The Roads Less Travelled …

After months of deliberation I finally created a account in Flickr to upload some of the photos I have taken with my [now not so new] camera. Link

Bouquets are welcome. Brickbats even more.

An avowed Harry Potter fan, I do not think I waited for any book so eagerly ever in my life. And as with almost everything you have very high hopes for, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, though not bad fails to meet the high expectations.

This book is the starting of the end. Most of the story revolves around the placing of the characters and their backgrounds before the final showdown. We come to know of a significant amount of Voldemort's past, his days in Hogwarts and his quest for immortality. The path to his destruction is also charted out by the wily old Dumbledore in his final days assisted by an increasing abler Harry. Snape finally gets his wish of teaching Defence against Dark Arts and we have a new potions master after which Harry suddenly discovers in himself a great talent in the art of potion making - getting finally better than Hermoine in some course, to her great chagrin. Hermoine and Ron break and make up ten thousand times and Ginny and Harry get together.

And the Half Blood Prince, you ask? He becomes probably Harry's best teacher since he entered Hogwarts. And surprise!! Harry's loathing for him at the end of the episode matches that of Voldemort. But as I said before this book was more like drawing of the battle plans and the few random skirmishes just before the main battle and Mr. Half Blood Prince definitely has big role to play in that.

So where did I not like the book. Till Order of the Phoenix the HP series had got progressively darker and the characterizations had become complex. Rowling takes a step back in this book, trying very hard to separate out the black and white from the mists of grey. Voldemort is painted in such a dark hue that darkness would have some trouble recognizing him. This is, I believe the greatest travesty of the book. A hero can probably be a simple character. A villain never. Also the character of Draco, is passed over even though he probably brings about the single most important event if the book. This is a part of seeing everything in black and white. You just concentrate on the white and forget the black. However, Rowling does decent work of taking further Harry's characterization. For the first time we see Harry operating alone, not too perturbed by the fact that his friends and well wishers continue to sideline his concerns. He realizes finally that the burden is his and only his to bear. No one, not even his dearest friends should be expected to share it with him. He is probably on the road to become another Batmanish character. And as for Ron and Hermoine, they too are more or less passed over [apart from Ron's antics with Lavender].

The book even though set in the darkest of environs - with the Dark Lord rising and all that - has a lot more hope. The readers and the protagonists both now know what they are facing. They know what should be done to win the war and to eliminate the evil, much unlike other books where the enemy was nameless, faceless, not-sure-if-alive You Know Who. Apart from that, to add to all the hope, we had love floating all over Hogwarts [sniggering smile] . Rowling had conscientiously avoided pairing off characters in the previous episodes but it was done too abruptly here.

Bottomline, if you are a Harry Potter fan, you will anyway read this book. But do not look for anything beyond rehashing of the old stuff, putting in the missing pieces and the drawing of the battle plans. And yes, the wait for the seventh book has started.

@Amazon
@Barnes & Noble

Long time ago, I saw Pather Panchali. And it touched a chord in my psyche. The movie was called by some as unnecessarily long and boring, without an apparent plot meriting its length. The way I saw it was that it was a movie about life - the way it is. Uzak [Distant], by the Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a film in the same mould.

Uzak takes us into the life of Mahmout, a village boy who has made it good in the big city and Yusuf, his cousin - laid off from his job at the village factory, who dreams of getting a job on a ship and striking it rich. Mahmout is not really elated to see Yusuf coming to his place to live; he invades on his private space, a space he has created with so much pain and is so comfortable in. Yusuf on the other hand was searching; outwardly for a job - but also in a sense for the meaning of his life.

Through various detours in the narrative we learn of Mahmout's ex-wife Nazan, his interests in photography and how in effect he lives in effect as a single individual cut off from the rest of the humanity. He has become apathetic. It is not that Mahmout has become emotionally numb - his conversations with Nazan and the way he goes to the airport in stealth to get a last glimpse of her - belie this proposition. It is just that he has relapsed into a state of utter emotional lassitude - a monotonous state and to him a very comfortable life.

