The Roads Less Travelled …

The above movie is a must see for anyone who says that India cannot produce cinema which is both appealing and yet does not woefully lack in substance. The tagline for the movie says it all, "A story of three lives. Struck by tragedy. United by destiny. Redefined by music…".

Abhinay, Prakash Rao, is an ambitious young man, sick of composing jingles for bubble gums and condoms, and wanting to create music which will last like the Charminar. Pinky, Perizaad Zorabian, is a hep, young business management grad who helps her mother in running her boutique but still is looking to define her own identity. Swarnalatha, portrayed with usual aplomb by Shabana Azmi, is an elderly housewife. What connects them together is an accident 20 years before and their music. That accident took away Pinky's father, Abhinay's mother and the Swarnalatha's son but most importantly took some element of music out of their lives. 20 years later they try to reignite that lost flame.

The movie was shot primarily in the Andhra countryside and the camera work was good but not stupendous. What again stood out was the music. Carnatic, Jazz and fusion Amit Heri weaves a melody incorporating all of these elements and fitting perfectly with the canvas. It was not your run of the Anu Malik songs but at the same time the music gave the movie the element of lightness which Indian art house cinema is not known for.

The movie is not without its faults. The acting and the casting are both suspect as well usage of English as a language. But one should see this movie to realise that Indian cinema is more than Akshay Kumar and Priyanka Chopra gyrating in Paris or someone trying to say how everything is wrong with the society and calls for a total revolution. "Morning Raga" is not a work on the state of the society nor does have any deep message. It is just a story captured by camera. Exactly what cinema should be.

I saw "The Hours" directed by Stephen Daldry days after it was released and I have to admit that this movie is one few which continues to vex me with questions even after repeated viewings. It is not that it is an absolutely brilliant movie. It has its obvious faults. But it is the relationship between the three principal characters which continues to confound me. It was therefore with great gusto that picked up the Pulitzer prize winning novel of the same name by Michael Cunningham on which the movie is based.

Reading the book definitely gives me a much better perspective of the whole thing. For one the movie marginalises some major characters who give the story different facets. The most ill-treated in this department are clearly Sally and Louis. Also the book relies a lot on the voicing the thoughts of the characters especially Clarissa, which Meryl Streep (for all her talent) could not convey on the screen. It is in this light that I can now say that Julian Moore's performance as Laura was better. Without words she managed to convey the claustrophobic nature of her existence. Thus the Clarissa Vaughn part of the story clearly was half baked in the movie, causing mental upset on part of the viewer.

Who really gets a more prominent role in the movie is Kidman as Virginia Woolf. In fact, the scene in the railway station where she makes Leonard realise that Richmond is killing her is almost completely missing in the book. That is coincidentally my favourite part of the movie with some of the most powerful words in the movie. And both in the movie as well as in the book it is Virginia Woolf who glues all facets of the story together. In fact one way I interpret this movie is that the three separate stories separate out the major character traits of the Mrs. Dalloway.

To end this, the lines that remain imprinted in my memory long after I have seen the movie … from the station scene I alluded to earlier.

Leonard Woolf: If I didn't know you better I'd call this ingratitude.
Virginia Woolf: I am ungrateful? You call ME ungrateful? My life has been stolen from me. I'm living in a town I have no wish to live in… I'm living a life I have no wish to live… How did this happen?

Virginia Woolf: I'm dying in this town.
Leonard Woolf: If you were thinking clearly, Virginia, you would recall it was London that brought you low.
Virginia Woolf: If I were thinking clearly? If I were thinking clearly?
Leonard Woolf: We brought you to Richmond to give you peace.
Virginia Woolf: If I were thinking clearly, Leonard, I would tell you that I wrestle alone in the dark, in the deep dark, and that only I can know. Only I can understand my condition. You live with the threat, you tell me you live with the threat of my extinction. Leonard, I live with it too.

Virginia Woolf: This is my right; it is the right of every human being. I choose not the suffocating anaesthetic of the suburbs, but the violent jolt of the Capital, that is my choice. The meanest patient, yes, even the very lowest is allowed some say in the matter of her own prescription. Thereby she defines her humanity. I wish, for your sake, Leonard, I could be happy in this quietness.
[pause]
Virginia Woolf: But if it is a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death.

Now that might sound like an extremely stupid thing to say, but when you are one of the type who always plan to clean their wadrobes, desks and rooms but never do, it does represent a significant achievement. Significant enough to blog about.

Now my room was a mess. Books lying about everywhere, since the rack holding them was full. And the usual clothes lying about at all corners. Anyway Saturday afternoon was spent on cleaning up the dump. Managed to stack up all books in one corner with enough space for future acquisitions. What more I even catalogued my collection of books and movies. No mean accomplishment, considering this was something I had been procrastinating since last year.

The above would have satisfied me but on Sunday almost the impossible happened. My roommate and myself returned from a shopping binge to see that we actually had no place in the fridge to put what we had recently bought. It was filled with half eaten pizzas, 8 month old eggs and some vegetables which seemed to be carved of wood. And the pride of place goes to that treasured apple of Gokhale's eye. Anyway what started out as a drive to clean the fridge to make space for the new purchases soon became the flood which was to clean the Augean stables that was our drawing room. Not satisfied with cleaned we also rearranged most of the furniture so that they become more usable and easily maintainable. Thereafter Martin also cleaned his roomed and I cleared out my wadrobe.

The prize …. Rama's exclamation on the phone … "Shit, this place actually looks like a home" … And all of us roomies agreed upon the fact that our moms would have been proud of us.

