Robert Frust

Crazy piss and more!

2009-04-06T16:42:00.002+05:30

This is an absolutely fascinating website. I chanced upon this list of strange psychotropic substances and can't get over my admiration for the spirit of experimentation that has led man to discoveries such as these:

Anafranil is an anti-depressant that causes people to have orgasms every time they yawn. Yeah. No joke. A 1983 article in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry found a case of a woman in her twenties who came every time she yawned! She even used it to her advantage: “She found she was able to experience orgasm by deliberate yawning.” This is one drug that had better not be outlawed. Now I just need to find a doctor willing to prescribe it!

At one time, Eskimos and tribes in Siberia were known to consume the urine of another person who had consumed fly agaric mushrooms (amanita muscaria). They did so for several reasons: Firstly, since there wasn’t an infinite supply of mushrooms, this approach help to conserve and economize them. Not only would drinking the urine of someone who had consumed the mushroom get you high, but also drinking the pee of the person who had drunk the first “batch” of urine would get you high! And so forth and so on, going up to 5 different “generations” of people! An added benefit was that pre-digested mushrooms didn’t cause as much nausea and cramps as just eating them directly. They loved this high so much, that they would butcher and eat reindeer who had also eaten fly agaric for a contact-high!

While you're at it, check out this fascinating video showing the effects of a famous experiment performed on spiders in 1965 with some very illuminating results:

Mood snapshot: random tag from mail

2008-12-19T19:31:00.005+05:30

1. What is your occupation? Student-about-to-become-corporate-slave

2. What color are your shoes right now? I'm barefoot :)

3. What are you listening to right now ? The Cranberries

4. What was the last thing that you ate ? Haldiram Khatta Meetha

5. Can you drive a stick shift? Yes

6. Last person you spoke to on the phone? A friend

7. Do you like the person who sent this to you? Yes

8. How old are you today? 23

9. What is your favorite sport to watch on TV? Don't watch sports

10. What are your favorite drinks? Vodka with ginger ale

11. Have you ever dyed your hair? Nope

12. Favorite food? Pizzas, paranthas, sushi :)

13. What is the last movie you watched? Tropa de Elite

14. Favorite night of the year? Birthday eve, maybe

15. How do you vent anger? Crib

16. What was your favorite toy as a child? Stuffed rabbit called Robu or some such

17. What is your favorite season? Just before winter

18. Cherries or Blueberries? Cherries

19. Do you want your friends to e-mail you back? Sure!

20. Who is the most likely to respond? The friend I last spoke with

21. Who is least likely to respond? The friend's best friend

22. Living arrangements? IIM hostel, called 'dorm' for a reason I cannot fathom

23. When was the last time you cried? When I was 16 :(

24. What is on the floor of your closet? Shoes, plastic bags

25. Who is the friend you have had the longest that you are sending to? Can't say, depends on whether we consider frequency of interaction and extent of involvement or merely time since first contact

26. What did you do last night? Watched JFK (the movie)

27. What are you most afraid of? Huge lizards, snakes etc

28. Plain, cheese, or spicy hamburger? Extra cheese!

29. Favorite dog breed? Dalmation

30. Favorite day of the week? Friday (new movies plus weekend ahead!)

31. How many states have you lived in? 4

32. Diamonds or pearls? Diamonds

33. What is your favorite flower? None, really

Wake up!

2008-12-02T19:01:00.003+05:30

There’s been yet another terror attack on our country, right where it hurts the most – in Mumbai. Materially as well as symbolically, these attacks have been one of the worst we can remember. There have been reams written about the attacks, who’s responsible, who’s been insensitive in public statements and who should resign. I’m not going to get into that.

Since the attacks, I’ve received many mails asking me to sign online petitions and mail them forward. Numerous Facebook groups have been started extolling the bravery of our security forces. As always, pundits and citizens have written about who should go and what should be done and how we’re a soft state and so on.

I hate what happened to Mumbai and to all of us. But I don't see much use in signing petitions and heatedly discussing news. I don’t believe we need a million online signatures to prove that we’re all sick to death with what’s been happening. I also don’t see much point in drawing assumptions that may be very off, and constructing action plans and pinning the blame based on those inaccurate assumptions.

For example, it is a common belief that the intelligence is out there and it only requires political will and coordination between forces to act on it. I’m not sure that’s true. We repealed POTA and since then, terrorist attacks have increased. While the Congress has been in power, the Indian Mujahideen have grown. However, was POTA the reason for relatively fewer attacks, and is the growth of the IM to be blamed on the appeasement of Muslims by the Congress, or have the times deteriorated? Is the hate and xenophobia that drives Islamist terror deeply entrenched in the Muslim community in India? How large is the lunatic fringe among Indian Muslims?

These are some of the questions that we naively answer for ourselves and then theorize till the cows come home. I do not advocate slow action in favour of excessive analysis, but I do believe the ordinary citizen knows little and often forgets it in her excitement and righteous passion. Much like cricket, everyone seems to know what to do with terrorism. Much like cricket, I think our best bet is to hope that the best people make the team and leave the rest to them.

Unlike cricket, however, we have more power over who makes the team. We can vote. Discuss, debate, write mails and circulate petitions by all means, but try your best to do the one thing that can certainly make a difference to the state of affairs – vote in the next general election sometime in March next year.

There is a beautifully designed and user friendly website – www.jaagore.com – that aims to make the exercise of one’s right and duty easier. Register on the website and ten minutes of interactive and painless form filling later, you’re done. You can register here if you’re a first time voter and even if you’re registered in another city and want to change your constituency. You may have seen advertisements of this campaign on TV. The website really works, and if they do what they say they will, this could change the landscape of politics in India by making youth participate.

Let’s talk about all that we ought to do, but meanwhile let’s do what we can.

Gangajal and cop-out endings

2008-10-08T16:53:00.001+05:30

This thought originated from a discussion on the Prakash Jha movie Gangajal. I liked the movie when I first saw it some years back. I love movies that have characters speaking Hindi the way it is spoken in the heartland. These movies are often based on political or social themes. Though I am from UP and even lived in Lucknow for the first eight years of my life, I haven’t been in close contact with any of the themes usually tackled. However, I feel a closeness to people from the Hindi heartland, their way of life and the issues that occupy them. I therefore hungrily consume anything from the movie industry that taps into this sentiment. When I first watched Gangajal I enjoyed the characterizations, dialogue and the atmosphere. I felt - and still do – that these were pitched just right by a man with a deep understanding and identification with the socio-political situations he recreates in his movies.

I had read about the Bhagalpur blindings in relation to reports preceding the movie. A crucial incident in Gangajal was closely based on the real life incident in Bhagalpur. In 1981, policemen in Bhagalpur blinded 31 undertrials in their own police station. They punctured the undertrials’ eyes with bicycle spokes and needles, poured acid into them and then covered their eyes with pads soaked in acids. The movie depicts the policemen’s actions as stemming from frustration and anger at their impotent system. What’s more, the city population holds the police as heroes for having meted out justice to criminals who would otherwise have escaped the law. The movie seeks to make the point that people get the police they deserve. Perhaps the director means to show that a society as violent and degenerate as this ends up being protected by equally degenerate people. The movie goes on to show how this sentiment of punishing criminals by blinding them gains wide acceptance and starts being applied wantonly. Once faith in authority or the rule of law is broken, society slips into degeneracy and inhumanity. The protagonist – Ajay Devgan – speaking as the voice of the director in the final act, lectures people on the need to preserve the humane core within themselves that differentiates them from scum, represented by a father-son politician duo. He saves the villains from the frenzied mob, arguing that civil society must let the law take its course and must not lose faith in it. More importantly, he saves people from themselves, from turning into demons.

SP Kumar’s (Devgan) last lecture jars a bit for being so transparent. The five minute monologue as the instrument of educating the movie watcher does not do justice to a movie that, thus far, has been making its point through dialogue, acting and screenplay. It’s a little like the play in which the narrator tells you exactly what you are expected to take away from what has unfolded in the last couple of hours in the play. That, however, is a question of the movie’s aesthetics and the quality of screenplay or direction. What really turned me off when I watched the film again recently is what follows the monologue.

The father-son duo slip SP Kumar’s grip and run into the town. He follows them through narrow lanes into a home. They fight and in the course of the fighting, they are pushed back on to a furrow with many pointed teeth. Both are stabbed through their eyes and die in an obvious reference to the blindings earlier in the movie. Now the problem with this ending is that it is a cop out. The director wants us to believe we should not take the law into our own hands, continue to have faith in it, that an eye for an eye has no place in a civilized society. Yet, he feels compelled to show the guilty suffering for their sins through cruel, retributive justice just a minute after he has made his point. Though violence is not the answer to civil society’s problems, comeuppance for the villains arrives in the form of the very violence society must abjure.

From touching complex social issues rather deftly in the earlier part of the movie, Gangajal gets reduced to yet another ordinary movie where the hero must rid people of evil, but must at the same time be noble and righteous. Therefore, the villains, as a result of their inability to settle at being forgiven and spared by the hero, make the mistake of trying to escape and kill themselves in the process by a variety of ways. Sometimes, they fall into gorges and sometimes they end up shooting each other and at other times, the police shoots them when they pull a final trick. The question of whether they should have been killed in the first place or not is never settled.

In all these films, the explicit message of rising above retribution and trusting the law to bring the villain to justice is subverted by the narrative. It is not enough to merely communicate your message in the movie. The message – if there is one you want to convey – must be communicated through the narrative as a whole. Gangajal is an example of an inconsistent narrative diluting the message and confusing the viewer. There are a number of movies that show guns, gangsters, sex and drugs only to tell us that they’re things that bring us to a bad end later on. Many of them do such a good job of glamorizing the very things they later condemn that the moral message of the film gets lost and the viewer carries back a more glitzy image guns and drugs.

So many people make the point that it is necessary for them to show certain things onscreen for building the characters and making them believable and so on. This is also the argument routinely trotted out by Bollywood in response to the Health Minister’s effort to ban smoking in films. It calls for a separate post but I think any industry has a social responsibility and seeing their idols smoke in movies is without doubt a major factor in making smoking look ‘cool’ and hence in children taking up the habit. Perhaps the answer is to not show people smoking when it can be done without, i.e. in most cases. The larger point, however, is that the narrative should not end up promoting the very things your movie seeks to show as undesirable or bad.

The Man With No Name

2008-10-02T13:21:00.000+05:30

Everytime I look at your picture
I can always see an arm rest on your shoulder
Even though I know it's only your hair
And the folds of your dress
I can never quite resist
Following the imaginary arm
Over your shoulder blade,
Through your careless hair
Around your neck,
Out of the frame
The arm that isn't there
Just like the Man With No Name

Once Upon A Time In The West

2008-09-28T22:42:00.003+05:30

I saw Once Upon A Time in the West in the afternoon today. Many reviewers name it as the best Western ever made. Giving it close competition are usually other Sergio Leone classics.

I'm no expert on Westerns. It's not my favourite genre and I have watched only a few. I liked Unforgiven (though a Western, it was made in the 1990s) and some parts of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and of course, Sholay. I have seen some films with Ennio Morricone's music and it's been fantastic at least twice - in The Good... and my personal favourite Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. Sergio Leone is an acknowledged master of Westerns and Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson good actors. All these factors would be wonderful in any other setting but all of them come together so beautifully in this movie that a work of true sublimity is created.

The movie is memorable almost from the first shot. Its opening is bold and brilliant - nearly 10 minutes of ambient sounds and a long wait by three silent gunmen. The mood and the setting is perfectly evoked. Finally, when the train arrives carrying the film’s hero (also with no name), the first of many great moments happens. A mysterious man plays the harmonica and Charles Bronson makes his entry worthy of the hero who’s never known uncertainty or fear.

Harmonica: “You brought a horse for me?”
Frank’s minion (looks back, there are three horses for the three minions): “He he, looks like we’re one horse short.”
Harmonica (shakes his head slightly): “You brought two too many.”

Frank, played by Henry Fonda, makes an even better entry in one of my favourite scenes. A family prepares a feast to welcome the father’s new wife. A shot rings out. The father looks up from the well at the birds flapping about – none of them seem to be dropping lifelessly from the sky. He turns around. In the far distance his daughter teeters and then falls to the ground, dead. He starts running towards her and gets shot mid-stride once, then again. The older boy gets up from his horse cart and is shot where he stands. The camera moves inside the dark home and follows the youngest boy running to the door where he stops, transfixed, petrified. We see his face and then Ennio Morricone’s magic begins. One note, and we see in the far distance one, then another figure in a dustcoat and hat coming out into view from the clump of bushes. Through the swirling dust we see five figures walk towards the boy clutching his jug of water for dear life. In a brilliant shot, made all the more memorable due to the music, all five converge to the boy. The camera comes around his shoulder to show Henry Fonda and his clear blue eyes and we know we’ve seen the man Harmonica has come in search of.

In the next two hours we see the two other characters of the drama - the outlaw with a soft core and a sense of humour who strikes an unlikely partnership with Harmonica, the widow who becomes the unwitting focus of three men, all of who “have something to do with death”. All of them act on motivations not immediately clear and slowly get involved in each other’s lives. In the middle of it all sits Harmonica, sharpening his piece of wood, shooting people when the occasion demands, playing the harmonica, staring out into space, waiting.

It’s precisely this quality of the movie – and the genre – that gives it its charm. The patient viewer gets drawn into the story that unspools through long shots of faces, silences that convey nothing and everything, eyes that contain behind them terrible secrets and immense capacity for evil and lingering shots of the dust and mountains of the Wild West. We share Frank’s curiosity to know what Harmonica is after. When he saves Frank from his assassins we share Frank’s confusion and slowly, like Frank, we begin to realize there is a deeper current running between them. Frank is hooked and so are we. He may be evil but he’s still a member of a rapidly dwindling “ancient race”. He cannot ride off knowing he has a mortal enemy who is driven by such hate that he has to save Frank for the showdown his secret deserves.

And what a showdown! The moment of dying is reached. We know now we will know. What makes Harmonica’s need for vengeance so great that he cuts down assassins who want to kill Fonda, explaining that “saving him from them isn't the same as saving him?” It seems even Frank is dying to find out. The men start moving towards their battleground to take positions. Just then, the music begins again. The haunting tune breathes life into the final contest and invests it with all the weight of expectation associated with the revelation of Harmonica’s identity.

Frank wants to shoot down Harmonica. He knows if he doesn’t, he will be shot down. Yet, he knows nothing matters more than knowing why Harmonica saved his life only to bring him to this stage. He needs to know more than he wants to win. He keeps walking when Harmonica stops, looks to the side, looks up to the sky, blinks while Harmonica’s grey eyes follow him unblinking, unhurried, sure. They stop and take position and wait in silence. And then the music picks up again and we go back and see the full extent of Frank’s evil and understand what has been driving Harmonica to this inevitable showdown. Frank draws but Harmonica shoots just as well as he plays. His journey is over.

Once Upon A Time… has the actors, the director, the cinematographer and the music director Morricone at their very best. I wish I could watch it again for the first time.

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Wrote this a couple of days back. I've been listening to the showdown tune almost in a loop since then. I also cannot count the number of times I've already watched the last showdown.
Paul Newman died yesterday. RIP Cool Hand Luke.

Worst movie ever made

2008-09-04T15:11:00.002+05:30

I watched, as the title suggests, Singh is Kinng yesterday. Without beating around the bush, I'd like to tell you to stay as far away from it as possible. If you meet someone you don't know well and you want to know if he has brains or any sense of aesthetics or is worthy of friendship, ask him whether he liked Singh is Kinng. If he says yes, turn around very slowly and run. It's my new litmus test to wean out the unworthy and those who pollute our world.

The movie sets a new standard in poor filmmaking. The plot is wafer thin, the characters are cardboard cutouts and the script is a two line scribble. I don't know how people like the director, scriptwriter etc of this movie ever get the chance to create this drivel. As a creative person, if one year of my life went into making this, I'd just retire. Don't know how or why or even whether this is such a big hit (since media has sold out already, proof being the positive reviews for the movie, reports of it being a big hit might very well be exaggerated) but even if I knew it would make me a lot of money, I'd just feel pathetic at the sheer lack of quality of my creation.

There are exactly 7 minutes of the movie that are worth watching. The first five, which fall under the category of so-bad-it's-good cinema, which have a Sardar called 'King' (or 'Kinng'?) with a french beard leaping off a building and parachuting in pursuit of his adversary on a motorcycle, catching him and then taking off with him once again! I guess if you're a Sardar anything is possible. Or maybe if you're King/Kinng. Or maybe if you're in a Godawful Vipul Amratlal Shah movie. The other two are when the song "Teri Ore" plays against the pyramids and Katrina Kaif does her thing in a black sari. The loser that this movie is, it doesn't even have the complete song. It has some 3 paras and that's it.

Akshay Kumar looks like an idiot for most of the movie and for the rest, slips into "Namastey London" mode, brokering Kaif's marriage to her bf who she doesn't quite know whether she loves or not with Singh aka Kinng's shining star in both her eyes. She floats along looking pretty till her marriage where there is a comedy of errors the result of which is that she ends up as Singh's wife (oops, sorry for the spoiler) and all is happily ever after jee. Balle balle.
Phew!

I also watched Rock On the day before. Should've watched these movies in the reverse order, because Rock On is actually a pretty decent movie. The music's good, quite genuinely rock-like, the acting's okay and the story's good too. True, execution could have been better but what the hell, it's watchable and doesn't make you come back questioning your faith in movies. Oh, but watch out for the extras in the last concert scene who have absolutely no idea why they're waving their hands at Magik (that's the band name). Their expressions are quite priceless :).

As you can see, I have a lot of time to watch movies and so on.

Foodiebay

2008-07-23T08:27:00.004+05:30

A close friend and his friends have launched an online restaurant directory with menus for Delhi, Noida and Gurgaon. It can help you find restaurant addresses, menus and other details all in one place. Check it out:
Foodiebay

Three things I might hate about you

2008-06-30T03:36:00.005+05:30

I sometimes think about my principles. What are the ideas that I hold inviolate? What are my rules of living? Many times I found that the ideas I held dear, or thought I held dear, were ideas I let go off when they inconvenienced me. I remember seeing my father and his brother discuss and debate politics at home, and I remember being struck by how clear they seemed to be about their set of beliefs. I admired and envied that confidence in their guiding principles. I wished I too had well thought through opinions that stood the test of time and scrutiny.

But I changed, my worldview widened, and my opinions changed with me. I realized there are many facets to issues and the man who qualifies his opinions and admits not knowing all or being sure or that he may be wrong may not be the one who will fire a revolution but he might well be the one steadily getting closer to the solution. I also realized that at my age, I don’t yet have the maturity or the experience to build strong, inflexible opinions. I benefit the greatest from being open to discussion, from continuing to iterate on my set of beliefs.

I do believe, however, that the older you get, the greater your need for strong beliefs. One cannot continually keep oneself open to advice. It may not be ideal to stop iterating on your beliefs but it is something that it seems to me is closely tied with developing the confidence of an adult. A man with an opinion that leaves scope for mistake always leave himself room to crawl out, but his opinion will never have any weight. There will always be people who can beat him in debate and logic, but I believe it is important for someone sure of his place in the world to possess beliefs that he refuses to put to the test of logic. Some prejudices make us who we are. If we try to escape them all, we will be nothing, just perpetual fence sitters. I say this because I see empirical evidence of this. The people in my family and life that I will ever turn to for advice are those that are able to make decisions. Equivocators are never wrong, but neither are they ever right.

So I too wanted my own toolkit of rules of existence. I never realized when my beliefs started solidifying but there are a couple of things I now know I live by. It is not a sudden realization, though the trigger for this post is a debate I had with a friend yesterday night.
I thought about the values I hold dear, and that led me to categories of people I dislike:

1. IP thieves
I give credit where it is due. Simple. And I hate it when others do not pay the same attention to crediting the right person with an idea they communicate. The earliest I remember thinking about this is during my quizzing days at IIT Delhi. We had many inter-hostel quizzes spread though the year. Every hostel had its own team and typically had a few stars. In my first couple of years I was struck by how great some of these stars’ contribution was to their teams’ performance. They seemed to be the ones with all the answers.
As I grew in quizzing and took leadership of my hostel’s quizzing team, I observed a crucial difference in the way we worked versus the others. I made it a point to make the one in the team who came up with the answer tell it out aloud. The other teams usually had a round of consultation and the seniormost member, often unconsciously, told the answer. While I made sure every team member, even if junior, got the visibility he deserved, I couldn’t know for years which quizzer in another was the one cranking out all the answers. This became important in inviting people to join teams for inter-college quizzes because one had to go by other quizzers’ opinions instead of having the data to make an independent decision.
Intellectual dishonesty, deliberate or unconscious, is so widely prevalent we don’t even notice it. There are so many friends who never think twice about telling a joke I told them or a comment I made, to a third person without referencing. You know the time when you say something funny to someone and later that night, during a dinner with the boss or with a girl who’s a common friend, the conversation is building up to the point where you deliver the same punchline and this guy breathlessly blurts it out and flashes you a grateful smile? I am the funny guy, and I hate it when you do that. The joke is my IP, and you piss me off by appropriating it. The same holds for all kinds of CPs – opinions, factoids etc.

2. The Chorus
I hate this too. Far too many times, my friends or people I know have echoed others’ opinions on people who don’t deserve them. When you press them, they have no reasons, not even any personal experiences that can justify their easy declarations about the subject. Even more surprisingly, people choose to completely ignore their own good experiences with the person and add their voices to the chorus. It’s convenient to align yourself with what the majority or the alpha people in the environment believe, but it’s not correct.

3. Armchair critics
This too has its beginnings in IIT. There were always people who thought everything was shit because the guy organizing Rendezvous was incompetent, or because the SAC General Secretary was dumb and so on. Here too, I find people utterly wanting in their understanding of the limitations and complexity of the situation of someone with responsibility. Just because someone is in power and you’re not, you don’t acquire the right to blame all that goes wrong on him/her. One must examine one’s own ideas about what is right and honestly evaluate whether they are what one would push if one was in that person’s position, and indeed. People must also develop some respect for those colleagues who make things happen, because a lot of us would do a much worse job. It’s exactly like the debate where the Opposition is able to punch holes in the Proposition’s model and expects to win the House’s confidence without supplying a better viable alternative.

---

Today, I bought a pair of jeans and a shirt I like and attended a salsa workshop organized by batchmates with two right feet and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I avoid dancing and am usually painfully self-conscious when dancing, especially when sober. Today, however, I decided to go ahead and attend the WS, even if I ended up looking stupid.
Well, I didn't look stupid and feel great at having stepped out of my comfort zone and survived. Then I watched the Euro Cup final with dorm mates. And now, I have that rare thing - a post to upload. Tomorrow, I'll go to a mall and buy a camera, which is a long overdue purchase and has been necessitated by my impending trip to Cambodia (more on Cam and Angkor Wat later). Life's good :).

Perception and The Superhero movie

2008-06-22T23:34:00.003+05:30

My friends told me something today that friends in previous lives have told me - that I don't smile, or smile too little, that I look snobbish (because I don't smile), that I am too sarcastic (worse because I don't have an innocent smile to neutralize the effect), that people think I don't like them. I hate it that it's still true. Over time, I have actually made efforts to smile more, to show more teeth, to look more likable. And now, when my best friends claim they've never seen me laugh and have got used to interpreting my half-smiles as a normal Human Smile Equivalent, I feel a little disappointed.
There are many reasons why I smile sparingly. The main reason, I think, is that I am, through a combination of my upbringing and my essential nature, a rather un-spontaneous person. This bugs me sometimes, because I feel so many things would be easier if I was more impulsive, but I really don't see how I can change that about myself. The lack of spontaneity results in a lack of expressiveness and outward emotion. Though I feel just as much as anyone else, probably more, I express very little. Many years of having held back on expressing myself emotionally have made me forget the language of emotion. I have trouble expressing happiness, sadness, love, affection, anger, sympathy (sympathy is the really hard nut) with the result that I come across as apathetic and unemotional. Which may not be completely untrue.
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On another note, I watched The Incredible Hulk yesterday. It's worth a watch but not a lot more. Superhero movies are fun to watch but almost all look like a patchwork of standard superhero movie elements - the pretty scientist/doctor, the hard nosed military General, the crazy scientist, the experiment gone wrong etc. For that reason too, I love the X-Men movies. They stand out for story, direction and quality of actors in a family of mediocre movies.
That apart, movie franchises are like TV series - they are addictive in spite of lapsing into mediocrity. A James Bond movie or a Spiderman n (though the third was exceptionally bad) is guaranteed to be fun, even if not memorable. The familiarity with characters and the universe and the promise of being shown some solid action translates almost always into a contribution from my side towards the movie's profits.

I did a wheelie today!