The films greatest strength is probably is the camerawork. The images on the screen reflect the prevailing mood in the narrative. Long and static shots, dark canvases [especially inside Mahmout's house] which show no color are pulled off to perfection. But two best shots in the movie are in Yusuf's lot. The first where he walks beside a derelict ship in the snow bound Istanbul harbor after he realizes that getting a job on the ship is not a cakewalk. And the seccond, where a fish taken out of water is struggling to live, but it cannot. It comes just after Yusuf realizes that the girl he has been following and wanting to talk with already is with someone.

The movie is without much meaningful conversation. In fact the first spoken words appear after around 5 minutes the movie starts. Conversations as a pre-requisite demands emotional involvement. And the character of Mahmout does not offer too much in this department. External sounds - the crashing of the waves, the sound of traffic etc - have been amplified somehow making up for the lack of human sounds. I believe these further pushes home the point of loneliness of the character.

In short, Uzak is movie one should watch.

Is technology making this world an easier place to live in? Abhijeet recently put up a post with his thoughts on the subject. I had some time ago also put my thoughts on what the people really need from the IT industry.

However the recent blog of Abhijeet did make me think some more on this topic. It is true that technology today is moving at a breakneck pace, and even truer that not many of these innovations reach the man on the street - definitely not in a place like India. This time I when I went home I did a simple experiment - to check how simple the things are when it comes to computers.

Google prides itself on being the single stop to search information. I told this to my father - who refuses to do anything with computers, saying it makes his life complicated - and asked him to try it out. What I realized after this was that even for a simple action like typing out some words and hitting on 'search' there is a lot of implicit knowledge that a person needs to have. He needs to know that buttons are the equivalent of switches which have to hit upon to produce some actions, also to know which button to push. He queried about what exactly is the 'I am feeling lucky' thing, and I explained that to him and then he asked me why is it needed. The way he saw it was that people like him would have more confusion trying to figure out which button to hit. And then I asked myself, how many times have I used that feature? Is it a necessity or is it just a way of exposing your geek quotient? This simple experiment made me realize yet again, that how far are today's applications are from being intellectually accessible to the common man.

It has also become fashionable for people to brand anyone as inane and bucolic based on his comfort level with the latest gizmos. What they fail to understand are that others have different things which interest them and not gadgets. What they fail to see are that these things have not become interesting enough; they do not give enough return on investment, in terms of both time and money. Yes, one can do really amazing stuff on a cell phone these days but only after spending 3 days checking out its features. Who has that kind of time these days?

And then there is the great issue of money. Today technology at least in India is an elitist passion. The latest cell phone would probably cost a average middle class Indian 3/4ths of his annual salary. A decent desktop would cost him 3-4 months in wages. How much can money affect the propagation of technology? A lot would be my answer. The case to quote here would be the telecom revolution in India. 10 years before, families used to stay up late because after 11 p.m. the rates were 1/3rd. And then at 11 all the lines would be busy and people would end up waiting for days to talk to someone. Today any call at any time within 500 kms is a local call. Pricing slabs are gone. There is talk of making the calls within the country as local. Upshot being even my remote village is well connected by telephone. And telecom with all these strides has still not permeated the lower strata of society.

Coming back to the real question, if usability and cost are the real demons why are we fighting other battles.

Any latest technological revolution, is brought about by people who understand the technology. For these people it is extremely difficult to sit in the place of an average person who has no clue about what this thing is. I being a developer face this problem everyday. The moment I start thinking of the user, it opens a can of worms and my task appears insurmountable. And I more often than not end up making a lot of implicit assumptions about the state of the end user. However what is heartening is that today most of the big players realize that usability is a big ticket item and they are spending considerable time and effort doing that.

As for the cost thing, they are coming down but slowly. The system I brought 2 years back for Rs. 50K is today available for 25-30K. Though not exactly accessible a reduction by almost half in price is not something that has to be scoffed at. The problem however is that the very latest system even today would cost 50-60K. So the reduction in price is also seen as depreciation rate of the product. Sometime back I realized for most of the tasks of a everyday user you do not need a latest system. Unless you are doing programming or are heavily into gaming you do not need the latest P4.

And lastly about the rat race and the quest for truth. What he terms as rat race I term as evolutionary selection. The best will survive and the rest will perish. And as for truth, it does not come to you, you go in search of that. Hence the need to keep doing things, keep innovating hoping that this idea will hit the target. There is no other way.

The bottom line, things are not hunky dory and picture perfect, but the movement is towards the right direction.