(Just Another) Inglourious Movee

Saw The Inglourious Basterds yesterday. What a crappy movie!! I mean, what's wrong with Quentin Tarantino, post Kill Bill? No spoilers here, but its a kind of story we all wish we could do in reality - as an Indian, I would so wish we had a crack team of vigilante type commandos killing Aurangzeb or some of the terrible tyrants that ruled us. So much for wishful thinking, but wtf? A movie that shows the clinical, ruthless Nazis and Gestapos as clumsy duds who could not wipe out a rag-tag team of American soldiers? While its true that there were some serious security breaches during the final years of the Reich, they were carried out by some of the most trusted members of such organizations as the SS, the Abwehr and the like. During the War years, even his close confidantes could not access Hitler - he was always in one of his hideouts such as the Wolfsschanze. And here you have him moving around as if he was a puppet despot of a banana republic or more a mafiosi. A Nazi movie - and without some samples of their atrocities? Not done. You cannot help but think of the Nazi's as bumbling fools.

But Christoph Waltz is such a fine actor. Wow! The whole movie hinged on his character and he played it to the T, as Tarantino himself admitted. Diane Kruger looked strange - quite old, but could have been the make-up. Brad Pitt's role was fairly small. It is basically Waltz's movie through and through...hmm, a damp squib. Wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Back from the hiatus!..Lots of tooning these days..:)

I am back after a two month break! Had been a rather busy time - moved to a new pad, got it painted and renovated, went to Delhi and bought some decorative stuff to spruce up the place. Thanks to Shveta, the place sure looks good! The last 10 days also saw Putun becoming a ma and we becoming uncles and aunts. While every married man automatically gets addressed as an uncle or an aunt in India (which is so irritating and unflattering), it feels rather nice to be a real uncle.

Nilu gave me an amazing dump of videos, games and utilities this time. I spent the last weekend watching some of those movies: a hilarious Will Ferrell starrer called the Land of the Lost made my day last Saturday. Very funny and also quite a fresh take on sci-fi concepts, with Mr Rick Marshall, the "quantum paleontologist" going places... a must watch! And then my favorite toons from the same Hanna Barbera - Iwao Takamoto stock: The Perils of Penelope Pitstop. With those rollicking Anthill Mob, their sidekick car Chuggaboom , the idiotic duo Bully brothers and one of the funniest villains in toon-dom, Sylvester Sneakley aka The Hooded Claw. Paul Lynde's dubbing of this funny guy is just too amazing. What actually puts these old cartoons in a very different league is that they used to tap the funnybone really well with the funny voices and really absurd storylines. So, be it the wheezy laughs of Muttley or the sniggers of the Hooded Claw, they made you laugh. Anime and Hentai/Manga toons are cool from a visual perspective - they are too smartly done and are serious, but there are times when you just want to put your brains to rest and become a kid - nothing beats the old Hanna Barbera stuff....hmm, back to work!

In a retro mood..

Spent the last few days, among other things, digging up old Rafi songs. Got hooked on to Kahin Bekhayal Hokar (Teen Deviyan, Music:SD Burman) and some of his rare non-film ghazals - Do Ghadi Baitho, Shaam Ke Deepak Jale and Tum Saamne Baithi Raho..lovely tracks. I never thought I would ever find Shaam Ke Deepak and lo! stumbled upon it on Youtube. Picked up the lyrics and the tune and have been humming that, and Kahin Bekhayal Hokar since the weekend. Also listened to some old SDB composed tracks such as Tere Bin Soonay from Meri Surat Teri Aankhen...Rafi is just amazing..While the lyrics of most of the ghazals and songs could seem ordinary, if one could just focus on Rafi's voice and his style, it seems out of this world. It seems so tough emoting his voice or even his mood and energy - very upbeat even when singing ghazals...