2008-03-07T08:05:00.003+05:30

I’m in a strange state this morning. It’s past 5 am as I begin typing this. I just rode a bike over a longish distance and back from IIM. My study group for the first two terms decided to go for early morning coffee and snacks at the Ahmedabad Le Meridien. My friend decided to let me ride his bike in order that I learn. My aim is to be able to ride a bike properly next year while on trips with my friends. Anyway, I ended the ride with a fall from the bike and a couple of impressive cuts on my hand that my friends have variously suggested can pass for those earned in a fight and those received from smashing glass. My unfortunate friend said I’d done a wheelie for a moment before we – he, I and his bike - were all splayed on the ground. I don’t remember because it must have happened in the half-second before touching the ground in which I gave up trying to establish coordination between what I wanted the bike to do (stop) and what I was making it do (go faster) and prepared to notch my first road accident. I’m wondering, however, whether the wheelie counts if one lands back on more than just two wheels. I went to my biker friend’s dorm and applied some Savlon on my cuts and it got me wondering about Savlon.
Savlon is possibly the best example of a product whose (relative) failure could not have been predicted by absolutely any one. It’s a better antiseptic than Dettol and it hardly hurts while Dettol burns. The product team must’ve worked long and hard on developing such a product to take on Dettol. When they developed it, they must’ve rejoiced at finding an antiseptic that had it both ways – medicinal value and painlessness. To see it fail in the market must have been heartbreaking. What happened was that consumers simply didn’t believe in the healing/antiseptic properties of a solution that didn’t hurt and stuck to Dettol. Whoever saw that coming? Of course, Dorm 8’s First Aid Kit contains Savlon (perhaps because it is maintained by a Doctor) and that means Savlon’s not completely routed.
However, I intend to continue learning to ride because riding a bike is exhilarating in a way driving a car (which I’m used to) never is. Robert Pirsig says in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that looking out of a car is just more television while riding a bike lets you become a part of the environment or some such and I agree. The very first time I rode a bike was on a long straight road with slowly moving windmills on either side made glorious in the orange and red of dusk in Jaisalmer. I kid you not. I had come to spend a fortnight with my Mama who was posted in the Air Force Station in Jaisalmer and he was taking me out to begin my lessons. Those lessons continued for exactly one more day but my debut was spectacularly memorable. Perhaps it was the Air Force-ness of everything around me or the permanent damage watching Top Gun at an impressionable age caused me but I thought it was the height of cool to stand with my helmet against my waist with the windmills all around and the day slowly setting as we changed seats for the ride back home. All I needed to complete my fantasy were Ray Bans – they’re absolutely the first item I’m getting myself if ever I get contacts. Actually, I need contacts for the sole purpose of being able to wear sunglasses so they’re joint products, in a way. Or bundled or something. I remember thinking then too how watered down the experience would have been in a car.
It’s a little like stopping somewhere wonderful during your trip and taking a photograph to capture the sublimity of the place and going back and seeing the photograph and finding nothing extraordinary in it at all. It’s because the photograph captures only one dimension – the visual – of the environment. Chances are the magic of the place was a bewitching mix of scenic beauty, the wind howling in your ears, the clouds moving in from far away, the welcome warmth of the sun and the wonderful music playing in your car, or some similar multitude of factors. The awesomeness and the sublime quality of the experience are hopelessly dwarfed in a photograph. It remains, at best, a reminder of how great things were but the greatness cannot be communicated to someone who doesn’t have it in his/her memory already.
There’s a good reason why my friends and I should do the soup-and-pizza-at-4 am routine more often and that is the wonderful insights that come but occasionally to extraordinary men and almost never to women and ordinary men. (I’m sorry for the sexism but it’s true – women, as Zen Babu often exasperatedly points out, just aren’t bakchod enough.) The insight then is the following:
An MBA is like a Swiss Army knife. Everyone wants one. It’s a status symbol. It’s expensive. It looks good. It enables you to do a whole lot of things that you couldn’t otherwise do. However, you are most likely to never use it for anything other than opening beer bottles (Zen Babu supplied the beer bottle opener function – the original developers simply thought a Swiss knife was useless and hence even more analogous to an MBA. Please note, however, that none of these arguments hold for a PGDM, which is of course an immensely useful thing.).
I just re-read the first line and I remembered why it was strange when I began writing this. It was strange at the time that I was nursing my manly lacerations and listening to Andrea Corr crooning Breathless at the same time and enjoying both. I’m clearly the biker boy with a romantic side now.

2008-01-31T04:22:00.000+05:30

I don’t know when this happened but it’s now become incredibly hard for me to post anything on this blog. I’ve therefore taken to beginning posts in the above inane way with absolutely no idea of what I’m going to write about or whether what little I’ll write I’ll want to post. While I love watching and discussing movies and would gladly talk films with you till dawn breaks a couple of hours later, I also feel vaguely irritated at my seeming inability to write about anything else that bothers or excites me. At the same time, I also realize that it’s not fair to blame myself for the long slumber this blog has seen and can any day lapse back into.
Time was when I was less cautious about who and what I spoke about. I therefore treated my blog as exactly the sort of thing that it ought to be – a place to pen your thoughts in, not as private as a diary but certainly a place for frankness, at least with myself. I wrote because I felt like it and found it easy, effortless. That’s not to say that I wrote wonderfully but fact is I wrote effortlessly and the reward was in enjoying the process. I don’t remember imposing explicit restrictions on myself but somewhere down the line, I stopped writing about things I felt deeply, even if temporarily. This was for a number of reasons, primarily that I did not want to volunteer to communicate my weaknesses or peeves or generally reveal more than I had to to anyone who cared to read my posts. I was also unsure of how much could be read between the lines by a regular reader and a personal acquaintance or friend. I remember this surreal bus ride mid way through which this guy turns asks me, “Aren’t you an escapist?”! I didn’t know how to react and I remember giving some fuzzy answer which may have meant something sensible. But that is one instant I recollect that drove home to me the way one’s image gets moulded. I hadn’t realized it but already, people who didn’t know me well judged me on the basis of what they’d heard. I realized then, and I realize now in IIM even more strongly, the power of the ‘image’. You are who you seem to be. Unfortunately, I haven’t made use of this common knowledge, much like a huge number of others equally aware of the benefits that acting a certain way consistently could bring.
I have made some concessions to the need to look good though. One among them is not cribbing on my blog about little things that piss me off. I’m more circumspect now about who I consider trustworthy. It will therefore be an inconvenience (I argue) were I to go write a thinly disguised account of my life’s goings-on if the other actors started reading my blog. Imagine Sonia Gandhi’s minions yes-madaming all day only to go back and announce to the world that these Romans are crazy!
This increased circumspection then automatically means I have to cut out the juicy bits from my blog. I have however been thinking lately about whether this makes a lot of sense and I don’t think it does. The best use of my blog is for reading stuff I wrote years ago and recollecting the incidents that made me write those posts. Not writing about what excites me is robbing me from a history that would otherwise have been recorded and refreshed at regular intervals. I’ll try to make amends.

Knock Knock

2008-01-23T05:12:00.000+05:30

Writing can be cathartic. Writing, however, can also be very hard. It's especially hard to write when you write within constraints. There's so much that I sometimes feel like expressing and there's so little of it that I can allow myself to express on a public forum like this.
There are times of course when I feel full of good cheer. One such time was the Sunday that just went past when three of us started out for lunch and proceeded to spend the next few hours in malls doing pretty much what we wanted. I can't remember the last time I enjoyed an outing so much. What was especially great about it was the spontaneity of the entire afternoon - nothing was planned, no one ever talked about hurrying or leaving or getting the work done or asked what we were doing aimlessly looking at books we weren't buying or clothes we weren't purchasing.
The next day was pretty good too, for a different reason. I watched No Country for Old Men, a movie I highly recommend, especially to anyone who isn't allergic to some fairly graphic violence on screen. If you positively enjoy violence, then you should try out Eastern Promises as well. It's not as good as A History of Violence (a personal favourite, can't recommend it highly enough) but it's got a pretty paisa-vasool Russian/Turkish mafia-in-London story with some nice touches, good casting and acting and a fight sequence that is glorious in its unflinching devotion to realism. I didn't really want to get into movies tonight but I can't resist one last recommendation: Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. It is one of the most beautiful things you're likely to see in your lifetime and it's end is so brilliant, so rich in symbolism, so quirky as a standalone montage, so touching in the context of the movie and the music so divine that I refresh it every few days on YouTube.
Right, getting back to our sombre mood before I digressed into movies, I don't quite know why I haven't been writing, especially since I like it so much. I know how great I'll feel after I've posted this on my blog and yet it's amazing I have posted so rarely in the recent past. I think an analogy is bathing in winters (except that I do bathe everyday :) ).
Meanwhile, people here continue to amaze me. I feel fortunate that I'm getting to spend two more years with such obviously intelligent and capable people after having spent four years studying and living with very bright people at IIT (with plenty of intersections between these sets). The difference between IIT and IIM is that while IIT had a lot of intelligent people who didn't seem too driven (and also plenty who were), my batchmates at IIMA almost uniformly seem an ambitious and informed lot. It's a pleasure talking with them because flaws in logic or factual errors are immediately exposed, because no one is able to hide behind superior articulation the way they could earlier and because while there's immense respect for substance, there's also derision to be wary of in case you talk nonsense. But none of this serves to elevate discussions here as much as a distinct difference in social, political and economic awareness among students here compared with when I was at IIT. Which is why it pains me that so many of my batch are getting bent out of shape right now for something that is very minor. Perhaps I should be able to generate the same passion for elections that my friends at IIT could and it seems those at IIM can, but I feel quite strongly about the silliness of feeling strongly about student body elections.

Hope Floats

2007-11-03T02:43:00.001+05:30

I’ve been thinking about the point of this blog and blogging in general for some time now. I’m no wiser. I feel like writing something today so I will.

I just came back from a show of Jab We Met. The movie has received good reviews and being an incorrigible sucker for anything from Bollywood that seems remotely promising I not only watched it myself in a movie hall I persuaded a group of friends to watch it too. The movie made me want to tear my hair out in frustration at the Bollywood clichés, at its DDLJ redoing, at some lame comedy. I spent most of the film marveling at the illogic or making fun of the impracticality displayed by the characters or second-guessing the Director. The music seemed the only redeeming feature of an effort with often amateurish direction, poor editing and average acting. Moreover, one of the opening sequences that has a taxi plying at night through the streets of Ram Ganj or something similar has production values harking back to the era of cardboard boats and smoky caverns of Alif Laila and its ilk. But the interesting bit is this: I left the theatre full of good cheer. The “recency effect” worked full on in leaving me with a great aftertaste even though most of the movie was rubbish by ending the film with possibly its best scene followed by a nice, peppy number and above all, making the nice guy get the girl in the end.

The last Hindi movie I watched before this was Johnny Gaddaar. This movie got great press too but probably for different reasons. I was very impressed by its director’s earlier effort – Ek Hasina Thi. Johnny Gaddaar was extensively advertised as being derived from and containing references to a number of Hollywood, foreign language and old Hindi films. I watched the movie and thought it was total rubbish and was very surprised to see all the great reviews it seemed to get. I’m probably being too simplistic but I believe a large proportion of reviewers were just impressed by the long list of exotic films from all over the world that seemed to have collectively inspired the movie. I thought the actors were uniformly bad, barring some character actors who were either wrongly cast or poorly directed. Neil Mukesh, the hero, was consistently wooden and looked appropriately dumb for the kind of plan he hatched. Rimi Sen looked confused and worried as always. A word about the minor actors: just because they are ‘character’ actors, they aren’t automatically good actors. The direction was alright but the real fault lay with the script. For the kind of movie Johnny Gaddaar is, I’m justified in comparing it to Lock, Stock… and Snatch. These movies have stories that are driven by coincidences but they have so many coincidences that the viewer accepts them within the movie’s universe. This film had twists that were too few and too late and just jarred.

I’ll still go for Om Shanti Om.

The making of Rorschach

2007-09-24T03:20:00.000+05:30

I'd like you to leave
Just don't splatter my whitewashed walls
With your blood and guts
Don't say, if possible, anything at all
Just up and go if you can
And if you can't
Don't stay and rant
I like silence when I watch TV
And don't accuse me of thinking only about me
'I' am a perfectly legitimate thing to think about
And don't say "Take care" when you take that step out
Because I will, whether you tell me to or not
You can simply smile when you go
Or mouth soundlessly at my back
And please don't remind me of the sensitivity I lack
Because I really, honestly, for once in my life
Don't care about the future, about the results
There's nothing I want to mend
There's nothing I want to ever feel like resolving
There's nothing I want to leave any scope for improving
There's nothing that I want to do with you, ever
Black and white are the easiest colors to view the world in
I want to say, this time, it ends.
---
Random poems late in the night
Don't have to be true, or accurate, or right
They can sometimes be born from the simple need -
And not from some subliminal seed -
The need to write.

In which I find my inspiration to continue at WIMWI

2007-09-17T23:40:00.000+05:30

8:10 PM Dashdash: so what did you decide
me: about what?
8:11 PM Dashdash: what you want to do today
me: i have to work on my btp
8:12 PM i also have an assignment demo
Dashdash: fine
fine
8:14 PM people with much more work than you
are a lot less rude to me
besides you're not a good manager
me: i don't see how i'm being rude
Dashdash: and you get nervous
that is your primary problem
you dont accept your faults
8:15 PM me: we ARE quite similar, then
Dashdash: no
im a good manager
and i dont get nervous like you
me: and you accept your faults?
8:16 PM never mind
Dashdash: even from rude people, yes
my accepting my fault never pacified your ego anyway so how does it matter
me: precisely, it doesn't matter
8:17 PM Dashdash: you dont deserve the air time you get
you're always speaking too much and listening too little
8:18 PM me: anyway, i have to leave
you must have something to do too
Dashdash: no one is stopping you smarty pants!
me: :)
bbye
Dashdash: just go

-----

I was searching for some old important sort of mail to do with my BTP when I chanced upon this. I thought it was funny so I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone by spreading the good cheer and giving my asphyxiating blog the Kiss of Life.

PS: I do think I am a little sarcastic at times, or at least I try. I don't think it ever worked on Dashdash, by the way.

OM

2007-09-03T00:25:00.000+05:30

"The bottlenecks will always be there. It's up to you to pick your exhibits."

Thank you L.

This too has passed

2007-05-05T05:50:00.000+05:30

This is not good. I’m spending what may very well be my third night out of the last four in the lab. Air conditioned or not, I really should be sleeping. I have to do some work – two large chunks of work actually – before tomorrow morning and it’s not as if I couldn’t have avoided this last minute scram. I just procrastinated beyond the point of any sense at all. A couple of nights spent finishing what should have been done earlier is comic and indulgent, but I really do want to sleep tonight and absolutely the last thing I want to do is to read about bloody timed automata. The weird part of all this is that about 10, or at most 12, hours later I will never again in my life have to read, write or communicate about timed automata. Timed automata will be wiped out from my life for ever and if I forget every little scrap of information I have not been able to stop despite my sincerest efforts from going into my reluctant mind and if I burn all the printouts I’ve taken this semester and if entire folders and assignments get deleted and if tomorrow timed automata were to be suddenly outlawed from the world, none of it would make a paisa-worth of difference to me. And yet, there’s nothing I can do but try my best to understand as much as possible of timed automata. It’s all really rather futile.
Sometimes I think that the only subjects that are of any real use to me are some parts of mathematics and the humanities courses that I did at IIT. The rest were there to fill my time. I could have used those courses to sharpen my mental faculties or I could have worked hard at them to keep from losing momentum. But to think that the course content itself was of any importance is to delude oneself. At least I have the satisfaction of knowing I’m leaving a stream of study I have no interest and little aptitude for. I wonder what people who are good at their engineering subjects, and worse, actually like their stuff, feel when they leave them to do MBAs or something similar. I don’t subscribe to the selling-your-soul-for-money nonsense or the theory that so much money is spent on us to make us into engineers and hence we are under some sort of obligation to humanity to engineer all our lives. But I don’t know how people who leave what they love for what they don’t feel. Perhaps most of them can love just about anything after finding beauty in subjects I find exceedingly dull. Perhaps they adjust easily to new subjects. Then, do those of us who have trouble finding things interesting find nothing interesting at all? I will, of course, be in a better position to answer this say, a year later but it’s a question that’s been troubling me in recent days, especially since I’ve been getting time to think at these totally avoidable ‘night-outs’ of mine.
Obviously, the time that I devote to writing a post eats into the time I should be spending studying or working. However, it is the part I enjoy most about the night-outs, so here goes another.

Some hours later:
It’s amazing. I have nothing to do here except study – three songs I’m in no mood to hear, no movies, books or music videos, no LAN, no one’s online and nothing’s happening on the Net. I have read all the blogs I normally read and have checked for new emails too many times already (there aren’t any). I am actually studying because there’s nothing else to do. I mean, this actually works – remove distractions from your life and you study/work by default. I always thought it was individual will and motivation that decided whether people studied or not. I had no idea removal of temptations worked this well. Try this at home.
Meanwhile, I’m getting rather pissed at myself because I need sleep and I can’t get any because I must work. What’s worse, since I’ll only finish by about 5 or 6 am, if at all, there’ll really be no point in sleeping because if I did I wouldn’t be able to get up in time for my work to serve any useful purpose.
I’ve been writing limericks of a slightly personal nature that may not see the light of the day but are pretty decent nevertheless. They’re certainly a change from all that I’ve written in the past months, mainly non starters.

For however much you opine
(And you’re quite generous with this line)
That I don’t, can’t, feel anything deep
And all I care for is my sleep
So often I’ve been far from fine

and others on similar lines. I think it’s especially apt because of the sleep line. Maybe all this is preparation for the future - which, frankly, terrifies me – but the point really is, what’s the purpose of a life in which I have to go through pain and discomfort and lack of sleep and it’s all a good thing because I’ll get used to an experience I’ll repeat in future? I mean, so I didn’t work when I should have. Big deal. I must have done something I enjoyed, like watching a movie or chatting someone up or writing a post. Why should enjoying life, living life, make me feel guilty? Why do we attach such a premium on hard work? And why the corresponding guilt attached with laziness?

Does work really set us free
Or is it all a giant Nazi conspiracy?

PS: It's 6 am now. Officially 3 out of 4.

A Day in the Life of Robert Frust

2007-05-03T12:50:00.000+05:30

2243 hrs: It’s been ten minutes now since I arrived in the lab. I’ve come here with the intention to stay all night. My main purpose is to study for my sociology exam tomorrow. However, I’ve come equipped with the DVD of the ten-part Dekalog and a pair of enormous headphones belonging to a dear friend I’m going to see a lot more of in the next two years for relief from the tedium of studying about development theory. I also have in my bag a packet of buns that I’ll consume some time between now and daylight (not that I’ll know it’s day inside this artificially constructed atmosphere with bright lights and unnatural temperature and humidity designed to make humans work at hours our bodies were meant to dream in, but never mind…). I also plan to go out for walks every couple of hours or so for a cup of coffee and a break from too much light.
But the most important activity today, and an interesting experiment to boot, is this: I’ll write a little every hour or a couple of hours - I don’t know – and at the end of the night I should have an interesting post that should meander through a lot of different things I’ll think about during the night (not all of which I’ll consider wise to communicate). Here’s looking forward to a good night!

2303: Too soon, I know but can’t resist. I’m in the lab with this PhD scholar. He just farted. There’s nothing particularly strange about that, of course. What is strange though is that he has his headphones on and while I could hear the phhht he made from ten feet away I’m sure he didn’t hear his rear roar. To work, to work.

2317: The only company I had in the lab just left. I’m free! I have the lab all to myself. I’m still not free enough to watch porn in the lab but soon almost everyone in the department building will have left and then I will be. I won’t, but it’s nice to know I can if I want to. Like the right to vote. Out of inertia or apathy I may never get a Voter’s Identity Card made, or never actually vote. But that’s not the entire point.

0031: It’s getting extremely cold in the lab. There’s no music. Maybe I should download some music. I’m finally feeling the effects of not having slept last night and having had only 3-4 hours of sleep in the day today. I’ll have to go out for coffee, warmth and fresh air soon. But I’m not doing that till I finish the first set of slides.
I’ve also started getting the feeling that I might have to stay on and write my term paper tonight because it may be too late otherwise. I have more critical work to do tomorrow, sleep or no sleep, and a major the day after.
Tonight, I may very well have to munch buns in hell.

0052: Just leaving for a cuppa with ex.

0459: Well. Where do I begin? We talked, and talked and talked. Ditto walked. Mosquitoes found us wherever we sat so we came back to the lab. I showed her the Dekalog because I thought she’d appreciate that the film was Polish. She did. We talked of languages – Slavic languages, the beauty of Urdu and the utterly unsatisfactory expression of English. She laughed at people who thought Italian was the most beautiful language in the world. She laughed easily tonight. I laughed a lot too. She gave me a wonderful song - Undertow by Pain of Salvation. We looked over the lyrics and I wondered aloud at my inability to express like that. If only I could…
I said I’d walk her downstairs. Then I said since I’d come down I might as well grab a coffee. I bought my coffee. Then we walked some more and my coffee got over. Then we talked some more and it was time for me to leave. I didn’t want to. She said I wouldn’t fail in hukka. I agreed happily and walked and talked more. We talked frankly. We talked of others, of ourselves, of each other. We talked little of the Past. We talked little of the Future. We joked and laughed at things I only joke about with her, at any rate in this language. Eventually we had to concede I wouldn’t pass without studying at all, so with difficulty we came once more to my building.
Here, then, I am, typing out a cruelly excised account of all that happened. This bare bones summary cannot capture all that was said and heard tonight. Sometimes, magic happens. More often, it doesn’t. And I am listening to Undertow, which is highly recommended. I feel full of good cheer right now.
And now, all hands because I really am in dire straits if I don’t devote every nerve ending in my body to studying for the next couple of hours. Couple of hours! Shit.

0550: The good news is that of the three sets of slides that have been added since the last test I’ve at least read carefully through two. The third will be done soon. It’s not so bad after all. I’ll have no respite even after the test though. I’ll just have to pull up my socks, tighten my loincloth and down a couple of cups of coffee and get right back to the entirely avoidable business of last-minute, D-Day, Panic Button work required to pass courses.
It’s daylight now, which is depressing. At night I always feel a sense of infinity. I get the feeling that the night will go on for ever. With first light comes the rude awakening that the night advances just as fast as the day and 8 am had been steadily getting nearer while I was reveling in the nighttime mosquito-infested air. Only two hours away now.

0610: Very sleepy now. Will get hallucinogenic soon. Wait, is that my phone ringing?

0622: I have been listening to Undertow in a loop now. I just looked to see where my exam would be held and got a pleasant surprise – my exam is at 1030 and not at 0800 as originally believed. This gives me time to breathe. Also to shit, shave and shower. Speaking of which, I remember a teacher once telling us that in the National Defence Academy, cadets had to finish the 3 S’s in 3.5 minutes. I don’t know if there is indeed an upperbound on the amount of time one can spend on one’s ablutions in the NDA, but if there is one I really don’t see how it can be 3.5 minutes, or even 5 or 7. One can perhaps imagine wrapping it all up in 15 minutes in times of dire urgency but anything less than 10 deserves a prize. Perhaps you can skip the 3 S’s on a couple of days and collect coupons for 3.5 extra minutes per day missed and encash them on the third day by having a long luxurious hot soak. Or perhaps everyone multitasks like crazy, brushing their teeth and shaving while on the pot, and then rinsing and gargling in the shower. Or perhaps… oh well, never mind! I rejoice to inform my readers that we at IIT can take all the time we want in the pristine toilets. Just one word of advice: always check whether the flush works and water is available before settling down with your morning thoughts. Unfortunate experiences have happened, though fortunately never with yours truly. Calls have had to be made for emergency bottles of mineral water (no running water) from the pot, though why someone would carry their cell phone to the Big Job beats me. There’s worse but never mind. We’re okay, most of the time. Yesterday, though, was very bad. Not only did we have no running water, we had no Internet! Basic human rights, anyone?
Can’t decide whether I should stick around for longer. If I do, someone may come to the lab and I won’t have to go deposit the lab key with the PhD scholar who believes he farts soundlessly. Besides, I’m enjoying writing this post and I don’t want to say goodbye just yet. If I stay, I’ll just keep listening to my new favourite song over and over again.

0654: I just orkutted a bit, wrote a couple of scraps, wished a senior who got engaged a while back a happy married life, asked another if he was interested in Spiderman 3 etc. Pretty general. Didn’t add anyone to my Crush List or anything. I think I really should fold my tent and walk the long walk back. The stale air-conditioned air is doing my oxygen starved brain no good at all. It’s not yet time to post though. I’ll take this post to my room and update it till I leave.

1018: Just woke up. Exam at 1030. Woke up just in time. This could have been disaster. It won’t be though. Must rush.

1244: The examination was easy. I finished it half an hour early. Undertow playing again. This song reminds me of Evanescence and the genre Evanescence claim their music encompasses - Gothic Rock. I think I have a cover by a female singer who, like Evanescence’s lead, is also singing on a very high note.

1302: Mozilla just died on me. I've had to re-edit, re-link, re-italicise and re-embolden everything.

Today’s been fairly eventful. Another day well lived.

I, Frust

2007-04-23T11:22:00.000+05:30

Get Your Cyborg Name

This obviously means
a) this whole get your cyborg name thing is a scam, since I've never been any good at anything useful, let alone a skill as vast and as universal as troubleshooting
or
b) I don't know myself well enough
or, most likely,
c) Frust is not my real name.

Let It Bleed

2007-04-15T10:09:00.000+05:30

Literature corrupts. Ditto with movies. Books and movies have given me a lot of happiness and many hours of feeling that I’m doing something worthwhile with some of my time over the last few years in particular, and the past in general. However, more than anything else, they’ve also been responsible for my increasing alienation from the value systems of my parents and their generation. At the same time, I’m not completely at ease with the value systems I find believable in B&M.
Some of the issues that bring out this conflict most clearly are my attitudes towards drugs, alcohol and sex. After having seen so many actors do lines of coke in films and having read about so many characters doing drugs in books, I find it easy and not in the least shocking when I see it on screen or read about it, or increasingly, hear about some friend of a friend (usually comfortably anonymous) having done hard drugs. It’s probably a part of growing up to stop viewing things in black and white and start accepting several things but what most accelerates this acceptance of things that I had absolutely no doubt I’d never do or condone is not just the frequent reference to them. It’s the incredibly casual way, the blasé-ness of it all, that changes you. It’s not too hard to keep your head when everyone else seems to be losing theirs around you. What causes change in people is when they question the very basis of their principles because no one else is doing drugs because they want to be cool; they’re doing it for no reason at all, just like that. We’ve grown up knowing that we shouldn’t do drugs (and I keep saying drugs although we can apply the same logic to smoking or drinking and more) just because they’re cool. We should fight the temptation that our friends will give us saying we’re not men if we’re too scared to even try. One can handle that. Even if I try drugs, I know I am only ‘experimenting’, because after all, what other time will I get to experiment? But when people are doing it like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and not making any efforts to recruit others, when there is no element of rebellion, when no one’s making a statement, that’s when your values implode. You don’t know who’s right any more. Perhaps your parents just didn’t know. Perhaps those public service messages were all wrong. Perhaps you’re just this person who doesn’t place himself in the way of interesting things. Perhaps nothing will ever happen to you.
I just don’t know what I think any more. Am I okay with certain kinds of behaviour, some of which I do too? Am I okay with my friends (say) doing drugs but not my family? Am I okay with my girlfriend smoking but not my wife? Do I apply different standards to men and women? Am I wrong if I do? Do more developed societies apply equal standards? Am I a chauvinist? Is it the society, my middle class-ness, my immaturity, my nature or just my sex? Will I change? With place? With time? With experience? With introspection? Should I change? Am I too nice? Am I too insensitive? Am I too proud? Do I compromise too much? Do I give up too easily? Will that change? Do I say ‘perhaps’, ‘I think’, ‘maybe’ too much? How much is too much? Do I reveal too much? Do I keep people at a distance? Am I too selfish? Do I not do things for people I don’t know?
Sometimes I think about putting my fist through glass, hearing the satisfying loud crash of the double paneled window before I feel the glass that sliced through my skin a moment ago. I see my arm drawing back. I see my bloody fist. I see myself pulling out shards of glass from my knuckles, each pull drawing fresh crimson blood. My blood. Blood that I haven’t seen for so much time except when I brush my teeth and my gums sometime bleed. Blood that’s salty. Blood that has come out before, when I was much younger. It never hurts as much as it seems, just like a bus is never as packed as it looks from the outside. I have too much blood. Women lose so much every month. They must feel nauseatingly female when they feel the blood run down their thighs, or do they wear a pad with the first trickle? Or does it gush out, leaving no option but to let it bleed? Perhaps they mark dates on a secret calendar. But why secret? Women bleed, we know it, they know we know, and of course they know. Perhaps they mark big fat crosses in red felt pens. Do I have to lose blood to feel alive?
Am I wrong, am I wrong, am I wrong?
I must be. I have to be.

