatens Nina, who's constantly worried about being replaced. As a crushing load of expectations begin to fracture her mind, the audience see things through her eyes, to be precise, her mind. (Which is why this is a mind-fuck movie for adults, and the neatly wrapped up 'Inception' is not.)

I don't know if the sex scenes from the movie are on high rotation on Youtube yet. There's nothing explicit - neither a view of a nipple nor a crotch. But the dreamy layer lends an eroticism that's more powerful than nudity. Are Nina's sexual explorations a symbol of her getting closer towards the black swan inside her? I tried to replay the scenes in my head after the movie was over: The ballet producer, played charmingly by Vincent Cassel, indirectly asks her to explore her sexuality so that she departs away her from 'little princess' image befitting the white swan. First Nina tries masturbation in her bedroom; before she can climax, she sees her mother asleep in a chair near her in her room and she stops her act. Then she tries in the bathtub; but this time its not her mother but her mental blockades scare her out of her mood. The director informs us that Nina's ready not only to accommodate, but to be taken over by her complementary twin, Lily, who exudes unshackled sexual energy expected of the seductress black swan, when she's able to fantasize and climax with Lily.

Sex is not the only symbolism in the film, though it was the only one that was quite complex and worked on a mature level. The next frequently used symbolism was the reflecting image. Almost every other shot has a mirror or a reflecting surface. Either the mirror image is doing something the actual person isn't doing (though I have to admit that the director doesn't opt for any cheesy boo shots) or the reflecting surface is a weak black reflection telling us what lies beneath. I thought the director went overboard in pounding the meaning through images. Then there's the expanding goosebump and the disappearing bloody patch, representing the struggle between the white and the black swan; this was the most cheesiest trick in the screenplay.

I particularly liked the interplay between Nina and her mother Erica (played wonderfully by Barbara Hershey). That there be no doorlocks in the house is obviously the mother's decision. In one of the earlier scenes, the ballet director asks Nina if she's a virgin and she responds no. But Portman plays this scene so wonderfully and Aronofsky directs this scene so wonderfully, we don't know if this timid girl is lying. The mother's decision to absolutely avoid all physical boundaries between her and her daughter partly arises from Erica's failure to shine as a ballerina herself because of her accidental pregnancy with Nina. A significant chunk of Nina's 'good girl, no sex' policy seems to be ingrained in her brain by her mother as a cautionary tale.

The director pulls off an expected, but satisfying climax by playing a trick on the protagonist's mind. Was it a cheap trick? It would be, if you're to flip through the pages of the screenplay. But the intensity of the camera, with it's grainy film closing up on Portman's face combined with an eerie background score adds complexity to her character, the narration, the movie as a whole. But I still don't like the very last scene, where the filmmakers leave it up to the audience to write their own ending. Aronofsky did that with Mickey Rourke's character in the 'Wrestler' and he does the same thing here with Nina's fate in limbo. It's not that I'm not capable of convincing myself if someone lives or dies when the closing shot is a bloodied body. It makes me feel cheated when the director strongly guides a viewer all along giving no room to wiggle and in the end shoves him into a wide expanse of possibilities.

When the Best Is Bad

2010-10-04T21:44:00.012-04:00

The Tamil blogosphere, 'critics' and 'pundits' are abuzz with Shankar/Rajini combo taking Tamil cinema to the next level. Wait a second, let me retract that: taking Indian cinema to the next level. And where has Indian cinema been all these days if 'Endhiran' represents the next level?

The movie is one big ad for a Rajini toy for all fanatics who puke on their Facebook wall that Rajini can make an onion cry and his gmail id is gmail@rajini.com. Too bad producers haven't thought of merchandising. By the time hundreds of Rajinis are stacked together to take the shape of a snake to gobble up cartoon police (near the end of the movie), I wished the snake to leap out of the screen and eat up most of the audience. They were all cheering. I don't know exactly what they were happy about - the very idea of a multiplied Rajini which was mind bogglingly stupidly executed or the 'special effects' which are notable because of their sub-par effects. Sensible people who hail this as a milestone must carefully choose their words - that this maybe a milestone for an Indian movie, in terms of special effects. But otherwise, the plot is badly conceived. The dialogues are bad. The special effects are pre-Jurassic Park era. The action (as in thespian, not blowing things up) and direction are plainly incompetent. I'm not a Rajini fan. But for a sensible fan, I'd recommend he get his fix from Annamalai.

The movie opens with the scientist Vaseegaran, played by Rajini (I know, it's hard to say with a straight face that Rajini plays a scientist) working on a humanoid robot. And by working, I mean he's literally working on it. He's screwing the stuff together, with the help of an assistant scientist and a deputy scientist played respectively by, wait for this, Santhanam and Karunas. These two wouldn't know the 'neural schema' (ooohh, a big word for a Tamil cinema) of the humanoid, and they primarily help with polishing and changing the dress. It just gets interminably boring from these first 2 minutes: Aishwarya Rai, the woman who's just dying to marry the scientist man and settle down, is pissed off that he hasn't returned her calls or replied to her emails as he's busy working. And after Vasee emerges from the lab, he goes on charm offensive and wins her over. Seriously, can it get any more clichéd? Bastards. I can't dwell on the storyline anymore; my IQ is dropping every minute I think of the story.

One of the guys said "machi, padam pattasu machi". Most of our (Indian/Tamil) movies and TV shows have been courting people who have a deep hatred for anything that is either intelligent or tastefully done. Shankar and Rajini have sound judgment. They know very well what makes their target audience go 'pattasu' and they get paid to flesh out their ideas which wouldn't pressure the acumen of a stupid 15 year old boy. (But there's a scene where Rajini converses with a bunch of mosquitoes. Anyone over 5 and has an attention span of 2 minutes would have heard their brain cells killing themselves).

One of the atrocities committed by the blogosphere is to classify this as a science fiction. It has to be, right? Because they use words like neural schema and humanoid and robotics. They obviously haven't turned a leaf of either Clarke or Asimov or seen '2001' or 'Solaris' or even something very commercial like 'Minority Report'. There's just not very little science in the movie, there's anti-science here. Artistic liberty on top of some basic science would have been appreciated. Every concept is either dumbed down or simplified or misinterpreted. The android is taught emotions and it falls in love. It's been done at least 18 times before with a decent scientific rigor. But what we witness in 'Endhiran' is a crime against humanity and humanoid-ity.

Hollywood is a medley. Titanic and Avatar, two mega-blockbusters feature maudlin plots with some horrible writing. But when they do special effects, they do it better than anybody else. The 'Men In Black' franchise is stupid, but it knows it's stupid and doesn't treat the audience like they're stupid. The Batman series by Nolan has a solid story and inventive action scenes. The independent film circuit here is super good. Darren Aronofsky has done 4 movies in the last 10 years and just look at how magnificently different the themes he's dealing with are. Alejandro Inarritu has done 4 movies in 10 years and though they have the same undercurrent, I don't think there's any other filmmaker who can do a better job of interconnecting multiple stories with this level of emotional impact. And there's Paul Thomas Anderson. Need I introduce Coen brothers or Robert Rodriguez or Quentin Tarantino? My favorite writers Aaron Sorkin and Charlie Kaufman excel in their own styles.

I'm not saying these guys are the best. Hollywood produces its share of trash every week. But there's something for everyone in every mood. I don't see that in our movies. Maniratnam, one of our best shots, directed 'Ravanan'. A movie that just goes nowhere, conveys nothing. And I have to say that I like 'My Dinner with Andre'. Just see 'Ravanan' for its dialogues. Kamal Hasan's 'Unnai Pol Oruvan' discounts the complexities of religion and politics and offers a 'thriller'. Well, Shankar and Rajini don't pretend to offer popcorn bites for the mind. But these guys combined are our front-runners and they all suck.

Slate, an American online magazine I visit daily, carried an article on Rajini and introduced him thus:

If a tiger had sex with a tornado and then their tiger-nado baby got married to an earthquake, their offspring would be Rajinikanth.

Seriously? Is there a universal rule that if you like Rajini you'll have to write nonsense?

Isabelle Huppert

2010-05-16T22:33:00.002-04:00

Once in a while you see a movie which features a stellar performance that you don't know what hit you. Isabelle Huppert's role in The Piano Teacher stabs you in the heart and twists the knife a bit. It's a wonderfully calibrated performance about the deleterious effects of sexual repression. The movie is supremely engaging and disturbing at the same time. I will write about the movie, which will entail a frank and detailed sexual exploration, in a later post.

Pricing a Book

2010-05-13T22:20:00.003-04:00

This book by Praveen Swami - India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad: The Covert War in Kashmir, 1947-2004 (Asian Security Studies) - boasting one of the most boring titles I've come across, costs $160. On the top of my head I can think of a few parameters that determine the price range of a non-fiction book. The perceived value of the content is obviously on top. Research scientists and anthropologists spend decades gaining knowledge which they summarize succinctly in an understandable manner. (A topic like Guns, Germs and Steel pops to me). We pay for their years of experience and analytical skills. Another determinant is the genre - an exploration of counter-terrorism, though important, doesn't sell as much a biography of Oprah Winfrey (pandering to the masses). And then the popularity of the author - Obama's earnings from his books last year was $8M.

But no common-sense approach would okay a publisher setting the price at $160 for a 272 page book. (I know there are businesses that pay a lot for slim reports. But this doesn't fall into that category. I bring in the number of pages because that's an indication of the extensiveness & depth of the treatment. A 57-year history can only be put in a nutshell in less than 300 pages; to dive deep and dissect would consume considerable volumes). Unless there are any state/jihadi secrets, which there obviously can't be, it doesn't make sense to price it out of reach of a common man interested in understanding the history. It's hard to put a price tag on any book and the value a good book delivers can never be measured in dollars. And this book might very well open eyes to many; it might very well contain many seminal ideas. But such an expensive price tag in most cases will work against the propagation of the author's knowledge; it may turn out as the prime means to ensure a reduced readership.

2010-05-10T23:48:00.005-04:00

David Brooks writes a column that I wanted to write about Elena Kagan, Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court. Here are the final lines:

What we have is a person whose career has dovetailed with the incentives presented by the confirmation system, a system that punishes creativity and rewards caginess. Arguments are already being made for and against her nomination, but most of this is speculation because she has been too careful to let her actual positions leak out.

There’s about to be a backlash against the Ivy League lock on the court. I have to confess my first impression of Kagan is a lot like my first impression of many Organization Kids. She seems to be smart, impressive and honest — and in her willingness to suppress so much of her mind for the sake of her career, kind of disturbing.

It makes theoretical sense to have someone in the judge's seat who can impartially listen to and make a fair judgement. But nobody is impartial. The school they they went to, the friends they had, the community they grew up, the crime rate around them (or the lack thereof), born to educated parents, educated in a Ivy League institute, marital life (or the lack of it), being a woman... A judge may claim to be impartial in their hearings but still all the arguments have to pass through their collective background filter and by virtue of growing up they would have lost their neutrality.

We'll know quite soon where Kagan stands; after all, she's replacing the liberal lion of the court and Obama wouldn't possibly nominate someone who's going to tilt the court towards right. But as the pragmatist conservative columnist David suggests, it is intellectually dishonest to not express your position on various issues that concern the society and play it safe all along for the sake of professional growth. It is ironical that she had criticized the senate confirmation process for not being insightful enough, while all along she has been preparing herself for such a process.

There's an episode from the melodramatic 'The West Wing' where the president initially leans towards a very centrist judge for openings (two) in the Supreme Court. But then he listens to an extremely liberal and an extremely conservative fight each other inside the Oval and he decides to go with them. I'm glad that Sonia Sotomayor called herself a wise Latina.

Sitting Duck or Bait?

2010-05-05T22:47:00.004-04:00

Faisal Shahzad bought a used SUV from someone nearby in a face-to-face transaction, did not scrape the VIN off the engine, loaded it with Home Depot grade explosives and left it near Times Square without properly setting off what could have been a ball of fire. The level of clumsiness he has exhibited will put any 15 year old Forsyth-reader to shame. And he's just back from Pakistan after a 5-month visit after alleged contacts with fundamentalists there. When the border police boarded the flight (he was trying to escape to Dubai, and possibly back to Pakistan) he said "I've been expecting you. Are you NYPD or FBI?"

Was he desperately trying to be apprehended? Is he throwing the intelligence resources a dummy trail behind his back? Was it a ploy to see how responsive NY's counter terrorism cell is in responding to such emergencies? Investigators say that he's talking freely; terrorists either blow themselves up or play hard to get. Is he a loony easy catch or is there anything more to this case?

Regional Affinities

2010-05-04T23:54:00.004-04:00

As I grew up and opened up to a variety of experiences I gradually lost my affiliations that made what was me during my formative years. I'm not a fan of Maniratnam, I don't love India, I don't think bisibelebath is the best dish ever conceived and arguably there are better writers than Rushdie. But during the IPL, I found myself supporting the Chennai cricket team, my city, though it's not my city anymore. And now the world cup has commenced and I'm back to my indifference, not caring much for India. And to think that I rooted for a team that not only had non-Chennai players but also non-Indian players and don't feel bothered by a team comprising all Indian players is... not unsettling, just a tad puzzling.

2010-05-03T22:51:00.003-04:00

Writing is like hitting the gym (what a flimsy metaphor to begin with). The more you do it, the better you get at it (and the nonsense continues). And if you begin to take breaks and are happy to be sitting home watching sitcoms, you get cozy with your laziness (a light-bulb moment!). I'm going through one of those phases - neither hitting the gym, nor writing amidst not doing many other things and am strangely happy with my lack of initiatives. And since any act, when not practiced or projected, loses its sharpness, I'm struggling a bit to put my thoughts in writing coherently, not to mention the ability to prioritize on which topic to write about. Like getting on a bicycle after 15 years, I'm hopping on it again...

In Other News

2010-04-28T23:15:00.001-04:00

.. blogging will resume this weekend. Thanks for checking.

What's Illegal in India?

2010-04-16T09:35:00.002-04:00

Human sacrifice, BBC says (emphasis mine):

The head and the body were found at the local temple to the goddess Kali near Chotomakdampur village in the western district of Birbhum.
Police say they have detained a tribal villager for questioning.
Human sacrifice is illegal in India. But a few cases do occur in remote and underdeveloped regions.

The shock value of such a news piece has slowly subsided since every once in a while I bump across the same headline. But what is BBC saying about the state of Indian polity to the rest of the world by including that line? The fact that we still have to deal with dangerous fools is another matter.

2010-03-23T20:54:00.005-04:00

The Supreme Court threw its weight behind live-in relationships on Tuesday, observing that for a man and a woman in love, to live together is part of the right to life, and not a “criminal offence”.

The Supreme Court of India decriminalized homosexuality last year. Now they've approved pre-marital sex between a man and a woman. What next? Pre-marital sex between gays. Whatever happened to our moral fabric?

Update: A friend asked what was up with me. Of course, satire doesn't come to me naturally. I thought the label 'Oddballs' would give it away.

2010-03-22T21:16:00.004-04:00

I had CNN on for almost 3 hours yesterday to see the final minutes of the health care reform bill pass the House. It will now go to the Senate and soon the White House where it eventually becomes a law. If I find the inclination & time I'll write about this historic bill [1]. But now I want to point out something else - the remarkable narrowness of politicians.

For the sake of the uninitiated, U.S is a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. In a country like Switzerland which practices direct democracy, decisions are made by the assembly of citizens. Most policies (be it at the level of a town or country) are in the hands of the public - the recent vote to ban minarets being one of them. Whereas in the U.S (and most other democracies) the general public elects officials who are entrusted to make decisions concerning their welfare - from their county to the country. Essentially, the elected officials are believed to possess a sharp long-term understanding of what's good and what's not for their societies.

