Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Memorial Day, an eventful weekend.

Our man Joydeep had come over from Columbus. That took some doing on his part, as he is also a newbie driver (even newer than yours truly), and driving on highways with no prior experience can be quite harrowing. Anyway, I learned a vital lesson about network security on Friday: my wireless internet at home is part of the University connection: hence configured using my University login.. and it is an unsecured network. So, some evil person downloaded a song using some bittorrent software, and it showed up on my name! Anyway, I get this notice from IT telling me that I am in hot water. I explain to them that I do not use any peer to peer software and I have never even heard of the song in question. After talking to the bloke in IT, I finally understand the only possible explanation for this, and he tells me to go secure my home wireless immediately. Which I do. Hence, a word of caution to everyone reading: secure your home wireless connection: there are much worse things people do online than merely downloading songs... and if evil neighbours do this on YOUR unsecured wireless network, then you will have a difficult time explaining to the authorities that it wasn't you. SECURE YOUR WIRELESS.

Ok, having done with that, I watched 'The Devil wears Prada' with C and V, leading to a great broadening of my horizons ( I now know that cerulean is a colour). I also hung out with our man Nandi and Rachna and got into a huge discussion about what constitutes an FOB desi (me).

Saturday was sleep, and viewing Terry Gilliam's famous work 'Brazil'. I understand why he was so pissed at the studios which cut out the ending to make it optimistically audience friendly. Dystopian works ending on a happy note speak volumes of the heavy hand of MBAs, not artists. Then I went out taking pictures with C, V and A. Which was good. There is something magical about the setting sun... here I was getting supremely pissed at this couple who were being all lovely dovey on this pier just at sunset. I realised that the shades of sunset and the angle of incident sunlight would last for 15 minutes tops.. and I wanted that pier in my shot! I mean, people, go be romantic somewhere else! Don't ruin my composition! Well, all said and done, I did find some nice angles.

Then Joydeep turned up. And we adjourned to a Thai restaurant. This one had Gawd-awful service. Will avoid in future. And quite unnecessarily expensive, too. Then we went out, and got back waaay after midnight. Tried to see 'The Kingdom', but crashed halfway through. Sunday was lunch at C's place, then a drive out to Lake Eerie, a place called Sterling State Park. Nice pictures. And finally, dinner at Niks place. Between the park and dinner was a harrowing drive through the most shady, seedy district of Detroit, and a traitorous GPS which tried to send us on the bridge to Canada twice. Joydeep had no clue why I was so shit-scared. He suggested that that we stop and ask for directions at the petrol pump.. I pointed out that the windows had bulletproof shutters, ergo I was NOT stopping. This was somewhat illuminating... I had a firsthand visual impression of what people mean when they talk about the economic downfall of Michigan. We drove past what seemed like miles and miles of abandoned factories and houses. The tailspin that the car industry seems to be in shows here in a city that is largely dead. Then we get to Niks' place, where I get yelled at for not meeting her for two semesters. But we get a great dinner. All in all, a very nice weekend.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Some tips on portrait photography.

I wonder why people don't do more natural light work? Or maybe, its just that I can't afford an FL-50 flash right now, so I only do natural light... anyway, check out this viddy on some cool portraiture tips.

About being rude...

Apropos my previous post.. linked here, I must add a corrigendum: cussing in Bangla should be likened to wiping one's arse with the finest Dhakai/Benarasi/Baluchari/Tashar. See, now I can be rude and wonderfully ethnically erudite at the same time!

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

How to be rude.

Me, I can cuss rather fluently in Bengali, English, Hindi, put in a bit of Urdu, and I am working on the Tamil as well. So basically, I can be rude to people all over India. I need to try some Mandarin. But what about Europe? Well, as I mentioned, I was recently at a party where someone was telling me how to ask people to well, umm perform certain services in German. But, clearly there is a lot to learn. This compilation of the best insults from many of the Occidental languages is worth a look.

But again, cussing in my mother tongue.. Bengali is probably the most mellifluous. It is like .. wiping your arse with silk.