Norwegian Wood

2007-03-31T07:27:00.000+05:30

Midori rested an arm on the bar and looked at me. “There was something like that in a Jim Morrison song, I’m pretty sure.”

“People are strange when you’re a stranger.”

“Peace,” said Midori.

“Peace,” I said.

These lines aren’t really an encapsulation or a sample of what you can expect from this novel. However, the very first time I read about this novel, I read these lines in the review and they’ve stayed with me since then.

The blurbs describe it as a story of love, loss and sexuality in adolescence. In that sense all of us should find something to identify with in this novel.

Freedom

2007-03-18T12:06:00.000+05:30

There is a special satisfaction I imagine deriving from being defeated by forces too big for me. Life is a constant struggle for as long as we keep battling forces that can be overcome with enough effort and resolve. But when you are brought down to your knees and kept there by a giant invisible hand that is simply impossible to throw off, you can finally give up. I keep imagining being beaten by Fate so roundly that I can then guiltlessly give up the Sisyphian struggle I go through all day, all week, all year. Every time I face a problem that looks as though it might just be too big for me, I come across a new one that makes the first one pale in comparison. But the day I allow myself to finally, absolutely give up on life, the future will cease to matter. What people think of me will not matter, because I will have ground my ego to dust. Whether people love me or not will not matter because any betrayal will only make me surer that life was indeed worth giving up on. I will then have the license to be mean to people who take the trouble of caring for me. I will be able to shamelessly plead for pity from everyone. I will be able to cut anyone in mid-sentence and tell them I couldn’t care less for them but I want them to listen to me for hours. I’ll do exactly as I please. I’ll be liberated from political correctness. Not only will I not have to be politically correct and pretend I view men, women, gays, blacks, browns, mongoloids, sardars, ugly people, beautiful people, rich people, poor people, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, people of different castes, dark people, fair people, women with facial hair and women without, foreigners, south Indians, people with the right accents, people with regional accents, people with fake accents, people who mispronounce words and people who correct my pronunciation, people who stand up during the Indian anthem and people who think saluting the flag and standing at attention for 52 seconds means they can cheat on taxes because they love their country, people who don’t even pretend they love their country, people who read, people who don’t, people who get their kicks from spending money and people who get theirs from technology, people who have no standards when it comes to people they befriend, people who have closed their minds to entire genres of music, films, books, people who have strong convictions, people who support reservations, introverts, extroverts, ambiverts, perverts, slimy people, holier-than-thou people, rightists, leftists, centrists, hawks and doves, abstract artists and people who write absurd plays and people who draw people who look like people, meek people, doormats, assertive people, people who never admit they have insecurities too, people who enjoy reading other people’s on their blogs, people who reveal theirs on their blogs, people who understand double entendres and graphic novels, people who watch the same music videos again and again, people who enjoy remixes, smokers, drinkers, vegetarians, beef-eaters, conservative people, liberal people, bohemian people, libertarians, Pakistan bashers, people who understand people don’t always mean what they say, people who always mean what they say, people who complete my sentences and people who never can, etc equally, I’ll also be free to shout out loud that I am a bigot and a racist even when I’m not because it’s so much easier to exist with hard lines delineating black and white etched in your life than with shadow lines that shift with time. I’ll be free to be a hypocrite, to love and hate at the same time.

True freedom is perhaps the freedom to be unreasonable.
______

I was going to make a strong pitch for 300 but it's been getting some pretty negative reviews too. I think everyone who's read and even mildly enjoyed the graphic novel by Frank Miller has watched the film already. If you haven't yet, drop everything and stand outside Priya or whatever your local equivalent is for as long as it takes to get a ticket and then watch it. Also practise your whistling because you'll want to wolf-whistle all the time. If you haven't been exposed to this kind of filmmaking, through Sin City, or even this kind of Art at all, through other graphic novels by Frank Miller & Co. that mostly consist of beautiful visuals, sex-violence-machismo stories in which characters (mostly men) speak almost exclusively in punchlines, then you may not like it. If you get turned off by violence, you will certainly not like it.
But if you like your movie to be a grand spectacle, and enjoy men on screen being ubermanly (even women say things like "only Spartan women give birth to real men", so you should get the idea), are attracted to depictions of honour, uncompromising valour and doomed last stands, go for it. Do not expect a history lesson, it's a testosterone fest. This movie should get you by the balls for you to love it.

I'll become your fan if...

2007-03-17T17:54:00.000+05:30

...you could help me with one or more of the following things regarding orkut:
1. Is there any way to be notified if you acquire a new fan, or if you lose an existing fan? Shouldn't orkut etiquette dictate that you at least scrap whoever it is you've become fanatical about, so they know?
2. Is there any way to see the list of fans for someone else on orkut?
3. How is the order of one's list of fans determined? I've added so many new fans but my first page hasn't changed for years.
4. Is there any way to search one's list of fans for a particular friend?
5. What is the correct way to search for friends on orkut, especially if they've changed their names to 'nicks' (don't do that, please)?
6. Is there any way to adjust time on orkut to IST?
7. Is there any way to get to a scrap that a particular scrap's been sent as a reply to? This is especially relevant when communicating with someone whose scrapbook advances several pages in a day.

On Amelie, mostly

2007-03-13T10:16:00.000+05:30

I didn't like Amelie. I don't know anyone else who didn't. I'll try to explain why I didn't.
Firstly, the movie is very, very heavy on narration. Now, apart from the obvious difficulty of watching a movie that you have to understand through subtitles, it somehow becomes worse when the (first half of the) movie is mostly visuals with a voiceover. There was so much of voiceover that I often missed enjoying the visuals themselves and almost felt like I was reading the script at some points.
Secondly, I believe films that make heavy use of narration as a device to take the story forward are somehow taking an easy way out. Films, like plays, are not meant to have narrations. There are characters in the films that should be used such that the story moves forward through them. The best example I can think of is the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. This is a play that has (I think) no narration at all and is yet profoundly moving. Contrast this with another celebrated play I read in a course a year ago called Antigone by Jean Anouilh. This play gave maximum speaking time to its narrator. While Death... and Antigone were both heavy on dialogues, the former had short dialogues that never lasted for more than a couple of minutes and the latter had the narrator speaking for ten minutes or more. I realize Art cannot be tied down by laying down strict formats but I also think allowing characters long soliloquies makes it much easier for the playwright than if he/she involved many characters in taking the plot forward. I think this is somewhat analogous to a filmmaker who choreographs a beautiful song and dance in his film as visual spectacle versus one who uses the song to take the story forward (and no, not by conveniently making the hero a stage performer).
I like Amelie's OST though, especially the one song I keep listening to (La valse d'Amelie). I find it slightly sad and touching in a poignant sort of way, although most people find it happy music. But then most people also like the film.
My third reason for not having liked the film is that I just find Audrey Tatou's permanently wide-eyed look stupid and I feel diabetic because of all the sweetness in her chracter. I like sweet movies too (Love, Actually - although a woman, and a filmmaker no less, claims it is misogynistic) but there was something that irritated me about this one.
-------
Please read The Kite Runner if you haven't already. After a long, long time, I found a book I totally loved from my heart without getting mixed up in how well regarded it was and a book I finished in half a day because I could genuinely not put it down. This is a book that is, for once, as touching as its blurbs promise. It squeezed tears from my eyes at least a couple of times.

Mujhe gussa kyon aata hai?

2007-02-24T22:52:00.000+05:30

I hate the whole fucking shebang.
I hate the noise, the loud, the LOUD shouts of the chorus in my hostel lawns preparing to present a street play that looks suspiciously like something I've seen, or more likely heard, earlier. I hate noise. I hate noisy airplanes flying overhead every five seconds when I'm talking on the phone. Why isn't this place a no-flying zone? [Now forty voices are chanting "Shanti, shanti, shanti" at the top of their voices - sweet, cruel irony.] And I hate it that people can't be louder on phone. In fact, I hate phones. I think cell phones are a nuisance. They can save your life. But they can also cause unbelievable levels of irritation.
I also hate a whole bunch of things that will take me the rest of the night to write down. Chances are, blogspot or IIT's fragile internet connection will act up before then.
I saw the video for Do the Evolution by Pearl Jam today. It's a great video, and all of us must watch it to know what we've done and what we continue to do to ourselves. The more things change, the more they remain the same is borne out more powerfully through a five minute animated clip than through fat tomes on civilization and history.
I'm almost through The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. It's good, and I liked it very much in the beginning and now, at the end. The middle is a bit of a drag though. A little bit could have been excised out. It's quite a relief to not have noticed up till now that it's a pretty big book. Usually, I'm ultrasensitive to the size of books and I groan at anything larger than Love Story.
Everyone has the same issues, man. Everyone's into identity and what-it-means-to-be-me-in-this-rapidly-changing-world and we're-at-crossroads and cusp-of-cultures rubbish. I'm sure every generation feels exactly the same way. I'm done with groaning about all this. It makes for compelling writing and nice IWE with spices and incest thrown in for good measure but really, big deal. Oversimplification, I'm afraid.
A rather large part of why I'm irritated today is because I'm having to study. It's been so long since I had to work on a Saturday that it feels a little strange. The upside of course is that I'm going to wake up tomorrow smug in the knowledge that I've become a mythical hard-working and sincere version of me I believe once existed. The truth is that for as long as I remember, I was lazy and cynical (qualities that often coexist) and hated work. The difference between then and now is simply that I hated it but did it, and now I hate it and don't do it. I'm oversimplifying again but in essence and shorn of detail, this is a fact.
I really, honestly, sometimes don't see the point of it all.

A BSP reject

2007-02-23T18:52:00.000+05:30

I know that this poem can scarcely
Offer tribute to the great watering hole of our times
Where all these varied species congregate
As they do in my rhyming lines:

Partially concealed from prying eyes
By cement columns of impressive girth
Lovey-dovey couples laugh and talk
And make plans (wink, wink) for ‘afterwards’.

The more pragmatic - who know the value of work
And, more importantly, the power of the ‘network’
Can often be found on the other side
Tapping experienced seniors for advice

While assorted wannabes prowl and watch
Out for popular people to engage
In conversation long enough
For others of their ilk to notice and rage

Those aspiring to be remembered awhile
Catch hold of juniors servile
Who in turn bask in the glory of ridicule
By the high and mighty in full public view

Hangers on and general slackers
Descend on the wind-t en masse
And lock each other in a psychological contest
Over who goes last for class

(They sometimes cheat at this show of strength
By never intending to attend at all
And yet acting as though they might
Therefore putting unfair pressure on others of their type)

Finally, people watchers like yours truly
Watch and observe and make mental notes
For the masterpiece they may some day write
That no Chetan Bhagat ever wrote

This poem is dedicated to all the conversations I’ve had over the years that have ended with the portentous words: “See you in the wind-t.”
It’s also dedicated to all the different kinds of people I’ve had these conversations with. I hope they forgive me any offense I might inadvertently cause them. If it’s any consolation I’ve been all of the above at some point or the other.

The lark's on the wing...

2007-02-13T14:44:00.000+05:30

IIT has never looked so beautiful.
I logged on to write something different. This post by my old friend Phoenix (a year and a half old (the post, not Phoenix)) promted me to transfer to my blog a line that I wrote for myself some time back when I was feeling low and that has remained on a post-it ever since in front of my desk. However, I'll reserve that for another time. Right now, Jilawatan by Call loops indefinitely, the window on my left is open for nearly the first time in months and a reasonably large part of everything in the world looks good.
It's wonderful to hear songs you once liked after a really long time of neglect. They lose none of their earlier charm and in fact, acquire character with age. You notice nuances that you didn't earlier and fall in love with the song all over again, only deeper than before. Some of it is because the song was always great and you didn't invest enough time or weren't generous enough the first time around. Some of it is because you have changed over time and notice and appreciate different things or the same things in a different way.
It's the same with (old) friends. I talked for a longish time with Phoenix and enjoyed the conversation. By her own assessment, Phoenix says she's changed. She has, and so have I, as have circumstances and I think we've all changed for the better. We talked about a lot of things - general, impersonal stuff to common friends to how we saw ourselves and each other to the New Age Woman, which is one topic I always love discussing. It was refreshing not only because she's one of those people who can come out of their skin and look at themselves and their world somewhat objectively but also because of the time since our last such conversation (peopletalk, I call it). It's a bit similar to meeting a relative after a year who immediately notices you've grown taller while your own family never consciously noted.
It's also strange that I think of Phoenix and other friends from this time as 'old' friends. Can friendships that limit themselves to the superficial and never delve into the personal, that never make demands on either person's time or resources, that in fact never have had lows, become 'old' or 'deep' or 'close'?
In fact, are lows a prerequisite for experiencing highs? This is a question that is analogous, IMO, to the difference between Eastern and Western philosophies. Eastern philosophies stress the need to reduce desires to nil in order to achieve lasting peace and contentment. Western consumerism, on the other hand, teaches us to be ambitious and to work towards fulfilling as many of our desires as possible as the path to happiness. Essentially, if you aren't dissatisfied with who you are and what you have you will not experience the joy that comes from working hard and achieving your goals. If you don't know hunger, you'll never enjoy chocolate. Our ancient wisdom, however, advises us to achieve permanent peace - and leave both the euphoria of achievement and the unhappiness of frustrated ambition, neither of which can exist without the other - behind by crushing our egos to dust and attaining an ego and ambition-free existence.
Right now, however, IIT looks lovely.
I can see a blue sky flecked with clouds and just a little too bright to look at without squinting and under it, green patches with gardeners and the rain working to make them greener and an idle stroller here and there on grey concrete with bright wet patches reflecting the mood above. Life could be worse. :)

There's more!

2007-02-06T16:39:00.000+05:30

In another time, when I was younger and more impulsive, I'd have written a detailed account of all that has gone wrong over the past five days and how my Groundhog Day continues. But I can't now because:
- I'll end up offending some of my friends (some of whom deserve some of the offense, but still...)
- I won't feel as bad in a couple of hours/days
- much of what I feel has to do with a number of irritations that have existed for some time now and have piled up ~~in a steaming pile of shit~~ and it will be unfair to blame innocents for it
- I don't want to present a lurid picture of my varied frustrations to voyeurs
- it will take too long
Therefore, it is enough for you to know that today has also been a spectacularly horrible day adding to my dark and surreal nightmarish weekend.
I'm paralyzed into inaction: I'm eating little, sleeping too much and skipping classes not with gay abandon or for higher pursuits but guiltily and helplessly. The few classes that I have gone too have had a dreamlike quality to them, as if the subjects being taught were familiar but in a different language. My hostel is literally breaking down in front of my eyes (the fact that it's poltu season once again lends the breakdown a certain irony) and the floors immediately above my head will soon be hammered and needlessly renovated through the day and the night. The only good thing about today is that I had a bath and a shave and that I still have clean underwear left that saves me the desperation of having to pounce on the only working washing machine left in our hellhole-of-a-hostel, which is of course right in the middle of all the construction going on (which in turn is without a doubt the result of someone wanting to make a lot of money or someone very stupid making the decisions), as soon as it is free.
The obvious advantage of bathing and shaving is that one is not compelled to do the same for the next few days/weeks, depending on one's appetite for unhygiene. I usually can't last beyond two days of not taking a bath so I consider myself quite prim. I do have friends, however, who have been known to last for weeks and in one unverified case, long enough for them to develop a fungal infection of the toe.
Anyway, I think I'll push off and do something more useful and directly related to furthering my career goals now. Adios, amigos.

PS: You know what will round off my memorable week? This post getting lost when I hit 'Post'.

Irshad

2007-02-05T17:10:00.000+05:30

Ladies and gentlemen, it is an honour to introduce my friend's Thinking Pad. He writes some of the most evocative poetry I've ever read (not that I've read much). And he writes in the language of the Gods. Some of you may have visited his blog already. Those who haven't, must.

Knee-jerk reactions

2007-02-04T12:06:00.000+05:30

I'm almost through what has turned out to be the worst weekend I've had in a really long time. I feel guilty when I say such things because I know there are people who don't have food, clothing, shelter, money, all their limbs and digits and my problems pale in comparison. What's more, the reasons why this weekend has turned to ash are, in the larger scheme of things, rather trivial. Essentially, I lost two debates and two quizzes in the space of 36 hours closely but comprehensively and that is all there is to it. However, I am affected by this in a much greater way than I usually am.
It's all probably pretty juvenile but then I'm tired of always being (in my judgment) reasonable. I want to be juvenile and politically incorrect and tell people I'm pissed with them and no, I cannot see how it is not their fault and I don't care.
I also want to tell some people I'm right and that's all there is to the matter. I try to use logic to explain my convictions but I realize now it's a bad idea. A good debater can quite easily pick holes in any logical defense I can provide to support my convictions. The only way to build and keep strong convictions is to believe they are right, reason be damned. You have to know some things are right and some things are wrong and not open yourself to interrogation every time you use your moral judgment.
Shivam and I, partners in grief, walked like schoolboys furious after losing a cricket match during lunch break and talked about life, women, parents, the middle class, values and money. A lot of what we said was stupid but we said them anyway because we're both too safe too often and both of us felt great at feeling something big and common. Some of what we said, however, still makes some sense to me. Perhaps I will outgrow all of this and become a vegetable who never loses reason. Yesterday I was happy to note I could still get angry. Today I'm even happier to report I can remain angry. I don't want the anger that I feel today, much of it unjustified and misdirected, to ever go away. I never want to not mind losing.

Goodbye 2006

2007-01-03T01:45:00.000+05:30

It's been a long time since I posted and I have only a list to offer you. It is, however, no ordinary list. This is a list that has been a year in the making. About a year and a quarter back I decided that I'd start maintaining a list of all the movies I watched. I figured since I watched so many of them and since they were such a drain on my time and well, just that because almost all of them were acquired free of cost from the inter-hostel LAN (which is the best bloody thing about IIT and which deserves a post to itself) I might as well make a list and keep count so I could measure my effort. I found out recently that a friend who I often talk about movies with and who's also often the only one I can talk about them with is such a friend for a reason - he watched more than 160 movies in the last calendar year! I have watched a little more than half of that number but even that is impressive by the lay watcher's standards. Here's the list:

MOVIES SEEN IN SEMESTER-6 (January - April 2006)

1)Casablanca
2)Natural Born Killers
3)King Kong
4)The Sting
5)Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (H)
6)Prozac Nation
7)L.A. Confidential
8)Some Like It Hot
9)Taxi Driver
10)Chariots of Fire
11)Oldboy (Korean)
12)Full Metal Jacket
13)Rang De Basanti (H) (twice)
14)Deewar (H)
15)Garden State
16)Underworld Evolution
17)Maqbool (H)
18)Double Indemnity
19)Maalamal Weekly (H)
20)Ghost World
21)Wall Street
22)Lord of War
23)Being Cyrus
24)V for Vendetta
25)Roman Holiday
26)The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
27)Vertigo
28)Man on Fire
29)Rear Window
30)Adaptation
31)Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
32)Ghost in the Shell
33)Die Hard

MOVIES SEEN DURING THE SUMMER BREAK (15/06/'06 - 26/07/'06)

1)Gangster (H)
2)Capote
3)X 3: The Last Stand
4)Heat
5)Mission: Impossible 3
6)Samsara (Tibetan)
7)Superman Returns
8)Cat People (1982)
9)The Hustler
10)Arth (H)
11)Krrish (H)
12)Elektra
13)Anger Management
14)Mystic River

MOVIES SEEN IN SEMESTER-7 (27/07/'06 - December 2006)

1)City of God (Brazilian)
2)The Godfather Part 2
3)Run Lola Run (German)
4)Omkara (H)
5)The Guns of Navarone
6)Dog Day Afternoon
7)Amelie (French)
8)12 Angry Men
9)Paths of Glory
10)Rebecca
11)The Bicycle Thief
12)Raiders of the Lost Ark
13)A History of Violence
14)Wild Strawberries (Swedish)
15)Haasil (H)
16)Platoon
17)Lage Raho Munnabhai (H)
18)A Better Tomorrow (Hong Kong)
19)Donnie Darko
20)Clerks.
21)Mrityudand (H)
22)Amadeus
23)Infernal Affairs (Hong Kong)
24)The Bourne Identity
25)On the Waterfront
26)Hazaaron Khwahishen Aisi
27)Crank
28)21 Grams
29)The Departed
30)Casino Royale (twice)
31)Road to Perdition
32)Der Untergang (German)
33)Revolver

WINTER HOLIDAYS (Dec '06)

1)Dhoom: 2 (H)
2)The Day of the Jackal
3)The Searchers
4)The Untouchables
5)Ran (Japanese)
6)Raging Bull
7)The Bourne Supremacy
8)Rocky Balboa
9)Heavenly Creatures
10)Amores Perros (Spanish)
11)The Prestige
12)Gandhi
13)Lost in Translation

91 in all.

Happy New Year everyone!

Sixes and Sevens

2006-11-06T16:15:00.000+05:30

I am often accused of being prolix
And this is something I intend to fix
By selecting a genre that limits
My stories to a measly word count of six!

Friends, countrymen, gentlemen and the odd lady
Please put your hands together immediately
For the newest beast in the city -
I proudly present The Six Word Story!

'Have money?'
'Yes'
'I love you.'

'I'm ill.'
'So?'
'I'm dying.'
'No!'

'Do you know my father?'
'Don't you?'

A long time ago, I died.

Boy met girl. She died. He cried. [Love Story]

'Wish you were here.'
'I don't.'

Note:
They're rather irritating to write and I don't have much time anyway.
Also, I can count. I know two of the above are seven words long. So hang me.

With the lights out...she's less dangerous

2006-10-28T13:33:00.000+05:30

Note: 1) The first half of the post was written pre-Diwali, the rest I wrote today.
2) I don't smoke.

There are many things I’ve been wanting to write about for some time, and seeing that I can’t find the energy or the time to do that, I will have to content myself with writing a lot of small posts about a range of things that trouble/intrigue me.

This would be a lot easier if people didn’t keep buzzing with stupid “Happy Diwali” mass greetings. I appreciate the sentiment as much as the next guy but “Happy Diwali” spam is rather pointless. Everyone gets so many of these that no one remembers who wished them and who didn’t, so the sentiment, my spammer friends, is sadly wasted on me. However, it takes no extra effort to send a mail to a thousand people instead of a couple, so I see your point too. I was just talking to someone and was asked what gave rise to “Happy Diwali”. I think it might have something to do with “Merry Christmas” or “Happy New Year” – these must have been the only greetings in English early translators of indigenous greetings could model English versions of vernacular greetings on. So instead of wishing each other an “Auspicious Diwali” we wish everyone happiness and mirth, which is okay too.

One of the things I wanted to write about, and which I now will proceed to, is my liking for darkness. Or, my dislike for the well-lit. My own room is almost always dark except for the single weak source of light from my table lamp. Since I have limited plug points and only one of the lamp or the mosquito repellent can draw power at a time, I often have to work in complete darkness except for the light from the computer screen. I invariably watch movies with all lights out, which is also why I enjoy watching movies a lot more at night than in the day when my white curtains can’t keep all light out. I choose dark corners in the canteen, never mind that I can’t see my food very well. I fantasize about smoking in my dark room and watching the glowing tip in the mirror come alive and advance when I take a drag.

Smoking, by the way, is a totally night thing. It’s harmful and will cause you to die sooner but I can understand why people who understand the sheer beauty of the smoke, smoke. Unlike alcohol, the other vice that it must immediately be compared to, a cigarette is alive, animate. Alcohol gives you a high, sure, but it’s just fluid that’s sometimes nice to look at in a glass that is sometimes nice to look at and hold. You can swill it, observe the sparkle and play of light and smell it, but ultimately you can’t do much more than drink it up and wait for the time when you’ll be saying things first and understanding them later. Drinking is not a process that you can observe or participate in like you can with smoking.

When people sit together and drink they have a lot of fun and their interaction is lubricated by the alcohol. But ultimately, every one of the group has her (*) own drink. The drinks don’t become one in the way smoke from every individual glowing tip rises and mingles and rises some more and disappears. People can bond over smoking the way they never can over drinks. No one shares drinks, and a smoke is nearly always shared. Not only does it make economic sense to share a cigarette, it also leads to a tremendous sense of shared peace and contentment. No wonder the Indians smoked peace pipes after burying their tomahawks. The real Indians too smoked hukkas to relax and sharing hukkas perhaps fostered a spirit of companionship. Of course, Indians look at smoking from a very different perspective if language is any indication. The Hindi verb for ‘to smoke’ is in fact ‘to drink’. In other words, we not only drink our drinks, we also drink our cigarettes.

