asheem joins the ocean above

Indian Ocean lost Asheem Chakravarty to cardiac failure in the wee hours of Christmas morning. I can't believe I was shaking the great man's hand backstage when the band visited Atlanta for the very first time in 2007. He epitomised the joie de vivre of the band and grabbed all the attention as he effortlessly balanced taans and taals, singing with gusto while churning out rhythmic gifts on the tabalaa. Watching Leaving Home will now be even more poignant. दूब गया है शाम का तारा. RIP Asheem. The ocean will never quite feel the same again.

innovations in city planning

Zebra crossing, India style (TM): As part of the latest wave of converting roads to one-ways without enough planning, the civic authorities rolled out the most intellectually baffling version of a zebra crossing ever known to civilised man. Here's how it works: once a suitable spot is chosen (using brown magic of some kind), the familiar strip of white stripes is painted over it across the width of the road. At this point, the most obvious next step would be to set up a pair of traffic lights, one light on either side of the road, so that pedestrians could cross when needed while vehicles waited for the light to go green. This is where the immensely gifted pan-chewing minds occupying the various administrative structures in the city unleashed their gift upon the tax-paying residents. They created a speed breaker just before the zebra crossing and pocketed the money for the lights. Lest you start screaming in administrative angst, let me remind you that this ensures compliance with the prevailing state of affairs: a constant race between vehicles and pedestrians for a slice of the road. The speed breaker is a supreme stroke of genius – try sitting with a splitting headache in a rickshaw. By the time the journey's done, your head will probably feel like an Olympic race track. Did I neglect to mention that each speed breaker has its own design? (watch out for the squiggly, the ramp-walking camel, the war veteran and the inverted pothole)

how to destroy the experience of watching a movie on the glass teat

It's a pity that no movie channel learns from Turner Classic Movies, which, IMNSHO, is the only channel that understands its target audience. Everyone else is out to get money from advertising and subject your average middle-class viewer to movie frames decorated with enough logos and tickers to put the Dubai videotapes of yore to shame. There are a couple of differences between the equivalence class of AMC, TNT and their ilk and the equivalence class of the South Asian hatchet job-men (SET Max, 9X, Sahara Filmy, Zee Cinema): the breaks seem longer in IST and the number of unique ads is severely low (in other words, repetition is the "need of the hour"). Here's a simple test: pick one of the South Asian movie channels and watch what transpires for about 40 minutes. If you're lucky you could get by with just one break; if you're unlucky, be prepared for two. Count the number of repeated ads. Don't be surprised to get something greater than 0. This is how bad things are.

cherubooty

Cable TV advertising finds a new low (no pun intended) by treating hapless viewers to the sight of a baby's bouncing naked behind (the product is Huggies Dry Comfort). Gratuitous (3 shots, I say!), shocking (the jaw very nearly becomes part of the wa.Daa sambhar) and exploitative of the gluteus minimus. Where are the taste pundits? Where are those who man (or woman) the ramparts of network decency? Surely a naked butt is a naked butt!? Or is there some unwritten law inherited from the yellowed railway rulebook about exemptions for children under a certain age? Walking the ramp in the emperor's clothes is not quite the same as free travel. Where's my uncensored morning coffee?

PS: Was presented with a shot of an infant derriere in an ad for Mamy Poko. Is this the new secret for high TRPs?

ads and Ishqiya

A Taaza ad makes a great case for the belief that drinking a cup at the right time can give you great ideas for a change in career.

A Colgate MaxFresh ad has us believe that the breath it confers is enough to make a hot ticket attendant horny. (they owe a lot to the Axe elevator ads)

A FasTrack Move On ad has the guy talking to his webcam use the word s*xy

Why, then, does the censor board have a problem with the Ishqiya promo?

