Recent news and views.

So, I ended up watching Nick Cage in 'Lord of War'. Now there is nothing remarkable about Cage's performance.. in fact this role was remarkably reminiscent of his role in 'Weatherman'. He is competent and does a first person narrator role quite well. But nothing great. The script was pretty nice, however. Some really nice cinematography, or rather good editing. Pretty face Ethan Hawke has brought nothing new to his Interpol agent character.. there are shades of Precinct 13 as well as Training Day in his acting. The real star of the movie is Jared Leto, who plays Cage's troubled and cocaine addled brother; the only person with something resembling a decent character, which he brings a lot of life to. See this movie: quite an eye opener about the worldwide gun running business.

Stage photography, more cribs.

I love my Olympus. It is an excellent camera, and it works fast and smooth... having had it for almost a year, I can work almost intuitively, without looking at a menu option ever. And, of course, the battery lasts forever. I was at the Indian Classical Music and Dance group concert yesterday at the Michigan League. These guys are a really talented bunch of performers.

The setting: the Hussey room, of the League was also pretty nice. This room seats about a hundred (packed, as I noticed);
and has a very somber walnut wood paneling. Now with two curtains open, I had enough ambient light to shoot at halfway decent shutter speeds... like 1/80 sec.
Remember that I use a 40-150 mm lens for close shots.

Hence.. tripod. But then, they decided to close the curtains... ambient light helps me... but distracts the performers.. and then you can see the results: noise!!!!! Shooting at anything like ISO 800 and above is going to fill you up with noise. A leetil bit of despeckling helps, but that is of limited use.

Leopard.. alomost here.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article2671384.ece

512 MB RAM is way too little.

And let me tell you why. First things first: I run a MacBook with Intel Core Duo 2.0 GHz, a 55GB HD and 512 RAM. Pretty decent. Except that Tiger, or Mac OS X.4.something is a fairly heavy load OS to run. Native OS X applications are totally stable. Stuff that runs on top of the X11 layer, such as Sparky and GIMP 2.2 are also stable, if sometimes a leetil slow. The problem is Firefox. Someone told me that Firefox has an undocumented memory leak which makes it further unstable the longer it stays active. Now Firefox stays on ALL the time. Consequence, my whole system is slowed down. And when I try running something like MS Office, everything comes to a standstill. I tried doing things to trim the basic load, like reducing my dock to a bare minimum of 7 items. I never use iPhoto, or any heavy load graphics package (I have Illustrator CS2). I have most of the dashboard widgets disabled. I even have the funneling effect disabled (less graphics: less CPU). I don't run Eudora or Thunderbird... I use Pine to check mail. Most of my work is at the command prompt. Still slow. This week, my sys-ad was nice enough to do a limited reinstall, without scrubbing the HD. Home directory intact. Not too much help. I need 2 GB of RAM.

The 'best' spy novels in the world and what I think about some of them.

Here is the Link:

And here is my opinion, along with the individual rankings:

Top 15 Spy Novels

Publishers Weekly prints a list of 15 top spy novels (Best spy novels? It doesn't really say.), compiled by Peter Cannon.

1. THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD by John le Carre (1963)

This is a high work of art. There are few authors writing in any field who have the capacity to delve into method and character to the exact depth of detail required to allow the reader to complete the picture himself. That makes Le Carre one of the best writers around. This particular book is the foremost of those novels which brought very close to mind the bleakness of the Cold War and all that it stood for. In the end, the spies on both sides had more in common with each other than with their political masters.

2. THE BOURNE IDENTITY by Robert Ludlum (1980)

This is a piece of sh**.

3. THE DAY OF THE JACKAL by Frederick Forsyth (1971)

An amazing work by the master of method. To be honest, this is hardly a spy novel: this novel deals with a political assassination. But I like it for its precise attention to detail. Hercule Poirot would have approved of Mr. Forsyth. Too bad he turned into a raving right-winger in his latter years.

4. THE SPY WHO LOVED ME by Ian Fleming (1962)

Wha? Mr. Fleming wrote action thrillers. These are not spy novels. Puhr-lease!