Listened to some Mike and The Mechanics after ages

Over this weekend, I was on a nostalgia trip, listening to all things old - soft ballads, rock anthems, the works...fished out two of the Mike and The Mechanics greatests - Living Years and All I need is a Miracle. Still sound so good and ofcourse, quite refreshing after listening to them after some 15-20 years. I also listened to a lot of Eagles and Don Henley in particular - Learn to be still, Tequila Sunrise (like Glen Frey too), Boys of Summer, End of Innocence, Love will keep us alive, New York Minute, among others..today I would download Mono (not the Japanese instrumental rock band but the british duo trip-hop act that churned out "Life in Mono" about 11 years back. I like trip-hop at times - used to listen to a lot of that when I was going through a rather depressive phase: Tricky, Portishead, Massive Attack, Everything But the Girl, etc)....wish last.fm or Pandora could play their free radios this part of the world (sigh!)...

Lexulous is to Scrabble what Mafia Wars is to..Dope Wars?

These days I play Mafia Wars off and on over FB (Facebook to the uninitiated) - a very addictive game involving various "mafia gangs" (basically your Facebook buddies who have also signed in into the game). That, and my favorite all-time game Lexulous (not over FB, but the game site www.lexulous.com. The FB version is not timed and can take ages to finish, esp. while playing across timezones) and therefore is not a lot of fun for people living outside the States. There are some truly cool features about the FB Lexulous though - stats, bingo history, personal scratchpad, graph, etc...but nothing like a short and sweet game on the original game site. Infact, I realized I was faring much better against strong FB players because of my "honed" gaming skills on lexulous.com.

So, coming straight to the point, Lexulous is the (in)famous variant of the classic board(and now also online) word game, Scrabble. I love both of these games. I also loved a nifty little app called Dope Wars ages back - where you "buy and sell" all kinds of drugs on the streets of NY, LA, London, etc, earn tons of dough, launder it, bank it and become a "rich ganglord". So when I got caught into the hype called Mafia Wars over FB, I was pleasantly surprised. Except for the bells and whistles (armors, vehicles, buying and selling properties to make more money),the feel of the game seems so similar to Dope Wars..Apparently there are other apps out there that are similar if not identical to these games. So....how does anyone guard oneself (one's intellectual property)in the world of games? A slight twist - cosmetic or added bells and whistles - seem to be all that you would need to launch your own little online game. Is that it? Well, not quite. Even when the net is crawling with millions of variants of tetris and pacman (there's a pacwoman variant too!), card games galore - and now classic board games like Scrabble, Monopoly, Battleship, etc, very few actually catch the attention of people in droves. Lexulous and Mafia Wars are some of the lucky ones. Lexulous has managed to outwit Scrabble online in terms of hits, while Mafia Wars claims to have 4 million users accessing it in a month (atleast in June'09)! Incredible! Ofcourse, its not just luck in the virtual world that makes you tick. The interface, the user-friendliness, and that x-factor that only an avid game enthusiast/designer can build in into the game. These are some of the things that separate the men from the boys I guess...

"Third World" Aviation risks

Another plane crash in less than a month - again, with a French connection and involving an Airbus. Apparently the model A310 is banned in EU since 2007. What bugs me no end is that while everyone talked about the AF447 crash earlier this month purely from a scientific or humanitarian angle, leading papers immediately after the Yemenia A310 crash started commenting on the "risks that third world aviation poses". Why? Just because kins of the victims can rip off airlines for millions when its a "First World" aviation disaster like the one earlier last month, while the second one happened involving a plane belonging to a third world nation? Could someone please ask the kins of those who died whether it makes any difference to them or the dead? Is this truly the second decade of the 21st Century? Or perhaps we really are too prejudiced to realize that we have not changed much from our greatgrandparents...

MJ is dead!

