Thursday, December 29, 2005

cinematic crimes

i dont quite know who started the trend; it may have been subhash ghai with 'pardes', but once he got the ball rolling (or whoever it was), the bollywood people have had a greattime abroad. looking at the movies made in recent times, the classic 'gaon ki gori' has died a quiet and unremarkable death only to be replaced by the 'item number' babe. decent cinema has been trashed and what we have is govinda prancing down some boulevard in some obscure european town in a polka dotted shirt and yellow pants. i mean, i have been told that govinda is a decent bloke and pretty smart to boot. but think of this people: we have organisations who take care of human rights, children's rights, wimmen's rights (ok, so there is no organisation to take care of the rights of unhappy JRFs, but let us pass over that lightly..) so why is there no organistion which fines these 'superstars' (may their fuel run out and may the go to gravitational collapse) for inflicting their hideous sense of fashion on us?


yes, we indians are guilty of many many social crimes at home, and quite a few abroad as well, but surely govinda as our cultural ambassador is where we draw the line? well, not so. akshay kumar is almost as bad as the aforementioned great. this bloke thinks that wearing black is cool, a steven seagal wannabe. tell him that steven seagal looks like a demented vampire learning karate and akshay looks pretty much the same. the only people who wore black and carried it off impeccably are trinity, neo and morpheous. go figure.

and what is the point behind shortening one's names? makrand becomes mac?!!! yuck! ok, here is my point to the good akshay: is the scriptwriter has decided to call you makrand, it is because of some deepseated grouse he has. but the best you can do is to take it like a man. calling yourself mac and wearing black doesnt help. it merely underlines the deep pathos of your life. again, the only point (in recent times) where a name shortening was not awful was when siddharth became sid in dch. dch was a classic. face it akshay, you have never made a classic, and you never will. leave it to the people who can.

oh, yes, while i am at it, a small message to the bollywood community. there can be movies which lie somewhere in between 'auntie no. 1' and 'muhafiz'. why not try making some of those? there is an audience, trust me. for starters, get all those buggers who didn't see 'lakshya' and ram it down their throats. the indian audience must get out of kindergarten, or what i think has happened is that it has been demoted from middle school to kindergarten. i mean, look at 'sholay'. and look at 'ddlj'. i rest my case.

someone give rahul bose a chance to act. also try getting rahul, akshay khanna (not kumar) and aamir khan together in a farhan akhtar movie. the heroines don't count, they have stopped acting a while back and window dressing is all they are good for. but in case one needs a heroine, get preity and maybe sonali kulkarni(not bendre).

