Plagiarism 2.0 – From Email Fwd to Full-length film

I guess this end of the blogosphere now knows all about the Lavanya Mohan – Charukesh Sekar story. Poor Lavanya, down with Charukesh and Vichar Hari yada yada. I’m surprised only one person has yet accused Lavanya of having her story ‘inspired’ from this Goodness Gracious Me sketch. J’Accuse! Make that count two. And KrishAshok saar, she need not have gone back and forth in time to view a video and write her story as you said, she could have just logged on to Youtube. I’m not saying she did or she didn’t. I’m just presenting the possibility. Of course, the possibility exists that she, like Kaavya Viswanathan, can cite Cryptomnesia.

But this case does bring up the issues of credit on the Net, non-attribution, and how easy it is to plagiarize. How easy it is to pass some story off as yours. And the prospect of seeing someone else reap the fruits of your hard work if you aren’t as popular or well-connected as Lavanya is.

A week back, I was wiki’ing for the storyline of Mumbai Salsa. There’s an American actress in that movie, Linda Arsenio. Click. Turns out she’s made quite a name for herself in Bollywood. She recently starred in the movie Aloo Chaat, alongside Aftab Shivdasani, Aamna Sharif, Kulbhushan Kharbanda. Click.

And the story read oh-so-so-so-familiar!

No, it wasn’t a rich-girl-poor-boy story.

But it was the same story as I’d received in an email fwd in December 2008. And this movie released only in June 2009. And it seems pretty popular on the Net, right from 2006. Here you go, link to the story, link to the story of Aloo Chaat. Decide for yourself.

The identity of the author seems lost to the recesses of time. But whoever you are, this is to inform you that you have been plagiarized. Sue ‘em for all it’s worth. Or atleast milk the publicity.

Of course, the chance is nonzero that the scriptwriter himself comes forward to say the story was originally his, and that he put it on the Internet circa 2004….

Minestrone Soup for the Confused Soul

I’m wondering if anyone still reads this page. It feels like ages since I updated here, and it shows. I’ve a lot more bottled-up emotions, my smile has never been more fake, and even my teenagy angst has given way to passivity. I’m also a lot less articulate these days, and that shows in the numerous reports and other official bits of writing I’m supposed to delivery weekly thrice.

I’m still finding a way out of the inarticulateness and asocial life I lead at the moment, a relic of an unprecedented amount of work I’ve been assigned,  and things that have happened to me recently possess a strong streak of speculation, something which has no place on this blog, so bear with my obtuse references.

I find I cannot, just cannot, tolerate negative people and pessimism. My entire being seems to dwell and thrive on optimism that all the damned negativity some people exude feels like Kryptonite, weakening me slowly, slowly, until I’m steeped neck-deep in despair and ready to willingly drown myself to put myself out of my misery. Here’s a general word of advice: Don’t say anything if you don’t have anything good to say. Unless of course, it’s juicy gossip.

I’ve taken courses this quarter that exude Awesome with every atom of their being. One of them had mining Facebook data [college networks] as part of a homework. Initially, I too was wide-eyed, just like you reading this are. Sadly, the data is suitably anonymized, and it’s in the form of boring old matrices. And it’s huge as hell… megabytes of numbers alone. Trends are spotted more easily with large samples. Turns out, you can try pretty cool stuff with those megabytes of numbers. Like checking out if college networks share common features, so that if you learn something about one network, you can apply it in other networks you study. Or seeing how to recommend friends to someone who’s just joined.

Among my unpublished drafts is an open letter to Juhi Chawla. No, it’s not about the Phir Mile Sur thing. During one of those hectic weeks, I was shopping for some ready-to-eat food. I was rather sick of the cheese pizzas, so when this carton of ready-to-eat Ashoka Chinese Fried Rice Indian Style with a grinning Juhi on it caught my eye, (and the Buy One Get One Free offer wasn’t too far behind), I grabbed it. After all, Ms. Chawla has lived in the US for a while, right? So she too would have shopped like me at one point or another, and if she was endorsing something, it had to be pretty good, right?Wrong. It sucked. I couldn’t have more than a mouthful. It took dollops and dollops of tomato ketchup to kill the taste of the fried spring onions rice. And heck, this carnage is just spring onions and rice. No beans, no carrots, no chillies, no nothing. I wonder what the heck was Juhi Chawla thinking when she endorsed this inedible pile of dogfood. Someone have her email ID?

And the Phir Mile Sur thing. I share the outrage of many others who’ve written about this. However, I feel it’s just by Zoom, not by the Government of India, so it doesn’t merit the attention it’s getting. I mean, what else do you expect of a channel dedicated to Bollywood and Page 3 types? Ignore it, folks. Not worth raising your BP for.

One of the bloggers I rather like got plagiarized. You can read the whole story here. Seems rather routine, except that her short story got made into a short film this time. Though, I think the approach she took was a tad impractical. Hell, you’re a great writer, granted, but there’s nothing Vasudeva-Srikrishna-Eeshwara-EndaDheivame-OhMyHoly-OMFG about plagiarism. It happens. It’s outrageous, but it happens. And don’t tell me you don’t like the extra attention and publicity that comes with your story being used in some other media. So, instead of crying blue murder, embrace it. Don’t say “You thirdrate plagiarist, you copied. I’ll tell to miss”. Instead, acknowledge that the other person might have made a mistake, and say now that we both agree a mistake has been made, let’s work something out. No one likes to be told by a complete stranger that they are in the wrong, not to mention scores of random netizens cursing them left, right and center.

That said, I found I liked the blog entry better than the Youtube video. There were rather talented folks in the video, granted. But why did they have to be speaking in Ingleesh for godsake? I guess the dialogues were written in English, translated from Tamil in the writer’s head, because the audience of the blog is mainly English-speaking. The filmmaker was so goddamn lazy that he had to retain every damn dialogue the way it was written? It reads well to me because I translate it back to Tamil in my head, just like I do with every RK Narayan novel I read… the words, sentence construction and the entire ambience is TamBrahm, a world I can summon in my head at the snap of a finger. Having to do the same when I’m hearing someone speak is nothing short of painful.

Coming back to food, I found Dairy Milk being sold at an Indian store for $4.99. While that’s laughable by itself, you also need to take into account that you can get larger bars of Hershey’s for one-fifth the cost. And it doesn’t end there…. you get Kurkure (Yes, Juhi Chawla again) for $2.49.

Being bereft of trustworthy outlets for your internal confusions for even a short while, compounds the problem, I find. It’s quite a feat to separate your best-case worst-case analyses from reality after a while. Close friends, I assert, are important as hell.

Apparently ‘Hell’ is an evil, evil swearword in this country. I found that out the hard way, after using it half-a-dozen times in the presence of my BibleBelt-born nephew. And, apparently, so is ‘Damn’. I can’t fathom that at all. After all, I was pretty used to ‘Bleddy Bhaskar/Bleddy Basket‘ probably since I started school, and I hail from the same state as this bleddy basket-case.