MJ is no more- no, its not Mary Jane of the Spiderman fame....kids of the current generation, in this age of the ubiquitous digital music and piracy, may not know who Michael Jackson was - but for those like me who grew in the '80s and '90s do not know of a bigger phenomemon in the world of pop than Wacko Jacko. I cannot forget how my sis used to drive us nuts day in and day out playing Bad all the time - Dirty Diana, The Way you Make Me Feel, Smooth Criminal..I hated those shrieks and grunts that she swore by. They, and George Michael's Faith were the flavor of the season in the summer of '87-88 in Delhi. We were after all a family raised on a staple of Indian classical, old Indian film music, western country (basically Jim Reeves, Glen Campbell, John Denver and Merle Haggard) and The Beatles, our musical gods. Every school used to have a Michael Jackson look-alike breaking into a breakdance in every Annual Competition those days. Later, through radio and hand-me-down cassettes, I got to hear some older Michael Jackson albums, and also some Jackson 5 numbers. And then I realised that this weird guy was a precocious kid who had thrilled the world many many times over than a lot of pop and rock icons before him. I loved Off the Wall and Thriller. It was such an original sound from the noise of punk rock that the early '80s was all about. That, or the spillover of the music of the '70s that passed as music of the early '80s - the Olivia Newton Johns, Sheena Eastons, ABBAs (though one of my faves), etc. MJ and Madonna were the colossi of the '80s. 41 million copies sold of Thriller - go eat your heart out!

MJ's '90s was not very hot. Dangerous, History, Blood on the Dance Floor...only the ardent MJ worshippers could take all that. It was not original. There were a lot of new genres available and thanks to the opening up of the music market in India, we could access a lot of world music. Even in his home turf, his heydays were all but over.

The last decade was very tragic indeed for the ageing celeb. It is something the kids of today's generation may be aware of. The notoriety, the shame, the fall. Allegations of pedophilia, of hideous facial transformations...everybody took potshots at the "King of Pop". His friends that pockmarked his Dangerous album jacket - Liz Taylor, Macaulay Culkin (who Macaulay, by the way?) - everyone knowing him started distancing himself or herself from him and his now infamous Neverland ranch. Then the once in a blue moon news of his trial, his selling his estates and moving over to Bahrain, his conversion to Islam, his n'th breakup/divorce.

The most tragic thing that I read today, as I read the numerous obits on the net singing paeans on that guy (after assassinating his character a zillion times over in the past few years), was that the poor ol' weird guy was living in a rented place. A person who was almost a billionaire a few years back had lost it all.

Its sad. But then, thats the way it is. RIP Wacko.

News of a plane crash: of fake photos and the net..

Truly, while a lot of people including Thomas Friedman talk of the internet as a flattener, making the world a flat place where there is no First World and a Third World (well, that is a very contentious topic, since as long as there is civilization and humanity, I believe there would always be inequality. Some would always claim to be Ubermenschen and some would always be treated as subhumans), its very difficult to accept anything the net dishes out as truth. Again, there are forces and anti-forces at work to ensure no one gets to know what the real picture is - perhaps there are low profile sites that are struggling to keep themselves clean - but its really difficult. The other day, I received a chain mail on an Iranian kid being punished with amputation of his limbs for stealing something petty (very Oliver Twistian tale)...and on googling I found many sites debating on humanitarian grounds around those pictures. And then some sites unfolded the fraud - that the pictures propagated were actually just a few snapshots of a series of pictures covering a street act in Iran (or perhaps some other mid-eastern nation) and that the kid is actually a street actor...Then the latest pictures purportedly showing the last minutes of the ill-fated Air France 447 crash from the inside, taken by an intrepid photographer (turned out they were snapshots of an episode of the drama "Lost"). An LA Times front cover some time back had an Iraq photo that turned out to be fake later (the paper fired the photographer, perhaps because he was caught)..so, how much of genuine stuff are we really getting? A newspaper atleast retracts from an earlier publishing if people start questioning the content and tries to ensure it gets its facts "correct"...

These days, whenever I receive a mail with some weird looking photos, the first thing I do is google up the key words in the mail and the word "fake". Not surprisingly, I get a full page of Google results.