Monday, May 19, 2008

About Fire.

About a decade ago, Indian born filmmaker Deepa Mehta directed 'Fire'. This film is about a young lady marrying into a lower middle class Delhi family. Her husband is a sleazy git who is passionately in louvv with his Tibetan/Chinese girlfriend and makes no bones about it. His elder brother runs the family business, a local take out restaurant where everyone in the house works. Said elder brother is a devotee of some kind of guru who preaches celibacy... and he practices it! Needless to say, elder bro's wife is a terribly unhappy, deprived woman. And now, so is the younger woman. Inevitably perhaps, with no remaining choices in their barren, loveless lives, they find solace in each others' arms. Oh, my, did I say the magic word.. lesbians??

Anyway, quite expectedly, the film drew intense flak from right wingers in India. And Deepa Mehta flew higher in the adoring eyes of her western audiences with each new ridiculously profane remark made by the likes of Bal Thackerey.

But why this discussion... well, yesterday, I had invited a few people to come over to see this film. As it turned out, of the people invited; the blokes copped out, and so it ended up with me being the only standard bearer of the evil Indian Hindu patriarchy around. Now, allow me to explain again, why this entire thing happened: I am a huge fan of Nandita Das (younger bride in the film). Enough said. Well, go look at my post on 1947 Earth. I wanted to see how my accurate my memories of seeing this film at the theatre ten years or so earlier were.

As I see it now, the film carries an important social message: it is no secret that homosexuality exists in India: anyone who claims otherwise is being foolish.. kind of like that Iranian premier. Whether gay people are persecuted in India is the second question: much of our penal code comes over from the fairly Victorian British way of seeing things: hence the answer is 'yes'. True also that many Indian women are unfortunate enough to live in unfulfilled marriages: but that is something that cuts both ways.

The one important factor to note is that Deepa Mehta's direction is terribly unsubtle.. it is utterly ham handed. And did she not pay any money to the composer, Rehman? All of the soundtrack is recycled from previous Rehman films. And it works badly: the music is often loud and overwhelming.. it tells you what you are supposed to feel. Actually, more like shouts it down at you. Bottom line: the film has almost no merit as a film alone: and this is something that I would be inclined to blame the director for.. the actors are very highly talented, they have not been well used. Here a few points of view on this film.

  1. http://www.infinityfoundation.com/ECIToutpouringsframeset.htm
  2. http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/30/fire.html
  3. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/may2000/fire-m02_prn.shtml
  4. http://www.sawnet.org/news/fire.html
For someone who aspires to the highest standards of filmmaking (read Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen), Mehta has a lot to learn and a really long way to go.


Thursday, May 15, 2008

On higher education.

I came across this wonderfully written article about the other side of universal higher education.. the dilemma of preserving the quality of academia while trying to get everyone to get a college education. Makes for a fairly good read, this is, after all, an anguished appeal to a system which is broken and needs to be fixed.

Honestly though, we seem to be increasingly a society which has been built on foundations laid by some really clever people; and the rest of us are struggling to keep up. I don't have any solutions, any remedies. But wiser men have thought about these things and have spoken about them. The other face of the future: the option which does not lead The Brave New World has also been spoken of by the great Aldous Huxley. It is called Pala, and for that you have to read 'Island'; Huxley's last, and perhaps greatest work.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Talks, fillums and other things.

I went to speak at a conference at Notre Dame last weekend. it was great fun.. the talk was well received, which was all good. In fact, I had been quite terrified of being grilled by hordes of angry biochemists. Quite to the contrary, it went across very well.