Watching the debate yesterday was quite appalling because the representatives of the House were just echoing the popular opinion of their constituencies. Every Republican and 34 conservative Democrats voted against the bill. (It passed 219-212). As a representative, not of the lower House of the U.S Congress, but of the U.S democracy, their job is to evaluate the bill and vote based on the what they think is right. But what happened was everyone bowing down to the political pressure of pleasing their constituents and pitching for re-election. All Republicans acknowledge how screwed up the health care system is, but they're just not happy with the bill tabled (although it has close to 200 suggestions from their party members). They want reform, but not in this format which is going to result in record deficit.

Obama joked a few weeks back when talking to members of the Congress: "When Americans say they're concerned about jobs, they mean their jobs, not ours". Only that he wasn't joking.

[1] Here's my very brief take: I support this bill in spite of being a fiscal conservative. The bill is watered down and doesn't actually reform. And though the budget office estimates that over a 10 year period the government will save $140 billion with its Medicare cuts, I highly doubt that. Taxes inevitably are going to go up and people are going to dislike that. Once people get used to a welfare scheme it becomes politically impossible to revoke (like reservations in India). And the right-wing would be quite right in fighting government expansion only if it weren't for health care system. But I believe any great nation should have a great health care system, where one doesn't go bankrupt in the process of taking care of one's family or is dropped coverage when one develops an expensive illness. It is a moral issue not a money issue. Good health coverage should be ahead of good education and good military for a developed nation.

Whoa!

2010-03-22T20:55:00.002-04:00

From Andrew Sullivan, on a retired U.S General's testimony before Congress:

SHEEHAN: The case in point that I’m referring to was when the Dutch were required to defend Sbrenecia against the Serbs, the battalion was understrength, poorly led. And the Serbs came into town, handcuffed the soldiers to the telephone polls, marched the Muslims off and executed them. That was the largest massacre in Europe since World War II.

LEVIN: And did the Dutch leaders tell you it was because there were gay soldiers there?

SHEEHAN: It was a combination –

LEVIN: Did they tell you that?

SHEEHAN: Yes.

2010-03-19T15:59:00.001-04:00

Tony Judt writes:

My generation was obsessed with the distinction between theory and practice—I knew a man in California whose doctoral dissertation was devoted to “Theory and Practice in theory and in practice.”

2010-03-18T22:54:00.005-04:00

Here's a sentence from 'Fashionable Nonsense' on epistemic relativism:

But the numerous discussions we have had during which the theory-ladenness of observation, the underdetermination of theory by evidence or the alleged incommensurability of paradigms have been put forward in order to support relativist positions leave us rather skeptical.

This quote appears in the 50th page - a point where the authors can safely assume that the reader is well in tune with the context and subject matter of the book. I was, in fact. Even then I had to read the sentence twice to understand what the authors are trying to convey. I've read books by professors written for mainstream audience and I've found most of them strikingly clear in getting the message across. Richard Feynman once said that however a difficult a concept may be, if you understand it thoroughly you should be able to explain it to a 17-year old satisfactorily. The authors of this book (Sokal & Bricmont) are professors and from what I've read of the book I can say that they know their stuff. But frequent sentences like this where the reader is expected to perform vocabulary gymnastics can be tiresome.

I understand that authors sometimes are so deeply immersed in writing journal articles for elite societies and keep talking among themselves when evolving ideas for a book which might result in chapters that are jargon loaded like this. But it should have been the responsibility of the publisher to make the authors' ideas more accessible (without diminishing or simplifying) - if at all their target audience are general public. I'm going to try to continue reading, but if I find myself rereading frequently I'll have to shelve it for there are many more in my wish list.

2010-03-18T16:15:00.003-04:00

I've seen many discussion board comments like this: "Do you have the required expertise to talk about the Narmada dam issue?", "I've worked in the election commission for 15 years, what rights do you have to question me on election fraud in rural India?", "I have a masters degree in journalism, don't teach me how to report riots"... I understand this style of argument because I've been there myself. This is mostly the result of reaching a point where they realize that they cannot satisfactorily progress (based on logic/facts/etc) a discussion because of their half-baked understanding of the issue or a realization that the other guy has brought valid points to the table that cannot be refuted and instead of conceding the discussion in an honest manner they hide behind their credentials.

Green Zone

2010-03-17T23:08:00.008-04:00

I'm a huge fan of Paul Greengrass' Bourne movies and a very huge fan of his 'United 93'. His camera techniques (jerky movements, small takes, rapid transition between long & close-up shots...) in the Bourne movies created a sense of immediacy and tension which with a good story and a solid actor like Matt Damon generated genuine thrill. 'United 93' is the first (I think) 9/11 movie and by keeping it completely non-political and non-commercial Greengrass delivered a punch to me that's been equaled very rarely in probably the thousand movies I've seen [1]. In Green Zone he has tried to conflate politics and thrill and history. It succeeds moderately as an action movie, but the naive treatment of the political dimension takes away any seriousness a thinking adult may invest here thereby boiling it down to a popcorn story for teenagers discussing politics.

As pointed out by Anthony Lane of New Yorker, even a google search and subsequent clicks made by a warrant officer (Matt Damon) comfortably sitting inside his room is shown to the audience with the cameraman's acrobatics where the monitor is zoomed in and out and focusing on just the words that the director wants the audience to read. This is precisely my fuss when dealing with movies based on real events: just show everything - politically - and let the viewer decide where he should stand instead of the writer/director cherry picking actions, events and decisions to suit their needs. I know Hollywood's political affiliations (Spielberg, Lucas, Cameron, Stone and many other bigwigs are on the left-wing) and I understand it is not their job to inform the general public on political matters in a non-partisan manner, especially when it comes to wars. Does Greengrass, the creator of a masterpiece like 'United 93', realize that presenting a simplistic story ignoring the political complexity [2] results in a shoddy cinema?

[1] Here's a link to my half-ass review of United 93. Talking of raw punches, Irreversible is another movie that hit me very hard.

[2] At the risk of sounding redundant, but to emphasize my point, I'll say it again: The director has great artistic license in the case of fiction. A soldier can even sing a song and dance when bullets whiz past him [3]. But when you base your story on a real and ongoing war, you have a moral responsibility to not dilute the events. This movie is inspired by Rajiv Chandrasekaran's critically acclaimed, politically dense 'Imperial Life in the Emerald City'. By calling the screenplay an inspiration, the screenwriter has disabused himself of that moral responsibility. I understand that there's only so much that can be crammed into 120 minutes, even if you're shooting a documentary, but this movie is shamelessly one-sided.

[3] The semi-fictional semi-docudrama Waltz with Bashir actually features a scene like this - a soldier waltzes in the middle of the road in a war zone in Lebanon. If you get a chance see it just for the brilliant visual style.

Mornings With Infant

2010-03-16T09:37:00.004-04:00

I was in the shower and my wife was all tied up getting our daughter ready for daycare.
"Can you get me a soap?"
"There should be a body wash."
"There are bottles of moisturizers and shampoos. No body wash."
"Okay." *Brief pause* "Use them."

Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness

2010-03-08T21:26:00.007-05:00

A few years back I read a book called Millionaire Next Door which when distilled had 7 or 8 bullet points which go like spend less than you earn, make a budget and stick to it, choose a profession you like, don't show off your wealth, etc. At the end of it, I thought, wow, this must not be hard. Then I realized that my parents and relatives and many of my friends' parents all have practiced most of the attributes mentioned in the book for most of their lives but they're nowhere near half as rich as the one's in the book. It wasn't hard to deduce - the authors of the book just looked at what the rich guys were doing; they weren't social scientists investigating the financial health of all of the cross-section of the society that had those millionaire attributes. While you could be persevering, smart, living well below your means and materialistically modest there are still pretty good chances that you could end up not becoming a millionaire. And I thought at that time what if a book dwelt on this aspect - where the author exposited in great detail that you could be doing all the right things successful people do and still remain not successful[1] enough all your life - the book would bomb at the marketplace. Who'd want to read a dejecting theory? Apparently, many. Taleb's Fooled by Randomness does exactly that and much more.

Taleb is a Wall Street trader and a professor in risk engineering in addition to many other things. He's well read and the range of references he makes here almost make me wonder if he were simply showing off his diverse education. The crux of the argument he makes in this book is that blind luck or chance occurrence is discounted by most, especially the successful people. His area of expertise is in the markets and he extensively draws analogies from the life in Wall Street to pound the idea home. He talks about the human nature to fit everything into a seemingly logical order and hence we fall into a narrative fallacy of explaining rare events (he calls them black swans) after they've occurred. Taleb effectively informs us that random (or rare, if you will) events will always be part of the human cycle and our historians and journalists should stop glamorizing them by fitting them into a logical flow and establishing a fake order retrospectively.

Once you accept that not everything follows a pattern, at least when it comes to the world of finance, then the expertise of a successful trader is called into question. That's what the author does - he claims to not know the how or where or what or when of markets - and in openly expressing his ignorance he also claims his superiority over many other traders who think they've somehow struck a golden forumla whereas in reality they're just deluded. Taleb even writes about a trading company that had Nobel prize economists[2] but crashed spectacularly in spite of their knowledge of the markets. Funnily, it looks like these economists referenced Taleb's papers on black swans after they went bust to absolve themselves - another attempt by these people to explain their losses and successes.

I'm terribly uninformed of what goes on a trading floor and I'm willing to take most of Taleb's theories at face value. But he extends most of his theories to life and I'm not too comfortable with his condescending tone here. Of course the rich and famous and successful guys did some right things at the right time - they either sat next to a venture capitalist in a long flight or were experts in a social phenomenon whose time has arrived because of technological breakthroughs or were married into a business/political family that had connections.... This interpretation of doing the right thing at the right time is something only time can confirm. It is appropriate to acknowledge the role of luck in making big. But Taleb gave me the impression that hard & smart work doesn't get you anywhere without luck and I don't warm up to that idea. In fact, he uses the example of dentistry as a stable profession through most of the book, and explains the low stress associated with a steady growth as opposed to a fund manager who is invariably stressed every minute of the day and has a high risk of crashing down. But he doesn't seem to imply dentistry as a successful profession by itself.

At some point I wanted to drop the book because it was getting redundant. He was just providing different use cases to illustrate his central theme; but at least he kept issuing nuggets from diverse fields such as philosophy, poetry, history & mathematics which kept me going. (With all that, I read only 13 out of 14 chapters). If you have a pragmatic view of life this book is not going to enlighten you - you already know that chance does things that smartness alone can never do. But that degree of unpredictability in our markets, as painted by the author, unsettled me a bit. In spite of its redundancy it's not a bad book. It was like having a cup of tea with your well educated, well traveled uncle - he repeats some jokes, but he tells them interestingly. So you sit and listen without fussing.

[1] Success in this context is mainly by money. The author cites a scenario where constant exposure to the ups and downs of market arrows takes a high toll on health and then goes on philosophical introspections on what good is money without good health.

[2] There's no such thing as Nobel prize in economics. The award is presented by the Swedish Central Bank and doesn't come from the Nobel fund. Taleb repeatedly points this out. He somehow can't get himself to place economists who predict and create patterns along with scientists.

PS: I'll take a 10 day break before I start my next book - Alan Sokal's Fashionable Nonsense.

Oscars 2010

2010-03-08T00:06:00.008-05:00

My morbid curiosity for watching the Oscars live (and unedited) has come to an end. It's really a test of human endurance to watch people go through their laundry list of thank yous. Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin should be spanked for hosting one of the most boring most-watched prom nights. I was glad that 'Avatar' didn't win anything big* and 'Hurt Locker' did win the top categories. At the risk of generalization and simplification I'll say this - it's interesting that James Cameron did the most womanly of the movies I've seen in a long time (and a crappy one at that) and made a ton of money while Kathryn Bigelow made the manliest of movies I've seen in a long time (a very good one) and has until now remained relatively obscure. In a world where cinema audiences are increasing men (especially teenagers), I've got to give it to James for breaking successive records with maudlin movies featuring horrible dialogues.

I liked Sandra Bullock's speech and I'm happy for Jeff Bridges.

* Avatar won for cinematography and now I'm really confused. In a movie like 'Hurt Locker' the viewer is made to recognize the vastness and emptiness of an Iraqi desert, a bustling market, the sweats on the face of a soldier. There's a whole lot of special effects in Avatar and the cinematographer still guides the view through his lenses - but it all seems a bit fake to recognize such a movie with the highest Hollywood honor. When most of a movie is shot inside a room with a monochrome background and movements aided though software and sensors, it somehow seems unworthy of Oscars to me. But then who said that Oscars should always go to the worthy.

2010-03-01T22:38:00.001-05:00

Two articles on the future of U.S solvency:

Eternal optimist Fareed Zakaria is being politically naive:

So, [deficit] problem looks unavoidable, but also insoluble. Remember, though, that America has a $14 trillion economy that was, until recently, growing quite fast. We can find ways to address even this challenge. Here are three simple proposals that would defuse the debt bomb, with money to spare... Each of these policies could be phased in so that the timing is right. They could be pared back, especially if other savings and reforms are enacted. (Currently, tax breaks and deductions cost the government $1.1 trillion a year.) But just these three fixes would place the United States on a firm fiscal footing, leaving it with ample resources to invest in research, education, infrastructure, alternative energy, and whatever else we want.

Niall Ferguson's ominous words:

Neither interest rates at zero nor fiscal stimulus can achieve a sustainable recovery if people in the United States and abroad collectively decide, overnight, that such measures will ultimately lead to much higher inflation rates or outright default. Bond yields can shoot up if expectations change about future government solvency, intensifying an already bad fiscal crisis by driving up the cost of interest payments on new debt. Just ask Greece. Ask Russia too... Washington, you have been warned.

Rushdie - I'm not a fan, but

2010-02-27T21:49:00.008-05:00

Yesterday I was at the Emory University for a speech (interview style) with Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens and Deepa Mehta. As I entered the campus my days as a student at ASU flashed back. There's an indescribable energy in the air that I was able to reconnect. Students were walking fast, talking on their cell, browsing.. even the one's sitting idle somehow gave the impression that they're enjoyably wasting their time. Interestingly I was never part of that energy when I was a student - my days were quite uneventful. Of course, like everyone I scrambled before the deadlines and stayed late before the finals, but the zest that's usually associated with an American student (or an Indian student in America) was colossally missing. Well, I developed a healthy taste for movies, but that's that[1]. To be back in such an environment tingled a bit of nostalgia.

In the last few years I've been able to strip myself of being a fan[2]. I used to be a 'fan' of Rushdie, Tendulkar, Spielberg... I still admire their works but not with a filter where I'd defend them even if they delivered a shoddy product. A few years back I would have been greatly excited to be seeing and hearing Rushdie, but not yesterday. He's a literary genius, but that compliment should come from someone who's far better in dissecting his literature. My appreciation skills are rudimentary. But so far Rushdie is one the best fiction writers I've read and I didn't want to miss an opportunity to see him in spite of the speech scheduled in a work day.

Rushdie didn't deliver a great speech (or great answers to the questions) but he made the session absolutely interesting by plugging in wonderful anecdotes. Sample these (a) Muslims in East London were offended by his 'Satanic Verses' and took to the streets in an organized march. A policeman notices a book shop on the protest march's path that displayed the book prominently and he gives a friendly warning to the shop owner to take the book down and save his glass windows. A journalist browsing books inside the shop hears this. This journalist comes back later in the day to the shop and finds that the book is not back on display and annoyed he asks the owner about it. The shop owner responds that all the copies of the 'Satanic Verses' are sold. (b) When his 'Shame' was published Pakistan banned it for obvious reasons. But all the foreign embassies thought it was required reading on Pakistani political climate and sent copies to their diplomats stationed in Islamabad. Once they read it they passed it on to embassy staff who later pushed it into the general public and thus almost all who ever in Pakistan wanted to read 'Shame' was ultimately able to read it.