In other news, I’m more or less abstaining from Google Reader. When I find time, I hope to be able to automate linking pages in Wikipedia, and possibly use the same logic to automatically mark important words in passages. I’ve also watched tons of useless movies recently, and am stuck on the soundtrack of Duet, looping the songs endlessly. I’m surprised I used to make fun of these songs when they first came out. Who knows, at this rate, I might one day be fondly recollecting the day Phir Mile Sur came out. I’m also confused as hell can be about a lot of things in life at the moment. I’m just hoping things fall in place like they always do.

And two links which put a smile on my face: here and here.

Blur

The past one month has been one long psychedelic trip. A lot of what I’ve been involved in is speculation. Not blogworthy material. Nothing blogworthy seems to have happened to me for quite some time now. Either that, or I’ve become remarkably inarticulate.

The world around me seems to be rapidly changing. Filmstars are dying, musicians too. Weddings are happening, and bad breakups too. A chatty, informal group gives way to a more specific, sharper one, not that I’m complaining. I’ve been reading a lot, and my To-Read list fills up quicker than I can say Netflix Contest, and yet, it’s been ages since I read fiction. Southern California is getting almost as wet as Bangalore, and all the stores are running out of umbrellas.

In the midst of all this, I’m trying to keep my sanity.

Shades of past emotions drift past me, sometimes hovering long enough to remind me of an aftertaste I’d felt long, long back. But more often, they just give me a tantalizing flash of a more creative, carefree, stimulating time, and disappear before I can put my finger on those precise emotions.

Story ideas come to me in the shower, and by the time I reach for my comb, they have left me, possibly never to return. Except for those microseconds when a similar train of thought reminds me of some or the other aspect of my stories, vanishing into thin air before I can be aware of and smooth them out in my head.

Random things have been coming back to me in the past week… some interview of SRK reminds me of how crazy I used to be about Bollywood flicks once upon a time. Watching some movies again which I hadn’t grasped completely the first time I saw them – Aayutha Ezhuthu, Siraichaalai – brings back memories of movie trailers on channels that have since ceased to exist, and of an idealism and argumentativeness that seem to have been knocked out of me. V-Day decorations bring back numerous instances of love-at-first-sight. Coming across my alltime favourite novel, RK Narayan’s The English Teacher on Google Books, after a very very very long time brings out the dormant novelist in me, the veteran of sixteen failed novel-writing attempts (most not more than a page), and the desire to create a work, nay, a masterpiece, a saga of ideas, idealism, inane humour, trivia, love, longing, self-discovery through or without a significant other… a wonderful work where there is attention to detail, where the tiny details set the mood for a deeper tale of complex human emotion. Just reading the first two chapters of The English Teacher brings up a past self  and latent feelings, memories and trains of thoughts, which make me want to put the book down and begin writing something myself, which motivation vanishes the moment I put the book down.

I lie back, listening to the rain pounding outside, and soak some more in the wave of past emotion ebbing away.

Cracker of a Question.

I’m no left-of-center person who thinks the idea of family is past its time. I’m not exactly a disagreeable person either.

But there’s something about someone passionately arguing about something with ill-formed arguments that prompts the contrarian in me. I don’t think this is an isolated phenomenon; I see a lot of others do that too. It is extremely tempting to point out the flaws in their arguments. And if the folks putting forth the argument are extremely cocksure, you just want to pull the ground from beneath their feet and see what they do next. It’s human character, I suppose.

Years back, I was learning Reiki from a most accomplished man, who enlightened me that Reiki was probably what Jesus Christ used to heal the sick. A couple of years back, I agreed with this point of view after watching The Man From Earth, where the protagonist was supposed to have been a disciple of the Buddha (pronounced Booda), who went west to become Of Nazareth.

But there were other things I disagreed with, mainly because of his ill-formed and cocksure arguments. “What has the Western world achieved in spite of all its technological advancements? People have no peace of mind, divorce rates are increasing, teenage pregnancies are rising…..”. Back then, I was quick to anger, quick to irritation. I proceeded to launch my own tirade of how the joint family system was unfair to women, how it quashed individual enterprise and aspirations, and all the other things that were in our Social Science textbook that year (Explain the disadvantages of the joint family system (4)).

That was when I was in my early teens. Now I’m far more disinterested in what others are saying, more jaded, slow to provocation (for the most part), less involved in most discussions (as they are normally reruns of earlier ones), and steer clear of trying to contradict age-old points of view (‘Communism/Capitalism shall save the earth’, ‘Gay men need to be subjected to electroshock therapy’, ‘Diwali crackers should be banned’, so on and so forth), and prefer to say ‘Whatever’, either out loud or in my head.

So I was with a group of rather pleasant people a few days back, and one of them was elaborating on the wonders that Indian culture has to offer to its Western counterpart.

Cuisine, I agreed – exactly how they managed to eat food that had but a modicum of seasoning in it, and salads that mainly consisted of the leaf collection they acquired on their morning walk, and how they marketed sauces that hardly tingled my tastebuds as ‘Superhot’, was totally beyond me.

Our philosophies, mm, yeah, okay.

Our family values. Being a veteran of a movie like 2012, I didn’t think the US of A really required much more bombardment of family values. But this man soldiered on. He told us about a Black man attending a Diwali celebration in Florida and saying to his hosts, “If only my community had family values like yours, crime rate among my community would be pretty low”. And hence, there was assumed to be an inverse correlation between crime rate and quantity/quality of family values. QED.

But something didn’t quite match. A counterexample occurred to me.

“What about crime families like the Corleones or the Sopranos?”.

I mightn’t be getting invited to a Diwali celebration in the short run.

December Roundup

December 2009 shall be memorable for:

• My going at the rate of one movie a day sans television. Previous posts will attest that I am no fan of watching movies on my laptop.
• Learner’s Permit
• Four independent bits of good news that got me thinkin’, dreamin’, hopin’ plannin’ for fifth and sixth bits.
• A couple of very entertaining mix-ups.
• Two polar extreme extreme points of views from two people who were classmates, and holding my ground in the face of both.
• First glimpse of snow.
• Discovering Rick Riordan. (Go ahead and click the link. It’s not Rick Astley. Godpromise.)
• Getting back in touch with longlost kin.
• Christmas lights and snow and ice.
• Increasing my count of American states visited to two. And so far, CA Rocks.
• Finding I’m not so bad with little kids after all. And that I rather like Lego and jigsaw puzzles that I’m now seriously wondering about restarting collecting both.
• My getting interested in Rubik’s Cubes.
• It’s not so bad being called Aunty. It anyday beats being asked ‘So…. which grade are you in?’. (I induced a strong look of confusion when I replied “Er… 17th?”)
• Kids say the darndest things.
• Watching an Indian-American kid drink water and eat sugar after a mouthful of mildly spiced pulao, and saying “You can’t leave now! Have atleast some of the Chettinad-style karakozhambu!”.
• Chasing Jesus Christ and Bugs Bunny for a picture.
• Discovering the effects of rapidly changing skin product brands on skin and hair, and watching months of maintenance go down the drain. Literally.
• Discovering the effects of sinfully spicy self-made cranberry pickle on skin.
• Losing my favourite comb and having two consecutive bad-hair days.
• Rather liking impulsively planned trips.
• Not regretting impulsive shopping sprees.
• Getting awesome clothes shopping tips from an Afghan-Iraqi-Paki woman.
• Life lessons yet again.
• #chetanblocks

Happy New Year, folks.