Which reminds me of a rather literal example of ‘drinking’ a smoke. A friend of mine and a regular and satisfied smoker (he knows he may die early and he likes that, so there go your class action suits) was on his last cigarette in Goa and it didn’t look likely that he would find another any time soon. He had a bottle of mineral water with him and he came up with a novel idea to preserve his supply of nicotine. He started exhaling in the bottle and shook the water so that the smoke mixed well and finally when his cigarette was spent he had a bottle of nicotinized water that he kept swilling for the rest of the trip back to civilization and cigarettes. Passive smoking obviously works.

* “every one of the group has her own drink” – This is a good example of a recent phenomenon I’m sure you’ve noticed in newspapers, magazines and perhaps books as well. Five years earlier, I’d have written ‘his own drink’ without a thought, or perhaps ‘his/her own drink’ but now it’s ‘her’ and not ‘his’. These days, when a pronoun has to be used to indicate a general person from a group, it’s the female pronoun.
This is of course a conscious effort to make up for the automatic assumption for centuries that we’ve all been guilty of making that all anonymous people were male. We went through a brief period of giving assorted anons of the world the option to choose their sex, by using ‘he/she’ or ‘his/her’ but this was awkward and ugly. English has never taken to the idea of making unknown people sexless by using ‘it’ and ‘its’ unlike several other languages. I suppose ‘she’ is just as good as ‘he’ and women do have a point when they take offence to everyone being male by default. Why shouldn’t the burden of proof shift to the men of the world?

Indecision

2006-10-04T00:54:00.000+05:30

I think I should
And I would if I could
But I can't so I won't
But I should try
Because if I don't
I'll never know if I could have
Done what I should have
But didn't try
And therefore never could decide
Whether I chose correctly
In not doing what I didn't
Ultimately.

Note: I think a couple of lines in this poem might have grammatical errors, I'd be glad if you could point those out. Grammar's a slippery friend.

Unsmiling Eyes (haiku)

2006-09-29T18:25:00.000+05:30

Crow's feet and front teeth
Wide smile and all the right lines
But unsmiling eyes

In which I'm unable to do a David Bowie

2006-09-29T18:20:00.000+05:30

We passed upon the stairs
I warned him to jump
The step that wasn't there
He looked into my eyes
And I flinched from his stare

I never quite knew
Which eye I should look into
When making "eye contact"
And I remember thinking
His smile never did reach his eyes -

I don't know what that means either,
But the skin crinkled in all the right places
Crow's feet and front teeth
Upturned smile and all the right lines
But the warmth in those brown eyes,
That looked black when
The light didn't catch them,
Was missing

I knew he wouldn't tell me
So I never asked
And we just went our separate ways
And never took off our masks

Late Night Delirium

2006-09-17T04:35:00.000+05:30

It’s so late at night
It doesn’t really matter
If I stay up for a while;
I’ll just sleep an hour later

Words have to be squeezed out
Like reluctant toothpaste
From a nearly spent tube
That can’t be replaced
Just yet

It’s been twenty years
Of having no one to wake up to
No one to put me to sleep
And no one to watch affectionately
When I do

I must shave tomorrow
Because if I don’t the hairs
Will get caught in the razor blades
When I eventually mow
My facial fungi down
And at the mirror, hairlessly frown

Random Rambles

2006-09-12T18:05:00.000+05:30

I can’t say I haven’t found the time to write anything because one can usually make time for whatever one really wants to do. I haven’t felt much like writing for a really long while. Strangely, my dormancy has coincided with the near-dormancy of several blogs I regularly followed. Somehow, this sentiment has gained ground among others as well. A friend who used to blog religiously confessed he didn’t feel like blogging either…

…

I listened to this wonderful track called New Slang by The Shins (I don’t know what either of those mean either) after a long time and found it just as amazing as it was the first time. Its lyrics are super, and the song has a tempo and tune that makes you love it in every mood. I always think of two things when I hear this song – American Pie by Don McLean and IIM C. The first because this song comes closest to New Slang in my mind’s categorization of the two, and the second because I heard this song for the first time on my way to IIMC for Nihilanth last year. That trip, by the way, was the second best trip of my life with friends, the best by far remains the Goa trip in the month before that. Goa, in fact, was so wonderful in every sense of the word that I didn’t see any point in attempting to record the fun in a blog post. We went from one crazy experience to the next and words can’t describe how much fun I had in that one week in Goa.

My reluctance to describe some of my most cherished experiences in words for posterity is similar to my apprehension about videotaping my loved ones and their lovable quirks. Some things are best left to marinate over the years in our memories. When you’ve built up an endearing image of a loved one over the years, you don’t want to know they were just normal people who we loved and learnt to love because they were ours. I hate being underwhelmed. I like my experiences to be sublime.

…

I’m on to The Cranberries now. I’m amazed at the kind of stuff I have on my computer which is forever gathering dust in e-folders. I’m no expert on music, but judging from all the tracks I have of theirs, it’s strange how their most famous song (Zombie) is so different in tempo and tone from their other songs. Zombie has heavy bass guitar sounds and is loud, angry and very political. All the others I can think of are ‘softer’, somewhat slower and a lot more personal. If I was a girl I would perhaps have said I’m in love with the lead singer’s (Dolores, wiki informs me) voice. But perhaps it’s too cutesy a thing to say.

…

There are some interesting things I’ve observed about myself over the past month. I’ve realized I’ve become to some people the kind of person I would hate. Some people think of me as obnoxious, snooty, disinterested, arrogant, proud blah blah. The tragicomedy is that I am all these things and more, but people often draw these (not entirely incorrect) conclusions because I’m shy or reserved.

I avoid dancing at parties not because I only let my hair down with my friends but because I (think I) don’t dance well. A popular forwarded mail carries this piece of sage advice from the Dalai Lama : Dance like no one’s watching. But what advice can you give to someone who doesn’t dance like no one’s watching even when no one’s watching!

I wouldn’t make special efforts to engage you in conversation because you’re boring, sure. But I would just as likely not make efforts if I thought you weren’t interested, and there’s no way to find out when I’m bored and when simply apprehensive. I hate being thought of as ‘sucky’ but I realize that being sucky works. You get to know people you’d never know if you just waited for them to appreciate you in time, you acquire the sheen of knowing important people among your colleagues and of course, you get the intangible benefits of being networked.
I can’t, however, change myself, and frankly, I don’t care.

…

I haven’t done any reading at all since my last post, but I have watched a few movies. I shall not inflict another set of movie reviews on you. I will, however, recommend A History of Violence to everyone who isn’t a total mush nut. If you liked Ghulam (especially the amazing fight in the end – they almost make it believable!) watch this asap. Even if you didn’t, watch it asap. I have said this before and I know RGV does not read my blog but I can’t resist saying this again: he should learn what restraint means in the language of cinema before making tripe like Sarkar. Tripe because small tweaks would have made the movie great but sadly, RGV got lost in the brilliance of his stupid “Govinda, Govinda” background score and made a painfully mediocre product. This film could teach him a thing or two. This movie shocks with graphic and frenetic violence in very short sequences and is able to do so because we are attuned to the slow pace of the movie. The slowness and the quiet serve a purpose – that of bringing out the stark contrast when violence makes an entry into the normal life of Tom Stall. It’s beautifully done. Go see.

If, on the other hand, you are the kind that weeps through Sleepless in Seattle on multiple viewings, watch My Sassy Girl instead. It’s the best love story I have seen in many years and it has been universally praised by everyone I know who saw it. It’s in Korean, so you’ll have to get hold of subtitles, although what really tugs at the heartstrings is this magical piano piece called Pachebel’s Canon that plays at all the appropriately mushy points in the movie.

And oh yes, I watched Munnabhai Part 2 a week or so ago. Everyone who wanted to has watched the film by now so it doesn’t matter much but for whatever it’s worth, I add my voice to the chorus prodding the nation to go watch Munnabhai. It’s a lot better than KANK and its ilk and has taken much greater effort to make. We get the cinema we deserve and if we get more of SRK and his godawful facial twitches it’s because junta likes that. Munnabhai isn’t the best ever but it’s good and deserves a watch. At the same time, I must clarify that I did not watch it out of some wish to do my bit for Indian cinema. I watched it to enjoy it, and enjoy it I did. You will too.

Warning: Movie Reviews, again!

2006-08-09T16:56:00.000+05:30

I haven’t posted anything for nearly a month now. Among other things this post serves to keep this blog alive. Long movie reviews take time and patience to write and read and I’ve watched quite a few movies in the past ten days that are equally deserving of individual reviews so short one-minute reviews are probably the best idea. In chronological order, these are the movies I’ve seen since the semester began:

1. City of God (Brazilian)
Not only is this a ‘great’ movie fully deserving of its place in the IMDb Top 10, it is also an immensely entertaining film. It combines great technique and camera work with a brilliant non-linear storyline and the locations (presumably genuine) and actors that neither look like filmstars nor are make this an authentic and fresh product.
An aside to this is something that I’ve been meaning to devote a post to for some time now. The omnipresent narrator guides us through a major portion of the movie. This is something that violates classic filmmaking principles. Logically, a film should not have to depend on a narrator and should be able to make use of its ability to communicate through sound as well as visuals. However, just as many great and well-regarded films make heavy use of the narrator as don’t. The Shawshank Redemption, Amelie, Adaptation (which put the idea in my head), even Double Indemnity are examples of the former. The Godfather(s), Casablanca and innumerable good films don’t.

2. The Godfather Part 2
RGV needs to switch off his cell phones, shut down his Flop Factory, sit down for three hours and watch this film to understand what ‘understatement’ means. The Godfather is calm and quiet in almost all his interactions with others because he knows, and everyone else knows, the extent of his power. His calm is not benign. Pacino never leaves anyone in doubt unlike Bacchchan in Sarkar who tried to be everything from Benign Uncle to alternately Doting and Anguished Father to Outraged Grandfather to that enduring Bollywood figure – the Principled Don and became nothing more than Amitabh Bachchan looking like himself in yet another new movie.

3. Run Lola Run (German)
Undoubtedly a fast paced and entertaining movie but I expected better from this film that I had heard good things about. The plot was interesting (Lola needs to get a huge sum of money (100 grand, I think) in the next twenty minutes or her boyfriend is toast) as was the treatment but I didn’t like the structure too much. I expected brilliance and was disappointed with mere cleverness. Nevertheless, good fun. The small running time doesn’t hurt either.
It really is all about expectations in the end. The best gift you can give a friend is convincing him/her before he/she is about to watch a movie that it’s going to disappoint him/her.

4. Omkara (H)
A good Hindi film after a really long time (although Krrish did have its redeeming moments after a painful first half). Actually, this isn’t a ‘Hindi’ film at all. The dialect is rustic and abrasive and while the dialogues and the language lend authenticity to the film they also make the film slightly hard to understand. The overall plot is simple enough and the correspondences with minor incidents and names in the original play are drawn out beautifully. Saif Ali Khan has the best role and shines, you realize very late that Konkana Sen is doing a brilliant job as well, Ajay Devgan does well too and his dialogue delivery is especially brilliant, Kareena Kapoor looks perfect for the role and acts well to boot. The frequent swearing is going to harm the film’s BO prospects but I was happy to see a rare mainstream movie actually going the whole hog with invective. Way to go!

5. The Guns of Navarone
A movie that illustrates the benefits of adapting books to film. The plot is gripping, the dialogues snappy, the men manly and the women courageous, the Allies brave and good humoured, the Germans partial to torture and Veritaserum and the pacing sufficiently fast to keep the viewer interested even if not on tenderhooks. For a movie that must be at least three decades old it hasn’t dated too badly at all.

6. Dog Day Afternoon
For some unknown reason I thought Al Pacino played himself in the movie, and since he could only have been playing himself if he was famous enough it followed that it was an old Al that starred in this movie. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to see a young Al (it’s a 1974 movie, I believe, around the time The Godfather was being made) play one half of a bank robber twosome with the actor who played his brother in The Godfather(s). The movie is an account of the robbery that goes wrong and turns into a hostage crisis, and it is especially astute in its account of the media’s role and the mob’s reactions. A famous scene when Pacino comes out and rouses the mob with cries of “Attica! Attica!” is electrifying. For the cultural significance of ‘Attica’, go here. Everyone acts well and though the movie does sag a bit in the middle, it again picks up towards the end. Closeups of Pacino when he’s talking into the phone with his (male) ‘wife’ are admirable for the sheer power of his performance.

7. Amelie (French)
I expected this film to be sweet, perhaps sentimental, a feel-good lesson on the beauty of life. Perhaps I expected too much. I found this movie a total bore, and struggled through the middle, even going to sleep halfway through it. Audrey Tatou is cute, but she’s not Audrey Hepburn. What’s more, she tries too hard with her silly hairstyle and girl-woman dresses and her permanent wide-eyed ingénue look. Lagaan was better.
A related point is that Amelie depends heavily on narration, especially in the first half. Normally one would prefer subtitled foreign language movies but this is a special movie that I’d much rather see dubbed in English because that leaves time to see the movie and not just read it.

8. 12 Angry Men
Wonderful study in the use of dialogue and mannerisms to make a film gripping. Apart from three minutes at either end of the movie, all the action takes place in one room (with the exception of perhaps a minute of interaction between Henry Fonda and a callous juror in the adjoining washroom… only talk) and yet this movie never drags. For a B/W movie with this unconventional setting to maintain a high level of interest of the viewer is an achievement. Fonda is good, as are all the other actors, without exception. This movie however owes the maximum to its screenwriter who has done a fabulous job. Most jurors have their personal prejudices and idiosyncrasies but rarely do they become complete clichés. The reason of Fonda and the way he brings the group around make it a demonstration of the qualities that a good team leader must possess.

The Ghost That Walked

2006-07-13T22:25:00.000+05:30

I have a lot of time and nothing important to do. I'm done with my work and am officially on vacation, starting now.
To celebrate the beginning of my holiday, I'm listening to fabulous music that I've downloaded from the Net, and have actually taken off my shoes and put my feet up on the desk. It's a wonderful feeling. Try it sometime.

I'm confused about my motivation for blogging. I've been blogging since January 2005, so that's proof I don't blog because everyone else does. Fact is, many others started blogging well after I did.

When I first started blogging, I wanted a place to publish my amateur poetry and publish occasional articles on. I wanted a place that gave some meaning to the stuff that I wrote from time to time and the things I wanted to write. I used to write these poems on the back pages of my notebooks during boring classes and it seemed like a waste to see them lost after the class ended. Were they no more than mere reliefs from tedium for me? I was not motivated by a need to share my thought process with the world. I simply thought it a waste of all the interesting things I did, said, wrote now and then if they were to be lost each time their immediate purpose had been achieved. There were several times when I thought of something and told myself it would make for an interesting anecdote in the novel I would never write. Sometimes interesting things happened. I got locked out of my room at 1 am in the night. I had my battles with technology and with IIT, and I usually ended on the losing side. These weren't without their funny side. And I could see the funny side of having to pound my hostel door for two hours to get into my room, or of being repeatedly cut off from the Internet in the middle of interesting chats with friends. Writing about the lighter aspects of certain otherwise painful experiences (it is NOT fun to have to break open your hostel door at night for example, and I've done it twice) was a way of getting the poison out of my system. Sometimes I felt strongly enough about certain issues to pontificate, such as my views on rhyme in poetry. I realize now and I knew then that my views were immature and vague, but I felt strongly all the same!

I blogged when I felt like blogging and about what I wanted. I experimented a bit and wrote posts on Raveena Tandon's rain dance and poems on suicide, on my future as I saw it and on life in IIT. My blog was a place I went to when I wanted to say something and didn't know who to say it too or even who would understand what I wanted to say. The comments were a bonus.

Lately, however, I have started feeling the weight of my blog. Instead of the blog waiting patiently for my wanting to write something, I find myself worrying sometimes that I haven't updated for a long time. I'm not afraid of losing audience. I'm not afraid of the comments drying up either although I often joke about that. Sure, new comments feel nice but comments are secondary to whether I feel happy about my blog or not.

Moreover, I find that increasingly I have nothing to write about on my blog. It's not like I don't say or think things anymore but a lot of what I think are things that I feel need not go on my blog. I no longer see the point of speaking my mind on many things on my blog. That reveals a lot about me and I don't want my blog to become a free peep-show to my emotional striptease. A lot of what I sometimes want desperately to say about love, life, friendships, the future, the past, the present, Life falls in the category marked “Personal”. Even if I don't have anyone to share gyan with I feel blogging about it would reveal more about myself to a careful or regular reader than I'm prepared to reveal. There are many things I don't want you to know about me, and a lot of what I earlier wrote would now qualify as no-go territory. My blog shouldn't be my best friend.

That is why I've taken to blogging about movies, books (I keep bunching books with movies, but do I ever blog about books? I think not.), casual experiences – neutral posts that are sometimes interesting but are not revelatory. These posts are harder to compose than ramblings on my life that I can write on autopilot but are just as much fun to write. I will continue to blog but the blog may follow its current course by continuing to be about movies I like and dislike (mostly dislike, they arouse greater passion), about books I read and books I have to abandon from time to time, about IIT, only occasionally straying into forbidden territory.
In other words, unlike this post.

From movies to trailers

2006-07-13T19:47:00.000+05:30

I've been watching a fair bit of TV these days. The reasons are that I don't have a laptop or a PC at home I can surf aimlessly on, and that watching TV is easier than reading. Reading a book requires me to concentrate fully on it, TV on the other hand can be and often is, watched on autopilot.

My favourite part of TV fare is movie trailers. I have tried to develop an interest in news but I can never stay on a news channel long enough for it to develop any news story in full. That's one reason why when everyone was making fun of Headlines Today and its start anchor Jhujhar Singh who had a massive lisp that somehow was ignored when he was signed on as a newsreader, I actually liked the channel. It did not think of itself as a serious news channel devoted to upholding high journalistic standards and gave little more than headlines in two-minute quanta. I was also captivated by Jhujhar Singh's delivery. In fact, my father and I marvelled at how Headlines Today could have employed a newsreader who found his own name a tongue-twister and how in spite of his clear and pronounced lisp, Jhujhar Singh dared to dream of becoming a newsreader and was able to realize his aim in style.

My Headlines Today days are long past. Now I limit myself to flipping between Channel [V] and MTV and assorted Sony's, Star's etc with a dash of VH1 now and then unless there's a great movie on, which is never. I like Channel V's 'Bai' and MTV's “Sorry for the Interruption” although I find “Bakra” offensive or/and irritating at times. Between them, these channels, with the honourable exception of VH1 which seems devoted to Hip Hop for which I have no patience, show movie trailers nearly through the day.

I like movie trailers because they showcase the best parts of movies and are short and snappy. I've often marvelled at how movies that I know I will hate if I get down to watching them have such great teasers. I believe that although the level of Bollywood films is definitely on an insane slide down, the quality of packaging, production values, and especially the quality of trailers, teasers and the entire publicity and post-production machinery is world-class. Our movies often have excellent art direction (Lagaan), brilliant teasers/trailers (Mangal Pandey), posters and marketing (Bunty and Babli, or any Yashrajland movie). If only the movies themselves were as good! But I suppose one can't have it all.

The above paragraphs are simply a background to what I really wanted to say: I've been watching lots of movie trailers and while I would normally enjoy them in the way that one can enjoy advertisements knowing fully well that the products being advertised can in no way match the glitzy ads, I have started to get irritated by one aspect of movies that is often given prominence in trailers. That aspect is the presence of tens of scantily clad white models gyrating in inane videos along with our heroes. That these videos are completely irrelevant to the storyline is expected. How many scripts actually need yet another song on the beach with imported extras in bikinis?

As long as the import of white women was limited to a couple of songs, they were an effective way of breaking the clutter of mediocre songs. Now, however, every film has these nubile nymphets dancing to Sanjay Dutt's laughable (as opposed to funny) flute antics, Himesh Reshammiya's soulful nasal melodies or even Paresh Rawal's grating number in Naseeruddin Shah's directorial debut. Speaking of which, if the overplay of the song is anything to go by, the film can only be horrendous. Someone wrote somewhere recently in a review of Krrish (or is it Kkrish?) that the government should pay Naseeruddin Shah some annual salary so he doesn't do tripe like Krrish for money. I hope for his sake Shah's film is a success. Surely Shah knows Paresh Rawal, despite his talents as an actor, does not make for a pretty picture. Surely he can see that every film has twenty white women dancing around the hero to words they can't understand but repeat. In fact, the better ones among what must be a limited East-European talent pool must have been booked because the women around Rawal are sadly, at best plain.

I was watching trailers the other day and in about five minutes saw four different films all with near-identical trailers. Each had a hero or heroes lip-syncing rubbish and utterly unremarkable white scantily clad women dancing suggestively around them. They don't break the clutter, they contribute to them.

Yana Gupta was a novelty when she just came in. Today, however, every unemployed white woman willing to shed some clothes for Bollywood's hypocritical camera can walk into a Bollywood studio and earn a bit part in a Bollywood film. This hypocrisy is age-old. We can lust after (and simultaneously bemoan the lack of morals and inhibitions of) white women but will react with shock and thrilled outrage when Rakhi Sawant does the same on TV. Our heroes can romance (with all attendant meanings) all the white women they want, but Indian girls come in only two varieties – the easy and the chaste. Maybe it's time Indian women proved Bollywood wrong. :)

Superman Returns, with a whimper

2006-07-09T16:47:00.000+05:30

The Usual Suspects was better. The X-Men movies were better. I saw Spiderman-2 a day before and that was a lot better. I came back to see LOTR-2 playing on HBO and that was a whole LOT(R) better.
Bryan Singer achieved the impossible with Superman Returns. He made it boring.

Everything I thought about the movie was turned on its head yesterday night. When I had first seen teasers and trailers I had been thrilled. When the first full-fledged trailers came out I was left open-mouthed. “This is going to be a great movie” seemed to be the buzz everywhere. I had watched X-Men and enjoyed it, and had later watched X2 and been absolutely blown away. X2 remains one of the best comic-book adaptations on screen, and I include Sin City and Spiderman 2 in the comparison. The other great adaptation is V for Vendetta. Sin City was a faithful adaptation but was hardly a movie. It was, in the director's own words, a comic-book put on film. Anyway, I found it a bit boring although its art direction was brilliant. I had found Spiderman too juvenile and Tobey Maguire's acting equally juvenile when I had first watched it (when I was more juvenile too) but the movie had redeemed itself with a brilliant last shot when Peter Parker walks away with his boyish jaw set from a doubly grieving Mary Jane in the cemetry because being Spiderman, he can't afford to get involved with anyone, even if she be the love of his life. The Green Goblin with the permanent hideous grin was laughable, but the movie was for younger audiences than say, Batman Begins which was targeted at a much more mature audience and which was dark and brooding. I liked Spiderman 2 because it was funny, sad, full of action and had its emotional moments, featured better acting and a better storyline and an infinitely better super-villain in Doc Ock. It was a great package.

All these movies were entertaining and Singer's unfortunately is not, which is criminal after all the pre-release hype and publicity.

The following is a random list of the things that were wrong with the movie:

1. Apparently the crew camped in Sydney or somewhere and transplanted five feet high corn for acres and built a barn and a house that resembled the original Kent farm in every way and of course spent a whole lot of time and money doing all of it. But what did the movie do with it? Kent crashes home, his foster mother puts him to sleep, he wakes up magically rejuvenated, alert, impeccably shaved and combed and goes to stand outside. His eyes glaze over and he thinks back to the time when he jumped like a toad on serious performance-enhancing steroids around his corn farm and discovered he could lie suspended in air, without his glasses to boot. The young Clark falls through the roof and covers his face at the moment of impact and lo and behold! He's still. In the air. And then he stares at his hands and his feet just to make sure he really is afloat on nothing and then he stares at his glasses for a full minute and we peer back through his glasses at Superboy. All of this takes a minute and a half of Superman's flashback time, and coupled with a night shot of his mother driving to see which alien spacecraft has crash-landed in her life yet again, is all they built the whole friggin' farm for. The night shot could have been done just about anywhere and the Superman-discovers-to-fly sequence could have been imported from the original Superman or better still, left alone. The trailers misled us because we thought we'd see Supe's back story but that is not the case.

2. Minor spoiler, although I knew this before I saw the movie and almost everyone else does too.
Is it ever made clear that Supe's relationship with Lois Lane goes into the super-physical realm? Has he slept with her in any comic book? Lois Lane lives in with her boyfriend and has a five-year old son. The son kills mommy's attacker by crushing him under a flying piano. He's Superson. The obvious interpretation is that Superman has made love to Lois. In fact, there is a particularly witty sequence (and there aren't many of them in this movie) in which Lois, on being asked to do a feature on Superman by her editor (who is absolutely no match to Spiderman's counterpart) says “I've done Superman”, quickly correcting herself to “I've covered Superman”.
Having established that their relationship did indeed span the physical realm, one is forced to ask whether it is physically possible for Superman to love without hurting her? After all, he is the Man of Steel, is he not? It is an intriguing question that I'm sure has been asked and perhaps, answered before. (Lois was of course hurt when Supe flew away to search for Krypton, but that was different, and besides she got a Pullitzer out of that.)
Another thought and one that I think is more original: Isn't Lois Lane now the only person in the world who knows whether Superman wears underwear under his blue tights or not, or whether the red one his only piece? Also, when he is in office, since he always wears his costume to work (including the cape?) how does he pee if he has to take a leak? Tough questions those, and ones whose answers can earn another Pulitzer for LL.