5. THE QUIET AMERICAN by Graham Greene (1955)

Haven't read.

6. THE IPCRESS FILE by Len Deighton (1962)

Another classic. Harry Palmer (our unnamed protagonist) cannot pass through an East European town without stashing cash, a couple of passports and a Browning at a railway station locker. And with good reason too: a fairly large number of people want to do him in. Dawlish, his boss and the head of the WOOC(P) isn't much help. The 'P' in WOOC(P) stands for 'provisional', which the Army hates. The Army hates most things professional.

7. THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE by Ken Follett (1978)

I tried to read this. Ken Follet writes absolute cr**. Avoid this.

8. MASQUERADE by Gayle Lynds (1996)

Haven't read.

9. THE MOSCOW CLUB by Joseph Finder (1991)

Haven't read.

10. ABOVE SUSPICION by Helen MacInnes (1939)

Haven't read. Now again, Helen MacInnes was really a romantic novelist who should have never ventured into espionage. Try reading 'Friends and Lovers'.

11. THE 39 STEPS by John Buchan (1915)

Haven't read.

12. HARLOT'S GHOST by Norman Mailer (1991)

Haven't read.

13. THE UNLIKELY SPY by Daniel Silva (1996)

Haven't read.

14. THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS by Erskine Childers (1903)

Haven't read.

15. MORNING SPY, EVENING SPY by Colin MacKinnon (2006)

Haven't read.

So, here we are.. at the end of the list, with a bunch of recent novels of dubious worth, some pieces of undiluted poison and quite a few worthy contenders missing. The list needs to be remade. That, I will do, when I have some more time.

Desi's Coming Home.

Having spent a couple of years in the US of A, I suppose I can say that I have grown somewhat accustomed to a high speed internet line, continuous power, etc, etc. But having said that, a graduate student lifestyle, or rather, a frugal, careful graduate student lifestyle is barely a few notches from what one would describe as 'poverty' in this country. But then again, I do believe that it is to a huge extent, merely a matter of perception: this country does something strange to you.. it turns you into a recluse. Backhome, waking up to the doodhwalla, the paperwalla, and the garbage collector doing the rounds was normal. hearing your neighbour yell at her delinquent kid for not doing his homework was also normal, as was listening to them turn the volume up on yet another Sonu Nigam hosted singing talent show. These are the sounds of India, and after a while, they are no longer intrusive, but merely an ever-present backdrop which you are only aware of by its absence. These are the sounds of home.

Cut to the West. Empty streets, silence and more silence. The only sounds are the noisy cheers of some frat boys on Saturday. Rich Americans, where possible have chosen to live in walled, secluded places where the cares of the world do not reach them. This country, where there are supposed to be no barriers, has chosen to erect impassible walls and create a new social class system.. or perhaps they have taken the oldest class system in the world and merely given it new shape.

For what it is worth, if you are wealthy and have the right skin colour, and presumably the right associations, you too, can live in their country clubs and wake up to the sounds of birds chirping. The inner cities are slowly cycling into ruin, fuelled by guns and drugs. The urban disenfranchised have nowehere to go, for they have been discarded as a bum job. They will never wake up to birdsongs, or walk on neatly manicured lawns. The leaders of the world have promised people freedom, and this is what it looks like. Scratch the surface of wealth and prosperity and you will feel seething veins of anger running deep.

But the eventual fate of this country does not concern this author. I am an passerby, an interested observer, at the most. My own beautiful India has suddenly woken up from several decades of socialist somnolence and wants a share of the pie. The middle class has decided that it is time to be upper class, and the upper class has decided that it is time to stop merely visiting the West; the West should now be brought here. So, we have CrossRoads, an exclusive shopping malll in Bombay which rather inadvisedly decided to only allow people with cellphones or credit cards to enter. This was in 2001, remember, a time when both items were not common amongst the 'riffraff'. The resulting outrage was interesting to watch.