These two anecdotes came up when he was talking about the effects of banning a book. Whenever there's attempted censorship, it certainly piques the interest of the public making it hard to actually ban the work. Nothing insightful, but the way Rushdie narrated these events (also explaining how those who protest/attack actually haven't read the work) was engaging and funny. At the end of the session he recited at a good speed a charmingly silly poem that ran for a full 5 minutes. Somewhere in the middle he forgot a couple of lines and without hesitation he simply explained what actually happens during those missing lines and continues from where he can remember. This is also the kind of quirkiness I enjoy in his writings.

[1] My movie discerning skills started when I first came to the US. That's a natural progression of the way things work - the more exposure, the less conditioning. As I saw more foreign movies my impressions of Indian stalwarts started breaking down. But it has taken a while for me - I gave a positive review to 'Sivaji' excusing myself as a true fan of Rajini. When I'm in front of a mirror a strange sense of shame engulfs me for not growing up even so late.

[2] Although I don't call myself a 'fan' of anyone, Charlie Kauffman is dangerously close to pulling me into his fan base.

Update: This is the 2nd half of the symposium, Rushdie is the primary speaker.

Reading? Yes. Book? No.

2010-02-21T20:34:00.005-05:00

I'm spending as much time as possible on educating and informing myself. Through blogs, columns, articles, podcasts and documentaries. But the sort of satisfaction derived from turning the last page of a book is missing. Books, supposedly, provide depth & breadth on a subject. The author's years of experience and expertise on the subject is juiced, bottled and ready for the reader to be consumed. That satisfaction is usually not derived from any number of 500-word pieces featured in Time.

When it comes to making a choice, I've been choosing articles and podcasts over a book because at the end of the said time, I'd know quite a bit about a lot more topics than a lot more about just one topic. And the advantage with these new media outlets is that most of the time they're dealing with trendy topics - be it the Toyota recall or Tiger Woods or the dysfunctional nature of U.S political culture - in addition to being in the know, they also contribute for a good lunch time chatter.

This instant gratification has come at a cost. Reading books was one of the main instigators of my thirst for knowledge. That cannot be comprehensively quenched by what is comparably a twitter feed to a New Yorker article. A great book does great service to the mind. I have a huge list of books in my wish list and I just realized the pointlessness of it. To think that that would always be my wish list instead of serving in my knowledge arsenal is so depressing.

So today I'm making a public promise of sorts to read at least a book a month, and provide a decent... I don't want to call it a review... but what I take home from the book. As with movies, I will not sit through something if I think it will not be worth my time. To begin with I'll try Fooled By Randomness by Taleb. I've tried his much acclaimed Black Swan and I found his tone a bit domineering and preachy. Irritated, I closed the book. Since then I've heard the title referenced at many places by people I respect. As I decided to reopen, I was told to reach for his first book and the Swan would just start flowing easily from FBR.

Part of making this book-reading an announcement is to apply that extra pressure on myself so that I cut down on some of my useless browsing. Any of my three loyal readers can feel free to ask for updates after a month. So, here's to re-establishing my dying habit.

Making It A Habit

2010-02-12T21:46:00.006-05:00

There are a few things that I do on a regular basis. Blogging is obviously not one of them. But I've promised myself many times to do at least a post per week. There were times when I wouldn't have anything to say and it's better I didn't update with a empty post that reads like a Facebook comment. And there were times when I was tightly occupied that I just wanted to close my eyes when I had a free minute. And I don't want too many quote-posts punctuating my page making my blog a link festival. (I thought I'll move them to Twitter but I haven't been active there. I tried podcasting and after an edition the stars aren't aligned to favor the next one).

The fact is that after a few busy weeks, where I didn't have an opportunity to post, when my calendar eventually started giving me blank stares I had eased myself very well into a non-blogging state that I was okay with sitcoms, documentaries and reading. I don't treat writing lightly. In fact it's one of my means of thinking. Even if I'm reading Wired, to be not able to express my ideas and reactions to the article is to wallow in lethargy - because when I sit down to write my ability to critique is put on spotlight; whereas if I don't write (or get into a discussion) I'm just a passive consumer of news & opinions. Here, allow me to smash my slump.

China is the new bully in the block. We have G7, the UN Security Council, BRIC, etc. But the two countries that mean a lot - both economically and militarily are the U.S and China. And China's behavior these days, either in Copenhagen on climate talks or arms sales to Taiwan or Obama meeting the Dalai Lama or refusing to revalue their currency to cushion trade imbalances or addressing human rights in their own back yard - is to give a symbolic middle finger to the U.S.

China's huge surpluses are contributed by the manufacturing sector, not the knowledge processing industry. There are many well thought out arguments on the web about how curtailing the power of web to their citizens could be disastrous for China's ambitions to become an economic giant. Well, this can be treated as a domestic affair. But its business deals with countries that aren't stable or repressive or politically against the U.S or all of these is worrisome: China's arms deal with Sri Lanka in their recent war on LTTE (should I say Tamils?), oil deal with Venezuela thereby propping the ridiculous Hugo Chavez, oil deal in Sudan filling Khartoum's coffers to kill more Darfuri women, not imposing sanctions on Iran as a member of UN council fearing a spike in oil prices.. going back to their reactionary help to Pakistan with nuclear technology in order to maintain their geopolitical supremacy.

For all its high-rises and solar-powered technologies and bullet trains and great malls there's not much to life if there isn't freedom. In spite of all its shortcomings India has a sense of humor, the press is free, they talk about politicians and the politicians talk back (sometimes with a stick), there are riots against the government, guys watch porn in the comfort of their room and some couples have 4 kids. When it comes to freedom the U.S is even better - I'll just say that late night comedians poke at presidents all the time and one fine day they step into the comedian's studio as a guest for a chat and a jab. Can you imagine the Chinese Premier sitting down for a cup of tea with a Chinese Leno?

2010-01-31T20:34:00.003-05:00

Today morning as I woke up, my 7 month-old girl was sitting next to me in my bed, babbling. As I hugged her she started licking my cheek. These moments make life easier in the middle of busy work & home weeks.

I'm expecting to resume blogging at the regular frequency (whatever that is) sometime next week.

Reflections by Tony Judt

2010-01-10T23:15:00.004-05:00

As I was getting my hair cut today a strand of hair slided into my ear. It was itching a bit but I didn't want to distract the hairdresser by asking him to stop so that I can clear my ear. Or so I thought. Within a minute the itch grew strong and all of my mind was completely focused on how to get that strand out. I then asked him to stop and shook and scratched my ear until I thought I was all set.

Now read this passage from an essay by Tony Judt, a professor and historian who's paralyzed from neck down:

Ask yourself how often you move in the night. I don’t mean change location altogether (e.g., to go to the bathroom, though that too): merely how often you shift a hand, a foot; how frequently you scratch assorted body parts before dropping off; how unselfconsciously you alter position very slightly to find the most comfortable one. Imagine for a moment that you had been obliged instead to lie absolutely motionless on your back—by no means the best sleeping position, but the only one I can tolerate—for seven unbroken hours and constrained to come up with ways to render this Calvary tolerable not just for one night but for the rest of your life.

My solution has been to scroll through my life, my thoughts, my fantasies, my memories, mis-memories, and the like until I have chanced upon events, people, or narratives that I can employ to divert my mind from the body in which it is encased. These mental exercises have to be interesting enough to hold my attention and see me through an intolerable itch in my inner ear or lower back; but they also have to be boring and predictable enough to serve as a reliable prelude and encouragement to sleep. It took me some time to identify this process as a workable alternative to insomnia and physical discomfort and it is by no means infallible. But I am occasionally astonished, when I reflect upon the matter, at how readily I seem to get through, night after night, week after week, month after month, what was once an almost insufferable nocturnal ordeal. I wake up in exactly the position, frame of mind, and state of suspended despair with which I went to bed—which in the circumstances might be thought a considerable achievement.

Thrills & Messages

2009-12-28T21:13:00.007-05:00

I saw No Country for Old Men yesterday and Unnaipol Oruvan today. Plenty of spoilers.

The chief among the many irritants puncturing 'Unnaipol Oruvan' is not its adolescent understanding of the political/judicial/social set-ups that define a country in dealing with terrorists but its horrible dialogs. When a 'terrorist' (Kamal Haasan) calls the chief police officer of the state (Mohanlal) to negotiate the release of imprisoned terrorists, Mohanlal asks "Is it true?" and "Who are you?" If you've read Forsyth's Negotiator you would have been better at dealing with terrorists. But on second thoughts, if you're dealing with a 'terrorist' bubbling with teenage-angst who demands instant justice such a negotiation doesn't seem like a bad idea. Stereotypes abound (a young geeky hacker, a good Muslim police officer, a Hindu arms dealer, etc), this movie is another in the line of disposable non-entertainment.

Tom Friedman has been writing for a while about the abysmal absence of rebellion among Muslims at the gross injustice perpetrated between themselves while they waste no opportunity to show up in unison be it a slanderous cartoon or a panda bear called Mohammed. So this movie has taken it up - a non-Muslim Muslim who calls himself a 'common man' tired of terrorists siphoning off the goodwill of the religion decides to call it even by killing the terrorists.

The repeated usage of kid gloves by Kamal in dealing with complex themes has resulted in a sharp drop in my respect for him. When half the Tamil film community goes gaga over Kamal's gamut of knowledge one expects that to be displayed in his films. (I know he's working on a borrowed script, but nobody stopped him from improving it). Even if he thinks the Tamil audience are not ready for something like Do the Right Thing he doesn't have much to lose. He's not at the peak of his career, he's well past it. All the thukda actors and writers have been singing paeans for more than a decade now. If he can't raise the bar, especially with such low budget productions where you don't burn your financial fingers, then Kamal doesn't get to complain about the quality of Tamil cinema.

The Coen brothers' 'No Country for Old Men' is a stunning film. There's less dialog to be heard than most other films. The atmosphere Coens create is just damn immersing. For the most part it's a thriller and a very good one at that. A man (Josh Brolin) stumbles into a horribly gone drug deal where all the players are dead in the middle of a desert with the drugs and money sitting tight. He sets off with the money, which leads another man (Javier Bardem) to pursue him. Their cat-and-mouse misadventures leaves a trail of bodies which brings in another man (Tommy Lee Jones), the sheriff of the town, into the picture.

Javier Bardem portrays a chilling psychopath and I don't remember the last time I twitched my fingers at the sight of a villain before seeing his performance. There's a scene that would easily walk into my annals of best scenes - we already know that Bardem doesn't need a reason to kill when he walks in a small town gas station (in 1980, west Texas). A conversation that ensues between him and the store owner gets so creepy and tense that I wanted to go out in the balcony, get a fresh breath of air, and then come back a bit relaxed. I don't know if this piece of brilliance is right out of McCarthy's page or from the fertile brains of the twisted Coens, but the belt hanging behind the owner, a visual symbol for a hangman's halter, sure belongs to the brothers.

The final segment of the film is completely devoid of thrills and delves into the pathos of the sheriff. He's concerned at the rise in crime without any motives. He comes from a family of police officers and he has heard stories. But working on a case that involves a psychopath who kills for the sake of it (not the mention the first lines of the film where the sheriff recalls the murder of a 14 year old girl by her boyfriend, again, for no reason) gets him depressed at the cultural depravity encroaching the society. The best he can do in summarizing this descent is in these words: "I think once you stop hearing 'Sir' and 'Ma'am,' all the rest follows".

There's a structural similarity between these two movies when seen from 50K feet - they both start like thrillers and end with a message. But that's as close as I can get to equating them. 'Unnaipol Oruvan' screams and yells I'm-a-thriller with its phone-call traces and pulsing music and then whams a 'message' to its audience in the last 15 minutes in an unabashed sophomoric style. 'No Country for Old Men' is so taut, visually and thematically, there's not a slight sag in the narration. Those looking for thrills to extend until the credit roll may be disappointed with the final 15 minutes. But it's a mature moral tale - a tale not shoved into my face, but I did the math to figure it on my own.

Avatar

2009-12-20T10:38:00.007-05:00

James Cameron is Hollywood's best special-effects-sentimental geek. From Aliens to Titanic, he's been covering new grounds in getting technology to further his stories featuring maudlin plots and clichéd outcomes but look very good on the screen. Avatar is in line with the era in terms of technology but sinks to new depths in a narration that's a juvenile bash against US foreign policies, corporatism and an anti-green lifestyle. Should someone should tell him that the pure-profit motif he decries in corporate America is responsible for all the technology that made the visuals of this movie so spectacular and the capitalism-believing studio executives funded his $300M project and chain theaters will make him millions as it has before? Well, who am I kidding here?

Here's a brief outline of the story: 2154. Earth is desperately looking for energy resources. A distant space body called Pandora has this rich mineral, funnily titled, unobtanium. Corporations and military send a force to study the natives of Pandora, negotiate a displacement to mine the mineral under their, wait for this, sacred tree. If negotiation doesn't work military might will have to be sought. (Why only the U.S military if the whole of Earth needs energy resources? China already bats towards imperialism. I would have appreciated Cameron if there had been a racial/geographical medley instead of just American soldiers. We see an Asian scientist, but he finally turns out to be a good guy).

I'm not a fan of good vs evil stories painted in broad strokes. You can make a movie appealing to anti-war and go-green activists, but this one is thematically immature to have a meaningful conversation about them when stepping out of the theater. (Ironically though, it has borrowed concepts from The Matrix, Dances with the Wolves and The Last Samurai, all of which do a decent job of getting the audience to delve into their worlds). Spielberg once said that visual effects should help the story, it cannot be the story. He also said that many give credit to Cameron for the technocrat he is but not the story-teller. I agree with the 1st sentence, not the 2nd one.

But go see it in 3-D for the visual orgasms it has to offer. This I like very much about Cameron - being able to realize the surreal imagery in his mind onto the screen. The world of Pandora is spectacularly vibrant, colorful and interesting. The middle segment is spacious and sets up the bond between the hero (a bio-engineered part human part native) and heroine. Cameron's not Michael Bay to throw up an action sequence once every 20 minutes. When there are no fights, there are adventures. We see new things along with the hero. This is a sample entrée in the banquet for my fantasy taste buds: the hero climbing up floating mountains to tame a flying dragon and claim one is a rite of passage in getting accepted into their community.

On Twitter

2009-12-16T20:23:00.003-05:00

I'm on Twitter. I'll try to cut down on my just-quote posts (where I say nothing but just quote a block) and move them to Twitter. Of course, there will be much more. This will be an experiment for me as I don't quite know to work crispness and humor into a short sentence and at the same time say something meaningful.

2009-12-09T10:50:00.002-05:00

This is quite scary:

During a year-long gambling binge at the Caesars Palace and Rio casinos in 2007, Terrance Watanabe managed to lose nearly $127 million.
The run is believed to be one of the biggest losing streaks by an individual in Las Vegas history. It devoured much of Mr. Watanabe's personal fortune, he says, which he built up over more than two decades running his family's party-favor import business in Omaha, Neb. It also benefitted the two casinos' parent company, Harrah's Entertainment Inc., which derived about 5.6% of its Las Vegas gambling revenue from Mr. Watanabe that year.
In a civil suit filed in Clark County District Court last month, Mr. Watanabe, 52 years old, says casino staff routinely plied him with liquor and pain medication as part of a systematic plan to keep him gambling.

It's scary because there were no signs of such behavior during Watanabe's early life. His fortune was not inherited. He joined his father's business when he was 15 and slowly built an empire. To transform a small toy store to a $300 million conglomerate requires not only extraordinary business acumen but also discipline and control - something that's not found in addictive gamblers. And then such a sudden descent in this manner, as if someone with no monetary orderliness won a lottery and decided to bungle it up, shakes me.