3. This is a pertinent question only for Indians celebrating the steady march of our compatriots to Hollywood. Why is Kal Penn in the movie? Is he the token 'brown' guy? No one else as far as I can remember is remotely non-white except the villain's technical right-hand man, and he's mute. It's almost like it's an inside joke. He doesn't say a word throughout the movie and then gets crushed under Kryptonite with other henchmen in a completely inglorious manner. It crashes down, they become dust. Lex and Kitty closely escape in the long standing tradition of super-villains and their molls.
Now that we are on Indians in Hollywood, why is Aishwarya Rai in any movie (Holly or Bolly) at all since she refuses to act although she's not completely incapable of it? I find it silly when people claim Aishwarya Rai is stupid. How can a woman who hasn't given two hits in her acting career in two film industries over the last decade still have a stupendously successful career if she's not intelligent? Manipulative perhaps, but stupid certainly not. This is almost immediately followed by praise for the intelligence of Sushmita Sen. Now there are many issues in this analysis that deserve discussion and one of them is that we often confuse articulation with intelligence. They aren't completely unrelated but sometimes stupid people speak great English and intelligent people give poor interviews. That, however, is not to say that Sushmita Sen is unintelligent, or indeed, that Aishwarya Rai necessarily interviews poorly.

4. Superman's theme charges you up like an Energizer bunny. I've been humming it, whistling it, singing it since yesterday. It's beautiful the way it starts off slowly, building up to a crescendo and then an expansive, grand tune befitting the stature of Superman. Sort of like the Bond theme. Sadly and inexplicably, the same theme music that the trailers employed so effectively has been nearly dispensed with in the movie.

5. There are bound to be comparisons with Spiderman, so let's compare Spiderman's upside-down kiss-in-the-rain-by-smitten-damsel with its Superman equivalent – when Superman takes his ex on an aerial tour of Metropolis. The Spiderman kiss had passion, warmth and promise. It became an iconic scene. Superman's love sequences are depressingly cold.
Lois goes up to the roof to smoke. Superman blows away the light. She tries again, Superman blows it away again. Subtle message on how Superman disapproves of smoking having hopefully permeated to kids, he says he wants to show her something. She takes off her shoes revealing pretty painted nails, gets on Superman's feet, he takes her up, amid corny dialogues like “Richard takes me up all the time”, “Not like this”, “Oh! (clinging to Superman). I forgot how warm you were”, Superman tells her he can hear voices that are crying out for a saviour and hence the world does indeed need Superman, never mind the Pulitzer committee that concurs with LL on Why the World Doesn't Need Superman.
In Spiderman, Spidey rescues MJ and swings with her holding on tight, first afraid, then secure, and drops her safely. His exuberance when he goes away with a loud “Whoopppeeee!” is infectious.
Superman simply glides back with LL and puts her back on the roof. Awkward should-we-shouldn't-we non-kiss is followed by Superman silently gliding away. It's almost irritating how Superman is so unspectacular, so quiet when he's landing or flying away. Even when he falls in the end from the sky having saved the world again from the evil designs of Lex, he falls with a gentle thud that makes you want to scream in the theatre just so there's be some excitement, some noise. What's this nonsense with understating everything? Bring on the bloody fireworks and the big guns. This is Superman! Everything should be super, larger than life, exhilarating, adrenalin-pumping. Almost nothing is.

6. Not only is there no sex, there is very little action. Unforgivably for a movie that dares to call itself "Superman", long portions of the movie are tedious, silent building-up pieces with no action to relieve the tedium. In LOTR, the comparatively boring but extremely important Frodo and Sam story moves in parallel with the exciting war sequences, achieving a clever mix whereby the action stands out because of the preceding silences and the quieter story stands out among the surrounding chaos. Like RGV in Sarkar (I wanted to link my review on rediffblogs here, but couldn't. The frustrations heaped on me by rediff are a running theme in my posts, so let me add by saying that rediff probably has the worst and the most imbecilic archiving system imaginalble.), Bryan Singer takes understatement to a whole new level by not showing potentially exciting scenes not because he can't show them but because Superman's story is big enough to be understated. Unfortunately that doesn't work. I went to watch a barrage of action and I was amazed to be confronted with scenes of museums and libraries and toy trains and whatnot. Superman was conspicuous by his absence.

7. The movie could have expanded boundaries and it instead chose to remain confined to the unidimensional interpretation of Superman. Perhaps Superman's story is just too fantastic for adults to appreciate but frankly it's faintly irritating to have to see Superman confront seemingly impossible crises and then overcome them with ridiculous ease. I felt like an idiot when, after having concluded that Superman would have to do something really special to reverse Lex Luther's latest doing – that of creating a mini-Krypton on the ocean floor near Metropolis' coast, Superman bored into the ocean bed and simply lifted the whole goddamn city-state out and then flew up with it to throw it into (presumably) the sun or perhaps into orbit, so that now Earth has two moons.
I know Superman is not about the plot or the story, and picking holes (even if they are planet-size) in its plot isn't in keeping with the super-spirit, but really, how is the script/story written? Random day in the life of the Superman scriptwriters follows.

People come together to brainstorm.
Boss: Alright, so who's come up with the most fantastically impossible evil scheme that Lex Luther can hatch?
One guy raises his hand.
Hand-raiser: Lex gets a crystal from the Cave of Silence (this by the way also gives us the chance to show our technical wizardry and satisfy fanboys by recycling Marlon Brando's Jor-El footage), gets a piece of Kryptonite from a museum, fuses them together, fires it in the ocean, and starts the crystallization of a continent-sized piece of land that displaces the water enough to completely submerge all of America, not to mention a lot of the rest of the world, killing billions in the process.
Applause follows stunned silence.
Boss: Alright, so what can Superman do about this new continent threatening billions of people, the future of the world and of the Daily Planet, and the American Way of Life?.
No one is able to think of a way out of this gigantic mess, and a perplexed silence follows the Boss's challenge. Then he shows just why he's the boss.
Boss (nonchalantly): Why, Superman will just lift the whole continent clean off the ocean floor and shove it out of Earth's atmosphere. After all, he once circled around the Earth fast enough to turn time back because Lois had died. And he neutralized the Sun-man in Part IV (although we're ignoring Parts III and IV) by carrying the moon to effect an unscheduled eclipse. We're only following in that grand tradition. Get to work then!
Much appreciative chatter and the apprentices get working.

People say you shouldn't think too much when you watch a film. I don't normally, and I enjoy my X-Men and Armageddon, but I can't scoop my brain out and keep it in my lap, no?

8. On the plus side, the casting isn't as bad as the reviews made it sound. Since the role of Superman requires the actor playing him to look the part more than act it brilliantly, Brandon Routh fits the bill. While no one can quite convince you that a man one-hundredth the size of an airplane can bring it to a mid-air standstill from a free fall thousands of feet above even if he does where his underwear out in addition to a red rubber cape, Routh makes a sincere effort. With help from Singer and his team, he might even have succeeded. He's not a great actor, but the acting is a bonus over the special effects and the breath-taking action sequences that you go to watch Superman for, and Superman fails to deliver on fundamental counts.
Kate Bosworth is pretty good. She's pretty, she's suitably sentimental, strong or snappy when the occasion demands. Again, she's not good enough for you to be unable to imagine another actress playing the role, but she does well enough.
Kevin Spacey is sadly wasted. He does what he can but he's given these pregnant silences through which you wait for a devastating witticism and it just doesn't come. He is an actor with such great comic timing of a sarcastic and malicious quality that it seems a shame to simply make him bald and let him be. It's like having Paresh Rawal in your movie and giving him PJ's to get the laughs from when he can do so much better, which is what happens all the time.

To end the tirade, I believe Bryan Singer is blessed with a fine sense of what is exciting in a movie and what isn't, so I'm sure even he must have realized when he saw the first cuts of his movie it wasn't going to be great. The X-Men movies don't put as great a burden on Singer's shoulders as the LOTR movies did on Peter Jackson's. Peter Jackson was able to follow his stupendous feat of adapting LOTR to film by remaking King Kong fabulously. King Kong wasn't as successful as it deserved to be but it was a worthy follow-up to LOTR. Superman Returns, however, does not do justice to the director who made the X-Men movies. It does not just lack some kind of a mysterious X-factor, it's simply a boring movie. Atlas indeed yawned.

:)

2006-07-04T15:29:00.000+05:30

The National Market plug

2006-07-03T19:08:00.000+05:30

I went to the National Market on Saturday and bought eleven movie DVDs. Saying that it was a great experience would be inaccurate. It was a fabulous, wonderful, AWESOME experience. I went with a much older friend who watches a lot of movies and who I'd spent a wonderful weekend some time back with discussing movies interspersed with the general lives and times of Bangalore, India and the world. I had seen Heat on that weekend and the experience of watching the movie was magnified many times because of the well-informed and articulate company I was in.

He led me to a small hole-in-the-wall shop that looked like it couldn't possibly hold any more than the latest commercial films. If I had been alone, I would even have given it a miss altogether. My friend asked the shopkeeper to show me his collection of 'Art/European' movies and the shopkeeper placed a medium-size suitcase in front of me and unzipped it. From that suitcase emerged movies I wouldn't have dreamed he stocked – European films, Iranian films, Chinese, French New Wave, old Hollywood classics... I sorted out a few and wondered whether that was it.
And then he placed the second and then the third and then the fourth suitcase followed by piles upon piles of goodies, and I whispered a silent prayer. Here was the best bounty I had ever seen anywhere, and selecting movies amid the crowding and the mild jostling and with the knowledge that if you left your place at the counter someone else would take it made it an experience to rival that of browsing second-hand bookshops.

Now my peculiar problem is that I have these eleven DVDs and no one to show them (off?) to, no one to discuss them with. They're lying at the bottom of my suitcase and I can't watch them at home here because some are a tad explicit (which is also why home (the real one) is ruled out. In fact, I'm going to encounter some raised eyebrows when my Mom sees the back cover of Cat People, or worse, realizes what the hand in the tasteful black and white photograph on the front cover of Hiroshima Mon Amour is covering. It took a while to strike me. The picture, for the interested, is on Wikipedia's page for the movie.) and I don't want to watch them with people who aren't interested anyway. I have no interest in introducing people to high-brow cinema. We like things best when we find them ourselves.

This, then, is the list:
1.Wild Strawberries – Ingmar Bergman. I've only seen The Seventh Seal, and have always wanted to watch the film that has a title as evocative as 'wild strawberries'.

2.Blue White Red – Kieslowski. I wanted The Decalogue, but it wasn't available in full, so I bought just this collection. Collections and omnibuses exercise a peculiar attraction, they give us the feeling that we're buying a complete experience; not just a segment of the body of the universe but the entire mythos, lock stock and barrel.

3.Hiroshima Mon Amour – Alain Resnais. I hadn't heard of the movie or the director, but the blurb claimed that this was one of the cornerstones of French cinema and the cover looked artistic enough, so I bought it. I looked at five minutes of it later and it does seem promising.

4.Jules and Jim – Francois Truffaut. I've obviously heard of the director and the French New Wave but haven't had occasion to sample any of its products, so I couldn't have left a movie that was one of the most celebrated of that period by one of its most celebrated directors. I just hope it isn't too dated. Good movies never age well. Only campy ones do.

5.Nayakan – Mani Ratnam. I've wanted to watch this ever since I've known about it. The Godfather is a powerful story in itself, and the story's elements adapted to the Indian context makes for what has to be a great watch.

6.The Hustler – This made me truly ecstatic (silently, of course) because I had just finished The Color of Money which was the sequel to the novel The Hustler and wanted the movie if not the book to complete my experience. The others I might find boring and might take some getting used to, but this is bound to be an entertaining watch. I watched the first five minutes, and they deliver.

7.Cat People – This is a movie that doesn't fit its company. Being idle some time ago, I had been reading Roger Ebert's reviews of his selection of the 100 greatest movies of all time and had loved the one for Cat People. I asked the shopkeeper whether he had the movie and he said he didn't. However, to my pleasant surprise, I found it in one of the final piles and immediately decided to keep it. However, Ebert's Cat People is the 1942 movie, while the one I have is directed by Paul Schrader and is the 1982 remake. All the same, the one I have was a hit and is a landmark of sorts for its eroticism and its cinematography and isn't smut (although smut's welcome too once in a while. I wouldn't buy DVD's though :).).

8.The Bicyclist – Mohsen Makhmalbaf. I wanted to buy an Iranian movie because the cinema of this little, conservative country is so well-regarded at film festivals. The only director I'd heard of was Makhmalbaf (although I can never pronounce his name right) so I bought one of his, having to leave plenty of other equally promising titles.

9.Kolya – I had to take this. It has the credentials – Best Foreign Film Oscar, and although the Oscars routinely pass up better movies for the Big Five, the Foreign Film prize is for a film from a much larger pool, viz. that of films in all languages other than English and some in English as well, and hence has a much lesser chance of being given to an undeserving film.
Aside: There is an interesting anecdote about Kolya. Apparently, Shah Rukh Khan was woken up at night (early morning, no?) to inform him that his film had won the Best Foreign Film Oscar. His bewilderment was explained when it was realized that 'Kolya' had won, and not 'Koyla' which had been released the same year, to a vastly different reception.

10.Possession (1981) – Andrzej Zulawski. This just seemed like a good movie, and I've liked Sam Neill since Jurassic Park and later Bicentennial Man. Wikipedia says it's a horror film/thriller. I love thrillers (who doesn't, after all, they thrill) and am afraid of horror, so I don't know what this one's going to be like, which is a good thing.

11.Death and the Maiden – Roman Polanski. I had to pass up Rosemary's Baby for this. Also, I think Rosemary's Baby might be available on the IIT LAN while this certainly isn't. I heard of this movie when I read that a movie released sometime back that had a beautiful poster but found no watchers, Dansh, was based on the play by this name, and the play had been filmed earlier by Roman Polanski with Ben Kigsley as the evil Doctor and Sigourney Weaver as, well, the 'maiden'. On Sigourney Weaver, what is wrong with her? Why is she so amazingly unsexy? Even Tabu is sexier, at least now. Or maybe there's something wrong with me.

****
I had a great time yesterday with DJK. Apart from concurring on the aesthetics of smoking and our liking for Roald Dahl, and discovering the happy coincidence of both reading the same book presently, we also agreed that blogging was at least partly an exercise in vanity. I admit, therefore, that I publish the list partly because I want you to appreciate my eclectic taste in movies. But there are other reasons too.
For one, it's been a long time since my last post. The last post wasn't really a post. I wanted to publish something and didn't feel like writing much, so I wrote a short poem, which by the way I think came out not too badly (There I go again! I'm a Leo, what do you expect?). Since I make it a point to stress how jobless I am I think I should be writing frequently, and therefore I thought I'd use the influx of new stuff in my life as material. Secondly, I want to tell everyone that National Market is a wonderful place for movies. If you are an anti-piracy campaigner, however, please ignore these as delirious rantings of a terminally bored and movie-starved man. The third is a completely selfish aim that this is my best chance at fulfilling, but that I don't have much time remaining for, and that will remain unannounced unless it is realized.

****
PS: It is maddening to have to add HTML tags to hundreds of words individually to italicise them or make them bold or underline them. Blogspot used to allow simple one-click options earlier but now the clicks mutilate the text in the making-post box beyond recognition. Also, italics etc in an .odt document don't import to blogspot. Why? Are you listening, blogspot? I've shifted blog once, I can do it again. Wordpress, they say, is good, and (arrgh! more pain!) it lets you take all your posts when you go. Think, my friends, and consider.

Gloom

2006-06-30T17:44:00.000+05:30

Clouds can take
Every shape
I can think of,
And that's great.

Except when I spot
A pattern in the sky
There's no one near by.

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world..."

2006-06-26T19:23:00.000+05:30

There is a woman, I'll call her Priya Lamba, who I've been trying to avoid for the past few weeks and who has proved to be impossible to not run into. When I take the lift to go up for lunch or snacks, she happens to be getting out with her boyfriend who's easily twice her size (partly because she's tiny). When I go to the pantry on the floor, I find her chatting away and I turn away guiltily. The only Lamba-proof place seemed to be the men's washroom but I manage to encounter her on my way there too – she is summoned by nature to answer its call the same time as I am. Yesterday was the last straw. I was going to the mall nearby to browse the mall bookshop (Landmark, which is a very well-stocked bookshop but they don't give any discounts, which is not so great) because I couldn't stand spending the entire day in my nest on the tenth floor with nothing to do except read books through the day and watch the World Cup in the evening.
Actually, that's quite a lot to do. I could easily not have had the World Cup to watch simply because it didn't coincide with my summer holidays, or because we didn't have a TV in the hole we had found for ourselves to curl in the cold night in, but I have to thank my lucky stars and my temporary employers for being generous to a fault, and providing us amenities that we scarcely deserve considering the returns they get from us. The one who actually deserves all this and more, who is working enough for the three of us, is the one who's never in the house because he's always working. So we have his share of fun too. All in all, it's a balanced deal as far as the company is concerned... huge digression, but I have a blog precisely for the freedom of digressing royally from the straight line of the issue.

So I was walking to the mall in fairly high spirits because of a) the great weather (more about that soon) and b) the bookshop awaiting me at the end of my short journey where I could while away the next three hours before the first knockout match at 7:30 pm. Actually, the match was at 8:30 and the two of us stocked up on chips and chocolates and sat patiently waiting for kickoff so we could tear open our packs of yummy chips. The kickoff, however, didn't happen for another hour with the result that we felt thoroughly cheated by ESPN and were left snack-less when Germany steamrolled whichever team it was they steamrolled. I think it was Sweden, but no room for losers in my overburdened mind. Anyway, I'm still on my cheerful way to the bookshop at the end of the proverbial rainbow and Lamba is the last thought on my mind, when suddenly, where a benign looking juice shop normally stands I see Lamba with her personal Hulk. What is worse, she sees me. What is worst, I must pass within two feet of her if I have to find my pot of gold. The alternative is going back to TV and boredom. So I grit my teeth, tell myself I have faced worse challenges before and carry on giving a good impersonation of the royal ignore while I can literally feel her eyes boring into my back as they so often do in office, in the elevator, in the pantry, in the no man's (and no woman's too) land in front of the washrooms. Or perhaps I imagine it and she doesn't really care. Or perhaps she has forgotten and looks at me with the curiosity that I hope she finds reciprocated in my look towards her, when I'm unlucky enough to be caught looking at her, or rather, looking out for her to make sure passage to the pantry is safe and Lamba-free.

Now for some background. Why am I avoiding her, and why does the sight of her fill me with dread and guilt? Dissolve to a time (sepia-tinted) many months ago, sometime in the winter of this year. I had come to the realization that if, at this relatively idle stage of my life, I could not find the time or the discipline to jog or exercise, I never would and I would grow into a pot-bellied, perhaps balding middle-aged man in the throes of midlife crisis, and would progress from there to an unfit and ill-tempered old age and so on. I therefore resolved, along with and at the prodding of a friend who looks innocent but who harbours thoughts that would make the straight and wavy hair of the world's women turn frizzy and who is also the secret owner of a three-pack on its way to doubling very soon, to jog everyday. Gymming is not for me, not for me the stale air of the small hostel gym with its machines to make you cycle and run in the same place, and building bulging muscles holds no charm. I mean, I'd like muscles but I'd prefer stamina and endurance. So we put on our respective track suits or running gear, I dusted my unused sports-shoes and put them on and was generally feeling full of enthusiasm for the run ahead. I had barely climbed down a step when I received a call from a friend who informed me that Oracle was recruiting and simultaneously conducting internship interviews so since I had a CGPA that was nothing to be proud of but was higher (at the time, still is, but for how long will remain is open to conjecture) than their cutoff, would I please haul my lazy ass to the said venue and get myself an internship since not too many people were applying? So I junked the jogging plans in a second and jogged instead to the venue to present myself before the firing panel.

On my way to the building, I realized I knew nothing about Oracle. If the interviewers had told me they would take me if I could string together five coherent sentences on Oracle (the company, not the character in the Matrix or Greek myth or any of those clever tricks) I wouldn't have been able to muster more than a line to the effect that it has something to do with databases. I don't know a LOT more now, but I can now fill a five minute conversation with my insights into Oracle having spent the last month and a half working in it. I slowed down and called a friend who is generally up to date in these matters and who I can trust to know these things. What's more, I trust him to explain to me things in English and not in some crazy language only resembling it. My observation from my only interview is that interviews don't require you to be terribly technical. Interviewers assume is that we know enough technically for them to go straight to other important questions such as “Tell us something about yourselves” or similar rubbish. They are wrong. I'm living proof that it is possible to get by not only in IIT but also in the IT industry with nearly no knowledge of computers. So he (my computer savvy friend) told me in about two minutes that Oracle was about huge databases for big businesses blah blah and I thanked him and jogged for the rendezvous.

Up until then I had been under the impression that I was in possession of a secret and Oracle's internship selection was largely a clandestine operation. Imagine my surprise when I saw one-third of the department there, looking at me with surprise. I settled into casual conversation with my batch mates and we all realized just how weird it is talking to people, laughing with them knowing that they could be the reason you miss out on something you covet. We agreed the placement season next year was going to be horrible. Your own friends sitting in front of you, and everyone plotting and scheming to get ahead, or alternatively to push the others behind. It wasn't going to be pretty, we concurred. I sent my resume inside. My resume contained details of my extra-curricular achievements and posts of responsibility etc and not a word about the one thing I ought to have stressed on – my project during the previous summer holidays, which were the two most idle months of my life ever. My only notable activity during those months was reading English, August. It was a book, the only book so far, that changed my way of looking at things and my life. I must read it again. I was the first to be called for the interview, my interview went from terrible to shaky to a good end, the others fared differently and to cut an infinitely extensible story short I was selected as was another, and one of the three short-listed candidates was rejected. The rejected candidate went on to bag a better-paying internship and he was happy too eventually.

Although she sat mute the whole time with an endearing smile on her face, Priya Lamba was one of the two interviewers. I remember thinking in the middle of the interview (which was going horribly at that stage) that she looked like a little known Bollywood actress, who is now Manoj Bajpai's wife and who goes by the lovely name of Neha.
A note on 'Neha': As an example of the adage that it is a small world, the friend who told me about the Oracle interviews told me once that in a snap poll of his wing-mates, they decided that the name 'Neha' was the name most suited for girls they imagined finding lovely. Thereafter, they took to referring to the girlfriends of their friends 'Nehas'. As in, “where has he gone” would meet a “he has gone to meet his Neha” in response. I might have forgotten details of the story but the essence is true and I think it's an interesting story that deserves to be told. I must also add that the girlfriend of the protagonist in Five Point Someone, probably the only book all of IIT has read and that includes books such as the Prospectus, Resnick and Halliday, the Honour Code and whatnot, is called 'Neha'. This incident is around the time when FPS was quite fresh in people's minds and it was not uncommon to find questions in intra-IIT quizzes and word games that referred to the Book. I must also add that the friend is a reader who has read widely and deeply, and I too have read some, so we are not to be judged by our affection for the book. I'm tired of repeating this and I'll do so again – FPS is not literature and does not pretend to be. It is a fun, racy read and should be judged as that. I enjoyed it immensely and would be proud of myself if I could write a book as enjoyable.

Well, Lamba was one of the two interviewers and both my friend and I recalled later that we found her more than passably attractive, even though she was rather tiny. (Tiny in women doesn't necessarily take anything away, in fact, tall women force me to stand straight and I feel like I have a spinal rod.) Many months later, our semesters having got over, we packed our bags, said a cheery goodbye to a city that was rapidly becoming unlivable because of the heat, and came to Bangalore. We celebrated the unexpectedly great apartment and the luxury by treating ourselves to a movie we should not have watched – Gangster. I have several issues with it but no time to dive into them.

We went to the office (which was two minutes away on foot – beat that!) next morning and were made to wait for a really long time. We thought of calling the two interviewers but neither were in Bangalore at the time.
Aside: They came together to Delhi, they were both not present in Bangalore when we arrived. Well, well. Never mind.
We were finally introduced to some managers, and we picked our projects in the next two days. We were given a room to work in and were equipped with a machine each. Walking past the mail-holding space I saw Lamba's name and was happy to note she was here, on our floor. We made plans to introduce ourselves to her, and imagined going for pizza with her and perhaps being introduced to some of her friends. Maybe all attractive women hung out together, we hoped.

Work began, Lamba was still nowhere to be seen. Then a week later, she was sighted. My friend suggested we go talk to her, I said later. This happened a few times, and each time we lost the opportunity to take the step. Little did we know we were ourselves closing the window of opportunity. There came a day a fortnight or so later when she first looked at me with some curiosity and I realized with regret that the window had been shut. I had blown it! It was too weird to introduce myself to her a month into the internship, and now we would remain unwilling strangers. Too bad, I said. Big deal, I thought.
But it started getting worse. I started seeing her more and more. We sometimes ran into each other on the office floor, but that happened once in two days or so. The frequency began increasing, and I started meeting her gaze once a day, at the above mentioned places. However, the window was now definitely shut. It got worse. Uncomfortable spatial closeness became a regular feature in the pantry. Then it started happening near lifts. I managed to escape a few times when I saw she wasn't looking to avoid having to share the lift with her (and the Hulk, the Hulk is always with her, please imagine them both together). In recent days the situation has become unbearable. I go for a snack at night (I sometimes surf the Net at night after dinner because this is so close) and there she is. I move towards the pool table, and she's playing! I go in search of cream biscuits and she's sipping coffee. I want to take a leak and she does too, in a different place of course.

And finally a few days earlier the worst case scenario came true. It was night, I'd just had a great sandwich and was feeling good after the cool wind flecked with water. I was waiting for the lift down, and she appeared (with the Hulk). No one in the lobby but the three of us. We waited in silence. The tension could be cut with a knife. My heart was beating audibly. The lift arrived, we got in, and I pressed '5'. Lamba looked at the panel, started then stopped herself. She whispered to her Hulk, “did you press 5?” No, he did, he replied pointing at me and she saw me and bored me with her accusing stare which screamed what an ungrateful and impolite turd I was to not even acknowledge the presence of the woman who might have got me the intenship in the first place. I held my breath, '5' was announced, I walked swiftly to my room not once looking back, and shut it behind me, panting.

From there on, it's pretty much been war. It's almost as if I have a homing device on me. She loses no opportunity to cross my way, irrespective of whether I'm on my way to eat, drink, pee, take the lift or go to the mall. It's guerrilla warfare at its most effective. Matters have come to such a state that I take advantage of my presence in another floor to get biscuits or use the washroom. I peek inside like a thief before entering the pantry on our floor, and dread waiting for the lift in the lobby. The men's room is the only place I confidently move in on the fifth floor, although that too has been compromised by the presence of the other interviewer a couple of times.
But that calls for another story.