Happy Today!

For one thing I’ve never understood the hullabaloo behind the New Year celebrations. What if they had decided to shift the origin of the earth’s orbit by a few extra rotations. And after all a circle has no start or a end.

But then I suppose it is a good time to contemplate the year gone, just like that, for no reason at all.

About decisions, and why they could have been better. About meeting people and not meeting some others. About disappointments, some which turned out for the good, others not. On why sometimes you’ve got to be cruel to be kind. About all the fun i’ve had, momentary or otherwise. About how, why its hard to set right a lot of friendlyness that goes stale. Reading, writing, researching, movies, music and more …

It is sort easy to slip into contemplation when I have an empty room for myself, on a chilly evening, watching the sun set over the Hiranandani Buildings, and into Powai lake, from my window, only wishing I had a steaming cup of coffee. Blissful serenity.

To a more eventful new year!

Happy times to you all!

Happy Holidays

Once upon a time after a trip to Mangalore, Logik had tweeted “Extreme paapa in previous janma = tyre seat of Bangalore-Mangalore bus”.

Here’s my version:

Extreme paapa in previous janma = near-toilet seat in turbulent American Airlines flight + aisle seat + next seat of lovey-dovey PDA-making couple, both of who made frequent trips to the loo + neighbouring seat of singleMom who couldn’t get enough of telling her life story to everyone around her + crying baby + flirty Latino man + curious passenger bound for Frankfurt who heard out singleMom  + right under overpacked bag due to which luggage bin could not be shut + disgusting in-flight movie on while eating and drinking + heavy-ish snowfall for the first time in two-three years at destination + plane circling round and round destination as no permission to land + plane running out of fuel + stopping over for seemingly forever at little-known airport for fuel + no card in pocket to buy food on flight + long loo lines + beverage-only diet for duration of flight which necessitates standing in loo line + when card finally found, crew out of food, beverages + lack of winter clothes as kith and kin had re-re-reassured me that destination remains pleasant at 24 degrees celsius.

But all that seems like Purgatory… I’m now in paradise and I have a White Christmas.

Happy Holidays to one and all

Never too far away from blogging

I haven’t published for weeks together now.  I seem to have writer’s block or some such thing.

For starters, when I was in the thick of deadlines, I came out with a blueprint for my first ever good work of fiction. All I’ve to do is fill in the technical details and it’ll be a decent story. However, it now is languishing as an untended draft.

I also have a lot of photographs to be uploaded to my photoblog. I’m having Uploader’s Block as well.

That apart, I walked in to Langson Library with the sole intention of taking a printout today, and walked out with two huge graphic novels, and a collection of Mark Twain’s short stories. More on those later. Then I thought I’d just pop in to the Science Library to return some books I’d used during the quarter, but… I walked out with iCon and a couple of other books that scream out “Programming is Cool”.  This is what used to happen with me in bookstores when I was in Bangalore. UCI’s libraries are much better stocked to let me indulge in my bibliophilia as much as I want. Thank heavens for small mercies.

And Amazon Used Books are great, too. You can’t tell the books are used but for yellowing pages. I have to begin reading Woody Allen’s Without Feathers (Arjun, thanks for the recommendation). Reading through One Hundred Poems from the Japanese, which is for my mother, I think I should learn Japanese well now… most things in the transliteration don’t make sense to me, some tantalizingly do…
I got I, Robot for my kid cousin… hoping to get him started on Asimov. Now I’ve read the book (ebook, if you will) half a dozen times, but reading the hardcover edition feels like totally something else. There are some books that you just have to read as books, not as ebooks. Asimov’s Foundation and Elijah Baley series might not be the ones to, but I, Robot certainly is. Just like The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain.

But what is not worth even an ebook is Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. The same formula yet again. Only, this one is not as cliffHangery. The only good bit about Brown’s writing is his ability to keep a tension hanging in the air. This book doesn’t even have that. Fail.

I’ve also been going at the rate of two movies a day for the past week. I’ve not watched anything earth-shattering or groundbreaking so far; just feel-good masala movies. Hmm….. I should post about the books and movies I’ve recently buried myself in. Soon.

Moving on to other things, a year and a half after graduation, I now fondly recollect memories of NITK. I even wrote a post (now yet another languishing draft) about how wonderful the college is, and how wonderful the men and women who emerge from it are. In short, NITK teaches you life lessons no other place teaches you. You learn to balance cheapness and thrift with sophistication and style in a way not many others do. You stop whining about small discomforts, not because you lower your standards, but because you know these tiny things matter not in the face of the larger aims you have.  And. You have larger aims in life. Because you’ve learnt that nothing is impossible for you. Then there are other things you learn as well – empathy, swalpaAdjustMaadi, don’tYuckSomeoneElse’sYum. And. Most importantly. NITK gives you the best sense of humour you’ll ever come across. NITK Rocks!

2009 is coming to an end soon… reflecting back, I seem to have ticked a lot of things off my ToDoList this year. I’ve studied AI and Markov Models properly, formally. I don’t anymore freak out as badly as I used to when I look at equations in text. I’ve tried my German on a real, live German and he said my accent was coming along fine. I’ve sort of kept my famous temper under some sort of a check. I’ve taken some possibly life-changing decisions.  I’ve paved the way for yet some more life-changing decisions to be taken in the coming year. I’ve finally got myself a bridge camera.

I’ve also had some startling realizations. Some gentler ones. Some life-lessons. Some rather harsh reality checks. Some pleasant surprises. A lot of good luck. A lot of elevating experiences.

The level of uncertainty in my life has definitely come down, and will hopefully remain so for the next year or so. There certainly still remains some, but those are more on the lines of pleasant speculation. I’ve also met a lot more people than I previously have, and meeting them gives me the impression now that I’m much wiser now than I was a year ago. I’ve been through politics that directly involved me at some level. I’ve quit my first job. I’ve traversed my entire emotional range.

All in all, it was  one of those years you take off after graduation to discover yourself.