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Chennai autowallahs

The auto is an ubiquitous aspect of urban life in india. they range from the little petrol run contraptions called 'peepde' (ant) seen in kolkata, to the somewhat larger and substantially noisier diesel 'garuda' autos (which can be a godsend when you are trying to make it to the tollygunge metro station during the monsoons and the family canoe has sprung a leak...). another one of this family i had encountered ages ago in chandigarh (7 years ago, one bitterly cold winter, having pulled off some minor stunt at a KV quiz competition and trying to make it to the railway station in time) had had its regular engine removed and ran on a kerosene fired portable generator. behaved like a small girl in fact; loud and rather petulant. then there the huge 'vikrant' autos which are found in central and north india, huge contraptions which can seat (read as squeeze) a correspondingly huge indian joint family, complete with five generations and a dog. these autos sometimes have meters (note that this meter is the instrument, the unit of length is the metre; and yes, i prefer the british and indian spelling) which are calibrated as per the whim of the driver and level of intoxication of the official inspector and is also correlated to how much the aforementioned stalwart is collecting under the table. sometimes, the driver has the misfortune of overcharging, and then being rude to a pretty college girl who just happened to be the neice of the son in law of the first cousin of the aunt of the mother in law of the maternal cousin, once removed of the deputy police commissioner. in which case, the driver's hindquarters are subjected to forward impetus by the leatherclad foot of the deputy commissioner. as you realise, it pays to marry into a family which boasts of atleast one deputy commissioner. (a deputy magistrate is even more useful).. but returning to the theme of this post, autowallahs come from all sections of society(well, not all..); they perform a service which is vital, their hours of duty can be quite awful, and i can only imagine what sitting all day in an open vehicle surrounded by trucks and buses all belching the most thick and sooty smoke possible does to their lungs. very often, they are the little guys who keep a city's transport running. their's is a necessary and largely a thankless job. having said that, i generally loathe autowallahs with an intensity bordering on the homicidal.
all too often, i have been taken on a ride by autowallahs inn ways more than one. it ain't to bad in kolkata where strict unionisation ensures that charges are fixed (the idea being that any one autowallah doesn't rob you, they all collectively do! this is a beautiful aspect of a "socialist in lip service but capitalist in fact economy" which is not immediately apparent to those yokels who live and deal in wall street in believe in such laughable ideas like the free market..) well, yes, the charges are fixed, the autos run on routes, the cops are paid off, and elderly officegoers have the security of standing in line without risking life and limb in a mad rush to grab the first auto. the union regulates itself and sometimes you as well. we find it safe and convenient. its a bong way of doing things; a remarkably intelligent way of doing things.
bangalore is much worse; here auto's run on meters, there are no fixed routes. but the basic problem is that you are at point A and want to be at point B. the autowallah wants to be at point C. hence, no agreement. the whole idea with being at point C is that there are infinitely many peoply at point C who want to be at point X, Y, Z and alpha. how does one remedy the situation. going with the infinite wisdom of muhammad who said that he will go to the mountains if they dont come to him, you can wish to go to point C. at which the autowallah becomes your best friend and even tells you about how much he loves Rahul Dravid and hates Ganguly (at which point you starts loathing his black soul, being an ardent bong and Ganguliphile yourself. for those who are at sea, Ganguly is the caption of the indian cricket team and a great cricketer, Dravid is a good cricketer and the wannabe captain. We hate Dravid.) Or, you beat the cirle, and give up your pathetic call centre job and start driving an auto.
chennai. the city of Jayalalitha, sambhar(an evil thing to eat) and evil twisted autowallahs. the city, also of matscience, where i have several friends, cheers to them, and the hometown of a good friend of mine (sorry, i hate to trash the city this way, but its not personal). yes, chennai autos have meters. that was a hollow laugh you just heard. meters which are so badly calibrated and they rip you off so hilariously that the autowallahs have stopped using them for shame. instead, one goes through an intricate process of bargaining with them. this is considered good etiquette for madrasis (chennai-ites). you mention your destination. the autowallah looks at you with an expression that clearly says 'what kind of a villager lives in an out of the way place like that? look at me, i live right next door to the legislature, this is what i do for a hobby'.. ok you get the picture. then he mentions a price. at which point, regardless of what the price is, you clap a hand to your forehead, point the index finger of the other hand at him and burst out laughing. rolling on the pavement for a bit also helps. after a bit, you sneer and tell him that the price he mentioned is about decent for a round trip to the moon. or chicago,, at the very least. at which point, he asks you to quote a fare. you immediately quarter whatever it was he had suggested. then he does the laughter routine. this goes back and forth for a while. after about six iterations, you reach a consensus. your journey then begins.

Monday, December 26, 2005

after christmas

it snowed. i ran some calculations. it snowed some more. i ran some more calculations. it snowed still more. i went to lab and checked the calculations. what a life!

after christmas

it snowed. i ran some calculations. it snowed some more. i ran some more calculations. it snowed still more. i went to lab and checked the calculations. what a life!

Saturday, December 24, 2005

the telescope

three friends, normal blokes, every one of them, like peas in a ..a.. pod, alike, perfectly. well, almost. one fine day, they were invited to look at the stars through a telescope. the first bloke didn't go to tech school as planned; he took classes in creative writing. he became a poet. not a very good one at first, but then his girlfriend dumped him for this random fellow with a kawasaki 500 cc bike. then he became much better. the second bloke of the group decided to not be a civil servant like his father and went to study physics and astronomy. he eventually became a cosmologist working on the evolution of the early universe. he got married, his wife eventually reconciled herself to never being able to drag him away from his computer. well, again, she didn't quite reconcile herself to it; she ended up having an affair with a sociology professor who lived down the street. but she stuck with her cosmologist husband for reasons of her own. he was not, after all a bad guy: he cared a lot about his family and wondered how his kids were doing when he remembered their names. no one gave him the nobel because theoretical cosmology is less rewarding, then, say semiconductors.. the last bloke went to a local degree college (community college for americans), somehow managed to scrape through, inspite of concentrating more on his off spin than his studies. he managed to get a small clerical job at the plant wwhere his father had worked for thirty years. he was recognised for his honesty and sincerity (which are not terribly rare qualities, but then, one does have some trouble looking for them on street corners) and promoted, there are limits to how far promotions will take one without an MBA, and he reached that limit by about forty five. he managed to send his son down to bangalore to study engineering like the rest of the country and his daughter did him proud by getting admitted to one of the more obscure dental schools in north bengal, siliguri, perhaps. he then did something his wife didn't like, atleast didn' t like at first: he bought himself a telescope. he went down to the birla museum down on gurusaday road and sat in classes with 9th graders and learnt about focal lengths and then sat in other classes with 10th graders and learnt about glass polishing and then sat in still more classes with 11th graders and learnt about the little math involved. after his retirement, he sold his little flat (and it was little) in garia and moved to kalyani. the skies are clearer there.