2006-06-22T17:39:00.000+05:30

I think I write better comments than posts (do not go looking for my comments and then smirk!). I also think, sometimes, that I write better mails than posts. I also think that I think of more imaginative things when I'm talking rather than writing. I think it has to do with the ball being returned from the other side. Conversation can stimulate thoughts, thoughts can stimulate writing, writing results in posts, posts give birth to comments, comments are replied to, the comments and their replies become a cyberspatial conversation, and another thought is sometimes born, and another post...

I noticed a lot of people visited my blog after my last effort but depressingly few bothered to comment. That can mean a) you're bored or/and b) my last post sucked.
If you're bored of me or my writing, you're probably not reading this anyway. If you are, keep coming back to see how long you can bear me. Actually, how can you be bored? I just changed the template, I added goodies on the sidebar, I even reply to comments now and now I offer you a genre-defying post after tepid poetry and scholarly film reviews on masala movies from Bollywood and Hollywood. Goddamn you if you're still bored. I can't offer adrenalin shots every alternate day if you can't find the energy to comment.
If you think my last post sucked, you should keep a few things in mind before thinking so and refusing to comment as a comment. One, do you write poems, or have you ever written poems? They are not easy to write, and I'm Robert Frust, remember? Not Frost. If you have, go to two. Two, do you write, or have you written more than three, poems that rhyme? That follow a rhyme scheme, while still making some sense?
Unless you are
Neruda or, well, Frost
I don't count
You as a
Poet
If you write a
Little story
That sucks/
Is nonsense,
So shut your
Eyes
And break it up
Randomly
Into pieces and
Publish it
As your very own
Free verse.
If you routinely write rhyming ballads or pensive free verse, I beg your apo-lo-gies (three syllables, no?) and would you please proceed to three?
Three, if you're so bloody brilliant what are you doing here wasting your time? And now that you are here, why don't you encourage a poor struggling poet with encouragement [and praise *hopeful sad smile, empty hat in hand*].

2006-06-19T21:44:00.000+05:30

For whatever they're worth, these are all I have written since the template overhaul. I tried and tried to come up with some back story or some epilogue to the first of these, but I couldn't. If I do in future, I'll re-publish the poem again.
The second was written as a response to the question that is now its title. This was one of those random questions that blogger throws up that you can choose to answer so that people have a better idea of who you are.

The Princess and The Frog

The frog told the puckering princess
The one with the luscious, inviting lips
Before you kiss
I must tell you, miss
I suffer from acute halitosis.

The princess smiled and lisped
Never fear, my potential prince
You may comfortably stink
I won't feel a thing
(Because luckily for you
Even if you do)
I have blocked sinuses.

The children are waiting! Please tell them the story about the bald frog with the wig:

The frog with the bald pate
With the princess on their first date
Mustered up the courage to tell
Cleared his throat, swelled, and began, "Well..."

But before he could even reach
The next word of his speech
The power was back, and there was light
(As God intended it to be)
The children shouted with glee -
"We can watch T.V.!"
And the story was left for another night

(Of course, the real reason
For the power to have arrived
At a moment most opportune
(Or infuriating, depending on whether
You're the unfortunate reader
Taken for a ride)
Or the unimaginative story-teller
Who's sea of stories has long dried
Is that I couldn't imagine
What the frog with the shiny pate
(And on his first date)
Felt couldn't wait
Till after the Kiss
By the eminently kissable princess.)

...new bottle

2006-06-13T17:56:00.000+05:30

Changes have been made
Of all sizes and shapes
Some are in order
Most are somewhat late

The old template has made way for the new
(As old things often must do)
From the classic (but boring) Black&White
I offer you blues and yellows and a cheerful shade of granite.

Don't think you'll notice, it's too faint
(I've tried to darken it, in vain)
All the same, I should let you know
That the lines below the blog-name
Are different from before

What else... let me think...
Oh yes, the links!
The sidebar's seen some action
Nothing's been removed, just some additions:

I now have a space to boast
About the great books I read
And below that, to raise a toast
To the nice new movies I've seen

Finally (for the sidebar, that is)
I've added a new counter of hits
So I can know I haven't been posting in vain
Even though the comment count stubbornly remains the same

From today my "complete profile"
Is slightly more complete
It now has a random query
And the response it received from me

Lastly, and leastly
The bottom of my page
Has a little button that claims
I'm only the 77th most popular Indian blogger these days

It would do my cause
A world of good
If you would continue to visit
(From different IP's if you could)

In return I give you my word
For whatever it's worth
That I'll post as regularly as I can
Meanwhile, could you please de-lurk?

Heat and Dust

2006-06-05T22:52:00.000+05:30

This is fucking unbelievable. I'm feeling very angry now. I wish I was The Incredible Hulk so I could throw something really BIG through the window out on the road and watch it smash into a million pieces. I was writing a review of Heat. Work was progressing slowly. Slowly but well. I was even researching a little bit and had opened Wikipedia for the factoid that I had found interesting in the morning. Here it is: "Val Kilmer states on the special edition DVD (in the making of featurette) that soldiers in the military are shown the bank robbery scene, with emphasis placed upon the scene where Kilmer's character fires on the police, performs a swift and smooth reload, and resumes firing. Supposedly they say something along the lines of, "If you can't change magazines as fast as this actor, get out of my army!"

I had begun the post with how happy I was that Blogger was loading now so I wouldn't have to try writing on Notepad which I didn't like because of compelling reasons A, B and C. I had written what must have been more than 250 words when I wanted to try being Nerdy Boy in spite of knowing zilch about hyperlinks and html code and shit, and I highlited a line and hit "Reload this frame only" without saving it first.

FUCK!

And now it's gone.

I was going to describe in loving detail the diner scene with Robert de Niro and Al Pacino, the two Godfathers of Hollywood and title contenders for Greatest Living Actor face off. This scene alone is worth watching the entire movie for, although the movie itself is quite watchable too. But this scene... the more I think of it, the more I am convinced that this was one of the best ways of doing this scene.

Let's say you are director Michael Mann. Let's say you have achieved the impossible - you have managed to get Al Pacino and Robert de Niro to play your two main characters in the movie. Regardless of the way your movie goes, regardless of the requirements of the script, regardless of the original screenplay and story and artistic vision, you just have to give us a scene in which Pacino and de Niro talk face to face, Michael against young Vito, One Great against Another.
The fist instinct is to harness the histrionic talents of both these giants by creating a scene of immense power and intensity. But if you are a good director, you'll probably realize that it's nearly impossible to create a scene good enough to satisfy movie fanatics who will surely line up to see the two giants slug it out.

So Mann, being a clever director, creates a scene that is the most successful anti-climax I have ever seen. He creates a scene that's light and cool in a movie that is consistently the opposite. The scene had to stand out, and stand out it does, by being a scene where the audience who've been waiting for it bite their nails in anticipation of all the things that can happen next but that rewards them by allowing nothing to happen, except talk.
But what talk! This is Hollywood meta at a whole new level. Pacino talks about his failed marriages, de Niro talks about "the woman in his life". Pacino asks de Niro why he does it, and de Niro asks Pacino the same. Pacino says they may never meet again, de Niro nods.

If you are a movie lover every scene involving both Robert de Niro and Al Pacino takes on a deeper meaning. While the now famous diner scene abounds in references to the real actors, the others don't always. All the same the last scene in which the Pacino clasps de Niro's hand resonates with a meaning to it that people who don't know who these two really are can never understand.

*****************

It seems I ended up writing something on the movie anyway. If you liked it, well, blame blogger for depriving you of the rest. If you hated it, you were spared a painful read, although why anyone who hated the above would have come far enough to read this line is beyond me. In fact, as a comment on the previous post explained, that was a fairly typical post and so is this. I must have filtered down to just those readers who like what I write, since I seem to be writing exclusively on movies these days.
Thank you for reading! Good night, and good luck.

X3 - Review, etc.

2006-06-02T17:47:00.000+05:30

I watched X3 yesterday and totally loved it. I had heard how the movie was high on SFX but lacked the emotional depth of the first two movies, so I went expecting a spectacle but with other expectations considerably scaled down. And I was rewarded for not expecting too much from the film because it delivered in awesome style.
Strangely, however, the scene that everyone is holding up as the one best illustrating the brilliant use of SFX in the movie - the one where Magneto lifts a bridge clean off its foundations and uses it to connect Alcatraz to the city - is not the one I found most impressive. The scene that stood out for sheer power and intensity was when Jean Grey aka Phoenix has a violent confrontation with Professor X, the most powerful telepathic and telekinetic mutant breaching Professor X's mental defences with ease with Magneto reduced to being a helpless witness.

If Jean Grey radiates power, Magneto is shown, to great effect, vulnerable in many instances. The all-powerful Magneto, the leader of mutants against X-Men, the scourge of humanity and my favourite mutant, is a mere Class-4, indefensible against a Class-5+ Jean Grey. I might have said this before, and I might get the opportunity to say it again since a Magneto spin-off is apparently being planned for a 2007 release, the X-Men movies are amazingly well-cast. Patrick Stewart has made his role his own, as has Hugh Jackman and to a lesser extent others like Halle Berry and Famke Jannsen, but the only man who could have played Magneto is Sir Ian McKellan (apologies for mis-spellings, if any).
The combination of ethical ambivalence, misplaced convictions and the knowledge of his own power make Magneto a very difficult character to play. It's pretty much impossible to visualise any actor other than Stewart playing Professor X either, but his character's morals and beliefs are never in doubt making him a character with fewer complexities and thus easier to play.
I've often thought Sir Ian would be the perfect actor to play Dumbledore, especially in movies four and beyond, because Dumbledore is a character who plays the benign grandfather most of the time (and especially with Harry who had become irritatingly idiotic in the fifth book, while Hermione had become irritatingly wise) but who can transform into the ruthless and frighteningly powerful wizard even Voldemort fears. For almost the same reasons, he made the perfect choice to play Gandalf.

Coming back to X3 and present times, what especially gladdened me today was the Box Office comparison of the Da Vinci Code and X3 on Rotten Tomatoes. X3 has made in one week almost as much as the supremely hyped DVC made from two. I haven't seen DVC so I won't comment on the movie but if a big-budget studio could not convince me to watch it in this era of super-slick trailers and teasers that make me make the mistake of investing into such Yashrajland turkeys as Bluffmaster, then they must look into what went wrong with their movie.
(Please note that 'Yashrajland' is a term that I have adopted from the Great Bong to describe the genre of movies characterised by wonderful visuals, occassionally good music, moist-eyed women and men, precocious kids and the requirement of a suspension of disbelief that I'm inacapable of.)
The reason I don't want to watch DVC is, however, not limited to its lacklustre trailers alone. I figured yesterday as I was thinking of which movie to watch standing in the queue for movie tickets at night, that DVC has no sex, very little violence, uncharismatic leads with no chemistry (there's no sex anyway and I think, one kiss in the book), an anti-climactic story, locations that everyone has seen on TV or in print, and finally a story that no one in the English-speaking world who has read more than one book in his life is unaware of. In short, DVC has absolutely nothing new to offer, and I have no intention of watching the movie just to see a translation of what was at best a gripping story with a disappointing end translated on to film.

I also watched the theatrical trailer of Superman Returns and it was every bit as good as you can expect from a Bryan Singer movie. This guy made The Usual Suspects and then the best movie series based on a comic book ever, and Superman promises to be just as great a movie-watching experience as the X Men movies have been. If he pulls it off, Bryan Singer joins Peter Jackson in the class of present day directors who make the best movies, the best movies being, as we must never lose sight of, movies which provoke and educate and stimuate our minds and everything, but also that entertain.
This is a great time to be alive!

Watch X3 now, and on the biggest screen you can find.

Hotel Kerala-fonia

2006-05-26T16:04:00.000+05:30

On the road to Trivandrum
Coconut oil in my hair
Warm smell of avial
Rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance
I saw a bright pink tube-light
My tummy rumbled, I felt weak and thin
I had to stop for a bite
There he stood in the doorway
Flicked his mundu in style
And I was thinking to myself
I don't like the look of his sinister smile
Then he lit up a petromax
Muttering "No power today"
More Mallus down the corridor
I thought I heard them say

Welcome to the Hotel Kerala-fonia
Such a lousy place,
Such a lousy place (background)
Such a sad disgrace,
Plenty of bugs at the Hotel Kerala-fonia
Any time of year
Any time of year (background)
It's infested here
It's infested here

His finger's stuck up his nostril
He's got a big, thick mustache
He makes an ugly, ugly noise
But that's just his laugh
Buxom girls clad in pavada
Eating banana chips
Some roll their eyes, and
Some roll their hips
I said to the manager
My room's full of mice
He said,
Don't worry, saar,I sending you
meen karri, brandy and ice
And still those voices were crying from far away
Wake you up in the middle of the night
Just to hear them pray

Save us from the Hotel Kerala-fonia
Such a lousy place,
Such a lousy place (background)
Such a sad disgrace
Trying to live at the Hotel Kerala-fonia
It is no surprise
It is no surprise (background)
That it swarms with flies

The blind man was pouring
Stale sambar on rice
And he said
We are all just actors here
In Silk Smitha-disguise
And in the dining chamber
We gathered for the feast
We stab it with our steely knives
But we just can't cut that beef
Last thing I remember
I was writhing on the floor
That cockroach in my appam-stew was the culprit,
I am sure
Relax, said the watchman
This enema will make you well
And his friends laughed as they held me down
God's Own Country? Oh, Hell! *

Thanks to Vivek who forwarded this to me.
Disclaimer: I found this funny and irreverent and absolutely do not intend to hurt anyone's feelings. In this era of idiotic lawsuits and multi-million dollar payouts for "causing mental trauma", who knows?

Agneepath, among other things

2006-05-25T17:02:00.000+05:30

Blogspot springs unpleasant surprises on me every now and then. Like now, for example. I was browsing through blogs, and came to my blog in the hope that someone had commented anew, or someone new had commented and my blog continued to show a depressing "2 comments" below my post despite a refresh. On clicking the link, however, I found I had had 3 visitors. I happily replied to their comments and found it a bit strange that my blog was unable to recognize its owner from the hordes who make up the traffic, and prompted me for my password too. Then I decided to blog about something and found to my alarm that I was ushered straight to my dashboard, the assumption being that the user who had logged in as "robertfrust" a few minutes ago was the same as the user who now wanted to go to blogspot.
I see a security issue here. What if I go to several blogs, comment on one after signing in, and then go to another blog and then move away and let someone else use my computer for a while and that someone happens to be a blogger and he decides to blog about his day and opens blogspot and voila! my blog innocently offers itself? Not that that's particularly scary and all, but it shouldn't happen, should it?

You see how I use certain words or phrases in my posts - I didn't need to end the previous paragraph with a question but I did. Then I began this paragraph with an address to an imagined audience. The question might have been rhetorical and the 'you' might simply indicate that I imagine I'm talking with someone (as opposed to to someone?) or it might be indicative of some greater effort to involve the reader of the post. I know if I ever write a book or a play (lately I've read a number of enjoyable plays), I'm going to be very conscious of whether it involves the audience or not. I have read and sometimes abandoned books that have bored me to distraction. And these include mostly 'famous' and high-brow fiction and only very rarely pulp fiction of the bestseller kind. Readability and brevity were issues that the great often couldn't care less about, and that bothers me.

I did go to Legends of Rock a few hours after I wrote my previous post and I found it every bit as satisfactory an experience as I had come to anticipate from its reputation. It's such a pleasure when you build up to something and then find the end result justifying the build-up. LoR has three floors, with the last floor being a roof-top bar, and the two lower floors having music memorabilia on the walls besides huge LCD televisions showing concert videos of great songs, one after the other. It's also a great pleasure to be listening to great and familiar music when you are drinking alcohol. My friend and I consumed what must have been more than three pints of beer between us and that coupled with the huge dinner that followed tested my digestive system a little bit, but the experience was totally worth the mild ache.
LoR also displays some cool T-shirts with Clapton, Morrison, Hendrix and a fourth bespectacled chap (not Lennon, we concurred) on the ground floor near the entrance and I immediately wanted to buy a couple for my brother, but deferred it till later because I figured I'd come here again. I even dreamt about those shirts at night, among other things. Somehow alcohol gives me a dreamful sleep.

I read a few chapters of Three Men in a Boat and found it not as dated as I thought it would be, but dated enough to not completely take to it. I'm debating whether to attempt to finish it or not. This morning I started a new book, one that I first came to know something besides the title about through a quiz question in IIT, and that I've been meaning to read ever since. The entire conception is nothing short of brilliant, and if the start is anything to go by, so is the book itself. I hope I like it enough to recommend soon.

Saw bits of Agneepath yesterday. I try to remain as unprejudiced as possible when I watch movies and I tried to like this movie when I last saw parts of it but I really couldn't help feeling irritation at Amitabh Bachchan's affected dialogue delivery and exaggerated mannerisms. It seemed to me almost as if he was playing a caricature of himself, much like I felt genuinely surprised when I saw a scene from one of Dharmendra's several movies done in the twilight of his career, with a nostril-flaring Dharmendra vowing to drink the villain's blood etc. I thought he was trying to fit the Dharmendra caricature in our popular culture. The caricature had come before the man himself for me, but of course in reality he had given birth to the caricature and not it to him.
Coming back to Agneepath, maybe I've evolved a little as a movie-watcher since some years back because I could appreciate some aspects of Agneepath that had been earlier obscured by my inability to digest an exaggerated AB, like its deliberate larger-than-life treatment of its protagonist, its use of many of Hindi cinema's enduring images and icons - the Mother, the Masterji, the child boot-polishwalla (evoking Deewar, among others) - and its focus on style and treatment over logic and plotline.
I also have to admit my interest in the movie, which was initially limited to observing why it was this performance and no other that fetched Amitabh Bachchan the National Award and did it truly better his performance in Deewar, perked up after the voiceover (Siddharth Kak's, I think) on Extraaa Shots (Sony Max, obviously) said the character of Vijay Deenanath Chauhan ("poora naam") was based on Al Pacino's Scarface. I guess it appealed to the trivia-junkie in me. Also, Scarface is never very far from my mind because the floor below where I work (and type this) in my office has an imperious Pacino reclining in his sofa on the lobby wall. The subscription says "Make Way For The Bad Guy". How's that for a tagline, hain?

I'm Back!

2006-05-23T15:42:00.000+05:30

I just spent close to 4 hrs looking for a bank which would send a demand draft against cash, and travelled across half of Bangalore only to find one that charged 60 rupees fora 67 rs. draft.

But I don't mind because:
a) I haven't travelled through much of Bangalore and this way was able to
b) I saw at least two places I wanted to go to, and therefore now the way to
c) I had a good meal in Pizza Hut, a lot better than the Oracle sponsored meals here, though hostel meals remain incomparably bad
d) I saw this amazing movie rental place called, what else but Cinema Paradiso which has a truly awesome collection of movies. I saw movies like Krysztof Kieslowski's (apologies if the spelling is incorrect) Decalogue, and Godard's and other assosrted exoticities, and of course the complete collections of the likes of Kurosawa and Hitchcock and Polanski. Also saw more Guru Dutt than have ever seen before ina single place.
Above that wonderful world of movies is reputedly the must-visit pub of Bangalore - Legends of Rock.
I intend to spend some good quality time in the very near future browsing through those movie titles at leisure (the membership fee is 3000 bucks, so won't be seeing any, but on the upside I'm reading a bit these days), and then spend the evening in la-la land above.
Life's been worse.

Movies over the weekend

2006-04-17T12:55:00.000+05:30

I'm listening to wonderful music I haven't heard in a really long while. Also, I'm usually slow to take to current hits, and find it a bit crass to follow mass choice in Hindi film music, but I really like a couple of songs from this forthcoming movie called 'Gangster'. The Bhatts don't consistently make watchable movies, but they do have good music and (usually) novel ideas in their movies.
Since we're living in a time of poor quality Hindi Films being made anyway, I think the least we should expect is good music but sadly even that is missing from movies. However, I expect some summer attractions to at least hold my interest while I'm in Bangalore for my internship.
I saw a song clip from Krrish and felt strangely enthused about it. That's the great quality of Rakesh Roshan's films - they somehow make me feel like they will offer unpretentious masala entertainment. Also, like I mentioned in a long movie post sometime back, Roshan Sr. is the only person in the whole world who knows how to present his hard-working, immensely talented but somewhat misguided son. Krrish holds the promise of entertainment. Ditto for Fanaa. All I've seen of it is a teaser-poster with Kajol (unibrow over beautiful brandy eyes) looking demurely down and Aamir Khan looking at her. It holds promise because I trust Aamir Khan to exercise enough influence to prevent Yash Chopra or Karan Johar or whichever one of them is directing it from turning it into their trademarked soppy product, considering he must have been cajoled (*chuckle*) into doing the movie. I think I can picture in my mind exactly how the poster would've looked had it been SRK on the poster instead of Aamir Khan. He would have been looking with liquid eyes under that irritating 's' of his eyebrows at Kajol, looking like he was going to cry if you looked for too long.
Basically, I'm thirsting for a good Hindi movie after having watched a whole lot of classic 50's and 60's movies in the last few days. I enjoyed most of them, but they are a little dated and I'd much rather watch good cinema from my time, i.e. now. Brief reviews are as follows:

Roman Holiday - Watch it, if not for Gregory Peck, if not for Rome in black and white (if you're into that sort of thing), if not for its famous Vespa scooter scenes, if not for its subtle and genteel humour and charm, and if not for its historical value and classic status, then for Audrey Hepburn. Audrey, Audrey, Audrey. She has the kind of dazzling smile that makes life worth living and reaffirms one’s faith in romance and beauty. She's so beautiful and so charming I had a knot in my heart when I was watching the movie.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly - First real Western I've watched, unless I count Unforgiven too. Found it really slow and boring at first, and went to sleep twice during the movie (also because I find it uncomfortable watching movies with other people in hostel rooms – this having nothing to do with them, but rather with my inexplicable discomfort; I feel constrained and feel an immense desire to be alone in my room) but was rewarded for my perseverance with a nice ending, made special by great music by the grandfather of Western Film music – Enrio Morricone.

Vertigo - Hardly any suspense, and whatever little there is, is revealed in the middle of the movie for no reason at all. Boring and unnecessarily dragging in parts, but deserves to be seen nevertheless for the romantic parts. I couldn't make up my mind whether I liked Kim Novak or not (also because I compare all women on screen with Audrey Hepburn now, and let's face it, she's a goddess). Apparently, she was famed for her beauty but I thought her face was too long and her eyebrows too thick and weirdly shaped among other turn-offs.

Rear Window - Disappointing end after a promising beginning, again boring and slow in parts, but has great dialogues that are witty and sharp in a way that seems to be characteristic of Hitchcock's films. James Stewart is good (in both films) and especially well-cast as the sardonic and terminally bored photographer, and Grace Kelly is divine. The parts I most enjoyed were the romantic scenes between Stewart and Grace Kelly and the sharp banter between the nurse and Stewart, especially when she lectures him on how what used to be simple relationships are now subjected to overanalysis and how the demand for intelligence in every activity has ruined the simple pleasures of life. I found my thoughts being articulated by her and him in turn.

Man on Fire - Got bored of Rear Window, so watched this two-hour breeze of a movie in the break. Very fast paced, technically innovative with the use of fast and shaky cuts and yellowish lighting and funky editing etc, and a decent storyline that faltered only in giving an unsatisfactory climax, this was a perfect antidote to the overdose of classics I was suffering from. Denzel Washington was good and Dakota Fanning seems disturbingly precociously good.

Adaptation - The mind boggles at Charlie Kaufman's complexity and range of thought. I had earlier loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind written by him, and now this movie has sealed my regard for him. This movie is definitely arty, as was ESOTSM, so you may not like it, but what it is not is pretentious. I was a little dissatisfied by its ending, but then I read about it a little and understood why the end was the way it was and then could do nothing but prostrate before Kaufman's talent.

PS: I came down to CSC to post this because thinking of opening blogger from my Net connection in my hostel is a dream, and now it refuses to open here either. Obviously, they don’t make these websites for users in developing countries where premier technical institutions feel easy and fast Internet access in hostel rooms is a luxury would-be engineers and scientist would do well to avoid getting used to.

Mango Man

2006-04-08T06:21:00.000+05:30

In some deep, inexplicable way, politics depresses me. I don't know if politics in IIT, affectionately or derisively abbreviated to "poltu", can be called "politics" considering "politics" is a weighty word that has come to be associated with violence, caste, religion and corruption in the public consciousness. Politics in IIT (Delhi) has never been associated with violence or religion to the best of my knowledge, and only in a miniscule way with caste. People who've seen more of IIT and its politics will contradict me if I'm wrong. Corruption, unfortunately, is probably a reality where many tens of lakhs of rupees are involved in organising some of the biggest fests in this part of India. The amounts may pale in comparison with multi-crore scams that we seem to be used to hearing about in national media, but even a few thousands is a sizable bit of the total sponsorships received and in any case, it's the principle we are concerned about.
As is apparent from the subject of this post, politics has been occupying a substantial portion of my mindspace in recent days. In fact, the last nine hours or so have been the only large chunk of time in which I've had something far more important on my mind, namely a minor exam which caused me to stay awake the entire night yesterday studying. It's not like I have been doing a lot of running around for my hostel's success in today's or tomorrow's elections, or my Party's in the house elections. But physical effort is not the only thing that actually tires you of something. Politics, which I find depressing, has been foremost in my mind and has hence depressed me.
****
Just got a call. Gotta go campaign.
****
2 Days Later:

It's over. We, 'we' being the part of my hostel I am affiliated with, won almost everything we contested 'them' for. We then won nearly everything in the external elections as well. In spite of one of the two alliances taking most of the pickings, most (boys') hostels are so fractured that almost every faction, and certainly every hostel, has got a share of the winnings. Both alliances have a fest each to conduct, and now that the electoral madness is over, I join other people reasonable enough to not take politics personally in wishing both the best. May both fests be bigger and better than this year's were. May there be fewer controversies, greater transparency and prettier girls. Most importantly, now that I've come to a stage when I can actually win quizzes in inter-college fests, may the quizzing prize money be raised from the current pittance.
I know I said I hadn't worked too much in the electoral lead-up. I did, however, work a lot on the last three days or so. I did what I could and we got the desired results. I should probably be happy because my 'group' has won. I did feel happy the day before, and to a smaller extent yesterday, on various small and big wins. But the happiness is short-lived. It does not give me the kind of lasting happiness that personal accomplishment does. When I won last year, I felt genuinely happy. I felt happy not just because I won a close election, but also because I (think I) was the only winner from outside the winning alliance, i.e. my win was unexpected. It was a special feeling to feel that my election was actually being discussed by the king-makers as an example of what to prevent from happening in the future. I felt very important. This time, the happiness was for others. Some of my close friends were very happy with the results and I felt happy with them. Some of my friends won elections themselves, and I felt happy for them. But the happiness could not match the joy of winning myself. It's illogical to expect it to, anyway.