PS: Read the whole article, it's very good reporting.

Vaaranam Aayiram

2009-12-08T15:11:00.003-05:00

When I decried the quality of Tamil films to a friend and how I can't get past 10 minutes of many that I've tried to watch in the recent past he insisted that I see 'Vaaranam Aayiram'. After watching it for 30 minutes I wanted to stop, but I persuaded myself because I haven't seen a Tamil film until the credits rolled since 'Dasavatharam' and wanted to sit through this one for the heck of it. Then I decided that in such circumstances I should go with my instinct and save myself some time.

While the usual formula contains part cleavage and part punch-dialogues, Gautam Menon, the director, in an effort to give the audience a 'non-movie' movie experience has stripped some of the ingredients. There are fights where the hero doesn't fly. The father is friendly, not fire-breathing. The hero falls flat after losing his love but picks up life with another woman and marches on. More importantly, there's no flow in the narration where elements of screenplay converge in the end for a grand denouement. But pretentious drab should not be confused with film art. 'Vaaranam Aayiram' is long and fails to engage. It's not cerebral and doesn't deserve delving into its themes.

While Menon wants to be appreciated for his bold vision for his tangential sub-plots in the second half, we can sense his turmoil to abide by some of the Tamil cinema's rules. Songs. There's a 10 minute episode on how the protagonist's parents fell in love in the 70s. Surya as a school boy? Give or take 20 years, the viewers won't notice! Although I'm annoyed by overacting heroines, Menon flashes his female leads with their underacting. Their stilted range of emotions is annoying too. The biggest downer is Menon's dialogues - in trying to be poetic he's managed sophomoric. Some may sleep through, some may scratch their heads and some may be wowed. I just didn't hate the picture.

But I'm happy the film is made. Surya is no better than Vijay for accepting such a non-commercial project for it all boils down to holding onto one's fort. While Vijay and Ajith have a strong viewership in B & C centers, Surya and Vikram with their flair for experimenting alternate between commercial and challenging roles to earn audience with sophisticated tastes. Nobody serves the art; every actor prostitutes their talent for money. But with the success of every Vijay/Ajith film we're traveling back in time. With the usual nonsense on how a woman should dress to crass comedy capitalizing disabled people their movies propagate virulent stereotypes. With at least 'Vaaranam Aayiram', we're going in another direction - it's progressive because there's no social degradation.

2009-12-03T15:30:00.000-05:00

This is interesting:

A judge has finalised a settlement in which film studio Sony will pay $1.5m (£850,000) to film fans after using a fake critic to praise its movies.

In 2001, ads for films including Hollow Man and A Knight's Tale quoted praise from a reviewer called David Manning, who was exposed as being invented.

He supposedly called Heath Ledger "this year's hottest new star" for his role in A Knight's Tale, said The Animal was "another winner" and Hollow Man was "one hell of a scary ride".

People who saw the films in the US can now get a $5 (£2.80) refund from Sony's pay-out, lawyer Norman Blumenthal said.

Sony did something enormously stupid. Their fictional cinema critic was just one Google search away from being exposed and still they went ahead. But the legal aspect of the outcome is interesting. So, if I saw the movie and retained the theater stub I'm eligible for a $5 pay-out. The judge thinks that it's appropriate the studio compensate half of the ticket price for cheating its audience. And 'cheating' here means misleading the common man by a fake positive review. I think the judge was legally bound to compensate the viewer somehow. But does it make common sense?

Shouldn't the audience who claim their $5 back be asked to prove that they saw the cinema only because of the fake review by the fake critic? No, because it's logically undecidable. This leads me to another question - how many cinema goers go to a specific cinema because their favorite critic recommended it? Before the internet, whatever newspaper/weekly you subscribed to and whatever critic worked for that publisher played a role. But now everyone has access to every cinema pundits' bytes. Rottentomatoes pools together reviews of popular critics. And IMDb has its rating for every movie - voted by the general public.

At the beginning of this decade, when my interest in cinema was at its peak, I devoured every review from every pundit. There was a phase where I allowed the critics to dictate what I should think about the movie. Wag the Dog is an example - I thought it was bland and predictable, but critics loved it. I read them all and taught myself to love it. This primarily came from the insecurity that I don't know enough, not mature enough, not culturally acclimatized enough to appreciate the product. It took a while for me to realize that I'll always be, heck, even some cinema pundits will be, inadequate and not always get the director's vision. Sometimes, it's just a cheap writer/director conveying something unworthy of serious interrogation. Sometimes a truly serious message is lost on me. But either way there's no need for me to hide my real thoughts.

I saw '2012' last week after reading Roger Ebert's review. For those who don't know much about film critics he's their equivalent of Brad Pitt. He won the 1st Pulitzer for film criticism (of only 2) and most of the times my likes and dislikes are in agreement with his. The cinema was such a disaster that I wanted to punch my fist through the screen (as if there weren't enough holes in the movie). If that's his only review some reads they'll think he has an IQ of the director of 2012. Since I've followed him over the years I know that's his guilty pleasure. He recommends some crazy products from time to time.

Now that I have rambled let me try to connect the dots and conjure a few points. Most people don't listen to critics. They have their favorite actors, directors, writers to decide if they should go to a movie. Those who read/listen to critics always take that with a pinch of salt. And they gradually educate if the taste of their critic matches theirs. But nobody I know ever respects blurbs behind DVD cases or newspaper ads. Those short sentences always have to be 'Brilliantly directed' or as in this case 'Another Winner'. Sony had to pay for something nobody would anyway have based their movie-going decision on and that's just dumb.

2009-12-01T10:17:00.003-05:00

Leaders of two very significant democracies come together. And it's on the eve of the first anniversary of a terrorist attack on one of the countries. Obama is about to announce his Afghan policy today while India plays a crucial role in the stability and reconstruction of that region. And I repeatedly read and hear the Salahi's breach into the state dinner. Not just at this respected news daily, but all my news sources have home-page items on the Salahis. In this loud media fart I wasn't able to find a single piece from the top dailies (Times, Post & the Journal) on the immensity of Singh's visit.

The couple that crashed into the party are celebrity whores. They're famous now for trying to get famous. And they want to get a bit more famous so that they can be even more famous. But what about the audience who care about politics, war, economy, health care? They're now driven to focus-journals like National Affairs & Foreign Policy. The editors are not even emphasizing the breach as an indication of the holes in the security details for the leader of the free world - they're carrying profiles of the crashers and what they're up to. With the flurry of coverage given to nonsense like balloon boy, Levi Johnston and now the Salahis, they're ...

2009-11-25T09:57:00.004-05:00

In Minority Report, set in 2054, Tom Cruise has transparent discs half the size of CDs which hold high quality video that can be projected. Spielberg consulted scientists from MIT ( and elsewhere) to visualize a futuristic home.

Now, even in 2002, we saw the beginning of the decline of personal storage tools with every digital content moving to the cloud. Although we have Bluray today for super-high-defintion content, in about 10 years when the information infrastructure is strong & deep and processing powers are manifold than what we enjoy today (when is Moore's law going to hit the physical limits and stop working?) every audio & video will be streamed from the cloud, it will be of supreme quality and there won't be any buffer time.

Did the MIT guys not see it coming? Or did Spielberg refuse because it would be a bland sci-fi prop to see a video clipping from the web compared to those cool mini-discs?

2009-11-20T09:59:00.007-05:00

And I thought WPUJC Waas, the Srilankan blower, had too many initials. [Scorecard]

Living Within Means

2009-11-17T14:13:00.010-05:00

Occasionally I blow-off steam. Being raised in a financially conservative society makes you think 18 times before you start to shop around for a nice pair of shoes. But compare that with the all-you-can-eat cheap money made possible to Americans by conservative savers like Chinese:

When Michelle Patterson was laid off as an executive director of marketing for a publishing company in January, she figured she could subsist comfortably, at least for a while, on the $20,000 she had reserved from her savings and severance combined. She continued to eat out regularly and made daily Starbucks runs.
"It made me feel like I was still at work," says the 41-year-old resident of Newark, N.J. She spent as much as $250 a week on networking meals and drinks with contacts. Some days, she scheduled up to four coffee meetings a day, picking up the tab most of the time. She also spent $30 a month for pedicures and $150 on her hair.
The reckoning came in August, when she examined her finances. Her condo had been on the market for six months but she'd yet to receive a single offer. Her severance and savings were nearly gone.

As much as I'd like to go out there and live the moment, fiscal discipline is so ingrained into me (just as it is for a mass middle class who grew up in India before the IT revolution along with other money spinners arrived) that it's quite impossible to sign-up for something beyond my capabilities. But American culture as a whole has exhibited an acceptable risk that has pushed its limits consistently - it's okay to buy a new car, new house, send kids to private schools, dine out regularly, take that Hawaii vacation - even if it's not in your means.

My philosophy is that if I fail, it's my personal responsibility. But for a good chunk of the Americans the cause of a failure is packaged and handed over to someone else - the lending firm whose practices are predatory, easily available credit cards that charge 34% interest, pay $0 to drive out a new car while the finer print said something monstrous. This finger-pointing, though not completely unjustified, has give birth to a thriving law business. Everyone wants to sue someone. This in turn has made the credit card firms, banks, auto dealers, insurance companies, etc get super legal protection who lobby for bills in favor of them or at least for bills that aren't too favorable to consumers.

A few months back I quoted a NewYorker article about American food culture where an entrepreneur gradually increased the portion size; the general public don't want to drink 3 cans of coke but it's okay to drink from a mini-well of coke that wonderfully complements the mini-bucket of popcorn. The normal serving sizes of junk food today are up from a generation ago. The same goes for houses, cars, credit card limits (considering inflation)... Market sees that if the common man likes to go on binge-eating, he's going to need a bigger shirt to wear, a bigger couch to sit on, a bigger house to roam around, a bigger car to drive around and a bigger coffin to rest. Americans know capitalism much better than anyone else. The mass wanted to move from a producer economy to a consumer economy. And the market delivered it.

Coming back to the above quote, two factors come to my mind - instant gratification & peer pressure. Going to a Starbucks and spending $3 on a coffee makes a statement about the person to the rest and that should make them feel good. The same goes for the car they drive, the dress they wear and the TV in their house. It's hard to dismiss them as having no foresight. Unemployed ones can't sustain this lifestyle and it doesn't take a Nobel prize in economics to see that. But they feel the need to continue the way they live so that they're respected. As behavioral economists would say, such acts aren't cold logical decision making sessions but are largely influenced by friends and neighbors and colleagues. And when an unemployed family continues to burn their savings to continue their way of living, they set a new standard for future unemployed persons.

PS: I know these observations are sweeping generalizations and over-simplifications, but they reflect reality at a reasonable level.

2009-11-10T11:38:00.002-05:00

It seems like I'm on another spree of linkfest without any of my commentary. But I can't resist this nugget of wisdom.

2009-11-06T15:58:00.003-05:00

Calling this Adoor Gopalakrishnan's piece bad would be an understatement. I'm having second thoughts about seeing his movies. [Emphasis mine].

A director of popular films in Malayalam recently said that the farther his films were from the realities of life, the better their chances of becoming commercially successful. But I think filmmakers should have a responsibility to their audience. They should not cheat the people, ignore them or assume they are intellectually inferior. Filmmakers need to have a lot of respect for their audience. Only then will their movies become worthwhile works of art. Most popular filmmakers take their audiences for granted. This is the most important difference between the makers of popular films and those of better films.

We go to a movie to see something new, to enliven our minds and our brains. We do it for the same reason we read a good book — to know what we don’t, to transport ourselves into experiences that we have not known, to look through another’s eyes. A work of art, whether it is literature or cinema, attains a certain importance when it enables us to experience life at close quarters. Such literature and films surely give pleasure — real entertainment to their audiences.

2009-11-05T11:13:00.001-05:00

This is tragic:

What's striking is the way young Chinese people can progress from first kiss to multiple abortions in a relatively short time. Take Hu and her college roommates, who all arrived at school as virgins. Early on, one roommate from Guizhou—a poor, rural province in the south of China—asked Hu and the others how she was supposed to kiss: with or without tongue? But by the time they graduated, all four roommates were sleeping with boys, and the girl on the bunk below Hu had had three abortions in one year.

2009-11-04T13:34:00.002-05:00

John McWhorter writes about the death of languages:

The main loss when a language dies is not cultural but aesthetic. The click sounds in certain African languages are magnificent to hear. In many Amazonian languages, when you say something you have to specify, with a suffix, where you got the information. The Ket language of Siberia is so awesomely irregular as to seem a work of art.
But let’s remember that this aesthetic delight is mainly savored by the outside observer, often a professional savorer like myself. Professional linguists or anthropologists are part of a distinct human minority. Most people, in the West or anywhere else, find the fact that there are so many languages in the world no more interesting than I would find a list of all the makes of Toyota. So our case for preserving the world’s languages cannot be based on how fascinating their variegation appears to a few people in the world. The question is whether there is some urgent benefit to humanity from the fact that some people speak click languages, while others speak Ket or thousands of others, instead of everyone speaking in a universal tongue.

2009-10-29T11:38:00.000-04:00

Gladwell writes:

The statistician Stephen Stigler once wrote an elegant essay about the futility of the practice of eponymy in science—that is, the practice of naming a scientific discovery after its inventor. That's another idea inappropriately borrowed from the cultural realm. As Stigler pointed out, "It can be found that Laplace employed Fourier Transforms in print before Fourier published on the topic, that Lagrange presented Laplace Transforms before Laplace began his scientific career, that Poisson published the Cauchy distribution in 1824, twenty-nine years before Cauchy touched on it in an incidental manner, and that Bienaymé stated and proved the Chebychev Inequality a decade before and in greater generality than Chebychev's first work on the topic." For that matter, the Pythagorean theorem was known before Pythagoras; Gaussian distributions were not discovered by Gauss. The examples were so legion that Stigler declared the existence of Stigler's Law: "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." There are just too many people with an equal shot at those ideas floating out there in the ether. We think we're pinning medals on heroes. In fact, we're pinning tails on donkeys.

2009-10-28T16:42:00.003-04:00

A few years back there were deadly car bombs going off in Iraq every week that casualties became a back-burner news item. Every network treated it as "yeah, yeah, one more bazaar explosion.. we were expecting it". Is Pakistan next in line?

Pre-Mid Life

2009-10-22T19:09:00.004-04:00

I'm planning to buy a car. After a ton of research a desi usually narrows the options down to 'you can't go wrong with this' Honda or a Toyota. It sickens me - not to drive one of those but to conform to a set of rules where value for money precedes comfort, driving pleasure. Not just in the matter of choosing a car but almost every decision in life is calculated to yield maximum value, choose the least risky route thereby optimizing for a mediocre life. Not just financially, but also in terms of experience, the richness of life. Bull shit. For once I want to buy a sports car. I want to drain my savings by taking a week long vacation in Paris staying in a good hotel, enjoying great cuisine, visiting wonderful museums, operas, ballets, smyphonies, tennis matches. I want to go see a cinema on a Wednesday evening. Sometimes I strongly feel like I want to quit my job and become a full-time blogger. Or write a novel. Or become a high school math teacher. Or educate myself in a field like history or anthropology. Clinging onto a monthly pay to take care of the bills is fucking poisonous.

Kandhasamy

2009-10-20T23:10:00.004-04:00

Saw bits and pieces of Vikram's Kandhasamy. The casting director should be shot for casting Krishna as a CBI officer. And the writer should be hanged for writing him Tamil lines. There's no reason to alienate his fanbase.