Hot sultry summer days and cricket mania

Its almost 11PM and still feels like its noon! After spending the day sleeping and then going to the mall (a mall trip is oh so stressful with the roads choc-a-bloc with cars, humanity and cattle, and the building itself teeming with people more interested in windowshopping), I am playing scrabble online and watching the T20 World Cup match between India and England..even the AC refuses to cool the room in this heat..:"(

Interesting term I learned today: Parallel Computing

Guess I must be sounding quite ignorant and stupid, but I had never realized the new challenges the software world is facing as the Intels and AMDs of the world move to a new paradigm (not new actually), of manycore processors. Apparently, Andy Grove had coined the term "Software Spiral" (didn't know he had coined any other famous term besides "Inflection Point"..:)) to explain the relationship between chip manufacturers and software writers - that as the processing power of chips goes on increasing, newer softwares are written to exploit the increased computational capabilities. However a few years back, that relationship gave way. Till then, the concept of computation was akin to a single lane road that was being widened by the chip makers to support higher processing demands. But apparently, they all realized that their chips were generating far too much heat - for all the transistors that they were trying to fit into a single piece of silicon - and even causing them to melt in certain cases (can imagine. My 256MB NVIDIA 8600 GT itself never stays below 67-70 deg Celsius at any time). The chip makers had reached a "Power Wall". So they started adding "lanes" to the highway - by adding multiple cores to a single block. And thats where the "Software Spiral" ended. Till date, major IT powerhouses are struggling to exploit the potential of manycore and have not been very effective. Apparently, by late 2010, the world of personal computing may see 8 core processors in the market (and I was surprised to know iPhone has 3 processors!) and therefore there is frantic race in the IT world these days to be a first mover in this area...

An amazing trip to Shirdi

Two weeks back we had gone to Shirdi..took a sleeper "Volvo" and travelled overnight to the holy town..The trip was just amazing - we put up at a hotel called Kalpataru right infront of the gates of the Shrine. The 100 or so yard strip of road in front of the Shrine is the thoroughfare of Shirdi - choc-a-bloc with tourists, shop keepers, beggars and squatters. But the best part was that we were graced with two darshans to Sai Baba's samadhi, and multiple visits to other places in the complex, including the Chavadi, Dwarkamai Mosque, Lendi Baug and nearby buildings, etc.

We reached Shirdi on Saturday morning, at about 8.30AM. The journey was good - couldn't have asked for more. The bus was like a couple of double beds on wheels - very comfortable. And with multiple stops all the way, we couldn't have asked for more.

On reaching Shirdi, we took a rickshaw to Kalpataru, and waited for a few hours to check-in. Got to know that there are daily power outages of 6-7 hours there (and perhaps across most of Maharashtra). Anyhow, nothing could have been done, and we cared less. We left the confines of the hotel in a few hours and started for a darshan. I had been to Shirdi once before, but didn't remember much about it. So, we joined the long queue that crawled slowly through the large hall that has barricades to keep the queue in order, and that has episodes from Baba's life adorning the walls (everything in Marathi though). After about an hour, we reached the end-point of the hall, only to take a flight of stairs down to a basement and then a flight upstairs leading up to the Sanctum. The main hall housing Baba's samadhi is adorned with gold and silver, and in the middle of the wall on the opposite side of the entrance is Baba's majestic statue. In front of the statue is Baba's tomb, and then two priests chanting prayers as devotees pass by, touching Baba's tomb, offering their prashad or donating some money..the exit is quick. The best part is - you can feel His presence in the place, and infact in whole blessed town. After all, He took alms on the streets of Shirdi, watered the plants of Lendi Baug, leaned on the walls of Dwarkamai, slept in the Chavadi and died in Dikshit Wadi.

After the darshan, we went to the complex housing a museum (we saw the Kaafani and the kurta Baba wore that still has stains, some of his cheelums, a grindstone He used to make flour, and other objects of His daily use...amazing), went to a bookstore and bought some books (I bought Baba's biography in Urdu), went to Lendi Baug and to the well from which He used to  draw water and water the flower plants and shrubs he had planted.

We stayed for much of Sunday as well - some of our friends were to join us that day - and then went for a darshan again (this time, there was no queue and it seemed as if Baba was beckoning us and cleared the entire path for us!). 

We caught the bus back to Indore late Sunday night. The return was eventful as some of our reserved seats had been resold by some unscrupulous agent. Oh yes, that happens in India sometimes. But it was a blessed experience and we are thankful to God , to Baba for everything that we've got.