I was trying to understand my feelings towards politics, and those of my friends'. Why do people get involved in politics? It's not a dangerous involvement in IIT, but it is a time-consuming one. I can understand why people who have tangible gains to gather from politics (such as posts or vendetta) get involved. What I don't understand is how they can remain motivated enough to involve themselves with increasing intensity over a period of nearly two months. So I was standing and observing on the SAC floor yesterday, and I realized people get high on two things - power and knowledge. Power and knowledge are, of course, inter-related.
There is information in the world that makes its possessors important. Knowing that A is going out with B, but B really lusts after C, who in a weird twist of Fate, loves A before the world does makes you powerful for those few days. Similarly, knowing the 'counts' and the 'coefficients' and the 'carpets' before someone else knows them is power. The importance lies is the exclusivity of the information. Knowing that you know what very few people know and that people are burning to know what you are thinking is a high. Control of the flow of data is one of the most powerful occupations.
The second reason is that being busy gives a feeling of power. On the two days of elections, nobody in IIT is busier than the fifteen or so king-makers. You can make them out at a glance. When they aren't glued to their mobile phones, they are talking conspiratorially with other king-makers or authoritatively to their hostel minions. They have creases on their foreheads and worried expressions on their faces. Worry and tension are the defining expressions on their features. Most look like they haven't slept well for some time, and look intellectually, emotionally and physically drained. But in spite of all the worries and the uncertainties, they are the ones with the greatest sense of purpose in that place. They radiate power because they know things we don't. In fact, they know whether what we know is actually correct. People ask them what the situation is, and they choose what and how much to reveal. They lead workforces and give directions like Generals of yore, and people do their bidding.
I want to be that too. I'd like to feel important and I'd like knowing that people were hanging on to my every word and that I didn't even have time to feel good about that, and for that I'll have to 'deal' and 'trade'. That's probably fun and everything but I don't know if find it interesting enough to keep me motivated for an entire month or even a fortnight. The pizzas, of course, are some motivation and if you have interesting company for the hundreds of hours you clock in meetings, it'll probably be somewhat interesting. It might even be fun.
I was just talking to him yesterday and I told him how I wanted to be interested in politics but couldn't really be consistently enthusiastic. Ditto with economics and finance. These are the things that people who've planned out their careers from their childhoods find interesting. I thought I should start taking some interest in banks, stocks, global markets blah blah but never could like Economic Times too much. I just like talking and lazing around really, and I'm not a natural at anything so I think my future lies in some boring job that I'll live with in anticipation of my two hours of TV with the missuz on reaching home.

I tried to look busy yesterday but the sad fact is that I wasn't needed. I could've been the most important person in SAC yesterday but it had been my decision that I didn't want that. And yet, I was attracted to Big Things happening in the institute as the political D-Days approached and I wanted a part of the excitement too. Instead, I was reduced to an observer. I tried to look and feel busy yesterday, but really no one was calling me, and all I was was a vote. That's it, a single vote. I remembered the same day last year when I felt vaguely resentful that as a newly elected Secretary, I was being herded with other outgoing representatives into another hostel, asked to pass my time with whatever I could find on a computer, and then unceremoniously taken to SAC by the GSec candidate to cast my vote. I wanted to tell him I was a Secretary and had just done my best to fuck up his alliance the previous day, so could he please show me some respect, but then I realized it didn't matter a bit to him. I was just a vote from an allied hostel, the same as all the others.
And so it was yesterday too. I felt vaguely unhappy that no one was asking for me. I had been a Secreatry, goddammit, and a good one at that and I wanted mah respect! But the sad truth is I was just a vote and no more valuable than any outgoing representative.
I slipped quietly away to KL for a dinner after enquiring if we were having our hostel treat in the night and being answered in the negative. I had a peaceful and undisturbed dinner and then came back at leisure to hear the remaining results and see our alliance nail it and my colleagues become holders of key institute posts.
Life goes on, I suppose. Well, whatever, nevermind.

Blog Arrears

2006-04-02T18:54:00.000+05:30

What I couldn't post yesterday:

I'm writing this in the darkness because I can't bear to see too clearly. The trouble with people like me is that we have to make every goddam mistake there is to learn. It' probably not even a big thing, and if I were to think logically I'd realize that although I did screw up, it might not affect the outcome too much. But I feel like shit. Because I screwed up where any idiot would've found it impossible to screw up.
My sense of fairness, or what I thought was that, has been exposed to be a farce. With this mistake, I've realized once again that sometimes it's better not to show off your ability to see the larger picture when no one else is interested. The lesson that this incident has slammed into me, and this time I have a feeling it's for good, is "Stick to your brief". Don't try to be a poster boy for fair play or whatever just for the heck of it.
I'm not strong enough to feel great about myself because I know I am right and the world is wrong, so to hell with it. I need people, and although there aren't a lot of them, I need them to like me. One should walk for praise after one has made a century, not when one's team is dying on the field and one is the only hope. There are times when one has the luxury to play fair. Most other times, only the result matters.
Like I said, it's probably not even going to devastate me, but the way I'm going from one minor disaster to another in my life, it isn't long before Armageddon occurs. I managed to piss off two people in less than twenty-four hours, both of which were valued team members, solely because I got taken in by my own half-baked sense of nobility. And the irony of the situation is that both have absolutely no reason to be pissed because what has happened now, after my ill-fated, well-intentioned but consummately moronic mishaps, is exactly what both would've liked and wanted in the first place. The entire loop that I introduced into the situation need never have been introduced at all. Aaaaaaaaarrrggh!

Unrelated: I remembered the night's dream very vividly today when I woke up in the morning.It was about this woman who's (somewhat unjustifiably but again because of an unnecessary accident caused partially by me) annoyed at me. I'll call her The Enemy, although she's not my enemy and is in fact someone I respect tremendously.
In my dream she and I meet and some awkwardness later, she says something very uncharcteristic. She asks how can she hug me if we remain acrimonious towards each other. That is of course the reply that solves everything in one fell swoop and I melt into Milkybar and I apologize profusely and gratefully make up.
Now this dream is obviously rich with possibilities of psycho-analysis and I half-know what I'm going to find if I were to analyze this. I'm scared of what I'll articulate if I do that, so I won't and I hope the fear that I know is nudging my conscious mind will never be revealed.

Unrealted2: Small things mar my day. Small things make me thrilled with life. I hate myself for the fickleness of my emotional state. I wish I was more balanced and capable of seeing the larger picture when it really mattered.
During the course of yesterday alone, I felt normal, happy, very happy, disturbed, queasy, unhappy, ashamed, normal, happy, bored, happy and finally tired and full of doubt when I went to sleep at 3 am.

Needless to say, I write this sort of stuff when I'm unhappy, which is right now.

******
After this, I went on a multiple-hundred word tirade against IIT and how I hated it blah blah. Then I tried posting that at 5 am in the morning but no luck then either. That gave me a masochistic satisfaction that I was right in hating this place all along. Now I had this pretty long post on my hands and I knew that it didn't make much sense to post it later because it would lose its relevance once the bitterness wore off. hat made me even more frustrated so I went to the only room that had a light on on my floor, which fortunately happened to be the room of my friend who has come to be used to my futile and often illogical tirades against all manner of things ranging from the Condition Of The World to the latest bloodsucking assignment. He was on his fifth consecutive night out and hence not in a position to throw an energetic and motivated cynic out of his room when he probably should have. So I just went on and spat acid for an hour and then apologized and thanked him and then came back and went to sleep.

Taxpayers, you're wasting your money educating me

2006-04-02T05:15:00.000+05:30

I have to work pretty hard to get by here. I hate it but I do it. I do it because the only thing worse than staying here for four years is staying here for five.
All I ask is that I should be able to check my mail in 5 minutes. If that is too much to ask, I have to say IIT's not worth the heartburn.
Seriously, just what the fuck is wrong with the Internet?

Minor Pains

2006-03-28T17:19:00.000+05:30

Request: Download the live version of "Hell's Bells" by AC/DC from somewhere and play it in a loop while you're reading this post. I rediscovered this today and have been listening to it incessantly. It would give me happiness if you do the same.

My words have been getting increasingly foul over the last few years. I had decided, however, to desist from using invective on my blog. So everytime I wanted to say "Fuck!" I said "goddam" or something equally unsatisfactory. I am lifting this self-imposed embargo on swear words from my blog with immediate effect.
The reason, correction: the catalyst, for this change is that I had two minors today, the second of which did me in the posterior, with style. The first minor in this course was bad enough (and when I say 'bad', I really mean AWFUL, not like people who claim they are neck-deep in shit and promptly score straight A's), but I consoled myself with the thought that since I hadn't studied it wasn't a reflection on my intelligence. I suppose I can say the same about this one if I really want to, but the honest fact is I studied for the little fucker, I learnt formulae, I memorised graphs, and made more of an effort than I usually do to understand stuff. And yet, the minor managed to comprehensively crush me.
Why? Because the instructor is a bloody sadist, that's why. I can't elaborate because I don't have any logical reasons for making this claim. All the same, this is how I feel and I'm entitled to my opinion, so that's that.

Also, I rediscovered Maddox. The guy is God. Read his page - you'll feel either love or hatred, both of which are feelings that add colour to our lives and are hence welcome additions.
I have been following this blog pretty regularly too. It's highly recommended, especially if you like Maddoxian deviant humour. A bonus is that this blog has a really cool url and following tag. You'll probably get a dry laugh out of it.

I earlier mentioned how today's happenings acted more as catalyst than as motivation for my decision. Something similar happened with English, August when I read it about a year back. It is the only book I can think of that I actually know changed me.
I had been thinking weird stuff for a while but the deviance was always tinged with a kind of guilt. This book removed all the guilt and all the reservations about subversive humour in one clean stroke. I suppose I loved that there were others in the world who saw the potential for humour in strange situations. Maybe I was just at a malleable stage of life at the time.
Not only does E,A combine subversive and self-effacing humour extremely well, it raises issues that I was starting to get very interested in. Cultural identity, the importance of 'roots', the politics and power of language in India, the differences between urbanised and small-town India and those between their citizens, our colonial baggage and will we ever discard it, our attitudes towards foreigners (read this article that appeared in this sunday's HT), our positions regarding our own history and culture - basically, questions of identity - these are questions that were raised by E,A and remain unanswered. The beauty of the book is its lack of stances on any of these issues. It doesn't create stereotypes (at least of the main characters) and doesn't offer simple answers.
This book also made me realize the importance of reading Indian fiction. I hadn't read much before E, A and I still haven't read much, but hey, at least I want to.

Angsty Pantsy

2006-03-24T01:12:00.000+05:30

I think I remember seeing the above subtitle ("Angst in my pants") on Beatzo's blog. I don't visit this blog and hence don't remember since I must've seen the blog in question on only a couple of occassions in a friend's place.
In fact, it's a wonder that I was able to figure out that it was this blog that I saw this phrase in. I'm usually not too great at being able to recall things when I most need to by thinking hard. They usually either come easily or hover in the margins (of my consciousness, what else?) till the time has passed. I once suffered for two whole days before I remembered 'Meryl Streep'.
It's horrible when you know you know something and you know you can almost remember it, but it just doesn't enter it (my conscious mind, doofus) when it should. I think a good analogy would be trying to reach a small fibrous piece of food stuck from the morning's breakfast between your side teeth that you can just about reach and wiggle a bit with your tongue, but can't dislodge. A toothpick, of course, is nowhere near reach.

Anyway, the motivations for this uncharacteristic post are the following:

1) the Net rocks today. Maybe it's the proxy, maybe junta is (are? Any suggestions on correct Hinglish grammar are most welcome.) studying for minors, maybe IIT's finally woken up and decided to devote more than the paltry bandwidth it reserves for the hostels. Like I told someone a while back, we're in the goddam Mecca (very blasphemous in these times) of engineering studies in a country poised on the cusp of economic and technological greatness in the world and the Net - basic human need of the iPod generation - is so awfully slow I blink through tears of rage when I check my gmail page download pixel by painful pixel.
But I'm happy today, so I'm scrapping people (on Orkut, I endorse Orkut over pretenders like hi5 et al.), and blogging and generally frolicking on the Net with a joy I haven't experienced since really long.
God bless champak, god bless the day I chose CSE (over EE, what else?).

2) rather prosaically, I haven't blogged for really long and suddenly for no apparent reason I remembered the phrase that now adorns the title on the top and thought it would be more apt than the previous subtitle. The previous subtitle was cool and I was attached to it because it was a Calvin quote. I have to admit, however, that this one is cooler and fits my profile better.

3) I wanted to credit the original source of this phrase, and issue a disclaimer simultaneously.
Now, if the source happens to visit my blog, I won't have to blush at having been caught plagiarising a cool subtitle. I'm proud of being one of the few people I know who give credit where it's due.

4) checked my blog before coming here (on blogger, where else?) and saw two new comments. Hence, felt enthused about posting. I mean, one can go on and on about how little one cares about comments but the fact of the matter is that one cares. Only to an extent, of course, but one would be lying if one said one didn't feel good at watching the comment count increase.
One of the two comments was deleted by the author. Like all popular bloggers, I've been getting my share of comments that are deleted by their authors (authoresses?) when they see to their horror what their comment really looks like in e-print. Retrospect is such a great thing. Now, the good news for you is I don't have one of those cool little provisions which make it possible for your comment to be read by me because it has already reached my mailbox. I (used to) think it's so vain to check your mailbox to see if anyone's commented. But my feelings don't stand the test of logic. For one, you can read the deleted comments which is really useful. Secondly, you'd know if someone's commented on one of your previous posts which I might miss.
Hence, I do not blame you, dear reader and fellow blogger, if you prefer to read my comment on in your inbox before your blog. I feel like doing that with my blog too, but I hate it when my inbox crowds with unwanted mails, and so I'll pass this. In other words, you're free to comment and then delete your comment. I wouldn't know it was you.

5) had a small poltu meeting with the kingmakers. Hate poltu. Everyone says that of course, but I despise it, and I don't lie. I mean, I realize it's required and all that and that people who sit for night long meetings are probably doing your hostel a service blah blah, but it tires me. Other things too, like futile debates on whether I prefer the Congress or BJP tire me. Surprisingly, for an institute as politically apathetic (wrt national politics) as IIT, I've been asked twice in the last five days by two independent and unrelated groups of people which side off centre did I prefer. Iusually umm and aww and pretend to think for a while before I give a general sort of answer. Then I get caught in these earnest discussions on The Right vs. Left vs. Centre and the future of India and India's relations with the US and should we have tested the bloody bomb and shit, and I just get tired. Seriously, who cares? I hate it when other people say this, but I don't either and that's the truth.
I needed a break and this opportunity presented itself, so here I am, typing.

6) didn't feel like studying CHL110. It's very boring, I'm screwed and I hate it. Just to put off the inevitable, I slept for four hours in the afternoon including the lunch hours. Strangely, I don't feel as guilty as I should and hence I'd rather do something I enjoy.

So those were my reasons. I didn't realize myself I had so many reasons until I put them all down. In fact, I can probably invent a few more if I try.

Anyway, going back to the basics, I love my new subtitle and this post is dedicated to the dude who came up with it. Wherever and whoever you are, you've made me happy today. God bless!

Women, Daughters

2006-03-04T05:47:00.001+05:30

We have the alumni reunion in Shivalik today. We were supposed to have had it from 4:30 in the afternoon but people only started coming in closer to 8 in the night. Though the lack of turnout did disconcert the organisers (my party in the hostel, if you must know) a bit, the event was a success once we got some alumni to fill our lawns. A nice programme (most of which I missed because I was chatting with him from Bangalore) was followed by a dinner and then by an interactive chat session with each alumnus introducing himself and relating anecdotes from his IIT days. At the time of going on the blog, an old gentleman is telling a story and getting polite applause for his efforts from my sleepy and bored juniors.
I wasn't really doing anything and was basically watching music videos on the big projector screen from the comfort of the front-row sofas on the lawn when I was commandeered by the organising team. I was told to ask the ones who were trying to sneak away to stay back for a small chat session. Now, I have always thought of myself as rather good with people. I might not be scintillating company or a charismatic host but I usually don't have trouble talking to people. However I do have a lot of trouble asking people inane questions and I am painfully shy in approaching people when I think I do not have compelling reasons to talk to them. So I didn't do much of that either.
Anyway, this auntie comes up to me and tells me her husband was from the first batch of IIT (the '66 batch) and would I like to ask him to share his experiences etc. with the students? Now, you might think I'm sick but I have this concept of who is beatiful and who is not. Some women aren't conventionally beautiful and yet, make you want to touch them or be close to them. You instinctively know they smell good, and the women I find beautiful are always women I somehow feel are freshly-bathed. This auntie too had a beautiful smile, and she smelled really good - not overpowering, just right - and had on a blouse with a ...ahem, deep neck. I could see cleavage behind her semi-transparent sari pallu and it was just beautiful and feminine, not in a sexy way as much as in an elegant way.
There are other women too that I find beautiful and women I have mini and major crushes on. There's one, however, who's been on the crush list for quite some time now. Since her debut, actually. She's not beautiful, but she's very very attractive. She's got brains, she's articulate, she's independent and strong, and also something that many new age women are not - vulnerable at times. This is where new age women don't do it for me. The new woman is everything any man would love to love - strong, intelligent, articulate, independent etc etc. What she's not and what she emphasises she isn't, is vulnerable. I mean, dude, if she's Sushmita Sen why would she want me? Which is why it's so maddeningly exciting to see that chink in the Perfect Woman's armour - that small insecurity, that little note of jealousy she couldn't stop from creeping in - which suddenly makes her a flawed beauty you can hold without feeling you're revealing more of yourself to her than she is to you. Perfection is intimidating. Almost perfect is what we can handle, what we can love.
Anyway, so this woman is someone who now possesses in my imagination all the qualities of my Ideal Woman. There was a time when I used to think of stuff in a very abstract way. Now, however, I have a face and most importantly, a name - a beautiful name - to address all my fantasies to. This is obviously very dangerous in case the said woman is ever attained and found wanting. In my case, this will never happen and hence it is perfectly safe for me to keep investing all my fantasies into her. I also think she knows I have a crush on her because I have a
silly grin on my face when I see her (the fifth-grader grin, it's been called). In fact, I'm pretty sure she knows it. I expect women like her learn to recognize these signs in men because they get them so often. In any case, being my Perfect Woman, she has a highly developed womanly intuition which helps separate out the likes of me from the general smilers.
There are other things too that contribute to my loving her so much.
She has a beautiful name. All the women I have ever loved or had crushes on (can't claim a large number, to be honest) have had beautiful names. Why can't all women (and men too) have great names? Why are some travesties still in circulation? I once knew a girl who was called 'Shatabdi'. What kind of a name is that? And what about 'Neyi Neveli', Amitabh Bachchan's granddaughter's name? Some names ought to have died out long ago because there simply are so many better names that are still not too commonly used. I think women should have names that not only have beautiful meanings, but also sound beautiful. I know I'm going to fret and research like crazy to select a name for my daughter. My son (should I have one) will, I'm afraid, simply not be lavished the kind of attention I would reserve for my daughter.
Maybe it's the result of having a brother and no sister(s), but I really don't want a predominantly male household again. Maybe it's because I grew up in one that I have all these romantic notions of how much I'd love my daughter, and maybe daughters are just as much trouble as sons are and in some ways only more so, but this is the way I feel and I can't see that changing in the next few years or so.
Like many other things, this idea too has come to be encapsulated by a particular scene frozen for ever in my mind. When a friend of mine was going away for a considerable period of time, after all the packing was done and the time came for goodbyes to family, she (I think) hugged each member in turn, but the scene that truly branded itself on my mind's eye for ever was when she threw herself on her father and they hugged so closely for what seemed like eternity. It was just so indescribably right that it stirred up something even in my normally unmoving heart. It was like a moment when everything stops and there is this blinding flash of realization that all the trouble, the heartburn, the pain, the sleepless nights, the agony, the times of helplessness in all those twenty odd years were worth it. That the juice was worth the squeeze.
I want to feel that too - the agony and the ecstasy of being a parent. For our own sake, we require individuals in our lives we can love selflessly and limitlessly. That is why we need children.
*****
I just went over this post, and it's embarassingly sentimental. However I'll post it anyway because I can't seem to write anything else (have started several posts and abandoned them all) and I don't want this blog to die for want of fresh material.

PS: Btw, the alumni reunion happened about a week ago. I wrote half of this post then, and the rest was composed today.

Weekend Ramblings

2006-02-11T01:19:00.000+05:30

This is a totally random post. Actually, I can't even say that this post will actually be completed and ever be posted. But I think now that I have said this post may never see the light of day, it will actually find its way to my blog. In fact, this post promoses to be so random you'd do well to quit right here. But if I was you, I'd be pretty intrigued by now and would read the entire post. I get the feeling that this post won't be as long as some of my previous posts on this blog. I used to avoid long posts, the logic being that I didn't like reading long posts so naturally, why would anyone else? But then I figured I should just go ahead and write whatever the hell I want to and not care too much about my prospective readers. After all, my blog is for me. Or is it? Isn't blogging about vanity more than any other single quality. You write to impress. Not everyone and not in every way, but all the same it is praise that you are looking for. Moreover, and I just thought of this, I get intimidated by huge books but people routinely read tomes and claim to enjoy them as well, so maybe most people don't mind long blog posts either and I'm just a lazy reader. However, I value brevity and I still think Animal Farm is one of the greatest books I've ever read because it's brilliant and brief.

I've been listening to "Aadat" (the Jal version(s)) repeatedly for the past few hours now. Just turned up the volume. I have also recently acquired a table lamp that's the best going away present I remember receiving (thanks to him). Actually, that is debatable but anyway I needed a table lamp because I hate bright lights (psychoanalysis anyone?) and I hated the tube light in my room. There were so many times when I worked in the light from my monitor screen alone simply because the harsh white light destroyed the entire mood. How the eff do you airguitar (yes, I do weird things behind the closed door to my room, which is why I love having a room all to myself. Jai Shiva!) to the Fade to Black solo in tube light? I also totally detest sitting right in front in KL in all that brightness and among all the activity. I prefer the tables at the back that are in the shade of the KL trees and that afford some privacy. I usually hate being by myself. At the same time, however, I hate too many people milling around me almost as much. I love a semi-private state, like maybe with a couple of friends in an open area. That's why I find walking around IIT infinitely better than being holed up in some room. I associate conversations with open semi-private spaces. Being with good friends in small rooms makes me claustrophobic.

Yes, so the table lamp is lovely because now I won't wear out my eyes trying to type in semi-darkness and at the same time won't have to wilt in the needlessly harsh tube light of my room. I love my room just the way it looks right now with its mess of papers and a shoebox and books and magazines and the computer on my table and clothes all over and wonderrrful music playing in the background. Feels good. The lamp gives out white light but it can also give out warm yellow light if you shut the case because it has a translucent yellow cover over the fluoroscent white twisted bulb (you know, the U-shaped ones). Also one corner of my room is now full of wires and stuff so it looks cool in a very, well, bachelor of technology way. I feel vaguely engineerish, and it feels good. I honestly wish I was better at what I'm supposed to have come here for. I mean, what I have and what I am will do. I'm not bitching about my life here. It's just that my Dad is an engineer (he was in IITK for a sem doing Batti Btech, which he then left to join the Railways) and he's very intelligent and I respect him tremendously, and my brother, although he's not as sincere as I suppose I was during my pre-JEE days, has inherited my father's analytical faculties and is very intelligent too. I am more of a mix of my mother and father, but there's no point talking about the kind of person I am since you know me already. It's like telling an interviewer you have great communication skills. Surely the interview will make that obvious anyway. Actually it's not a correct analogy but I just thought that the blog kind of serves the purpose of revealing my qualities anyway, so I'll just let you draw your own conclusions.

So, Aadat begins again for the perhaps fifth, perhaps tenth time and I continue writing. I've written a lot today. I have what can be called an anonymous blog where I write stuff that I can't write elsewhere for fear of it being misused against me. So a lot of the writing I do these days goes into that and the blog is sadly sidelined. It's so much easier to write with no fixed agenda in your mind, to just ramble on with not a care in the world. It's like those rare moments when you enjoy your own company (no double entendres please!), like now. I don't want to stop just yet, and I'm not feeling too sleepy either, so lemme think of something else...yes, I feel very sleepy in others' rooms and I often find them more inviting than my own. I just had a little power nap in my neighbour's squeaky clean room (his is easily the cleanest room among all my friends), but now in my room I don't feel like wasting time by sleeping for more time than I absolutely have to. My hukka prof (who btw looks snooty but is actually quite genuine) has been quite disappointed in failing to make us understand that there are people in the world who are such incurable romantics that they don't see the point of living unless they can suck the very sap out of life. Look (I feel like telling her), IIT is a very middle-class place. People come here from all subclasses within the middle class and most arrive with the express purpose of doing as well for themselves as they can, which as I never lose an opportunity to point out, is a nicer way of saying "for making as much money as they can", without compromising too much etc. Some of us become a little weird, many discover they are rather bright, and many among us become these sad wannabe-weirdos. Anyway, my point is very few among us have ever obsessively loved anyone other than ourselves, very few have ideals we'd lay down our lives for, we live unabashedly for ourselves and we don't see anything wrong with that. So it seemed a little funny to me when she said to some girl in class (whose voice btw reminds me of my cousin sister - many people remind me of other people but more about that later), and I try my best to quote here, "...if I look straight into your eye and ask you if you'd ever die for someone you love, would you?" or something to that effect. Gimme a break. I know people who've probably been in some stage of love, and I'm certain they wouldn't die for each other. It sounds almost corny. She gave us the example of Dead Poets' Society and I took great pleasure in informing her that I think the kid who shot himself because his father didn't allow him to take part in a play (a play, Jee-sus!) was a loser. I hate a few things, am I then justified in killing myself because the sap comes in trickles into my mouth? Leaving aside Andhra Pradesh, I think suicides don't occur because people don't have enough to eat and nowhere to shit. They happen when bellies are full and there's too much comfort in life and people feel a vague emptiness in their lives. That's why some really developed country (Norway or Denmark or something) has the highest suicide rate per capita and not India, as one might perhaps expect.