A few points to note, though: I use open office because it transits almost seamlessly between by Linux and my Mac. Go OO!! (very few people will understand the hidden connotation). But what really gets me is when evil video systems fail to cooperate with my Mac, just 'cos they are all Windows optimized and evil. Also, I tend to backup my presentations in .ppt, .odp, .sda, .pdf and .jpg formats, and keep them in two separate emails, and on a disc and on a flash drive (which is formatted to be readable across any OS). People may think that I am being paranoid. Far from it. Things have a way of collapsing when you least expect them to. Hence backup as much as possible. I hold true to this, and I think so should others. People who walk around without taking precautions are just asking for trouble. Having said that, I probably get more than my share of trouble in this context anyway.. but then, I try hard to solve those problems.. sort of like Rincewind.. I include here, for your edification and amusement, an excerpt from the wikipedia page on Rincewind, "In fact, Rincewind has the dubious privilege of being the Chosen of the Lady, the Discworld's most mysterious goddess. It is for this reason that he is constantly finding himself embroiled in unpleasant situations and coming out more-or-less on top. However if he ever realised this, much less acted as though nothing could seriously harm him, then she would instantly lose interest. Besides, having the favour of the Lady, in addition to being unreliable, also means having the very reliable enmity of Fate. People have said that the gods smile on Rincewind (due to his continued existence despite all odds.) Rincewind feels that, although he knew they were definitely doing something to him, he had never considered it to be smiling."

Ayan Paul, my friend from collegeis working on his PhD in high energy physics at ND. We got to hang out after a really long time.. which was awesome, as we had some six years worth of catching up. Ayan took me to this party hosted by a bunch of phys/math people. Awesome party.. the kind I have missed for way too long.. and proceeded to introduce me to his friends as '.. he used to be a physicist'. Hmmm... Anyway, I learned a little about this bloke's work: logic theory, I cracked, and got laughs for a few Erdos jokes, and I learned how to be very rude in German. Altogether, time wonderfully spent.

And then, I got back.. and happened to watch David Lynch's very very strange film 'Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with me'. Now, Mike, our media library bloke once gave me Blue Velvet to see, because 'I was seeing to many strange films', as he put it. Why would you do that to someone, unless you wanted to weird him to hell and back? David Lynch paints a very surrealistic, yet beautiful canvas filled with strong, arresting, performances. In Blue Velvet, Isabella Rosallini's performance is lovely.. yet so utterly weird. Fire Walk is stranger still... and this will take another couple of views to go down properly.

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Yeah, so what was I saying now..?


Nandita Das.. I have been slightly gaga over this particular actress ever since.. Rockford. which was, my, oh, my, almost a decade ago. So we (the kids and yours truly) ended up seeing 1947 Earth last night. This film is by Deepa Mehta (the series being Fire, Earth, Water), so naturally we had quite high expectations. It starts of small... in fact the camera work is quite shoddy at times. One gets the impression that Mehta had brilliant ideas, but was quite slipshod in their execution. And the DVD print was quite crummy too (where did the AADL get their hands on it?), with lousy sound... which was a great pity, given that the soundtrack is by none other than the great Rehman. But somehow, the inchoate pieces come together in a weirdly compelling fashion, so at the end of the film, one is somewhat .. shaken.

But enough about the film, this post was supposed to be about Nandita Das (who, in fact, reminds of someone, now that I think about it).. and how Nandita Das is really lovely and all that. Well, you know what.. let me put in this picture to make my point!

Now I know why I am so bloody depressed...

I tried to post this yesterday...

but I got a 502 server error or something.. which means my compadres in CS are not doing their job properly! Anyway, yet another blog about how it is nice to be in CS and not nice to be in anything else... read this and repent, ye all!

Thursday, May 01, 2008

See what I mean about Facebook?

I mean, seriously, people.. do I really want to compare movie tastes with you..? You sods probably think that Angie Jolie is the best actress since.. umm Ingrid Bergman. Then there was the brilliant superpoke application.. with all due respect, I do not appreciate you wanting to wanting to throw sheep at me. Stop sending me lame Facebook apps.. its an awesome tool to keep in touch, announce birthday and graduation party's and put up pictures of the same. Just stop it with the 'buy my friends for 10$' shite!

See this viddy.. this is what Facebook will be like if it turns into life...

The Indian baby dropping ritual.

Read and view here.