Losing weight at snail's pace..:-(

It seems oh so easy - movie stars keep doing that all the time and Teleshopping folks keep showing those shapeless beings transforming into handsome men and women - but a 1.5 mile treadmill walk or a 2 mile cross-trainer trek burns only a 100 calories...that, and some diet control..and yet I have lost only 2 kilos in 11 days...:-(..drat, and double drat!

Joined a Fitness Club!

Yeah, Yeah! Suddenly I have become a Weight Watcher, conscious of my sedentary life and a need to shape up! I have enrolled into a weight reduction program at a neighborhood gym that includes some power cardio exercises, sauna, physiotherapy and massaging. And ofcourse, a dietician who would be advising me on what to eat and not. For all the fatty food I had at the McD's, Chillies, Arby's, Papa Johns', etc, its taking quite a lot to get rid of the lard I collected. And to top it all, to sit infront of a computer 12 hours a day! Hope all that changes! Lets keep our fingers crossed for this guy..:-\

Twitter, Last.fm these days!

Twitter has taken the world by storm - and I guess its for people who don't get time to personally interact or socialize a lot, are always on the move and could only thumb a line through their smartphones. I have started twitting too - downloaded this nifty app called Tweetdeck that runs on the ubersleek Adobe Internet Runtime (AIR). So, while thumbing even a line of message seems oh-so arduous to me, I did not mind keying in a few tweets through the web. Oh, and another category (thats growing by the day these days) of people would love the tool - those who do not have the patience to scour through pages of blogs..it is fun and worth checking out (I feel like an old man these days in anycase, catching on trends when they are already very commong, passe or sun-setting)..
And the other thing - Last.fm. Thanks to the app available for my Nokia N95, could try it first on the phone. Now, my notebook. Reminds me of Pandora. But Pandora's dead for me now - I loved it so and now it is confined only to the US..makes sense though. Through the weekend, I tried out a lot of new age artists similar to Sarah McLachlan, Hevia, Clannad, Loreena McKennitt and the likes. Turned out there are so many artists in quaint scandinavian and far-eastern locations producing such top class music. Nilu usually is on top of genres closer home such as Goa Trance, etc, but for me a lot of it is new. The radio picked up some cool Karunesh, Prem Joshua, etc too!..would try some of it this week too. Can do a lot of work with such relaxing music playing..

Saw a flag saying "Objectionable stuff" in my blog

Whoa! Objectionable stuff? In my blog? Well, thats the hazard of using the net - you never know who hits you and why. Is it the talk about war-time Germany? Is it about a tainted company which was in the news recently?..Anyways, such flags make me wonder - how do journalists operate? Anyways, hope the good samaritan who marked that flag on my blog would be kind enough to step by and let me know, through a comment or a mail...

Ideas to Icons

Got to know over the weekend that a colleague and good friend, Sajal, won the Young Manager's Award instituted by the Indore Management Association. The annual presentation competition had as its theme "Ideas to Icons" and Sajal made a very innovative pitch - coming out with his own model combining Innovation with Character and Trust. Among other stuff, the presentation talked about Satyam (Idea to Icon to (bad) Idea??), Mr Obama, etc. What really made me think about this presentation was my subsequent discussion with a friend today who still works for Satyam, as a senior executive. Obviously outraged and bitter about the whole scam that has so badly shaken up Corp India, esp. the Indian IT industry, some of these guys are contemplating switching tracks through higher education - getting another MBA degree - possibly from a good US school. Living and wading through the current morrass in the industry is quite painful, especially when you carry the baggage of a tainted company. Perhaps we could see a significant surge in MBA admissions this year. Who knows? I guess it is a good time to go back to school and look for ideas.

Trying out Adobe Contribute

I am creating this blog using Adobe Contribute, an Adobe application that directly links to a blog or website server and lets you add images, flash files or Adobe pdfs to the page. A good way to spend the weekend. Its a little nippy today here and we just wrapped up a game of Lexulous, the Scrabble variant thats oh so addictive..