And what’s lined up for 2010? More self-discovery, I expect. Apart from that, hard to say. All I know is, whatever it is, I’ll either face it with the confidence 2009 has given me, or it’ll give me enough strength to face 2011. And here’s a prayer again to Goddess Saraswati as always so that any episode of Writer’s Block is always temporary, and may there never be any wavering in my interest in learning.

Mousy Tale

About an year ago, Soaringheights and I, hit upon this brilliant plan of training lab mice to navigate a maze. We (Read she) even convinced the organizers of Micromouse at IITB’s Techfest, to keep the circus going before the actual event started. Yes, we were supposed to make a mouse go searching (for a piece of cheese perhaps?) and reach the centre of the maze.

We did manage to get a couple of albino rats (the cute little white ones with ruby eyes) from a vet somewhere, in a bird cage. Three and six months old she-mice. After much deliberation we decided to call them Pinky and The Brain, for an hour. Then decided on Sample 1 and Sample 2. Then again decided to call Gangu Maushi (Commom name among kaamwaali bais). But well what really stuck was just mouse.

After the first day of terror that the mice would escape and run around the whole place (which did happen the next day), we figured caged mice did not mean we could take it to the maze and train them. There was a whole prequel to it. MOUSE MAINTENANCE!

• These creatures take as much space as they can. They can run around a whole house turing up at the most inconvinient places. Implied, we needed a bigger cage.
• They love to hide. They love to play. They love to go through empty tissue paper rolls, and tissue paper pieces.
• They are fussy about what you give them to eat. “I wont eat this. I wont eat that. I’m bored of this. More Cornflakes, please!”
• They don’t mind dirty surroundings. Until the stench starts to bother you.
• Its true. They have really really sharp teeth, and have a immense need to keep biting even if it means the other mouse in the cage.
• Don’t underestimate them, they know of ingenious ways of getting out of the cage.
• They run really fast, even if it means on you. (No. I could never muster the guts to touch them ever).
• They are not as bad as I make them sound.

Then came the incident where, one fine day I wake up to hear “mice running lose”! to see white things running helter skelter. And before I knew sample 2 died by the accidental-being-pushed-by-a-suitcase-while-trying-to-retrieve-it. Very delicate things. <mourn>.

Mice are social creatures. So, we got another one, sample 3. At this point we realised that that there are different kinds of mice. docile. meek. sane. wild. really wild. really really aggresive. Now the alpha, beta hierarchy exists in a mouse colony. What happens when you let a really aggresive mouse into the territory of a sane mouse. Thats right. 3 bit 1. 3 bit 1’s eyes. 3 bullied 1 to shiver. And we sat there watching, not knowing what to do. Seperation does not help. Thus, 3 was let lose into the wild.

Now we had had enough. Me watching. Soaringheights struggling to take care. It went to her house. And then was given away to a little boy who adored the thing.

Micromouse was all forgotten.

It took me a week to give up on taking care of them. And soaringheights a month. Her sister and dad a bit longer. And a little guy who loved it until it died.

PS: This blog hits 100,000 hits a few days ago. Nothing much. Just another milestone. Thanks for stopping by. We love you all!

Correlation… causation? Coincidence!

I’m back to blogging, but only for a bit. Next week is a bit hectic. But I HAD to post on this.

When I was working in Bangalore, I was in a team full of young people just a few years older than me. They were much more experienced, and I, the only fresher, moved from module to module learning what each bit did. And it always, always happened that just as I moved to a new thing, the person handling that module would get their wedding fixed and would go off for a month, leaving me to work on that module.

There were the usual jokes about my being some hex or something, but it was mostly attributed to the common age group of all my mentors, and a week of holidaying following the end of each iteration, following which my colleagues would go home, and be subjected to a week of bride/groom-seeing.

And now the saga continues.

The person I am working with is an alumnus of University X. And has a wife who is expecting.
The person I might be working with, completely totally unrelated to the previously mentioned person, and of a completely different age group, is an alumnus of University X, though in a totally different mostly unrelated discipline. And has a wife who is expecting.

PS: I know such coincidences are everywhere, that if you look hard enough, you can find the shape of a holy grail on the Boston, Detroit, Washington DC, Chennai, Surathkal, Bangalore maps, so don’t make that point in the comments.

2012 – Musings and whinings

Now if there was one movie I was asked to recreate, it’d be 2012. I’ve been working on the Google Earth API for some time now, and all the stuff I’ve come across – zoom ins to historical spots, topographical maps, skies, day-night effects, sunlight-on-surfaces effects – is majorly the essence of this movie.

I have no excuse for watching this movie apart from acute boredom.

So the movie opens in a copper mine in India. Everyone in India wears turbans, including taxi drivers, everyone has a manservant, the women are all pretty and the men are either servile or nerdy. And everyone speaks English in an Apu-from-Simpsons-esque accent, with the phrase ‘my friend’ liberally littering their speech. And the names and places are imaginary… never in history have more nonsense words been invented in relation to India since Herge talked of the Maharaja of Gaipajama.

Jimmy Mistry is the Indian geologist who has discovered that solar flares are causing neutrinos or something like that, due to which the core will collapse and the crust caves in. He looks like a dad in an Asian Paints ad, with a wife and son to match. He also has very bad Hindi.

So black guy listens to this brown guy and gets freaked like crazy. Next person shocked is random white guy, who in turn shocks random black guy, who turns out to be President of the United States. Who freaks out other Heads of State.Who all jointly decide not to freak out the rest of the world.

And so random people end up getting killed, including the curator of the Louvre.

Nah, the story is getting too much into detail here. There isn’t that much of it to merit that. I’ll quickly summarize the rest of it.

As usual, there’s this broken-ish American home at the centre of the whole thing. Next time there’s a problem in my relationship, I’ll just pray hard for an earthquake/tsunami/terroristAttack/shootout/hostageCrisis which will magically make everything alright by killing off irritant sideRomanticInterests who might be direct competition for one or both of the main characters.

Oh, and how many people miraculously die when their part in the movie gets over. How many miraculously appear when you need them.  You need a plane. Magically, there’s a pilot with a plane there. But you don’t want the pilot in the movie. So he dies in the earthquake. And they all suddenly remember “Gordon’s a pilot!”. And then you need a bigger plane to fly to China. Magically a rich Russian materializes with a big plane and experienced pilot to fly to China with. And he needs a co-pilot, so Gordon and gang are on. Then they hit China, and Sasha, the Russian pilot with the awfully exotic accent dies. Needless to mention, I was most sorry to see him go.  Gordon the boyfriend becomes a thorn in the side once Hero and his ex-wife realize they still want to be together, so he dies in a freak accident.Hand of God? This God can only be a multi-limbed Hindu God.

But no, they have to be politically correct, and the teachings of the Booda (that’s what they call him in this country anyway) are in vogue, so you have a Tibetan monk explaining things by means of tea and teacups.

