The Roads Less Travelled …

Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev - the big three of mid to late nineteenth century Russian literature. While the first two are acknowledged literary giants, I was surprized to find from the foreword to the edition I have, that it was Turgenev and not the others who was the most widely read and acclaimed in those days. However it seems that this giant has faded into relative obscurity. I had heard of the name earlier and had dismissed him as another Salieri. And only reason I picked up this book was that almost all Haruki Murakami’s depressed protagonists like to read him; plus the fact that the book had only 250 odd pages to read made this choice much easier.

Fathers and Sons, Turgenev’s most controversial and lasting work, though lacking the epic scale of War and Peace or the incisive pyscho-social analysis of The Brothers Karamazov, is truely a masterpiece in its own right. Turgenev, unlike Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, probably did not believe in certain philosophies as the bulwark on which the perfect world would rest. He was more interested in observing what is, rather than postulating what can be. And yet, it was this book that gave world the term Nihilism, often used to describe the writings of the great Friedrich Nietzsche, a much more radical philosphical point of view than what Tolstoy ever alluded to in his works.

What really struck me as I wound up the book, was how well balanced the characters were in the book. The protagonist, a nihilist by the name of Bazarov; Arkady, his one time companion and co-conspirator; the older generation of Nikolai and Pavel Petrovich; each gets an equal share of attention from the author and one cannot really judge from the characterizations, the author’s philosophical leanings. Turgenev was universally reviled, by both the right and the left, after the publication of this book, as they failed to find any concrete justifications for their respective philosophies. The author allows each character its own space to play out its role in the plot, and yet constantly anchoring them to the real world that he was describing, unlike Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky for whom the character often existed in a vacuum.

The writing is precise and economical - an extra sentence never belabors a point in this book. This is facilitated by the author’s reticence to flesh out the intricacies of the psychology of the character, and often limiting himself to write as a observer rather than the creator. Very rarely does Turgenev resort to taking the reader inside the heads of the characters and when he does that these become an extremely effective medium to communicate their true feelings. And never does he exagerrate the actions of his characters, as if subscribing to particular philosphy. To bring out the difference, I would compare the duel scene here between Pavel Petrovich and Bazarov and a similar scene between Pierre and Dolokhov in War and Peace, the result in both cases being that one of the combatants was injured and the duel had to abandoned midway. While Tolstoy chooses to go inside the head of Pierre describing with picturesque clarity his feelings before and after the act, Turgenev prefers to report things as they happened and the consequences they entailed.

Along with the text, my edition of the book, the 1972 Penguin Classics Edn, also has the Romanes Lecture by Isiah Berlin added to it. This was for me the most incisive commentary on Russian literature of those times that I have read. It allowed me to understand , the various issues Turgenev here and others elsewhere, were trying to address.

So even if I hate the rest of Murakami’s books I would remain thankful to him for introducing me to this great master of prose through his characters.

technorati tags: books, literature

A book is always better than the movie based on it. But if a relatively uncomplicated book has ever been made into such a bad movie, I do not know of it. If the movie were to be described in one word, a good one would be melangé.

GoF is not my favourite book in the HP series. I felt when reading the book that Rowling had lost her way; that she was forking out too much and introducing too many things at the same time. However, this is also the book where we are introduced to the wide world of magic rather than the limited coterie of Harry, friends and family. We come to know of foreign schools, magical tournaments, see the first Death Eaters and at the end Voldemort is reborn. When it came out it was by far the most voluminous of the series. Taking this book and making a decent movie out of it - tackling the myriad and intertwined narratives - is a challenging task; a task that Mike Newell fails to achieve. He fails at the very outset by not identifying a core theme for the movie. The identification of a core theme would have allowed him to identify and cull out the extraneous material with relative ease.

Instead, what happens is that random parts of the narrative are thrown together in the mix without rhyme or reason, much like one of Snape’s potion assignments, hoping something good will come out of it. The movie does not tell a story of its own. It merely puts on the visual medium parts of Rowling’s book. This is my biggest disappointment with the movie.

On other aspects, Michael Gambon as Dumbledore did not exude the same charisma and power as Richard Harris in the earlier movies. Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort had too short a role to make any mark. The main trio however have grown and put on mature performances. The graphics were top of the line as expected from a mega-gazillion venture. These however, remain only sidenotes as the film lacked a basic narrative spine.

The HP series is essentially about human feelings, emotions and conflicts rather than state-of-the-art graphics. The graphics and the sets are the means to an end and not the ends in themselves. I was hoping after three movies Warner Bros. would have understood that, but maybe then I was hoping for too much.

technorati tags: movies

For some time I had been hearing that Ojos Inc. was upto something big. Early this month, it came to my notice they had finally got the alpha of their first product Riya out in the market. And after a very very long time, I was truely astounded by a product. Mind blown, eyes popping out astounded. Nothing less. Since then have been putting off this post, so that I can write about the first hand experience with Riya; but the beta user thing is taking much more time than I had expected. The really great thing about this product is that these guys are not running around catching the latest wave of tagging, web 2.0 etc though they are all that. From the looks of it they have a solid technology behind their product, something that cannot be replicated so easily. Really cool. Their CEO, Munjal Shah, blogs about his experience with Riya here.