2009-10-19T14:29:00.001-04:00

Jacob Weisberg writes:

That Rupert Murdoch may skew the news rightward more for commercial than ideological reasons is somewhat beside the point. What matters is the way that Fox's successful model has invaded the bloodstream of the American media. By showing that ideologically distorted news can drive ratings, Ailes has provoked his rivals at CNN and MSNBC to experiment with a variety of populist and ideological takes on the news. It's Fox that led CNN's Lou Dobbs to remodel himself into a nativist cartoon. It's Fox that led MSNBC to amp up Keith Olbermann. Fox hasn't just corrupted its own coverage. Through its influence, it has made all of cable news unpleasant and unreliable.

The Promised Podcast Debuts

2009-10-18T02:47:00.006-04:00

Here's my podcast. Varahasimhan, a friend, collaborates with me on this. This is our first. There are grunts, groans, pauses, stutters, grammar errors, repetitions, poor audio quality in parts, etc. Let me remind you: this is our first podcast. We both were quite the tight-asses that we usually are not. Recording our conversation made us slightly conscious of ourselves, I guess. When we discussed the final topic I had a lot to say but came across quite incoherent. I hope to get better with time.

You can download the podcast here.

This one's in English. Here's the timeline:
0 - 5 mins: Introduction, Why Podcast?
5 - 21 mins: FTC's new regulation for bloggers.
22 - 25 mins: Marge Simpson's Playboy Centerfold
26 - 42 mins: Is our society compromising ethics by liberalizing?
43 - 44 mins: Goodbye

We'll be doing one in Tamil quite soon and I'm hoping we'll be our relaxed selves joking around. We greatly appreciate your feedback.

Update: The audio quality is poorer than I expected. I used Skype to call, Powergramo to record the call and Audacity to clean up the background noise. I realize that I should have subjected the audio file to some volume-even process because for a good part my voice level is low. If you have any alternative technologies to suggest, please do. I want my second podcast to be very very clear.

Markets & Models

2009-10-14T10:22:00.006-04:00

This is bad reporting. I'm not expecting NewYoker's level of depth from every daily or weekly, but I read the whole piece (surprisingly through Slatest) and felt bah at the end. On top of conveying nothing, it's plain vanilla stupid. This is the capsule: Filippa Hamilton, a model for Ralph Lauren (RL) was fired because she's fat. She said "They fired me because they said I was overweight and I couldn't fit in their clothes anymore". Hamilton's photo was published after digitally doctoring making her look unbelievably slim. "I think they owe American women an apology, a big apology," she said. "I'm very proud of what I look like, and I think a role model should look healthy." And this becomes news? Rolling-eyeballs, scratching-head, plug in your favorite cliche, but wasn't she getting paid for her figure, skin texture, bust size, etc?

I'm not a fan of models. They look anemic and there's no life in their eyes. Though I find some of them beautiful their expressionless ramp walk makes them all look like cold-hearted robots. But that's just me. The market's requirements are different. Cultural conditioning goes a long way in defining beauty. And it is such culture codes embedded unconsciously that dictates RL to hire or fire models. Men in west dream of slim, smooth skinned and sharp featured women which makes women want to have those attributes. Jared Diamond once wrote in an essay that men in Papua New Guinea thought western women were sexually unattractive, "look at their pale skin, small breasts and weak arms, they're not fit for raising a family" they would say. (Had it been Papau New Guinea she would have been fired for not being plump enough).

Hamilton's second statement can be interpreted as opportunistic if only it weren't so moronic. She has had a contract with RL since 2002 and all the while she must have passed their metric test. Now that she's put on some flesh she's suddenly proud of her looks and demands an apology - not to her - but American women. Her implication is ludicrous. Any advertisement for a personal adornment feeds to a dream. Somehow their product makes you feel good, improves your productivity, adds class. Even a silly deodorizer transforms you from a office geek to a babe magnet. Women's clothing being such a big market and RL being such a premier they have high standards of the dream they want their customers to experience.

PS: I was very reluctant on writing this post because what I have to say seems so obvious. But I had to persuade myself into posting this because it must not be obvious to a few who think it's news worthy (NY Daily, Slate).

2009-10-12T16:12:00.001-04:00

Dawkins says:

"[My biology teacher] came into class and asked: 'What animal feeds on hydra?' We didn't know. He went right around the whole class asking. Everybody was guessing, and then, finally, we said, 'Sir, Sir, what animal does?' And he waited and waited, and then he said, 'I don't know. And I don't think Mr Coulson does either.' He burst into the next room, got Mr Coulson and dragged him out by the arm, and he didn't know either! It was a wonderful lesson, I never forgot it and neither did anyone else: it's OK to not know the answer."

Podcast in the Offing

2009-10-11T03:11:00.008-04:00

I was reading some of by earlier blogs posts - the ones I wrote about 8 years back. It was sickening to my stomach and strongly felt like throwing up. There were some generous people who said "You can write". Wow, talk about humanity. Anyway, I was reading these cringe-worthy posts and then I thought about the ones I had written in diaries even before that which nobody knows where they're now. Though it comes as a relief, there's some distress. I don't remember how bad they are. In other words, I'm trying to measure my evolution in terms of my thought process. Not just my range of thinking but also my skill to express those ideas coherently.

And then I thought 10 years hence I'll have a bunch of blog posts, but why should I restrict myself to the written word. With such posts I always have the freedom to edit & update a number of times. But with a podcast I don't think I'd have the willingness to rerecord whole sentences, edit the old one out and plug the new one in. Polishing a podcast would be painful - and that's nice because that would be a raw and faithful representation of my thoughts. Moreover, to be able to know about my thoughts through my own voice has a strong fingerprint element to it than written words.

All pumped up, I started recording using the software that comes with the machine - and the quality was awful. Well a part of the credit goes to my timbre, but the technology is to be blamed too. I'll research a bit, download a proper audio software, buy a microphone and post my first podcast by next weekend. But here's the thing, though each of my posts hardly take 2.5 minutes to be read the podcasts will be quite longer. Of course there'll be some rambling but I plan to include stuff that I would usually have exorcised from the post. I consider it a success if I can publish a podcast every month.

Hmm, I'm thinking way ahead of myself. Let me publish my first podcast and see how it all works out.

Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize And the Academy is Asked WTF

2009-10-09T14:24:00.006-04:00

The Nobel committee sent a bouquet of roses to the White House today morning and sent tins of black paint to 204 other individuals and organizations that were nominated for this year's peace prize. The nominations for 2009 peace prize closed on Feb 11, just 21 days after he was inaugurated. His success at the international level can mostly be narrowed down to stellar speeches which strove hard to reshape the image of America. But that's not in any way adequate to even consider him for such a reputed international prize.

I'm a huge fan of Obama as a personality. He embodies personal responsibility and effuses charm. His speech-making skills are supreme. And I don't doubt his intentions - he wants the world to reduce their nuclear arsenal, he's encouraging greater co-operation between nations to fight climate change and he's taking human rights seriously in countries like China & Myanmar. I think the prize for all of his qualities and vision was given by the American electorate when they elected him the president. Now it's time for him to restore the confidence of American public and project diplomacy & pragmatism, which his predecessor lacked, in the world arena.

Many say that this could be interpreted as a work-in-progress and could be validated for the actions the man will take in the years to come, but that's such a weak argument. The MacArthur genius grant does that - they choose accomplished personalities and give $100000/year for five years with no strings attached, providing artistes and scientists a much needed financial freedom so that they can continue their great work and contribute to the society. But to be shortlisted for the genius grant one should have a solid record, not just noble visions.

Nobel prizes are usually awarded to personalities who have made ground-breaking changes in their field of work. The peace prize has been quite wobbly - you don't see a Ph.D student starting research on a promising technology nominated in the physics category. In this light it is surprising to even think about Obama's nomination, let alone his victory. If the committee were hell bent on giving some prize, they should have given him the literature prize. As an author of 2 best selling books, his literary resume is a bit heavier than his political one from an award perspective.

Update: And now to why I like Obama. He said the following today morning:

Let me be clear, I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations.

To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honored by this prize, men and women who've inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.

Hero

2009-10-09T01:46:00.004-04:00

The camera is placed in a horribly out of control swing that goes hither and thither - aimed at the general direction of the south Asian man who's emerging from the waves, without a shirt but with a pant, but wait a minute, there are 11 white girls in tightly stitched bikinis that their nipples pierce through.... where was I, yeah, what are they doing running their hands over the chest of this clueless man person who hasn't shaved in 2 days and why is the cameraman cranking in and out the zooming functionality of the lens so as to go from an excruciating panoramic shot with everything-in-the-frame but no fucking detail to another excruciating water crashing water molecule freaking hydrogen-oxygen bond shot and while it's a breezy balmy day at the beach what the heck was the costume designer thinking when he gave those sun glasses to what now seems to be the alpha male and now why is he moving his hands and legs crazily in the streets of London while those waiting for their bus watch this retard with a mix of pity and disgust and now he's driving this red convertible through the lush green pastures of Switzerland and there are cows, big ones, in the background.

Why hasn't Salman Rushdie Won the Nobel Prize Yet?

2009-10-07T16:39:00.005-04:00

The Academy will announce the winner of Nobel Prize for Literature for 2009 tomorrow. I read 'Midnight's Children' when I was 23 and went haywire why they still hadn't given Rushdie the prize. This FAQ is for such young men (and women of course).

What? Yeah, yeah I'm still a young man.

Why didn’t/doesn’t Author X get it?

A lot of people claim to know exactly why certain authors get or don’t get the prize. Which is funny, considering the aforementioned confidentiality. Truth is, until 50 years have gone by, we usually have no way of knowing if they were even nominated.

Pick a reason:

There’s one award to give out each year, and on average, more than one deserving author. New books are published each year. Do the math.
The people who decide on it are a bunch of literary snobs. They’re not necessarily politically conservative (by US standards) or raging communist revolutionaries (by European standards). They’re just snobs, elected by other snobs for the specific task of being anal about language and literature.
Not everyone is a prophet in their own lifetime. See: Kafka, Franz; Proust, Marcel; and others.
People, on a whole, read an awful lot of crap and keep expecting the Academy to validate their reading habits. Not gonna happen (see above under snobs, literary).
The Academy has really boring taste sometimes. Fortunately, the older members are dying off.
People like to speculate, and they seem to think that the longer they speculate about an author, the better his/her chances of getting it. Whether the Academy gives a damn about how often a certain author has been mentioned by people who are not them is unknown.
Authors die. The Nobel can’t be given out posthumously. Good thing, or they’d have to start with Homer and Gilgamesh.
Authors live. Not getting it one year doesn’t disqualify you from getting it next year or 20 years from now. See: Lessing, Doris.

And so some writers, for various reasons, end up without a Nobel prize. Funnily enough, we keep reading them despite their non-Nobel status. Putting it succinctly: if Tolstoy, Woolf, Joyce and Twain didn’t get it, there can be no shame in NOT getting a Nobel prize.

The Polanski Affair

2009-10-02T15:30:00.005-04:00

If you don't know anything about the Polanski news item, here's a brief recap: Polanski, at the height of his Hollywood celebdom in 1977 took a 13 year old girl to the actor Jack Nicholson's house saying that he's going to take pictures of her for the French edition of Vogue. He gave her drugged champagne and once her senses were quite numbed he performed oral sex, sexual intercourse and sodomy. Before each act she had resisted by saying 'No' and he had forced his way through. To escape conviction he fled the U.S. He was arrested last week in Zurich. He was on his way to the Swiss Film Festival to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award. At the time of this post, there's a good chance that he'll be extradited to U.S and sentenced.

About 8 years back when my movie hormones were pumped up I tried reading an unofficial biography of Polanski. The tone dealing with his crime was romanticized. It talked about how as a boy he had a rough ride under the Nazis in the Krakow camp, his mother was killed in the ghetto, how his fully pregnant wife was murdered - all giving him a turbulent state of mind. And to top it all, the author portrayed the girl as having features that were well older than a 13 year old, which might have confused (rather invited) him about her real age. It was morally repulsive to continue reading a book that cheaply defended a criminal and I put it down.

But to my surprise, it was not just that author who seems to be enamored with Polanski as an artiste, most of today's France is. It is one thing for a group of cinema directors (Scorsese being one of them) to stand united behind him and ask for the charges be dropped (as repugnant as it may be). But for politicians to call the arrest "Absolutely horrifying" and "Judicial lynching" is plainly preposterous. They have an obligation to say at least the politically right thing, not just reflect popular sentiment.

Some defenders claim that even the victim has forgiven and moved on and why should the law authorities continue to pursue. That the victim has moved on shows her grace and maturity. If anything, that's how one copes with her life - by treating every new day the first day of the rest of her life. But the idea of the justice system is to ensure fairness by assuring the common man and his teenage daughter that those with powerful connections don't escape through cracks. A good artiste does in no way translates to a law abiding person and as much as good art is necessary for society, strong law enforcement is even more vital for the functioning of a society.

History is replete with abusive, unstable, socially graceless artistes who have gone on to produce masterpieces that have stood the test of time. I try to see Polanski and his works as separate entities. If we had to judge a song or a movie or a painting based on the moral highness of the artiste producing it, we'd have a lot of empty galleries, silent airwaves and crappy movies. Polanksi, as a director, has been handed the lifetime award by cinema fans long before. I don't think his notoriety will surpass his artistry. Picasso was never faithful to his 3 wives, but we don't remember him for that. With that in mind, Polanski should surrender himself without posing legal challenges and in the process make himself a real man.

Seeds of Objectivism

2009-09-27T13:25:00.000-04:00

From Jon Chait review of a couple of books on Ayn Rand:

Anne C. Heller, in her skillful life of Rand, traces the roots of Rand's philosophy to an even earlier age. Around the age of five, Alissa Rosenbaum's [Ayn Rand] mother instructed her to put away some of her toys for a year. She offered up her favorite possessions, thinking of the joy that she would feel when she got them back after a long wait. When the year had passed, she asked her mother for the toys, only to be told she had given them away to an orphanage. Heller remarks that "this may have been Rand's first encounter with injustice masquerading as what she would later acidly call ‘altruism.’ " (The anti-government activist Grover Norquist has told a similar story from childhood, in which his father would steal bites of his ice cream cone, labelling each bite "sales tax" or "income tax." The psychological link between a certain form of childhood deprivation and extreme libertarianism awaits serious study.)

2009-09-27T12:09:00.005-04:00

I'm an eloquent man, most of the times. When questioned or in need of an explanation I put forth my thoughts quite clearly that the listener doesn't need a rephrasing or a repetition of my response. But with the missus I'm another man. Today morning at 5 there was a barrage of accusations that I don't wake up enough times to put my child to sleep. God knows how many tons of hours of sleep I've sacrificed; alas, there's isn't a god. And today morning as usual I was stuttering, marshaling my argument skills with no effect while the lady shot point by point, instance by instance, quoting date and time leaving me wanting a glass of water. Had it been another person in a different setting, I'd have shot back too, but this time I was merely repeating the same thing again and again which she incorrectly discredited.

And this is not the first time nor am I the only husband. What happens to our skill to logically progress an argument with the wife in tight family corners?

2009-09-23T20:22:00.006-04:00

Look at the evolution of a blogger. Amit Varma, author of IndiaUncut, the most popular Indian blog used to write some decent pieces for Mint & Cricinfo. After winning the Bastiat Prize for online journalism, competing with serious writers like Clive Crook, he's now the most popular media-porn columnist in India. He now writes this & that about India and Indians, mostly nothing of substance. Clive was not a push-over when he lost to Amit, but since then he's grown in stature. He writes lucidly on matters of importance to the general public. Anyone who writes on serious stuff is never going to be as popular as the gossip columnist or the frivolous writer flaming conspiracy theories. Did Amit intentionally steer clear of writing 8 paragraph columns about what's ailing the Indian polity and settle on picking snafu headlines from tabloid? Only he can answer. But I still don't understand his popularity - the blog was nominated for the best Asian blog award (came in an unbelievable 2nd) and he's now on the panel to judge this year's Bastiat winner. Where is this all heading?