And then the movie gets more preachy, moralistic and stereotyped than a movie with Nirupa Roy. Family matters. Family. Family. Mother-father-kids. Family. Togetherness. Black-White Bhai-Bhai. Why don’t we listen to our hearts? And so on and so forth. Everyone ends up with a family or dead. Just like we have the whole mangalsutra sentiment, the wedding ring sentiment is coming up in Hollywood. Soon.

And a million subplots all ending by death of one or all of the parties concerned. The rate of death ending stories was so much, it reminded me of this post of Arjun’s.

What I was mildly irritated with was that they went through all the trouble of inventing names of Indian places, and when they showed an AngelaMerkel-esque German Head-of-State, and Queen Elizabeth and her dogs, couldn’t they, couldn’t they just show some random guy in a sherwani and say or atleast hint that he’s the Indian Head-of-State? One-sixth of humanity, folks, one-sixth of humanity. (One of my friends theorized that the Italian PM chooses to stay back in the Vatican and not join in the whole Noah’s Ark business because the Indian HoS was sufficient to represent both countries).

What I would have also preferred was that the who’s who of the world was supposed to be in the Ark, so couldn’t they have spent four minutes parodying, say, Bill Gates, Murdoch, Stephen Hawking, Paris Hilton, Donald Trump, Paul McCartney, Al Gore?

All in all, a Bollywood movie masquerading as a Hollywood one. Nice SFX, though. I’d like some posters of the movie.

And… I finally solved the mystery of why Hollywood movies are rather short, just over an hour – they don’t have the concept of ‘interval’. This movie was two and a half hours long, and no interval. Pretty evil, evil on the bladders of the audience.

Terse Verse: The Nerd

I was a fresh-out-of-high-school kid when I saw a notice at NITK for the Crrescendo Creative Writing Contest. One of the topics was “The Nerd”.

I fail to remember the motivations behind this piece of work, apart from the promise of a prize and eternal fame, and also the aabb rhyme scheme… it was five years ago… (Omigod, half a decade? I’m ancient!). I refrained from publishing this for various reasons, and then forgot all about it. I remembered it recently, and it was thankfully saved in my inbox. So here goes nothing. Remember, this is the teenaged Priya writing not the jaded worldly-wise girl in her twenties. If some phrases make no sense to you, you’re not alone… I don’t understand it totally, either.

Read on for a healthy dose of romance, violence and books.

The Nerd

Deep down ’round dark tomes

In a building of glass and chrome

Was he.

I don’t know how he looks

For his face forever faces books

But I did catch a glimpse

Of long and lissome limbs

And erect gait and five-foot-eight

And wondered:

How the hell does he breathe?

His nose is covered by sheaths

And sheaths of printed pulp

Which he absorbs in a single gulp.

I wondered some more

As I made towards the door

What could be his name?

He was not new to fame,

Some called him geek, some called him punt

He answered these aliases with a funny comic grunt.

But he said not a word

When I called him ‘weird nerd’.

The notice screamed ‘Silence Please!”

My heart thumped hard, ill at ease.

I asked him out on a date

He replied, “Today’s the twenty-eighth,”

He sat there alone, looking dazed

Into plain blank space he gazed

‘Twas then that I had enough of nerdiness

And proceeded to knock His Weirdliness

Off his seat, face red as a beet.

“Crash!” went his extra eyes

I pulled him up in a trice

I saw the look upon his face

Shouldn’t have done that, what disgrace.

Nerdie was playing hard-to-get

And refused to fall into my net.

But now the ice [eyes] was broken

Sorries said, words were spoken.

I cried, “What are you doing in this lib[rary]?

You deserve to be up there in the sky!

Greek God, what a fine face

You hid behind tomes all these days!”

Said he, ” ‘Tis all part of the image,

Survival instinct in this day and age.

Wormy geeks get better deals

Than playboy types and other stereotypes.”

“Yea,” I agreed and did proceed

To bury my nose in voluminous tomes.

How Wanderlust got WordPressed, Distressed, and got her WordPress Account Back

I had been maintaining a rather quiet existence when all of a sudden, on Thursday, people were pinging me asking what I did this time to violate the WordPress.com Terms of Service. This very neatly escaped my notice as I was away assaulting the tastebuds of my roommates with some concoction that resulted from a cooker, some vegetables and some rice. To top it, Windows had installed updates and thus autorestarted my system. I never got to see those pings.

And then there was this offliner from my mother asking me to buck up and not just lose it and go offline, I can always create a new blog, can’t I?

I tried accessing my blog. And was informed that This blog has been archived or suspended for a violation of our Terms of Service.

And not only that. My WordPress.com account had been suspended. So all my blogs had been ‘archived or suspended for a violation of Terms of Service”.

I tried to remember what exactly I might have done that might result in something like this. Surely I had not done anything like last time. I tried going through the Terms of Service. Apparently I was responsible for my account not being compromised. Suddenly I had grand delusions of my eighty-four-character specially-chosen password being cracked by a spammer and this page being used as a spam location.

Tuna gave me this link, and I reported that this blog, my photoblog, my jokes blog and my cs blog were wrongly believed to violate the Terms of Service, and I asked for an explanation.

A couple of hours later, I got a reply from WordPress saying

Hi,

Sorry for the mixup.  I’ve restored your blogs.

All my blogs were back, save this one. Oh Hell!! I went back to the form. Some more time later, I got another reply saying

Hi,
My apologies – the system should not have done that.

I have removed the warning and I am sorry for the concern it caused.

Fine.

And then just as I was thinking of posting this entire story, my WordPress account was suspended Yet Again. Back to the forms.

This time it was

Hi,
I am really really sorry. Some new code has caused this, it was not someone reporting or looking at the blog. It was automated and completely wrong.
It cannot happen again now, it really can’t.

I am very sorry for the problem and for annoying you so much – that’s the last thing we would want.

And this time, only NITK Numbskulls was back. The others weren’t. Forms, again.

Hi,
I am really sorry for that happening – I cannot see why yet but I can assure you it will not happen again.
The blogs are back just as you left them and I very much apologise for the trouble we caused you.

Oh God. Finally, everything is back as it was. Thanks everyone for pinging, for bearing with me.

I wonder what bit of code caused that. How do you automate suspension of blogs for violation of terms of service other than those related to spam?

Wrestling multi-armed bandits: How do I… filter stuff from Google Reader?

For those of you who don’t know, I trip on Google Reader.