After almost a year, I managed to get a week and a half off to visit my parents in my native place. Technology has made communication simpler and accessible but definitely is still far from the day when it can distort our realities into what we want. Anyway my stint at home as is the custom consisted primarily of four activities in any random order: Sleeping and Eating (primary activities) and Reading and Visiting (secondary activities).

The first 2 do not merit any justification. Visiting, hmmm…  It seemed that this time everybody I have known in my 22 years of existence was in town and wanted to meet me. Actually I was genuinely happy to see some old faces, uncles who used to buy you candies or aunties who gave you that extra sweet when you went to their place. But in some cases the familiarity felt like overkill. I would have rather slept at home.

And finally reading … My vacation reading list (including to and fro journey times ….)

1. Rommel by Desmond Young - An excellent account of the exploits of The Desert Fox by a British officer. Also throws some light on how the uniform branding of the Germans in WW2 as Nazi  is both unfortunate and wrong.

2. Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre - The new age “Catcher in the Rye”, Vernon is a cross between Holden Caulfield and one those boys in BAckstreet BoYz. Again highly readable if not for anything else then for the slandering dysfunctional humor.

3. Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran - Amongst the best popular science books I have laid my hands on and also probably amongst the most accessible. Starting from extraordinary neurological cases Dr. Ramachandran manages to wriggle out facts and hint at truths on the very basis of our existence, the human mind.

4. And finally managed to go through 10 chapters of Automata theory and languages by Ullman and co as well as a similar number of chapters from the OS book.

And now I am back …. Looking at a change …

Merci Vibs ….

Seer

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The voice of people is the voice of god. The motto of the Roman Senate is nowhere as valid today as in the software industry. As the influence of computers pervades every aspect of modern life, it becomes imperative that IT systems, which till now mainly are seen as "geek bastions", turn into accessible tools for the common person. The key challenge here is to considerably reduce the steep learning curve that novices have to face.

Engineers (like me) might object to this whole debate saying that the user interface has come a long way since the days when using a computer implied typing commands on the command prompt. Having come from that background, they fail to estimate how difficult it is for a tyro to even comprehend basic principles of computing. One reason for this high learning requirement is the richness of features that many of the common software products possess. Consider this simple scenario -

"A Martian is given a plug which is connected to a bulb and is taken near a socket, how long will it take him to figure out that once he puts the plug in the socket and inverts the switch position he gets light. And to it compare him trying to make a written text bold in Windows Word, probably the most used software".

Word is more difficult to learn than switching on the light because of the multitude of choices that the user faces when trying to accomplish the very basic tasks. The above probably is a measure of the nature and magnitude of the work that needs to be done to make computers the ubiquitous entity, which everybody expects it to be in the near future.

Economist, the UK daily has brought out a special report on the dual conundrums of reducing the complexity of IT systems and defining intuitive and usable interfaces. The two largely go hand in hand. The report goes on to demonstrate that the complexity of computer systems is a dual bane - it reduces the efficiency of people using it and it costs them more to maintain them. To it I should add, it costs them more when they buy it. The future challenge therefore lies not in adding new functionality but to define concrete, intuitive and extensible interfaces for the end users.

This turn for a simple usage should I believe stick to what Einstein once said, "Things should be made as simple as possible. But not more". Simplicity does not imply reducing the smart things engineers do today make the systems work. It implies hiding them. And this task of hiding is techinically more challenging than putting it all there on the top. One does not have the cushion of asking the user things that he does not have to do but are still necessary. It might also imply giving more floor space to basic features so that once the software is started what is to be done just stares at your face. It also means that a consumer should be able to add on to his existing product any additional functionality without much of an overhead in time or expense.

Tragically, such a switch could spell doom or atleast the end of the hegemony of big few in the IT industry. Simplifying products would be tantamount to courting competition. Once interfaces become simpler and the basic functionality less you do not need a huge corporation like Microsoft to write something like MSWord. Or you would not need scores of Infosys employees to maintain the decades old mainframes. Nevertheless, as Google founder Sergei Brin would probably say, "This is the good way to do things"

Pulp fiction remains one of those movies which I apotheosize. Thanks to kalyan.. I now know which is my character in pulp fiction

Check out your PF character at http://www.pyrrha.org/pulp/

Tired of being underappreciated and manipulated by powerful “others,” you fight back. Though possesssing a cold, violent outside, you have a soft, scentimental inside. You love your partner, you cherish family heirlooms, and you want nothing more than to be geniunely happy — but you don’t mind having to kill a couple of nimrods who happen to clutter your path. Take the What Pulp Fiction Character Are You? quiz.

Not that I was really busy or anything. But a few notable incidents have happened since I last blogged.

For starters I broke my hand. It all happened in a extremely innocuous way. I was playing football as I do on most evenings and we were almost closing when trying to fight for the ball I tripped and fell. This happens atleast 3-4 times daily but this time I fell rather awkwardly on my left wrist resulting in what the doctor termed as a burst fracture. To my mechanical mind it looked like a simple case of impact failure when the end of one bone hitting the other caused a crack in one of them. Takes a lot of force to do something like this and I guess I must have fallen with a lot of momentum (with my weight not unlikely) or I have turned into Mr. Brittle Bones.

Anyway the upshot of the whole incident being that my left forearm will be in plaster till the middle of November. No footer and typing is a pain in the ass. Anyway now after almost 3 weeks I can get some modicum of normalcy back since I can move my fingers and so typing has become as lot easier. Anyway I hope this gives some impetus to the my frequency of blogging.

Now playing: Simply Red - Lady Godiva’s Room