2009-09-14T18:17:00.005-04:00

Watching Federer battle Del Potro is like watching Tendulkar and Dhoni on two ends of the pitch. While Potro can get the ball across the net effectively it's clumsy to watch, especially when you have Federer on the other side performing a ballet.

Update: I spoke too soon - Federer's unforced errors in the fifth set exceeded what he's committed in this whole tournament. Kudos to Del Potro.

2009-09-12T04:55:00.004-04:00

I wonder if there are any atheist or even agnostic musicians from India in the last 50 years (post-Darwin, generally speaking) whose legacy is half as impressive as that of Ilayaraja's or Rahman's or Balamuralikrishna's or M.S.Subbalakshmi's. I wonder if there's a direct relationship between submitting oneself to the divine and creating divine music.

2009-09-10T12:29:00.002-04:00

Truly a useless observation but I have to point it out: After Federer won his first set and was walking to his chair, he took the optimum route so that the towel boy from the court corner didn't have to cover a few extra steps, which also means that Federer didn't have to wait a few extra seconds to grab his towel. Interestingly, he won the set without breaking a sweat.

2009-09-10T12:22:00.003-04:00

After beating Robin Soderling 6-0,6-3,6-7,7-6 to reach the semifinals of the US Open, Federer said "It was cold in the beginning and I felt at home. After a couple of sets it was even cooler and he must have felt at home."

For those scratching heads - Federer's from Switzerland and Soderling's from Sweden.

The Arrow of Love

2009-09-08T21:10:00.007-04:00

My feedreader is overflowing with unread pieces. My Netflix documentary remains unseen for weeks. The weekly magazines are barely skimmed. I don't know where my library check-outs are. Personal time and space are lost. But the loss has flown into something more beautifully indescribable. When I wake up at 2 in the morning to sing a boring song without a hint of scale or tempo, my daughter listens as if that's the only sound that will put her to sleep. And the tiredness and frustration resulting from hours of sleeplessness melt away at her smile. And when she pulls the hair off my forehand when she cries, it isn't really painful. The disappearance of her blissful smile as soon as I focus my camera isn't that disappointing.

All the things that my wife and I do to keep her happy, healthy, safe, comfortable, asleep & active have heigtened my respect for my parents. I never realized the amount of work involved in caring for an infant can be done with such eagerness. I'll never be able to reciprocate the emotional investment my parents have made in me. Same way, I'll have to accept that my daughter will be able to unconditionally give all of herself only to her children (if & when) but not her parents.

2009-09-02T12:38:00.004-04:00

Brilliant reporting & analysis from Steven Brill in New Yorker about incompetent New York teachers and the rigidity of teachers union in protecting them. Sample their attitude:

I asked the woman for her reaction to the following statement: “If a teacher is given a chance or two chances or three chances to improve but still does not improve, there’s no excuse for that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences.”

“That sounds like Klein and his accountability bullshit,” she responded. “We can tell if we’re doing our jobs. We love these children.” After I told her that this was taken from a speech that President Obama made last March, she replied, “Obama wouldn’t say that if he knew the real story.”

The Afghan War

2009-09-01T16:22:00.003-04:00

Diplomats and pundits and statesmen and politicians and professors and military men and reporters have written, spoken, argued, decried, urged, lauded and warned about the U.S war in Afghanistan. I earnestly add my share of bytes.

Obama has said a few times that the war in Afghanistan is a 'war of necessity' as against the 'war of choice', the one in Iraq. Few columnists recently delved into details of what actually constitutes 'necessity' and declared that this war cannot be called one such. (Briefly, a necessary war is when your security is threatened or when you can't pursue other options to resolve a conflict). But political speeches are such that complex ideas that require hours of explanations in thorough detail are conveniently simplified into understandable snippets for the common man. In that sense, what Obama implies is that the war in Afghanistan is more significant than the Iraq invasion which was launched on flimsy grounds and was executed without understanding their view of democracy.

But how necessary is this war, what are the stated objectives, how far are the U.S (and the International Security Allied Forces) in reaching them? After September 11, George W Bush decided to invade Afghanistan to root out Al-Qaeda and the Taliban that were harboring them. Presently, security analysts agree that there are very few pockets of the terrorist organization operating within the borders of Afghanistan. Most of them have moved east to the ungoverned tribal areas of Pakistan, some to Yemen and even as far as to Somalia. Understandably they seek Muslim countries with a weak state (and there are quite a few) and the U.S forces cannot keep stepping into these countries. And Al-Qaeda cannot forever hold a special place in the Pentagon/CIA/Whitehouse triad. If protecting American land and subjects is the point of 'war on terror', they should be lessening their focus on Afghanistan and adopt a zoomed-out view. (There are other forms of threat from grassroots terror camps that can easily target American embassy or personnel).

Two of the stated objectives after the fall of Taliban and driving away the Al-Qaeda is to institute a democracy and create sustainable conditions for nation-building. Theoretically, there's a democracy. Karzai was the democratically elected president in 2004 and as that term was coming to an end they had another election a week back and in a few weeks a winner will be announced. But how indicative are the subjects exercising their right to vote the vibrancy of their democracy? The government controls only one third of the area inside their political borders. Their army is poorly trained. The policemen demand bribe even if they're to do their part of the job. Money has to be pushed in almost all government offices - right from setting up a school to constructing a bridge. In spite of world's non-military assistance, it remains one of the poorest countries.

The U.S & allied troops are greatly outnumbered by the growing insurgents. There are approximately 29,000 US troops and 65,000 ISAF. The country's population is close to 40 million and for any adequate security, considering at least 1 armed person for 100 (such a ratio is not needed in a land of strong law enforcement) there needs to be 400000 troops, just to ensure that boys and girls can go to school and the lady can go to the market and the man can go to his office and all return safely. This is a whopping number. At this point, the international forces are not pitching in any personnel and U.S is the only active contributor. The chief of military operations there, Gen.McChrystal said that the current strategy is not working and it needs to changed radically. His aides suggested that he may need 40,000 more troops to plug the security holes. Considering the growing dissatisfaction at home at the way the war has evolved, the members of Congress may not approve for what could turn out to be another Vietnam.

Nation building is an abstract term. For the sake of this piece, let's say that it means building roads and bridges for effective transportation of men and materials, building and maintaining schools for the effective long-term growth, building & training a strong army that can defend itself, instituting an honest police force to resolve and contain civil conflicts… A diplomat recently said that 10 agricultural experts are more powerful than 100 soldiers in building a country. But when the nation's political entity itself makes money by cultivating poppy (for opium), there's not much one can do. And in areas where the corrupt police don't have much voice, there are warlords who wield their power over their tribes or cities. For a fee they resolve disputes; for a fee you can run your own mom-pop shop; for a fee you can build an office so that they don't blow you up; for a fee they'll return your son safely after kidnapping; for a fee they'll not disrupt your business; for a fee the international aid workers can continue to help the locals…

Afghanistan has been a place of constantly quarelling tribes. A unified leadership for the whole political entity cannot command respect and power, even if the leader is worthy of it. Hamid Karzai is clearly not that material. People are now longing the benign rule of Taliban. American officials say that they have to fight the kleptocracy, not insurgents, to create pockets of safe zones. Karzai recently brought in an exiled Uzbek warlord from Turkey to appease and win the votes of Uzbek tribes. Even during this election, local warlords and tribal leaders congregated and decided who they all should vote for. (In some areas, it is reported, a delegate of the local leader will walk into the polling booth and vote for everyone in the town). When power is distributed in this manner the U.S cannot dream of building a nation, instituting a democracy and happily flying back.

Should the U.S gradually withdraw its troops and call it a day? What if the Taliban from Pakistan heads back and wrests control of major provinces? Would that increase the threat level to America? Is it time to ditch the Bush doctrine of preventive/pre-emptive war and focus on protecting citizens like other countries do? After 8 years into war, is Afghanistan moving towards peace and stability? Do Afghans really like the presence of foreign troops? Do they feel safe or anger at the sight of a humvee? Should Obama consider cutting down on war expenses to prop up his starving economy and help finance his mammoth health care bill? (Taking a breath) If Obama were to pull out, what would happen to America's credibility? Is creating a monster there to counter Soviet expansion in the 80's not enough, need they create another one by leaving before the job is done now? Wouldn't American absence from the region embolden the militants in Pakistan in advancing and destabilizing the nuclear state? Would revising the military and political strategy (currently underway) reduce the pain? Can understanding and respecting their religious/regional affiliations of the populace and including their 'tribal leaders' in a bottom-up, 'you-have-the-power', decentralized approach be effective?

WTF?

2009-08-29T22:24:00.005-04:00

Respected film critic Andrew Sarris writes the following in his review of Knocked Up:

Knocked Up isn’t going to help change the world or anything, but at the very least it may help take one’s mind off the relentlessly dismal headlines. I don’t know what greater service a mere movie can perform these days.

Conservative Tributes

2009-08-28T11:11:00.002-04:00

Two conservative columnists pay sublime tribute to Ted Kennedy. This is why I like George Will and David Brooks. Though I disagree with these two wonderful analysts sometimes, they present their views with great decency and force that it's hard to turn away. It's as if they demand respect for their opinions through the means of presentation.

New Rule for Bill Maher

2009-08-26T23:35:00.005-04:00

Bill Maher should stop inviting Ashton Kutcher as a guest on his discussion panel for Real Time. He gobbles data and anecdotes and opinions, possibly from newspapers or podcasts or may be they're even his own and then regurgitates them. He stacks his words as if to ensure he doesn't miss any that he had studied for the show. That's not how a discussion evolves. You contribute, contradict or complement a point made by the previous speaker in an interesting, insightful or a funny remark. But he often digresses and tries hard to impress. To go on driving in your own track is not fun to follow. You can say a mundane truism, if that's all you have to offer. You can say "I didn't know that". The pressure to impress and get the audience to applaud when on TV is understandable. But when flanked by smart people, not diluting the standard is important.

I sometimes wonder what I'd be saying if were a part of a discussion that I'm watching or listening to. Some podcasts are by stalwarts - they're razor sharp in their observations. I'd just sit on the sidelines and listen, and if allowed I'd ask them to elaborate on a few points they've made.

Lucid Dreams

2009-08-24T20:52:00.005-04:00

When I was a young boy I'd often have dreams where I would fall off from tall structures - temple towers, buildings, mountains... As I was falling off I'd paddle my arms and legs and the sound I made because of kicking my blanket was enough to wake me up. That essentially killed the dream. Later, when I was in high school or even after I graduated from my engineering school I would have dreams where I would be late for an exam or utterly unprepared and would hurriedly flip through the pages. The timeframe of these exams were years before the dream. As I would sit to write the exam, suddenly my conscious side would kick in and reduce the level of panic. It would say "hey, you already wrote that exam, you graduated, this is just a dream". But the interesting thing was I wasn't awake yet. I was still partly asleep.

In the past few years, my dream-consciousness has evolved. If I find myself in a tight corner, as often they're the themes of my dreams these days, my consciousness doesn't step in right until the crucial moment when I'm about to be caught/revealed/slapped/exposed. But exactly at that scene of the dream, something inside me is activated that not only assures me "hey you aren't in this situation really, this is all fake", but also starts taking control of the situation and guides through events. I'd like to say that it's me writing the story of the dream, but they're so brilliant, the dialogues spoken are so deep and touching and funny and sharp if I were asked to write them in a wakeful state I'd only draw a blank.

A couple of days back I was dreaming of this guy dancing amazingly and guess what, I'm the one choreographing. I don't know a from b when it comes to dancing fundamentals, but I'm the one directing his dance steps. Now, I don't recall any of the steps other than the fact that it was exhilarating to 'see' him perform. I had never thought I was alone in going through this phenomenon (appropriately called Lucid Dreams), but didn't know it was such a well established area of psychophysiology. Here are a few links if you interested: [1][2][3].

Inglourious Basterds

2009-08-24T10:51:00.005-04:00

Allow me to indulge, for this is not a review, only a ramble. First, let me get this off my chest - Time's Richard Corliss is an asshole for revealing the final scene in the first paragraph of his review. I usually read the first and last paragraphs of reviews from people I respect (Corliss not being one of them). I was just flipping the pages of Time and read the first paragraph a few hours before stepping into the theater. Imagine the bitterness in my mouth. But then he says something sensible in the last paragraph, and I quote here: It's just possible that Tarantino, having played a trick on history, is also fooling his fans. They think they're in for a Hollywood-style war movie starring Brad Pitt. What they're really getting is the cagiest, craziest, grandest European film of the year. The Europeanness Corliss means is that the action is in the words. And sometimes the simmering tension between conversationalists is so hot that when they finally pull out their guns the atmosphere seems to cool down.
*
Every review I've read is head over heels with Christoph Waltz's performance as the smooth Nazi criminal. He's good. But not all of them are talking about Melanie Laurent's portrayal as Shosanna Dreyfus. In one of the trademark QT scenes where dialogues and photography and acting skills come together: Laurent and Waltz sit together in a restaurant in Paris; he's a Jew hunter, she's a Jew under an assumed French name; he hints that he knows her identity by ordering a cup of milk (she was raised in a dairy farm). The talk is plain but we can feel her pain and fear. I've seen such control with other European actresses like Julie Delpy, Kristin Scott Thomas & Emma Thompson.
*
There are five chapters in the movie, all loosely related but contributing to the final chapter's momentum. The first chapter is titled 'Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied France...' - lending a fairy tale feeling and totally quashing anyone who expects historic authenticity. The second chapter is not titled, it simply says 'Chapter 2'; this is Tarantino's symbolic middle finger, somewhere between casualness and lazy arrogance to even name his film segments. And even when he comes up with a title, it doesn't make much sense. The final chapter is called 'Revenge of the Giant Face' or something like that, but has no significant meaning.
*
The beauty of individual sentences doesn't always add to the beauty of the scene as a whole. This is mostly the fault of the editor, not Tarantino, for he can't distinguish between the goodness or mediocrity of his dialgoues as they all are his children and he loves them equally. There's a scene where random German soldiers play a version 'find out who I am in less 21 questions'. And then the same game is played by characters of interest to the screenplay. This was a stretch. There's another scene where a German-speaking British soldier with a special interest in pre-German-war movies is picked to play a spy. The scene bothers us with details of German cinemas now and then. There are a few other examples of such sag and it would have been a taut experience had they been edited out.
*
We know that Tarantino is self-indulgent and sprinkles his works full of references to other movies, mostly B, sometimes parodying, sometimes celebrating. Another quote, this time from TNR's Chris Orr's review: Inglourious Basterds is far better than those films, but it is still, in some fundamental sense, less movie than "movie." And if Tarantino hopes to reach his full potential as a filmmaker, someday he's going to have to find the nerve to work once again outside the quotation marks. I can't agree more with the sharp Orr. Tarantino is a serious filmmaker and his talent cannot and should not be wasted on borrowing and punching classics and exploitation flicks. Though his 'Pulp Fiction' paid homage, it was ultra-refreshingly original. 'Kill Bill' is in a sense a Hong Kong kung-fu dance and 'Inglourious Basterds' in that same sense a spaghetti Western.
*

2009-08-21T10:49:00.003-04:00

I'm not sure if there's anyone in Hollywood who enjoys writing and listening to dialogues more than Tarantino. And the way he places them in his meticulous script, every scene grows a personality of its own. Be it the talk about tipping waitresses in 'Reservoir Dogs', or the foot massage before getting into character in 'Pulp Fiction' or explaining karma to a little girl whose mother is just murdered in 'Kill Bill'. They don't add much to the flow of the screenplay and the movie wouldn't be diluted without those scenes, but it is these little pearls that make the movie glitter. And then there's his boyish delight in shocking the audience and ignoring it altogether - the accidental killing of a man in a car from 'Pulp Fiction' elicits the response "may be you went over a bump or something". This is the real fanboy Tarantino. I can't wait to absorb 'Inglourious Basterds'.