Multiple reasons. To start with, there were a lot of things I missed out on by virtue of ignorance, while at NITK. So I subscribe left right and center to anything that aggregates together information about opportunities.  And then there was this time when I wanted to improve my domain knowledge on things like Knowledge Discovery and Text Mining and Machine Learning and Data Mining and Image Processing and Software Engineering and… you get the picture, so I subscribed indiscriminately to a lot of blogs that write extensively on these topics. There was also a time during the holidays when I stumbled on a gazillion blogs, found them all wonderful, and subscribed to them all. And I feel I don’t follow movies and music fervently enough, so there are some entertainment blogs that keep me informed of things in that arena. There was a time during my professional life when I would reach office absurdly early, and there began my subscribing to quizzing blogs, so that I could get my daily dose of trivia before I began work, or during my lunch break. And political blogs. What would life be without them. There are also photoblogs and photography blogs which I subscribed to in an initial enthu, and starmark various posts to implement them whenever I can. Then there are those zillion-feeds-a-day blogs like Freakonomics or MentalFloss.

And initially, the Recommended Feeds section was a huuuuge hit with me. It gave me access to so many good feeds I might have otherwise skipped.

And shared items. Some or the other person who I follow is always jobless. And finds time to discover a million new blogs and share all the (mostly good) things they find there.

I never felt the need to prune my reading list over the past year. I had atleast an hour-long commute to work every day and found that catching up on my feeds from my mobile was the best way to spend that hour. I routinely found myself craving for more, during those times in traffic jams.

But now, I don’t obsessively compulsively refresh my Reader every few minutes… there is hardly any time for that. Right now. I find it quite a burden to bring my Unread count to zero. And the number of feeds that pile up if I don’t log in for a day or two is really, really scary. It’s only in three figures, though.

I don’t particularly like marking things as Read. Especially because the things I subscribe to are interesting, worthy of respect, even.

“Unsubscribe. Easy!”, you might say. No, it is not that easy. Now I mightn’t have time to read all that I ask for, but there will definitely come a time, say winter break, or some point in time, I KNOW, when I’ll look woefully at my empty account and wonder what used to take so much of my time. It has happened in the past.

And I did try unsubscribing from some feeds. But most of those were feeds from blogs whose owners had long quit updating, feeds from blogs of events which happened rather long back, and feeds which I generally do not find very useful.

But there’s this seemingly irrational reasoning in my head that I should read feed X because it’s good for me, it’ll help me grow as a person. And that makes me avoid unsubscribing based on like/don’t like  or goodWriting/badWriting.

So what do I want? An application that magically transfers all the information data I subscribe to and transmits it to my head. While I’m sleeping.

More (or less) realisitically, I just want some sort of a recommender system that tells me which of the two-hundred unread feeds right now do I absolutely have to read, and which ones I can safely mark as hell.Or atleast some sort of a ranking system.

And I came across this article which voiced all the concerns I had! (Through Reader, of course ). Great, people are already on the job.

Till Google listens to that and comes up with some system like that, or until someone attempts to come up with such a system, I’m stuck with 135 feeds most of which post regularly. So what do I do?

Logik suggested crowdsourcing once. I’ll-share-good-stuff-from-TechCrunch-you-share-from-mentalFloss-and-greatBong. But is it really reliable? And how do we evolve some similar system? Any thoughts?

And I really don’t want to trim down this part of my life. Fact remains that these nice reads do definitely keep me on my toes, keep me informed, give me good fodder for conversation, are useful in many ways…. and heck, it’s convenient. It’s also nice to have something good to fall back on when you don’t have anything else to do.  All I ask is for more convenience.

PS: There might be some to whom my concerns might seem alien. “You’re a computer addict”, they might say. Heck, do I call you an ‘air addict’ or ‘water addict’, or… ‘rice addict’…. or ‘Sunday Mass addict’? If I’m on my laptop the whole day, it doesn’t mean I’m a computer ‘addict’. While I’m logged on, I’m also networking, keeping in touch with friends, reading novels, going through tutorials, looking up recipes, watching movies, making jokes, reading the news. I don’t ask you “Why are you alwaaaaaayyys standing up or sitting down?”, do I?

And no, I don’t wear glasses.

Bleg: MTV India version of A Little Less Conversation, pretty please?

I was watching some Youtube clip of Ocean’s Eleven, and the next one on the playlist was A Little Less Conversation with clips from the movie. And the next related one was the Elvis vs JXL version of A Little Less Conversation.

And sadly, the next one wasn’t the MTV India version of the same thing.

Yes, there was one.

I think this came out in 2001 or 2002. MTV used to make their own videos of popular international hits. I don’t distinctly remember any others apart from this one, though. It had a shadow of Jailhouse Rock in it… the setting was a prison with the cells arranged like it was in the original video. Cyrus Broacha was the jailor, and there were several inmates. All with their own dance styles.

One I remember was Kareena (lookalike, obviously) in her red You are my Sonia costume [Oh What The Hell, all I can find is a low-quality Youtube video of the song, and NO shots whatsoever on Google Image Search for Kareena in that costume. Was it really from some other era or what?]. Another was a pair of Chandramukhis doing a mujra just like Madhuri in Devdas, only, twice as fast. I think there was a Hrithik too, doing his famous step from Ek Pal Ka Jeena.

I think this video was more vivid and colourful than the original. Maybe it was the rather in-your-face popcul references that did it… the original showed dance styles, not personalities or caricatures.

Thing is, I’m not able to find a video of that. I haven’t tried really hard, though. If you’re able to locate it somewhere, please, pretty please share it with me. And it’s really worth the hunt… it’s a damn fine video, one of the best to come out of MTV. It’s pretty cool and slick for a parody.

So what are you waiting for? Go memory-lane tripping! And get back to me.

 

Off with ‘em Misconceptions!

I entered the United States mentally prepared for things that would surprise me. But oh well, I still end up shocked, surprised, all that jazz.

First, about Americans. All I knew of them was that Indians worked rather hard in American companies. If something had to be done, it HAD to be done, even if it was 2 am on a Saturday morning. I don’t yet know if that’s a misconception, but here’s what I know: Everyone, EVERYONE without fail just clears off the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology building at 5 pm sharp. And the place wears a deserted look on weekends. DESERTED. Yeah, there might be exceptions, but the place is tombish as the evening wears on.

And then about geekdom. I thought they were the bottom rung of society, etc. But then, I see Tshirts that say “Talk nerdy to me”, and “I Love My Geek”. And a few other things besides… geeks are the cool guys here, or so it seems to me in gradschool. But not that much geeky joking around. Not here, atleast. I thought I cracked the least geekiest jokes, while I was at NITK, atleast when you compare me to a SaiO or folks from Tronix ‘08, but a post-doc with a double PhD from two continents and several other geek qualifications besides told me of late that I crack the nerdiest jokes he’s ever heard. ‘Plenty more where I come from’, I said.

And mad scientists. I attend classes taught by one of them. Contrary to popular perception, they are the most sociable people, some of the funniest I’ve met. And they have the best sort of communication skills I’ve ever come across. Even the most complicated equations take on a pleasing face when they are teaching you about those. They’ll talk to you for ages about their research and it won’t be boring in the least. Even if it has nothing to do with what you’re interested in.And if you don’t understand something, you can ask a million times. Oh, their awesome patience.