Lesson of the monologue: Enjoy mess food and sadistic profs and lots of work and no girlfriends because maybe all these hardships are keeping you alive.
Okay, this post is much longer than I expected it to be. Apologies.

PS: I collected lots of Calvin quotes today and noted them down somewhere. In fact let me see if I can find something cool to end this with.
This kinda fits: "Weekends don't count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless." :)
Happy weekending everyone. I'm off tomorrow for a quiz with some of my favourite people on campus.

Being Dorian Gray

2006-01-25T16:41:00.000+05:30

Like everyone else, I have changed a lot after having come to IIT. I suppose I was a bit of a child when I first arrived here. In the two and half years I have spent here I have perceptibly changed. This has been a recurring theme in my posts for some time now. I wrote previously that I can at times actually notice how different I am and how differently I behave from only a couple of years ago. I often catch myself remarking only in half-jest “How things change!”.

I have rid myself of several qualms I had about many things. For example, I was one of those people in school who actually had issues with cheating. On the rare occasion that I did cheat, or skipped work, I felt a guilt that I feel even today. The guilt is, however, going away and I think IIT’s greatest contribution will be equipping me with a faith in jugaad.

Many people think I am cynical and berate me for not loving life more, especially as I have so many things going my way. I can’t deny I am cynical sometimes, and I don’t blame people for believing that is a permanent state. What they don’t realize is the extent of their own cynicism. People just use words like ‘cynicism’ interchangeably with ‘pessimism’, ‘skepticism’ or ‘depression’.

Cynicism implies believing the world is past repair. When you ask me to like the world for what it is, do you not realize you are asking me to buy into the perception that since the system won’t change, we should change to make the system work for us.

In a cesspool of corruption and selfishness and naked materialism, we must transform ourselves into slimy creatures feeding on the filth, or die of poisoning.

I respect those people tremendously who look down upon the cesspool’s lowlife, and yet occupy a position in society that I’d like to occupy. There are people who look like they are intelligent, perceptive and sensitive, who work hard for their lives and careers, but who have principles. These are people who look like they have grounding. Their principles will stand them in good stead and the sacrifices they might make for their principles will serve them better than the compromises they could have made at crossroads in their lives. These are people who understand what culture means, who understand that some things are sacred, who empathise with others without condescension. These are people who are spotless, who are looked up to and asked for opinions. These are people who genuinely try never to be late, who apologize when they’re late for no fault of theirs, who go some way in being the kind of men or women that Kipling made his model in ‘If’.

And you so want them to respect you for you respect them so much. You don’t feel ashamed of the influence their opinions have on you. You wish you were a protégé to their mentorship, or alternately their mentor. You feel, instinctively, that they will understand what you say when others will only nod. You know you’ll connect.

And then they tell you quite casually how they did this only because they wanted something they coveted, and which they coveted so that they’d get that miniscule leg-up in their careers, possibly. And it’s not the statement that shocks you. What shocks you is that it’s not an admission, it’s just a fact. Fact of life.

And you then realize that you were wrong in investing so much respect in ordinary persons. They are, after all, ordinary. They live and breathe the same smoke you do. And if you think you can manipulate your way to the top and absolve yourself by confessing and admiring those that prefer the stairs for their diligence and adherence to values, why should you expect them to not want to take the elevator?

And so let’s all try and enjoy the elevator ride in spite of all the claustrophobia. Because no one on the stairs is there because they enjoy walking. They’re there because the lift was full. And although it’s an inspiring sight, if you’ll leave your place in the lift to join the staircase fraternity, one of the Brotherhood will rush to take your place.

So let’s all admire their courage and envy their peace of mind, but from a safe distance, and knowing fully well that our admiration must not translate into action.

Let’s celebrate ambition and greed
And sex and sleaze
We’d be nicer if we could be
But we’ll gladly settle for selfish and mean

We suck up to the meanest
We taunt the meek
For the mean represent the best
And the meek represent the weak

Truth is Success
And anything less
Is just not good enough
For the bloody best

Being Positive

2006-01-22T20:48:00.000+05:30

I have rightly been accused of being cynical and negative about many things in life. A small experience yesterday brought home to me just what kind of a sad item people think I am. I can’t pretend not being secretly glad when I know people talk about me, but being talked about and being a subject of discussion and analysis are two slightly different things. The second smacks of being treated as a specimen, and that’s not an appetizing thought.

Anyway, I have decided to list out all the nice things I can think of about my various gripes.

My department (CS):

1) Fast internet access (through proxy), esp compared to aam junta that has no access at all.
2) Free afternoons, fewer classes, sometimes relaxed attention criteria, no labs.
3) A cool email account on my department server; it certainly beats the telnet email id. I can even have robertfrust@... unlike on telnet where I must be forever known by my number. It’s another matter that I haven’t set an alias yet, but the knowledge that I could is empowering.
4) Respect among people who look suitably impressed at the enormity of my burden when they realize I am in CS.
5) A bigger ftp account, but I neither need nor use it, but as in #3, it’s not what I do with it that counts. The power is in knowing I can.
6) Lastly, if I must have a low GPA, I might as well have it here where it is somewhat defensible.

On second thoughts, since I don’t want to extend this article beyond today, I’ll end with showing the silver lining to my pet gripe alone. Extending this to finding good things about Life etc will make this pretentious and fraudy.

PS: Among the several things that I come up with now and then, there’s one particularly cool thought, which also happens to fit this situation: Worse things happen to better people.
Now if only we could make that sink into our subconscious.

It's very late, and I'm very sleepy, but I don't feel like sleeping

2006-01-10T02:23:00.000+05:30

Everything's gone,
Lost or left

And there's just dust,
Blood and sweat

That remain
All else is pain

Stripped of pride
You wish you'd died
But you survived

To live in isolation
Doomed to try

And regret
But never forget

What is the secret?

Movie Ramblings

2006-01-08T21:43:00.000+05:30

I was sitting in a friend's room watching new movie trailers and I suddenly realized, "This is a good time to be alive!".

If you are a fan of rock music (like my younger brother is), you'd probably wish you had been around to witness first-hand the growth of rock 'n roll, and experience the headiness of knowing this was as good as it would ever get, in the 60's and early 70's. Anyone who's seen Almost Famous will probably flashback to those scenes to picture what I aim to convey.

I love movies, and I absolutely relish good-looking movies. People like me, who derive a special pleasure from watching movies with geat cinemaography, sets, lighting, camera work, have never had it so good.

My favourite type of look is dark, moody, tense. Here are some movies/scenes off the top of my head that I like primarily or partly for their visual merit:

1) the yellow-tinted Kaante with jerky shots (e.g. the last big scene when all the main players have drawn guns and the camera goes round the actors in circles)
2)nearly all of Sin City, Underworld etc.
3)the last slaughter scenes in Apocalypse Now - the movie is the most beautifully shot movie I have ever seen, and the scene when Charlie Sheen comes out of the lake covered in mud is God's own work
4)lots of rainy scenes - Chandrachud Singh lying and crying in the mud in Kya Kehna when he finds out Preity Zinta is pregnant, a drenched and drunk Ethan Hawke under Michelle Pfeiffer's balcony in Great Expectations, Raveena Tandon dancing on top of a building under construction in Mohra (that I devoted a post to in Bhoot), rain in LOTR, and newer movies like V for Vendetta and Ek Khiladi Ek Hasina (they both look good in the trailers).
5)the fabulous opening 5 minutes of black and white footage of the Nazi camps in X-Men
6)Yeh Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaaye in Guru Datt's Pyaasa - haven't watched the entire movie but would love to
7)the scene where Humprey Bogart is drunk in his bar after closing time in Casablanca - "Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she had to walk into mine."
8)Ardh Satya and other movies of that era that I have missed but feel very strongly I'll enjoy
9)Abhishek Bachchan telling his father he killed his brother in Sarkar - I was so unhappy after watching Sarkar because I thought RGV did all the hard work and still managed to not make a brilliant movie.

Some scenes speak so eloquently that they become the points around which the viewer stretches the entire movie. I remember my favourite movies as a jumbled montage of powerful scenes.
This extends to books and music as well.

I remember Harry Potter IV (the book - the movie didn't do this as well as I imagined it, in fact I wrote a detailed screenplay for this scene) for the scene when Dumbledore blasts the hell out of Crouch Jr. and shows just why he was so feared and respected among the magical community, and li'l Harry sees Dumby for more than just a benign grandfather-figure.

And I love so many songs for their little/long solos (Fade to Black, Fear of the Dark, Highway Star, November Rain) or for the inflexion points that make the song leap from temporary favourite to work-stopping involving (Layla's piano piece, With or Without You, Don't Cry, Jab Kisi Ki Taraf etc etc).

But good looks can only get a movie so far. Look at what happened to the two Matrix sequels.
What I really wanted to say was that I really love the trailers of many movies only to be disappointed with the complete product. And this is true for both the 'ollywoods.

I believe the movie industry in India is world-class or close when it comes to publicity - trailers, teasers, item numbers (look at the promotional video for Bluffmaster), or set design and aesthetics (Lagaan, Black, HDDCS etc.).
It is a joy to watch movie trailers of the better produced movies that most TV channels believe should receive top billing during the evening hours, and that MTV and V believe ought to be priority programming for the Generation-X/Y, whichever we are, and then a proportionate disappointment to watch the promise being betrayed in the complete movie.

Sadly, we lag far behind in terms of quality stories and screenplays, and even direction. I think we have actors who can match the best, if only they were put to test.
In fact, it is misleading to claim we 'lag behind' because Hollywood produces lots of rubbish too, and their rubbish takes many times more money to produce too, so at least we match their abysmal quality with fewer resources. However, Hollywood simply produces so many more movies and of such varied themes that India may never be able to match their range, even if we do match their best as we have earlier.

Not only are the majority of our movies severely limited in scope, most directors/producers manage to screw movies on themes that ought to be their strengths with equal consistency.

For example, I enjoyed DDLJ immensely - I found it witty, musical, unabashedly filmi and quintessentially Bollywood, and by extension Indian, in the values it espoused.
However I was very disappointed with the half that I saw of Mohabbatein by the same director - tired, cliched, soppy, and sweeter than a syrup-drenched jalebi. I didn't realize it then but that started the hero's journey towards metrosexuality and super-sensitivity that was perfected in Kal Ho Na Ho and cemented in other productions from the house of Johar/Chopra that must now make movies only for gays/giggly girls.

I started writing this to declare I was entralled by King Kong, and am now convinced that Peter Jackson is the film director to make a multiple-part Mahabharat that will be the greatest movies the world will ever see, and then I can die peacefully. If the Mahabharat TV series can be bettered, only Peter Jackson can do it.

I believe there are some abilities that some directors have almost by instinct, and others don't, that make some movies life-changing, and others intellectually stimulating or simply entertaining.

One of the most important is the intuitive ability to cast right.

Quentin Tarantino has it. All four of his movies I have seen (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill 1 and 2) have been cast perfectly. It is impossible to imagine any actor who could have fitted better as the character he/she played.

Peter Jackson has it. Naomi Watts was perfect. She was the right mixture of beauty, poignancy, courage and humour. Naomi Watts was, in KD's words, a heartbreaker. Nobody else would have done.
Adrien Brody was perfect. Somehow, someone who looked like a movie star would have ruined it.
Peter Jackson handled even the love scenes (the scene in which Naomi Watts catches the gaze of Adrien Brody while shooting on the ship is pure magic) so well that I'm convinced he's the one who can do it all - epics, love stories, human dramas, all combined. Hence Mahabharat, since it is one epic that combines politics, history and human drama into a story that has as many layers as your understanding of people allows you to unpeel, and requires the highest talent to be handled well.

Bryan Singer has it too. The X-Men movies are perfectly casted, as are the LOTR movies, except that I thought Viggo Mortensen's voice in the third movie was a little high considering he made two big speeches.
Hugh Jackman as Wolverine is perfect. Ian Mackellen is brilliant as both Gandalf and as Magneto. He would've made the perfect Dumbledore too, the right mixture of wit, underlying ruthlessness and kindness. But I'll let that pass because the Harry Potter movies have been improving with every subsequent movie, and the fourth was pretty good, partly due to the delectable Emma Watson who also acted very well.

Among Indian directors, Rakesh Roshan, Raj Kumar Santoshi, Karan Johar are some of the contemporary fillm directors who posess that elusive ability to make movies that appeal. Somehow, they make movies that communicate with the inherent Indianness in us, often perpetuating cliches and regressive or outmoded values but all the same, striking a chord.

A related point is that I think Hrithik Roshan is an ass. I inform people on the first ocassion I get what an ass I think he is and I think I might as well put it in print and speak to all my fans at once.
I think the above is the behind (joke) because he doesn't play to his strengths, and he does have a major strength. He is the best dancer the industry has ever seen. He killed them in KNPH, and he danced like a dream in the Home Trade ad that used to come on TV many years back, before Home Trade was exposed for the fraud it was.
I haven't seen Saturday Night Fever (although would love to, so please lend if you have it and earn my undying gratitude) and I don't recollect much of Disco Dancer, but I get a strong feeling that in the hands of a capable and shrewd director - read Rakesh Roshan since Duggu baba's has had a 100% success rate with Papa and a 0% rate with everyone else, which naturally says something about his lack of judgement rather than ability - a mixture of the two dance-driven movies can propel Hrithik once again to national heartthrob status.
I mean, no one dances like him and the dude tries to beat SRK at weeping in KKKG, or Ajay Devgan's nice-guy act in HDDCS with his own in the one with Esha Deol (why is Esha Deol still in the movies? and Tushar Kapoor too - they look like brother and sister to me, somehow).
He should be having dance-driven movies made for him, and instead is trying to fit into existing stereotypes. I wish I was his agent.
I'm certain Kkrish will be a big hit, whatever else it may/may not be. Rakesh Roshan knows his stuff. He's not brilliant, but effective.

Martin Scorcese, on the other hand, hasn't impressed in the 2.5 movies I have seen of his. But I will reserve judgement until I see Raging Bull and Taxi Driver.

Steven Spielberg too has a similar problem. Jurassic Park, Jaws, Indiana Jones etc are great. But his human dramas, though immaculately produced, directed and acted in, lack an undefinable quality that stop them from being truly touching.
For example, Schindler's List has to be his greatest in this genre (haven't seen Amistad, in case you think that is better), is a great movie, intellectually. The use of all black and white is an inspired choice, Ralph Fiennes is adequately chilling, and Ben Kingsley is good too, but the film just does not speak to the heart the way Titanic or Deewar do, and that's the crux of it really.

There's no logic to these things.
Like clothes with lycra, you either have it, or you don't.

Time shall fly...

2005-12-03T14:38:00.000+05:30

Right now, I'm young. I can do anything.

I don't believe I can die. I'm not dense enough to believe I can't die, but Death is an interesting concept, no more. I am not conscious of my mortality.

It's thrilling to recognise the period of change for what it is. It's fascinating to see myself changing, growing.
There's such a sense of expectation in my life. The future lies ahead of me, unsullied, unexplored. And the greatest thing about the future is that it's all mine. I can't escape it. It won't leave me. I must move forward, and I am moving.

Everybody is, but I know I'm moving. I get a kick out of knowing that my life is clay in my hands. I can shape it whichever way I want.
I'm happy I'm awake while the wet clay is being fashioned into the brittle object it will become when it has been through the hearth that the world reserves for it.

Even when things are not going the way I've planned, I take pleasure in the fact that really, nothing's lost.
My world is rich in opportunities. I walk so many forked roads, I can't run out of paths to take. I know I'll make it. Even when the odds seem stacked against me, even when I feel low, the feeling never quite leaves me that my life will sort itself out.
Because so far, I have had no real problems.
Because so far, I've had no major disappointments.
Because so far, my self-confidence has not been shattered.
Because so far, I haven't lost.
Because nothing's behind me, and everything lies ahead.

My world is rich in possibilities. I have yet to decide what career to choose. I have yet to decide the direction my life should take. I don't know what I'll be doing ten years from now. I don't know who I'll be with. Or where.

But I get the feeling that ten years later, I'll have a pretty good idea what I'd be doing ten years later. And where. And with whom. And if I'm fortunate, why.

And there will come a time when I'll get up and realize, this is it.
This is the woman I am going to be married to for the rest of my life.
This is about how much I'll earn.
These are the things I'll be able to afford, and these are the ones I won't.
These will be the people I'll call friends from my youth.
This is my family, nuclear and extended.
No more kids to be born.
No more marriages to take place.
No more degrees to be collected.

I'll get up one day and realize I'll never go to Seychelles after all.
I'll never go to Goa with friends.
I'll never motorbike to Ladakh.
I'll never spend a fortnight doing absolutely nothing in the Andamans.
Actually, I might never spend a fortnight doing absolutely nothing. Ever.
I'll never have another summer holiday.
I'll never stop worrying.

There might come a time when I'll know with a pang, this is it.
My life's been decided.
And there'll be nothing I'd be able to do to change it.

And I'll stop wondering, and talking to myself, and writing personal diaries.
And I'll stop wishing for envy from people who marvel at my weirdness.
And I'll get on with the boring business of living.
And before I even know it, I'll become my parents.

And my kids will wonder whether I ever did anything. Maybe I was always like this.
And I'll not remember when I wasn't.

And if I should chance upon my laconic teenager's diary, and if I should give in to the temptation to read it, I'll find my thoughts, my fears, my hopes written in my handwriting in someone else's diary under someone else's name.

And I'll have turned old.

Finally!

2005-12-01T17:29:00.000+05:30

I have done it!

Welcome to my new blog.

I owe an explanation regarding the title, the delay, the urgency and the execution of this long-drawn plan to emigrate from rediff, and to blogspot.

The title first.
Credit must go to my friend Advait for suggesting this name. Many years ago (in our second year) he wrote a limerick that he signed off with the name Robert Frust, and mailed it to the IITD CS batch of 2003 Yahoo group. The limerick was nice, but what stayed with me was the brilliant name.

This was around the time I discovered the wonders of DC++, having recently become the proud owner of my own computer and room. After spending a little while on DC under the pseudonym that I have reverted back to today, I became, to denizens of DC, 'robertfrust'. Some of you might have noticed with envy or astonishment as I climbed the charts displaying GB's shared. I now stand at a respectable 39 odd GBs, having left my days of having had to share my C: drive and hidden files to avoid the humiliation of DC treating me like a parasite who salivated at the thought of terabytes of goodies while he shared a measly 4-5 GBs (phew! that was a long sentence) long behind.

Anyway, robertfrust served DC long and well, and it's time now for the old identity to earn its keep.

Coming back to the issue at hand, I loved the name and didn't forget it thanks to its presence on DC, which I religiously access at least a couple of time a day.

All this time, I was happily settled on rediffblogs. I even wrote an impulsive post on how much blogspot sucked compared with rediff when I once went to sleep waiting for blogspot to accept my comment.

But that was before I was introduced to the wonders of proxy servers that I, as a privileged member of that most envied and most reviled (sometimes by their own) class of future Computer Scientists and Engineers being readied in the crucible that IIT Delhi specially reserves for the best of the bloody best (another obscenely long sentence, I'll soon write a post on my inability to form short sentences that I can keep track of), can access.
(Digression: That is all I wanted to say - that I have an account that I use to access my department's proxy servers because I can, but look at the monstrosity that I gave birth to instead.)

Anyway, for several reasons which I shall discuss below, I grew first disillusioned, and then irritated with rediffblogs. And so the search for a blogspot account began.
Why blogspot? Because almost everybody else is there, that's why. And because Google is the future. And because it looks good. And because of those cool look-at-the-movies-I-watch-and-books-I-read features that I have seen on many a blogspot blog side panel. I too will impress you in the coming days with my eclectic taste in books and movies, but for that I'll have to enlist the help of some of my computer-savvy friends, so that will take some time. Don't mind.
(Quick query: what is the past tense of 'mind'? Is it 'minded'? It's surely not 'mound'.)

So I was searching blogspot for a cool url, and I acquired bumbledrone.blogspot.com. It might seem a trifle weird (it's not even a word, it's not even two words), but I had my reasons, and reasons I then believed were good ones.

You see, my name 'shalabh' means 'bumblebee' in Sanskrit/Hindi. It could also be used by Sanskrit scholars for describing many less appealing members of the insect family, but I prefer to believe my parents who claim it means just the bumblebee. Hence the 'bumble'.

Now, I thought the bee is female (at least in Hindi, it's a she, what's more, it's a fly - madhumakhi), so bumblebee.blogspot.com might play unwilling host to a lot of unwanted male visitors who expect a strong, independent, opinionated girl-woman behind my blog.
Hence, the 'drone'. Also, I know I bore a lot of people, I often go on and on in spite of clear indications that my audience isn't listening; in other words, I sometimes drone.

So I decided I'd start posting on bumbledrone.b.c.

Except that I didn't. I couldn't. It lacked bite. It lacked meaning. It lacked easy recall. It was a clumsy non-name. It lacked the X-factor. I didn't like it, but I didn't admit it to myself.

Then the majors arrived. And along with the majors came a flood of ideas for new posts. And I just knew that I had to shift soon. The window of opportunity was open. I could either leap through it, or be shut out forever.

I took a walk with Vibhor. We went up to the Vishwakarma Building roof. He told me Vishwakarma was the God of architecture and construction. He told me some cool questions he had come up with (we're both wannabe quizzing studs). We decided we'd make a quiz totally devoted to shady questions together, possibly next semester, maybe in Cranium, maybe later. He also told me 'dumbledore' meant 'shalabh'. Being a Harry Potter superfan, I was kicked.

Only the previous day, Nithin had told me how he had enjoyed a long conversation with a woman who was doing her PhD in the Humanities Department on, hold your breath, Harry Potter! How cool is that? I was instantly overjoyed.
So finding out that the only wizard Voldy's afraid of shares a connection with me made my day.

As I was sitting on Nitin's computer the next day, I navigated to blogspot.com, with the intention of acquiring dumbledore.blogspot.com, and I was about to enter my choice when it suddenly came to me like a flash of inspiration that comes but rarely... my inward eye flashed neon - ROBERTFRUST - and with trembling fingers I typed in robertfrust as my desired url, and eureka! I got it!

The name, of course, is apt if you know me. I write and like poetry, and I'm often unreasonably and inexplicably frustrated with life.

Now, the urgency.
I complained about blogspot on rediff. And now I shall gripe about rediff on blogspot.
Sweet something. Irony? Perhaps.

I saw a movie once - Reality Bites, starring the most famous shoplifter in history and Sanjay Gupta's idol's muse's ex-husband - in which the shoplifter is asked to define irony, quickly. She's zapped. As the elevator doors close on the interviewer she mumbles that she can identify irony when she sees it, but oops, no marks for identification sweetie - you're not hired.
Ever since I have wondered whether I know irony when I see it, and whether I can define it. I've even asked people who look like they are ironic all the time to explain it to me, but I've either been disappointed or a very poor student. I'm starting to get used to both in a lot of other aspects of life as well, but that's beside the point here.

I was content with rediffblogs for a long time, mainly because rediff shares my philosophy of keeping things as simple and uncluttered as possible, esp. in matters to do with Compuerji.
Digression: Hope the Big B gets well soon. I got a shock in the morning when I saw his post-operation photo with the sheet upto his face. I thought he was dead, and I genuinely felt very unhappy for a few seconds. I never realized I liked him so much.
But then my honeymoon started to end.

I couldn't import that cool movies and books feature on my rediffblog.
I had trouble inserting links in posts.
The blog template isn't one-tenth as readable as that which hosts much less read-worthy posts on blogspot. Every T, D and H writes a bloody post and it all looks so beautiful. The classy white page, the lovely font, the perfectly chosen colours...
Lastly and fatally, you can't leave lines or even start a new paragraph in the comments. If you wish to reply to several comments, you go along with the ugly rediff way of bunching them all together. If you, or someone else, writes a poem, sorry, rediff decrees that you must read it in one unbroken line.
And today I couldn't even edit a comment. I had to copy it onto notepad, edit it, delete the original comment, and then comment again.

I stuck with rediff when all my friends were on blogspot. I thought they'd learn and the loyals like me would be rewarded for their faith.

But sadly, I was wrong. Rediff did no such thing. They didn't make the slightest effort to keep me from crossing over. They allowed me to be converted.

So I'm leaving rediff, but with heavy footsteps. It's too late now, but I'd still like them to do well.
Good luck, and goodbye rediff.

I extolled the virtues of rediffmail sometime ago too, but I've left that as well for gmail.
And now I've said goodbye to yet another rediff offering that rediff could not bother to update in the face of competition in favour of a company that is out there, doing it.
And it's beating Microsoft at its game.
True, it is starting to acquire Microsoft-dimensions, but then a duopoly is preferable to a monopoly, isn't it?
It is no more David, it has now metamorphosed into Google-iath.
It's become a fight between equals, and it's fun to watch.
I love Windows and I love Google, so I wish them both the best.

Meanwhile, I have the best seat of them all, and I'm not letting go of this one.

I've chosen blogspotting.