Raja Kaiya Vecha

2009-08-13T17:26:00.005-04:00

I was 11 years old when the movie Aboorva Sagotharargal was released. I was in a remote part of Gudiyatham at that time and on a typical day parents with their kids will sit in their broad verandahs with piles of mini wooden planks for lining up safety match sticks (one side of which will be immersed in a chemical compound and later dried) and weavers would occupy the roads to work on their blue & white thread rolls and the third major chunk of populace will be rolling beedis

What I strikingly remember is that almost every house would have their radios blaring because a good chunk of the household is outside working. Add to that tea shops, who have since the invention of radio abused them. And barber shops. And there's the 'audio' shop which would proudly display their black speakers as tall as me. And the bunk kadai. Even medical shops had them on in a low volume. On my daily commute to the school, I would get to listen to the complete song in varying volumes, with varying degrees of clarity with rare bits of silence.

And this one time - sorry about the much needed digression - I was sent to some shop to buy something and the song 'Raja Kaiya Vecha' was broadcast. The song starts with a bickering between a mom & son, I stand in front of a house to listen, and then onto the hero's talent as a car mechanic, I stop in front a tea shop, and then onto an irrelevant comparison between women and cars, now I'm in front of a barber shop. I had to grasp the song because one of my classmates had hyped up how inventive this song was in terms of sexual connotations and I had to illustrate my coolness and contribute to the discussion by what I made out of the lyrics the next day. After listening to the song I remember brainstorming about what word implied what and trying to come up with interesting theories. All this came back to me as I watched this song today.

China's Respect for Intellectual Property

2009-08-13T07:06:00.002-04:00

An NYT report on WTO's ruling that China had violated international free trade rules by limiting imports:

Ron Kirk, the United States trade representative, praised the panel’s legal finding. “This decision promises to level the playing field for American companies working to distribute high-quality entertainment products in China,” Mr. Kirk said, “so that legitimate American products can get to market and beat out the pirates.”

Mr.Kirk knows pretty well that this is just a baby step of a diplomatic pressure. When Harry Potter books and DVDs are available for less than 1/10th of the marked price, only the insane and the high-on-ethical-pedestal will be paying a visit to the original showrooms. The U.S producers have long whined at the possibility of missing the huge Chinese boat and have constantly engaged in soft nudging since the Clinton days. You can't blame the Americans - when they're the Chinese's largest consumer, the U.S fiction writers and movie producers and software coders and chip manufacturers expect the potential Chinese consumer to return the favor.

Respect for intellectual property is not big in developing countries. The general public wants to enjoy the fruits at a much cheaper cost. There's an Asian edition by the original publisher for a lot of products which are quite less than what their western counterparts pay. But that pales in comparison to the bootlegged version available at the mom & pop store. In countries like India where law enforcement itself is weak, one can't do much but whine. But China has an iron grip on what its subjects can see and buy and can effectively enforce what should and should not be available for consumption. Their current lax ethics seems like an open policy of negligence to what the west has got to say.

China's stronghold is manufacturing and it's not easy to pirate and make them take a plunge. Of course you can manufacture a lesser quality shirt or a cheaper toy, but obviously it doesn't make business sense to 'copy'. Where as most of the western economies' export revenue is knowledge based which can be duplicated with relative ease and hence made money or gotten free. For China to take this issue seriously most of state's revenue should be earned through companies and institutions that are knowledge based. When the treasury coffers aren't getting filled because of shady deals under the tree, the police will wield its baton.

And China is morphing itself away from manufacturing. There are English classes held in football stadiums. It is luring Americans who can't find a job because of the recession. With trillions in foreign reserves, they have started to invest substantially in R&D and communication technologies. They just executed a mass transfer of their population from lower class to middle class by taking advantage of the rapid globalization; even the recession has not bitten them hard - in fact their stimulus package is touted by economists to be the most effective. The government has stepped up investments in sceince and technology studies & firms.

But their opaque bureaucracy has its drawbacks. The state recently instituted a policy where every computer bought will come with a software installed that's supposedly designed to filter 'inappropriate content'. Not just pornography (what's wrong with that?) but any foreign site that riles the Chinese action & policies. Youtube and blog sites are banned on whims and fancies. The press is not free; the judiciary has its limits; one needs permission from the local authorities for a peace protest march. Add to this other social problems like the imbalance in male/female ratio because of their one-child policy (which obviously leans towards a male progeny) and an educated middle-class that has been clamoring for more information and freedom.

China has had and will have a hard time trying to transform its huge young population into knowledge force and at the same time checking their tweets and facebook status (figuratively speaking). If the state loosens its hold and unleashes the power of cooperation in every sense, I believe they'll command a bigger piece of 'services & innovation' pie. Until that happens, their markets (not so black, they're quite open in the streets) will continue to support pirates. Of course, there will always be some sort of violation - copiers, scanners, video tools will be put to use. But it wouldn't as flagrant as it is today.

Humor is Hard

2009-08-08T10:50:00.002-04:00

Hawkeye writes:

If aliens were observing social patterns of earthlings, their report would read something like this - the younglings discard waste products from their intestines, which are emitted out through fissures on the back of their bodies. Curiously the male's social standing among other human beings is determined by how many times, how quickly and how desirously he cleans the youngling's intestinal discard. Cleaning the backside of younglings and removing intestinal waste with passion and love shows that the male is progressive, sensitive, caring and responsible.

2009-08-07T22:24:00.003-04:00

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is without a doubt the best movie I've seen this year, and probably will for the rest of the year. From a script by Guillermo Arriago, who is best known for his collaborations with Inarritu, Tommy Lee Jones simply sparkles as the lead actor and the director. I think I've written about this before - I see Jones in drabs like 'Fugitive' and 'MIB' which hardly leave an impression and then he blows me away in In the Valley of Elah. In a scene from this movie, we see him sitting in a jeep doing nothing. He doesn't twitch his lips or shake his head or play with his eyeballs; but somehow we can sense his pain and anxiety with that still look. Now, that's just terrific acting.

2009-08-06T23:03:00.002-04:00

My friend Varaha wrote:

As the suicide bombers killed the infidels and went to heaven, they were not unhappy that the virgins were not veiled.

I've been writing for quite some time now. And I don't ever remember using a double-negative. I would frame the sentence in a different way. And this guy uses a triple-negative just like that.

Treating Kids

2009-08-06T20:43:00.003-04:00

I went to a book shop in a hospital recently. As soon as I entered I saw that the lady behind the counter was preparing to close down the shop. Even before I asked (it wasn't lunch hour yet), she told me that her grand daughter is graduating from pre-KG to KG and her daughter had her invited to the graduation party. This reminded me of a line from the movie 'The Incredibles' where Mr.Incredible says "We keep coming up with new ways to celebrate mediocrity" on the occasion of his son's 'move' from the 4th to the 5th grade. I wouldn't go as far as to call it mediocrity; after all there's some effort involved. But call it a graduation party?

I grew up in a drastically different environment in India. I was slapped in school by the teachers, at home by my parents. And I was a good student and quite obedient. The general understanding was that the teachers and the parents wanted to discipline their children and the stick did the trick. And this was normal as almost every kid was treated similarly. Growing up in a lower middle class family, my mom borrowed money for my monthly tuition. I didn't buy those 'group photos' clicked every year with all the students of the class. Most of the time I didn't even bother to inform my parents of it as it would cost them. The family of six slept in 2 rooms and my prized possession of a table lamp came in when I was 13.

The rise of the middle class is not merely in terms of finance but also marks the level of cultural liberty. My 5-year old neighbor goes to a special class for math & reading that costs a little over $200 every month. Her parents sit with her to help her. When she goes wandering they softly but firmly pull her back and ask her to focus. After every mini assignment she's showered with 'good job'. Needless to say, new dresses and toys and restaurant visits are perks of good behavior. And this is not just my neighbor for she is representative of the new normal. Not just the U.S but also in India. As both parents are educated and employed, money is a lesser problem and spending 'quality' time with the kids becomes a priority.

I'm a strong advocate against force, be it verbal or physical towards children. It took some maturity for my emotional bruises to heal and see the love of my parents. But when compliments are used like 'pass the salt', what actually will the child think of itself? By treating every reading session an achievement, aren't we inflating the actual effort involved and thereby boosting the ego of the child? Do they even evaluate if their accomplishment is age-worthy? What would happen to their self-confidence when they're competing with much smarter kids later in life and there's nobody patting their backs?

With the passsage of time, almost every aspect of our culture has become liberal. This has prompted parents presenting a friendly face to their kids (they don't call their dad 'Sir' anymore). But this new degree of freedom shouldn't absolve them of their responsibilities. While every step is progress, I believe kids should be instilled in them a sense of humillty; parents and teachers should show them the long road they need to travel; they should expect no cheerleading just for trying things. As a parent I can understand how protective and over-cautious one can be. But may be it's time to take off those training wheels in the kid's bicycle and let him/her fall once in a while. After all, falling is progress.

2009-08-04T12:23:00.004-04:00

This space has become a link festival in the last couple of months. Though my commentary appears alongside, it's very minimal and essentially asks the reader to head to the link. At this point I'm not forcing myself to 'write' articles and I'm going with an impulsive flow of this-can-be-blogged. But I don't want ScreenAct to become a bouncing pad where regulars come only to go to another page. I plan to strike a balance by curtailing the number of quote-posts and adding more of my thoughts about the topic. This will also help me to evaluate my thought train over a period of time.

Why?

2009-08-04T11:50:00.003-04:00

When an article starts with packed confusion like this, there's not much incentive to proceed. Is that an attention-grabbing technique? I was more put-off than curious to know what the heck the author was blabbering about.

Sometime after the 14-year-old retired actor and chimpanzee Travis Herold was shot and beheaded by Stamford, Connecticut, police in connection with an aggravated assault against 55-year-old Charla Nash, but before former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick finished serving a federal prison sentence for conspiring to violate the civil rights of dogs, South Korean scientists announced the birth of a beagle that glows in the dark.

2009-08-03T18:54:00.006-04:00

Gladwell dissects the character Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mocking Bird) and the interplay of race and law in the south before desegregation. I found this excerpt interesting and shocking in equal parts:

One of Dorr’s examples is John Mays, Jr., a black juvenile sentenced in 1923 to an eighteen-year prison term for the attempted rape of a white girl. His employer, A. A. Sizer, petitioned the Virginia governor for clemency, arguing that Mays, who was religious and educated, “comes of our best negro stock.” His victim, meanwhile, “comes from our lowest breed of poor whites. . . . Her mother is utterly immoral and without principle; and this child has been accustomed from her very babyhood to behold scenes of the grossest immorality. None of our welfare work affects her, she is brazenly immoral.”

The reference to the mother was important. “Though Sizer did not directly impugn the victim herself, direct evidence was unnecessary during the heyday of eugenic family studies,” Dorr writes. “The victim, coming from the same inferior ‘stock,’ would likely share her mother’s moral character.” The argument worked: Mays was released from prison in 1930.

2009-08-03T12:07:00.003-04:00

The superior Economist observes the state of Arab countries. Plain words, crisp observations, thorough coverage, unbiased, readable lengths* all make it a great choice for news & opinions.

Democracy is more than just elections. It is about education, tolerance and building independent institutions such as a judiciary and a free press. The hard question is how much ordinary Arabs want all this. There have been precious few Tehran-style protests on the streets of Cairo. Most Arabs still seem unwilling to pay the price of change. Or perhaps, observing Iraq, they prefer stagnation to the chaos that change might bring. But regimes would be unwise to count on permanent passivity. As our special report in this issue argues, behind the political stagnation of the Arab world a great social upheaval is under way, with far-reaching consequences.

In almost every Arab country, fertility is in decline, more people, especially women, are becoming educated, and businessmen want a bigger say in economies dominated by the state. Above all, a revolution in satellite television has broken the spell of the state-run media and created a public that wants the rulers to explain and justify themselves as never before. On their own, none of these changes seems big enough to prompt a revolution. But taken together they are creating a great agitation under the surface. The old pattern of Arab government—corrupt, opaque and authoritarian—has failed on every level and does not deserve to survive. At some point it will almost certainly collapse. The great unknown is when.

* I don't have anything against long articles. If anything, I have a tiny bias towards them for they usually explore a topic in great detail. But when it comes to current affairs and observations, there's usually a lot of stuff going around and it's better when the word count is limited to 500. And The Economist does it superbly without losing any depth or clarity.

Slamming Open the Door

2009-07-31T22:43:00.003-04:00

One of the cruelties of life is a parent made to bury his/her child. American poet Kathleen Bonanno talks to NPR's Terry Gross about her collection of poems, Slamming Open the Door which are about her murdered daughter and how she deals/dealt with it. I was struck by how gracious Kathleen was in opening herself to difficult questions. Though it has been a few years since her loss, I don't think any parent can fully 'recover', for the lack of a better word, from such a devastation. I don't remember being moved so forcefully in such a long time.

Cinema Liberties

2009-07-31T19:01:00.004-04:00

There are cinemas that are very firmly rooted in the real world and picture images and sound words seen in our homes and our neighbors. That fraction is negligible; the majority of the movie goers don't want to see a 'Pather Panchali' or a '21 Grams'. It's quite the opposite where they want to escape from their daily realities and see a dinosaur chasing a car or a 800-pound gorilla destroying a city. Almost every story told takes a certain amount of liberties - be it physical, political, biological, psychological.... heroes fly, doctors cry "what a medical miracle", judges reach verdicts the same day they hear trials, presidents achieve political solutions after make-believe negotiations.... And a somewhat intelligent viewer doesn't dig deep into the process, he just knows these are the means to tell a story and decide to play along with the writer/director. But this ploy of over-simplification on part of the film-maker takes a beating if the story itself sucks or has glaring holes.

I saw 'Public Enemies' recently, the story of John Dillinger, a famous bank robber during the depression era. He's touted as, obviously, a public enemy by the bureau of investigation (before it went federal, and thus becoming FBI), his posters are out, he's shown in news reels before cinemas begin and the common man (& woman) know how he looks like. But guess what, this John Dillinger guy is always in open - at a race course, cinema theater, restaurant... without any make-up at all. In a hard to believe scene he even walks into a police office dedicated to hunting him down and converses with one of them. Michael Mann's movie, is very good in almost every dimension - action, direction, production design, costumes. But this aspect where he's just walking in the park but nobody nabs him is irksome and bring down its believability.

'Ice Age 3' posed another problem. We have dinosaurs at the end of ice age - which is a scientific impossibility. But apart from that, there's a whole range of species from which you can draw a forest food chain and they're walking and talking together as friends. This is not only rosy for kids but also incorrect. I wanted to ask my 10-year old niece with whom I watched "Did you ever wonder what they all did for lunch?" And then there's the impossibly horrible 'Journey to the Center of the Earth' where there's a whole world in the core of our planet. The story takes colossal scientific liberties which grind chillies on viewer's eyes (an Indian metaphor) over and over again.