And these days we have gated communities in our own cities, where the rich can sit back and soak in India, sans the stink coming from the nearby slums. To be at the centre of a potentially violent social transformation is quite edifying: resources are being diverted to these palaces which municipalties can ill afford to squander. But who's listening to reason? We all want in, and we want in now! Add to this the dilution of the meritocracy by the rather stupid decision of the Central Government to introduce large scale reservations at all levels of work and study; and we have a rather potent combination.

This was a rather long winded article which I started writing because I read this article:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2156352,00.html#article_conti%3E%20nue

Immigrants create a better England?

An excerpt from the Statesman today.

Migrants Score Over Natives

Nigel Morris

LONDON, Oct. 17: Migrant workers contributed (pounds sterling) 6 billion to the country’s economic growth last year and earned higher wages than their British counterparts, Home Office figures revealed yesterday. The study concluded that new arrivals were harder-working, brought sought-after skills and paid more in tax than they used in public services. The population rose by 189,000 last year, with 574,000 migrants arriving and 385,000 people leaving. The government figures suggested migration was throwing a life-line to an economy suffering skills shortages and struggling to support a growing bill for pensions.
It was calculated that new migration accounted for about one-sixth of Britain’s economic growth. The home office said the newcomers had “high levels of skills than the average UK natives” and that employers found migrant workers “reliable and hard-working”. It reported that migrants earned on an average (pounds sterling) 424 per week last year, and as a result paid more per head in tax and VAT than Britons.
~ The Independent

Tibetan woes.

Tibet is under Chinese rule... has been since since (I think 1959). That was when a combination of military force and some nasty diplomatic arm twisting forced the spiritual and political leader of Tibet, the Dalai Lama into exile in Dharmasala in North India. These events where followed shortly by the Sino-Indian way of 1962 in which we had our noses thoroughly ground into the dust by our Chinese brethren. Those five years, I tend to think were the defining years of the decline of the Indian polity. Pandit Nehru, for all his wisdom and charisma was at heart a wide eyed romantic and he was thoroughly taken in by the Chinese cant of 'Hindu Chini bhai bhai'.. which translates to 'Hindus and Chinese are brothers'..... of course backing that up with a lot of firepower. Nehru died a disillusioned and heartbroken man. The Tibetans, the unhappy buffers between two local superpowers have lived in exile in India. The Indian government turns a blind eye to Dharmasala and does not negotiate with the Tibetan government in exile.

Bush has recently decided to honour the Dalai Lama with the Congressional Medal of Honour. This is almost two decades after the Nobel Committee decided to give the man the Nobel Prize. And quite predictably, the Chinese are very unhappy- to the extent that they have told the Prez to his face that he must not award the Dalai Lama.

Now let us do a bit of analysis: firstly, the Tibetans are in exactly the same dispossessed position as millions of refugees after partition: their homes have been taken away and they were made almost destitute. They have not assimilated with India, their host nation. They have, for the most part viewed India as a waystation and nothing more. They have contributed little, if anything to the national polity, economy and culture. One can argue that had these Tibetans ended up somewhere in the Western hemisphere, they might show greater alacrity in joining the mainstream.

Secondly, it is not in India's economic interest to piss China off. We can ill afford a confrontation with the PLA. If a few Tibetans have to live in India, they just have to suck it up. Having said that, the Arunachal is a highly disputed territory.. it would not be bad for an Indian protectorate to buffer the North East from PLA aggression.

Thirdly, this immediate event is indicative that the US has cards which it is not showing: the Chinese have been very aggressive at any talks of Taiwanese or Tibetan autonomy. It won't hurt to think about the appalling trade deficit that the US has with China.. money which flows largely into PLA coffers, thanks to slave labour factories. This trade deficit ties these two nations together in many different ways.... right now the Indian response should be to wait and watch.

Back in town.

I was at Cambridge, MA over the weekend and had a lot of work. Went on a whale watching cruise in the Boston Harbour area.... the pics should be up here and on Flickr shortly. Right now I have a bunch of spectra to process and look at.