Two more of the the so called web 2.0 generation products caught my fancy as well. Library Thing, is your online book catalogue while TagWorld looks like an aggregation of Flickr, Blogger, del.ici.ous and Orkut.

The former clearly appealed to me because I have rapidly growing book collection and my Excel sheet, though adequate for now, leaves a lot to be desired. The other day a friend of mine wanted my book collection list to borrow some stuff and we ended up emailing three-four copies of the same file between. Having an experience like the one above, it can be understood, why some people think that the desktop, email, files metaphor is now truely groaning. As for the product itself it pretty clean and simple to use with some cool features. Tagging is simple. The upload UI however constrained also is easy to use. Syndicating of one's catalogue using RSS is default behaviour, which I thought was really nice. The initial uploading of the book data is painful. Even the upload tool they provide, "Swiss Army Knife" of file imports, shreds out only the ISBNs and adds them to one's library. Hard luck for people like me, for whom books means the title and the author. Plus the free service has space for 200 books. Heck even I have 200 books and that too from the last 2.5 years. Also the search is fairly comprehensive - search on books, tags or persons are allowed. I guess these guys are looking to become some kind of a Flickr of books thing.

TagWorld - your one stop web destination. I can almost see their tagline. They have got in a host of features allowing them to compete with Flickr, del.ici.ous and Blogger/Livejournal at the same time. The best feature I found here, after some hunting around is that one can upload files into ones account. True, can mail them to one's Gmail account and get the same functionality but this feature gives a hint that these guys are thinking big. Beyond the standard, cool yuppie, blogging site. But low marks in UI design of the pages (the ad palcement is pathetic… I know I am getting the service free, but still) and the general user experience. It took me 4-5 iterations to hunt around for a way to search for people. And they claim to tap into the social networking aspect of business.

Also in case one is interested in looking out for more such products, make sure you visit TechCruch.

I like Argentinian way of playing football. Puritans may favour the quick passing game of Dutch while connosieurs of footballing beauty may prefer the Brazilian Samba. But none these sides present to a viewer the flexibility that Argentina offers. Their play is different against each team, moulding itself to exploit the weaknesses of their opponents. You will find them playing the quick passing game against an onerous defensive rival like Italy and yet switch to more catenaccio style of play relying on counterattacks, against a flashier opponent like Brazil. And the fact remains that most of the times they end up playing good football.

Sad then they lost against an England team. It was a friendly … but then who ever wants to lose?

What exactly is Web 2.0? Tim O' Reilly defines it here. What then is X Internet? Forrester Research's G.F. Colony defines this here. Both of the above terms, especially the former, seem to be in vogue today and with almost no one very sure of what these mean. No wonder then that Joel Spolsky is slightly skeptical.

However, the fact that there is something afoot is hard to argue against. We are seeing a deluge of ideas today on how applications are to be built. WWW as a platform. Syndicate. Share. Tag. Rich User Experiences. Thin Clients. Quick release cycles. Products as services. Web 2.0 is more or less an overarching term that encapsulates these ideas. This ambiguous and pliable definition, is probably one reason why there are many who pose as Web 2.0 applications. The desired end product is however the same. Simple workflows for the user. And this goal is not new.

What then is new?

User expectations for one. The user today is not satisfied with static content from the web. He wants the content he sees to be dynamic as per his needs. If he wants stock quotes at the top of his website so be it. And if he is barely interested in the NY Times best seller list, they should not even occupy an inch of the precious screen real estate. He wants information painlessly and fast. The burgeoning expectations have in turn forced the major players to forget the old product management cycles, while focusing on quicker releases and frequent but painless updates. They have also forced them to think what the user really needs rather than what they think is good for the user.

And second, certain disruptive technologies [AJAX, RSS etc]. AJAX has shown that the richness of the desktop applications can be achieved with web applications also. RSS and Atom standards have made syndicating data [both in and out] relatively painless. Windows Vista will have RSS integration built into the OS itself, allowing application developers to use the incoming data in a myriad of ways we probably cannot dream about. But the best thing is that RSS today seems to be becoming a standard in which a considerable number of major players are investing in (except Google).

It is with this background that one has to see Microsoft's unveiling of their new live.com service. At the outset, one would be lulled into believing that this is just a clone of another Microsoft site start.com. In fact, the later is much better site with support for Firefox also present. The new site is half baked - not very stable. But it seems Microsoft is finally entering the world where Google seemed to be the only player. And a brief tour of what the Live service will offer in future will leave no pretensions about the scope of this endeavor or the fact that MS is entering the space in a big way. (That the half baked release might come back to bite them, as Joel here says, is a completely different matter.)

These steps are however small steps in the grand dream of finally allowing the user to have everything as a service rather than handing him the entire product in one shot. Everything in this world should be rentable, and more so those things whose frequency of change is high - like software. How it happens can yet be conjectured? Will the browser be the new OS? Or will desktop apps make a comeback? But the end result is can probably be taken for granted.