But I don't have complaints when a 78-year old ties up thousands of balloons to his home and flies it from somewhere in USA to somewhere in South America without any GPS in 'Up'. It's a beautiful movie with a subtle message for adults, nice humour and a gentle touch of love throughout. Nor with 'Kungfu Hustle' which has no shred of logic and takes pride in its supreme lunacy. There's this little known Tamil film 'Thedinen Vandhadhu' which I find hilarious - a low budget 'B-center' offering which just fires on all humorous cylinders. It's my guilty pleasure, no doubt, but it has huge legion of cult following like 'Kadhanayagan'. Where 'Public Enemies' and 'Ice Age' failed 'Up' & 'Kadhanayagan' succeeded because it had my attention. I liked the what the characters said and did. The story is fantastic (as in unbelievable) but I lent myself to the story-tellers completely without any questions.

Grabbing the audience's attention and holding on to it for most of the running length determines the commercial worthiness of a movie. Such a silly point to make, but I wonder why many writers, directors and producers miss it. To simply state that my taste didn't suit a movie or the audience are not mature enough to appreciate it is a bad argument. These products don't make any money for their bosses. Then why do the studios green light such projects? The truth would be close to 'studios are experimenting tones and styles and stories to see if this clicks with the audience'. You wouldn't know that a series like Austin Powers would take off until they're made. I think 'American Idol' is horrible, but I don't question the studio's judgement. But sometimes they overestimate the stupidity of audience and create what everyone equally considers to be a great bummer. A good way to cull them out is to check IMDb ratings which are broken down by sex and age - there are cinemas that have dismal score in almost all the categories.

Aghast

2009-07-27T11:20:00.002-04:00

Forget that J.C.Joshi guy who thrust science into palmistry. Francis Collins, Obama's nominee to be the next director of National Institutes of Health wrote the below, as quoted from a Sam Harris' piece from NYT:

Slide 1: “Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time.”
Slide 2: “God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings.”
Slide 3: “After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced ‘house’ (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the moral law), with free will, and with an immortal soul.”
Slide 4: “We humans used our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.”
Slide 5: “If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?”

Arattai Arangam

2009-07-26T14:17:00.004-04:00

I rarely tune in to this obnoxiously shitty show. Unfunny jokes sprinkled with 'messages', songs sung without a scale or a tempo, nonsensical metaphors about social commentary, 10-year old kids talking about foreign relations... What pisses me off is that the audience are just so rotten it's as if they're waiting to laugh and applaud if the speaker paused for a couple of seconds.

Paid Analysis

2009-07-25T21:35:00.005-04:00

Michael Kinsley writes for Slate (emphasis mine) on the death of newspapers:

But how else will they be different from the newspapers of today (or a couple of years ago)? What of value will be missing? The lists tend to reflect the subjective tastes of the listmakers. But typically these lists include 1) local and community news; 2) international news (in particular that iconic Baghdad bureau); 3) investigative and "enterprise" journalism at all levels; and 4) serendipity—stories you stumble across as you turn the pages of a newspaper. (No one seems overly alarmed about national news or about commentary and analysis of any sort. As a paid-up member of the commentariat, I note this bitterly but without comment. It would be hard to argue that there is a shortage of opinions on the Internet.)

Mike, let me assure you. I'm alarmed. I know that the web is abound with opinions and a great chunk of them are unbelievably naive and absurd. Most of those who take news seriously invariably value the editorial page too. Although most of the opinion articles published today are reflections of their bosses' political/environmental/economic affiliations, they're nevertheless informed and present at least one side of the argument convincingly. And this is very important for me to stay away from confirmation bias. And in cases of columnists like David Brooks - a conservative writing for a somewhat center-left paper, their opinions and the comments that ensue for their pieces are too invigorating to be lost to a bad business model.

Silly Crazy

2009-07-25T20:37:00.003-04:00

I was reminded of this joke from 'Kadhala Kadhala' while watching 'Family Guy':

MSV: Swimming pool patheengala!
Mouli: Naan pakkadha swimming poola. America fulla swimming pooldhan.
MSV: Appa car ellam enga pogum?

Incorrigible

2009-07-22T12:10:00.003-04:00

A comment by a J.C.Joshi on the weekly science column by the wonderful Olivia Judson. These are the people who say evolution is the work of god:

Olivia, as a Hindu I am glad that you say, “…Even on your skin, the diversity of bacteria is prodigious. If you were to have your hands sampled, you’d probably find that each fingertip has a distinct set of residents; your palms probably also differ markedly from each other, each home to more than 150 species, but with fewer than 20 percent of the species the same. And if you’re a woman, odds are you’ll have more species than the man next to you. Why should this be? So far, no one knows…”
Although the subject is vast, in brief, the above perhaps could help realize it as the basis also arrived at by the ancients who developed the art/ science of ‘Palmistry’ that is practiced since time immemorial. Each finger and gaps between those are believed to represent different members of our solar system such that both palms represent two hemispheres, eastern and the western. In which, in the males, the lines on the right palm are believed to represent his likely behaviour as an independent individual, while the left palm indicates the likely effects of other external influences during the life-span and, hence, need to read both palms and predictions made based on the predominant lines on either palms, whereas, in females, the reverse is believed applicable…

Why We Eat Junk

2009-07-17T14:44:00.003-04:00

Elizabeth Kolbert writes in The New Yorker on why we're fat. Though the following snippet is about the role of corporations in fattening the public, the article covers a broad range - social, biological, psychological and even political.

In the early nineteen-sixties, a man named David Wallerstein was running a chain of movie theatres in the Midwest and wondering how to boost popcorn sales. Wallerstein had already tried matinée pricing and two-for-one specials, but to no avail. According to Greg Critser, the author of “Fat Land” (2003), one night the answer came to him: jumbo-sized boxes. Once Wallerstein introduced the bigger boxes, popcorn sales at his theatres soared, and so did those of another high-margin item, soda.
A decade later, Wallerstein had retired from the movie business and was serving on McDonald’s board of directors when the chain confronted a similar problem. Customers were purchasing a burger and perhaps a soft drink or a bag of fries, and then leaving. How could they be persuaded to buy more? Wallerstein’s suggestion—a bigger bag of fries—was greeted skeptically by the company’s founder, Ray Kroc. Kroc pointed out that if people wanted more fries they could always order a second bag.
“But Ray,” Wallerstein is reputed to have said, “they don’t want to eat two bags—they don’t want to look like a glutton.” Eventually, Kroc let himself be convinced; the rest, as they say, is supersizing.

2009-07-15T16:56:00.003-04:00

In a funny, interesting and insightful (for a male) article by Sandra Loh on why sex-deprived working western women in seemingly stable relationships are beginning to crack down on their boring but stable marriages.

To work, to parent, to housekeep, to be the ones who schedule “date night,” only to be reprimanded in the home by male kitchen bitches, and then, in the bedroom, to be ignored—it’s a bum deal. And then our women’s magazines exhort us to rekindle the romance. You rarely see men’s magazines exhorting men to rekindle the romance....

If high-revving women are sexually frustrated, let them have some sort of French arrangement where they have two men, the postfeminist model dad building shelves, cooking bouillabaise, and ignoring them in the home, and the occasional fun-loving boyfriend the kids never see. Alternately, if both spouses find life already rather exhausting, never mind chasing around for sex. Long-married husbands and wives should pleasantly agree to be friends, to set the bedroom aglow at night by the mute opening of separate laptops and just be done with it. More than anything, aside from providing insulation from the world at large, that kind of arrangement could be the perfect way to be left alone.

2009-07-15T09:10:00.002-04:00

Can a lawyer get any lower than this?

Bollywood actor Shiney Ahuja's lawyer on Tuesday gave a new angle to the case, claiming that the victim of the alleged rape belongs to a lower caste, which is "aggressive" in nature....
Elaborating his version of "consensual sex", Shivde argued that if Ahuja had tried to rape the victim, she could have "definitely" resisted. "She belongs to a lower caste, which is aggressive by nature, and she wouldn't have submitted herself so easily. They are known for being aggressive," Shivde said.

Link via Amit Varma.

2009-07-14T14:44:00.001-04:00

When I said to my manager that I'll be having a child in a few days, she asked me to learn to walk without sleeping. Now I am.

Reviews, Length & Presentation

2009-07-06T22:52:00.006-04:00

Hoover Institution publishes great book reviews. I have 2 issues - length & style. The first one is a minor quibble. The author has got to write all his thoughts. For the sake of impatient readership the author can consider condensing or editing out ideas/opinions/sentences that don't fit into the crux of the review. But if the author wants it out there, there's no stopping. Still 5500 words is pushing the limits by modern web article standards. There are pieces in NYT Magazine, TNR & New Yorker that run upto 12 pages - but they deal with a solid topic, like the recession or racism or celeb-culture. James Wood, one of the revered book critics in work today, conveys his thoughts in a far lesser number of words. At this point in my life and with my exposure, I'm not inclined to read a review that's a considerable size of the book being reviewed. But I respect the author's decision to go all the way.

Their style really puts me off. I've seen instruction boards in a few railway stations in India that makes little sense - because they were framed in the British Raj and nobody took the pains to rephrase it. It would be something as simple as 'Don't spit on the platform', but to comprehend what's written on the board you'd need a colonial tight-ass next to you. Hoover's reviews aren't that bad, but the mere fact that they invite comparison to 19th century British English is worrisome. Read these sentences:

Regardless of one’s political proclivities or whether or not one just happens to like the personable Barack Obama, it’s clear that the president relishes the vague metaphor, adores the illogical argumentative sequence, and luxuriates in making words mean what only yesterday they didn’t.

Orwell is important here less for the topics he wrote about — although subjects such as poverty and oppression are obviously significant — than for the observational and anti-theoretical way in which he endeavored to write about them.

It's not ununderstandable, but there are much easier ways to say the same thing. It's almost like decoding a poem to enjoy the juice - only to find that there isn't any juice, but a talk about juice. There's a lot of fashionable nonsense on the web which requires both dictionary and wikipedia to understand individual sentences, but put together as a whole wouldn't make much sense. There was a time when I wanted to be a decorative writer and I devoured on articles and writers who used high-sounding words that many didn't understand. I've changed since then and started valuing content more than presentation. Salman Rushdie was my favorite writer. He still is, but more for his richly imaginative narration and less for his vocabulary grandeur. Having said all of that, I still recommend their reviews; criticism is a literary genre and Hoover is very good at that.

2009-07-02T22:54:00.003-04:00

I lost interest in women's tennis after Henin's retirement. To put it succinctly, they all sucked. Williams's sisters intimidated their opponents through sheer power, Sharapova & Safina inconsistent and a host of other ex-Soviet players stepping into top 10 on a round robin basis. Today I saw bits of the Wimbledon semi-finals between Dementieva and Serena Williams. Though not anywhere near greatness, I was pleasantly surprised at the quality.

MJ

2009-07-02T22:20:00.001-04:00

Geroge Best once said "I spent most my money on women and cars. The rest, I squandered". Now that MJ's dead, I can't remember him for his contributions to music (of which I don't know much about) but for the decline of his life and lifestyle. He went from making millions a year, not only popularity and adulation but a crazy love of his fans, being a milestone in cultural history to financial bankruptcy, being reviled by the mainstream and an object of constant jokes for late-night comedians. For many of his fans he was long dead and the child molestation trials were only a walking ghost.

One of my friends said that he would make an interesting psychological study - he's been in front of the camera since he was 5 and practically lived most of his life chased by paparazzi. In a TV show aired sometime in 2002 he rents a grocery store for a night so that he could push the cart and buy stuff like bread and coke - just to see how if feels to walk the aisles of a store like a common man. That moment was heavy and I felt very sad for him. To be able to walk in a park without attracting attention might have been a sanity booster to him, but that day never came. (It is in light of MJ that I find celebrities like Daniel Radcliffe great; the kid made millions of pounds before he was 18 but still has a cool head and talks sense).

I've never really seen or listened to MJ. There was a brief phase in my early years when he was all the rage, just to fit myself into a coterie I listened to most of his tracks. Given my music appreciation background (grew up listening to Ilayaraja) I wasn't impressed. After his death I looked up one of his live performaces in Youtube. His pelvic gyrations, robotic movements, moonwalks, I liked. But mostly I'm impressed at the way he controlled just parts of his legs - it felt like a meeting point of kinesthetics and dance.

2009-07-02T18:14:00.004-04:00

Homosexuality is not a crime anymore in India, finally. So cops can no longer blackmail to slap a case if they find two men hanging together in a restroom... that's a relief. I came to know that it was a criminal act when Vikram Seth came out of the closet a few years back. And wondered why the hell should the government intervene between two consenting adults in their bedroom. But I found later that a good chunk of the population still perceived it not only as unnatural, but also unethical. A couple of my ex-colleagues called it a 'disease' and said that gays should be 'treated'.

Talking of laws and gays, even a culturally liberal country like US doesn't allow gay marriages in all of its states.

Listen to what this clown called Kamal Farooqi has to say about the ruling:

You are known as a liberal Muslim. Why don't you see the sexual emotions of hundreds and thousands of people around us? If your son or daughter would have been gay how would you have addressed the topic?

If my daughter or son would have been such, I would have definitely counsel them. I would have explained them this is unnatural and inhuman. Because this will ultimately lead to the destruction of the human race. This (legal right to have sex with the same sex) cannot come under the definition of 'freedom'. All kinds of freedom have some moral context or ethics. We have to follow those ethics.

Nature of Crime

2009-06-29T22:56:00.003-04:00

Bernie Madoff got 150 years. He's 71 now and considering the average age of a U.S male, he might live another 10 years. So, the number 150, is merely symbolic, media fodder. A number thrown at the general public by the court so that they come to appreciate the immensity of his crime in the light of his punishment. I'm usually a man of peace, but I believe Madoff should have been let alone with his victims who shouldn't be punished if they were to resort to their primal instincts.

We associate crimes with where they leave their victims. So a rapist or a murderer is at the top of the list. Fine. But a pick-pocketer should not be relegated to the bottom just because he picks the wallet of a salaried man. The effects of a loss of what could be a sum equivalent to a weekly budget could be colossal. And in a time & culture of credit cards, hedge funds and electronic transfers, Madoff is proportional to a billion pick-pocketers. Not only did people lose their beach homes, but also their retirement savings. I was listening to this woman who lost $750000. A typical response-attitude would be "She's a rich bitch anyway, she just lost a yacth. She's not on the roads." But as I listened to her story I realized that it was her whole life's savings and she has worked hard and smart to get where she was. To rob that money was robbing her of her life's fruits, of her belief in humanity. Without spilling a drop of blood, he has sucked the life and soul out of her. That's as big a crime as murder.

2009-06-29T10:21:00.003-04:00

Lera Boroditsky, a professor of psychology, neuroscience & symbolic systems (aww.. the very words sound sexy), writes in a brilliant article on how languages we speak shape our thoughts:

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."

2009-06-28T23:00:00.004-04:00

It baffled me to see Tony Blair not only stutter enormously but also fail to offer decently mature answers on his interview with Fareed Zakaria. I have my own problems with Zakaria in spite of being one of the most lucid writers on current affairs today. If you read his columns for Newsweek or his books, you'll be convinced that he certainly knows a great deal about the subject he's talking about and offers nuggets of insights that are easily understandable. But when he's on video, he doesn't have that grip on me, he has a little less charm. But Blair made Zakaria look like the king of TV hosts - he mumbled & jumbled and in the end didn't say anything worthy for the viewers to take home. And he was a charismatic leader for 10 years! Talk about the role of speech writers and teleprompters.

2009-06-28T12:33:00.004-04:00

In order to get out of the confirmation-bias trap, I read WSJ and other conservative columns. Peggy Noonan is one I love to hate. She uses a grand language and argues with little or no points at all. Today I saw her in This Week where she sort of defended conservatives who fall off their high moral chariot while discussing Mark Sanford's affair. Wow, if this crap continues not only the Republicans, but also their mouth pieces will have no credibility left.