And the utter lack of hierarchical barriers. Getting back to the aforementioned Institute which is deserted at 5 PM… I found that out the hard way. On my second day in the place, I had been staring at my monitor for two hours and stepped out for a breather at 4:55 PM. I came back at 5:02, to find everyone gone, and the lab locked up. My things were inside, inclusive of wallet, mobile, laptop, keys…. and the whole place seemed to be deserted. I was told by someone to go up to the top floors, where the folks with keys were. And they were the only ones with keys, apparently….. this place was out of reach of Campus Security too. And hurry, because everyone leaves at five. I did so. I barged into the first open door and disturbed a man having a no doubt well-deserved peaceful cupcake. I blabbed something about my situation and he cross-checked whether I really did belong there. And then came down three floors to open the door for me. And waited till I had cleaned out my stuff. “Thanks!”, I said, “What do you do ’round here?”

“Oh, just Assistant Director”.

But then, the overwhelming social equality or whatever gets to me. We’ve come a long, long way since John and Yoko sang “A very Merry Christmas / For Black and for White / For Yellow and Red Ones / Let’s stop all the fight”. No allusions to perceived skin colours. No shortforms of people’s countries of origin – those have already been used during WWII and hence been given rather negative connotations. And lighter shades are more common than darker ones. And all you Dalit Leaders who talk about affirmative action and social justice…. just live here for ten days and then talk.

And for some strange reason, all the evangelists are South Korean. All the churches I’ve seen are, too.

And there’s this one-toothed old black lady at the same spot on campus every day getting people to sign petitions to make weed legal and taxable.

Did someone say the Nano would increase pollution? Hell, they haven’t done a comparative study of the USA and India. It naturally comes to me to hoard every single scrap of paper I find, and at the end of six months, parcel them off to the raddiwalla. Here, you shred and throw. And what’s with the leaf-blowers? This post sums it all up for me. Oh, and how many eucalyptus trees! In the middle of the desert! Isn’t it common knowledge that eucalyptus depletes the water table?

And the houses don’t optimize on sunlight.. it’s the way they are constructed. If I want to use my walk-in closet or the bathroom, I need to turn on the light. Even if it is blindingly bright outside. And all the doors/windows face only one way. No cross-ventilation whatsoever. Oh man….

Every single building, device and vehicle here seems to be built for an emergency. The first thing that hit me were the doors (literally). You pull the door to go into a building. So that when there’s a disaster, you can push the door (which is more natural) to get out. Every single time I approached a door initially, my head would fill with images of a hundred screaming people pushing Bren Hall’s main door and spilling out.

I mentioned my blog in passing to one of my non-Indian friends, and he asked for the URL. I gave it to him… but couldn’t help thinking WHAT he would understand from this page. All the lingo I use, all the references I give on this blog…. they seem so localized. That’s just a realization… I’m not complaining.

A Happy Kannada Rajyotsava to everyone.

And something I’ve been wanting to embed on a blogpost from a long time.. here you go:

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Playlist: part 1

I suppose I am about to embark on another music exploring extravaganza. All thanks to DC++. And Its about time I compiled a list of songs which are, or atleast find compelling.

1. Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now: Found her after my cousin remarked that Big Yellow Taxi is her original and not Counting Crows. Beautiful lyrics. Deep emotions.

2. Sugar Hill Gangs’ Rapper’s Delight: Best one i’ve heard.

3. Elvis Presley’s Rubberneckin’: Just love the initial music and his complacence and the way he sings. Loved it so much that I never used to allow soaringhieghts to pick her phone when it was her ringtone.

4. Shaggy’s Chica Bonita: Well, flirtatious lyrics. Spanish Guitar. Everything said.

5. Safri Duo’s Samba Adagio: and Played Alive: Heavenly beats

6.  The Temptations, My girl

7. Simon and Garfunkel’s 50 ways to leave your lover: Crazy bitch

8. Rolling Stone’s Sympathy for the Devil: Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name; Whats puzzling you is the nature of my game.

9. Edith Piaf’s La Vie En Rose

10. Bob Dylan’s version: Mr. Tambourine Man ad It aint me babe.

11. I suppose I simply can’t pick any of the Beatles song. The super heroes who sum up life. (ok that was a bit over board ) More on them later.

This is, i suppose is a very small list compared to the the number of songs I listen to. But well …

My Stupid Computer

I have computer. ( I mean who doesnt?) .

Ive had it for too long. Id like to think of it as my alter ego. A very silent one at that. Who knows my expressions when im reading something on it. Watching a movie, listening to music. It also exactly knows what my expressions are when im chatting with somebody, or even when im talking because im always in front of it. It also knows when im crying, when im sad when im happy or even angry. It is sort of my extended self.

The idiotic thing also knows how disorganised I am, yet how I can mine things through it. It also knows what I use a lot and what I dont use at all. I have carried it through a lot of things and and it has still managed to survive the occasional rough handling.

It is idiotically slow, and very prehistoric piece of equipment.

Now I think its dying. A very slow death.

I would like it to know that it is something that I have cherished having. I also want to thank it for being with me through thick and thin remaining faithfully by my side and silently watching me over. It is one of those really precious friends.

I will keep it till its last breath and maybe never give it away.

The Incomplete List of Things That Put Me Off.

Wrote this ages ago. I’m clearing up old drafts now. Deleting the ones that lead nowhere, and trying to publish the rest. Bear with me.

Like most normal people, there are a lot of things that put me off. Some things more than the others. I guess most of these are common. Just that, in me, these things cause chronic changes in facial expressions, tone of voice, and at the extreme, have me walking out of the place silently, and at another extreme, have me screaming the place down.