Friday, December 23, 2005

conversations with computers

open pod bay door comp.
silence.
you heard me right, open pod bay door.
silence.
ok, change of tactics required here.... you open the pod bay door now, or i reprogramme you with a large axe!
silence.
and then i wake up and realise that i am not talking to hal, or eddie, i am having a conversation with my rather stupid sgi irix which decided to be helpful by giving up the ghost yesterday. now, its not like i have anything against computers, i love them! but get me straight here, at the point where i begin drooling over the kde desktop is when i realise that something is missing from my life. computers have decidedly turned me into an even more xenophobic person than i normally am. i keep wanting to reach out and run top -o -cpu on people to know just what they are thinking at any time. poeple talk to their cats. i have been accused of having a computer as my best friend. and guess what's really strange? i don't code! thats the strangest part of it.. i am not a computer person at all. i am the last person you want to have around while debugging tenn thousand lines of code. algos go whoooosh over my head and for me functions are still well behaved only if they dont diverge, or if they do, have a finite number of finite discontinuities. i use two fingers and a thumb on the keyboard and despise the mouse.
as with many devices, the sheer joy of getting an obdurate piece of software to work overshadows the fact that it is fundamentally useless and you could have just as well done with a piece of paper. having said that, i don't know too many people who remember long division, and one of the things my students do is to put in as many places of decimal as their calculators can accomodate. which, with a ti-765765765757 can be somewhat large. at which point, i have to let them know that we haven't determined the masses of atoms to that precision upto now. somehow i think cavemen were better off. atleast, they had rock music.

pebbles

just finished 'pebble in the sky'. its quite amazing the amount of reading one can accomplish if one is working on long ended simulations. to paraphrase douglas adams, reading an early asimov is somewhat like watching buckets of paint being ferried in and out of the sistine chapel. asimov's early short stories are quaint in a way that the writers of today seem to have given up. where else would you find 'green jabra water, cooled beneath the deserts of mars'? (gotta get a sip of that) but yes, the cynicism that seems to pervade todays writers, this knowitall attitude that they all pull.. it stinks. but then again, the barrel chested heroes(again, borrowing from isaac) who seem to conquer galaxies single handed are always to be despised. something to think about: asimov's early protagonists were captains of spaceships, about to explore the universe. his later protagonists came to include one middle aged detective who got into trouble for what he did not do with this pretty murder suspect and had a habit of saying 'jehoshapat!'. read le carre. poetry disguised as spy literature. safe houses and departmental memos mixed up in descriptions of characters as characters. they talk about getting under the skin of the characters one reads about. le caree make you one of them. so we get drenched with smiley as he trudges home and God has removed all the taxis from the face of London.

the mysterious case of the shrunken gloves

the title says it all. it has long been known that leather is pretty good as winterwear, ok so i am not that kind of hinndu who refuses to wear leather, nor am i that kind of.. well, individual who owns leather pants (somehow one imagines other stuff as well). ok, so the only item of clothing in leather i have is a pair of gloves. thinsulates, to be exact. bought at a price which still scandalises me (the angst of conversion to rupees and haing a heart attack every time one goes shopping for groceries). and they shrunk! simply, quitely, with no notice whatsoever, i woke up yesterday and saw them shrunk. correction, the left hand glove was shrunken, the right was ok. but today, the right hand glove seems to be going the same way. now i went over all possible scenarios: its not like i have been sticking my hand in the freezer and keeping it there, or dipping my arm into buckets of acetone for teh sheer joy of it. i even thought of my esteemed shohogrihobashi pinching them and doing evil things to them. i dismissed it, he doesnt have the requisite imagination. still thinking.

testing

ever been to a 'paraar pujo' in kolkata. or its suburbs, the suburbs are better in this respect, less professional, more profound and sometimes very very silly. well, at some point after jhontu has plugged in the microphone and nonte and his friends have scaled the nearby trees to strategically place loudspeakers in them.. the fun begins. i say strategically, as this is that time of the year when the risk of heart attack is the most, partly because of nonte's speakers (usually of the aluminium 'Ahuja' variety which crack at the slightest opportunity) and partly because of the bhog at the para'r pujo and the rosogollas and the mishti doi, and then of course the almost unending round of bijoya.. well, its a nice way to go. ok, so here goes, and babu at the mike 'testing, testing, one two three, hello hello' ... ?