• Gender wars. I’ve had enough of these over the past one year. Quite thoroughly, too. While it might be a big use in breaking the ice with the opposite sex, the arguments are all stupid, easily refuted (unless you’re a stubborn, thickheaded doofus), and the next person who says “I can’t understand women”, or “All men are like that only” gets a socking from me. For God’s sake, it’s just your damn social ineptness, not any fundamental characteristic of either gender that prevents you from understanding a person of the opposite sex. And I really felt like smashing the TV a zillion times when Hum Tum was on. I watched just to see how much I could tolerate.
• Pseudo-Bangalorean-ness. I’ve lived in this city all my life. I like a lot of things about it. I hate a lot of things about it. But then, it’s home. It’s where my permanent address is, will be. It’s something I take for granted. So it sort of pisses me off when I read of “idlis as soft and white as a Mysore Mallige” or “Masala dosas so crisp, they would give the news in Indian Express a complex”. In nostalgic stream-of-consciousness-reminisces, fine. Not in food reviews. Gah. And the eternal question. “”Where have Bangalore’s sparrows gone?”. Probably the same place as the sparrows in other metros. It’s not a city-specific problem. And they would probably be more numerous in Bangalore  if you and your ilk didn’t zip around in your Alto having the aforementioned idlis at Veena Idli Stores Malleshwaram for breakfast, the melt-in-mouth Bisi Bele Bath at MTR for lunch, the aforementioned Masala Dosa for a snack at Ganesh Darshan, Jayanagar, before topping it off with dinner and a tipple at Pecos. Just one more time I hear Swalpa Adjusht Maadi, I’ll probably try increasing your Kannada vocab by teaching you other phrases commonly heard outside spirit stores in the Kalasipalya area.
• Too many LOLs over IM. Honestly, if you laughed that much in real life, you’d beat Mr. YMN Murthy of Jayanagar Laughter Club fame. And he laughs for the therapeutic properties, like increasing circulation, clearing airways, increasing endorphin levels. Which typing LOL, ROFL, ROFLOL, ROFLMAO, LMAO won’t do.
• Star bloggers. Nothing personal. But doesn’t it feel weird getting a few dozen comments all saying “First!”? I generally find that the level of discussion at these blogs tends to be ke-rap. But then, you pander to the lowest common denominator, that’s what you get.
• Pseudosecularists. Needs no further elaboration if you read my blog.
• Dirty kitchens. I’m too used to my mother’s and her mother’s kitchens. Anything below that golden standard, and I feel like picking up some Vim, a scrub, some rags, a broom and a mop. This, coming from me who tries to run when Amma calls me to help in the kitchen.
• Negative people. There are some people I know who can NEVER say anything good about anyone. That girl who studies well almost always does well because she cheats. That goodlooking boy out there is always a Don Juan-ish swine. That artsy kid there comes from a depressing family, that’s why he draws… to get away from the pain. The girl holding her boyfriend close is always a protective witch who’s really insecure about her relationship. That divorcee is so successful because she charmed her way up. There’s absolutely nothing in the world that can’t be repeated in a mocking tone. There’s absolutely nothing that can’t be parodied to make it look like something the dog threw up. Everyone is against them because the world is insecure about such a smart/beautiful/brilliant person, and everyone is frickin’ jealous. Either that, or they are so radical, so full of novel thoughts, so rebellious that the world can’t stand them, the descendants of Galileo, the suffragettes, Ramanujacharya and who else.
  There’s no point trying to change their world-view… they are ostriches with their heads stuck in the sand. Depressing. Keep away.
• “Modern” people. I knew of this girl who was considered by many to be fairly ‘modern’. She wore ‘modern’ clothes, her folks didn’t quite mind when she brought home rather ‘modern’ young men… the works. And she wasn’t allowed to play her musical instrument of choice at a place outside her religious spot of choice, under threat of it being separated from her forever. I’d rather be medieval. Or stone-age.
  It amuses me to listen to people say “these conservative ideas about sex and things are taking us back to the stone age”. Uhh… you didn’t have to wear conservative clothes in stone age, nor did you have to worry about social mores when sleeping around… is it such a bad thing, according to your er… ‘modern’ self?
• Swine Flu hype. I’ve already woken up crying from two nightmares about dying of some fatal fever. Just quit the damn thing, will you? I knew people in my ex-workplace who caught the ‘flu, and were back at work within the week.
• Evolutionary psychology. We haven’t stayed unevolved for 50k years. I think I’m rather removed from being a cavewoman. Don’t blame your brutish behaviour on the fact that you evolved from cavemen. Bulk of the arguments for gender wars come from here. That’s why I hate it all the more now.
• Self-Help. I think they aren’t exactly in the real world. There’s an entire post in this. I’ll write it sometime soon.
• People who don’t disagree. “I’ll have what you’re having” is fine when you don’t know to read the menu and are too embarrassed to admit it. But not because I’ll be offended otherwise. There’s nothing that directly implies that you and I can’t be friends if our stands on, let’s say, the best sort of music in the world, gay rights, football-vs-cricket, or hell, even political parties, are different, even at loggerheads. Be a real person, for godsake.

That’s just some of my pet peeves. There are more, as you might already know, or will find out.

Art and Life and Imitation.

I wrote this rather long back. I’m just clearing old drafts now. Deleting the ones that led nowhere, publishing the rest. Bear with me.

I watched Nadodigal a few weeks back. I don’t recommend it. Painful to watch. Even worse music.

But everyone seemed to be lauding it for its ‘realism’. Yeah, I was one of them, too, while watching the movie.

The language they use seems authentic. The smallTown-ness seems so too. The character sketches seem so too somewhat, at some level.

But what bothered me a bit was the clothes.

One of the two leading ladies wears quite uh… realistic salwar-kameezes in the scenes when she’s at college. And in the scenes at home, she wears loose striped tshirts with skirts.

Which made me wonder… how much should art imitate life and how much should be vice versa?

It’s fine when Sadhna cut became a trend, when Yuva skirts were the latest, even SRK’s ‘Cool’ chain is fine… but when art imitates life, which life promptly imitates back, doesn’t it make things bleaker than it already is?

Like what would life be if the loose striped older-and-much-bigger bro’s tshirts and mismatched skirts became a trend? Sure, it might have a chic avatar which would quickly be adopted everywhere, like Boyfriend Jeans, but heck, at the end of the day, it’s just bad taste.

There’d be no sparkle, no break from the mundaneness of reality. Now NITK Lingo, if shown in a film, would probably appeal to folks from other corners of the country where they talk proper. But to us, it’s just “Eww man, he can’t even put DASA lingo properly”. And god save the country if everyone started adding -ax and -esh to phrases. It’s okay in college. Tolerable. But if magnified on a large-enough scale, it can easily be painmax.

This sort of life-imitates-art-imitates-life thing can work well if the stuff imitated in the first place is different enough, diverse enough, cool enough. Like Denim… it was just workers’ clothes to begin with. But as we become more and more homogenized, and can know enough about any culture we want at the click of a button, like just look at any damn college blog for NIT and IIT lingo, there’s not much novelty value. Everything’s just another stereotype. We’re so inundated with information these days that we cannot get back the wonder we had at anything new… like how speaking Mumbaiyya suddenly became cool after RGV’s Satya came out. Plus, our lives and thoughts are so influenced by the Media these days that there’s nothing to imitate that isn’t already there in some form in public memory.

Like once upon a time, MTV with their superstar lookalikes was so cool. These guys who looked like Dev Anand, Hrithik, SRK, Ganguly, and parodied every damn thing. But now they are part of our er.. ‘culture’, and now we can as easily have a parody of people who parody superstars. And subsequent levels of indirection. While there can be innovation in these subsequent levels, like you see in re-re-remixes, it can’t be as good as coming up with original stuff.

Move over Madhur Bhandarkar. We want Manmohan Desai.

PS: I just wanted an alliteration. I don’t think Mr. Bhandarkar is all about realism… it strikes me more as a weird voyeurism.