Do these people even watch the shocking dross that already runs on television?

just jhaag

written just after sitting through an episode of यहाँ मैं घर घर खेली and पवित्र रिश्ता

• Alok Nath is alive and kicking! Good grief! The man was around rinsing emotions when we got our first television set; ThespiaNath seems to have perfected a new "bhaarii" tone and now wanders about with a thevar moustache, a brooding drooping anti-smile and a set of facial expressions that make you think he's trying to recover from having consumed a dose of laxative that is well past its expiry date
(Of course it took me a while to see the most obvious reason he showed up in this show -- it's a Rajshri production; duh!)

• The script (a grandiose word for this enterprise) and dialogues were written in bullet time and filmed at 100 FPS; nothing else can account to about 15 minutes spent on close-ups, shots featuring a camera trying to adjust its focus and preposterous wide-eyed reaction shots


• The paucity of useful material is quite evident when the most significant thing that happens in 20 minutes (surrounded by zooms in, cuts to XCUs featuring gnashing teeth, appearances of faces in slow motion) is a slap. It's not a simple, effective slap. It's a completely fake exercise in sleight of hand


• These soaps owe a lot to theatre: how else can you explain the expressionist faces that support voiceovers?


• The only lighting scheme employed is what we used to refer to in college theatre as "doing it with generals" -- this means that all you do is turn on every light you have, ignoring the difference between spots and foot lights and you end up with everyone looking like a fresh candle with nary a shadow around; there's no sense of mise en scène; clearly no one looked at something like The X Files to understand how useful lighting can be


• Although it's clear that it's a work of fiction, soaps like this make an even stronger assertion: it's impossible for anyone to behave like this in real life.

itsy bits and phrases

Someone at ADP seems to have been sending website development work to IT yutzes with questionable chops in the English grammar department. How else can one explain an FAQ item titled I clicked a pay date and my statement isn't displaying. One wonders what the statement should display? Its blooming rear? Itself? Its innards? Bravery? Cowardice?

The next time you explore someone's Picasa Web Albums after following some URL in an email, look at that innocent line below each photograph: Sign in to like this photo. It's an interesting way of trying to appear friendlier than the average note on web pages to sign in to drop comments and the like, but it has this vibe of Big Brotherly love in it.

When Sears prompts you for a user name and password for your online profile, there's a cute hint below the text box for the password warning you that Your password is cAsE SeNsItIve. It's cute but it gives me the feeling I get when I read chatspeak.

a sight to raise you up (on the last day)

I love the many annoyances of Vista: from the beautiful dialog boxes that tell you nothing in eye-pleasing fashion to the extra barricades laid to make even an evening walk seem like a hop and skip in Purgatory; from the refusal to come to terms with whatever works to the insistence of let even the simplest task be left unencumbered. After having nearly given myself a homemade Ghajini cut (right down to Aamir's evil Spock-ian sneer of constipated rage), I can only resign myself to chuckles at the silly creativity in the error message I saw most often while I tried to get a laptop to understand what "being on the network" meant (it was only a reboot that rendered this melange of metal incapable of sending its packets across over the fence of the modem to named parties on the outside -- that I can ping it on the local network is an example of black humour in Class C). Some creative dunderhead decided to exacerbate the pain of having to switch to Administrative mode by giving it a phrase of its own. To see this phrase, all you have to do is run something like "ipconfig /flushdns" in the command window you managed to open after searching high and low for a shortcut. Since you didn't bother to use the intuitive "Run as Administrator" option in the context menu, you will now see the beatific message the requested operation requires elevation.

This suggests several possible things: perhaps administrative commands can only be run in a rarefied environment much like that in hill stations or up in the stratosphere or perhaps even in space (where no one can hear you installing updates); perhaps such commands require a bust uplift; perhaps one needs to be in an elevator going up to the penthouse when one attempts to effect a clearing of the DNS cache; perhaps one needs to be free of all vestiges of the disgust that one has been feeling so far -- flush with a smile.

Just give me some unbleached bathroom tissue instead.

PS: if anyone knows how to fix my problem, drop me a line. Until then don't even tell me that Windows 7 is better. Escaping with multiple fractures is likely to be preceived as better than death, but it ain't holdin' no candle to whooshing through life without a scratch.

accidental people

How does it feel to realise one day that you've missed the abuse of with in the United States? How does it feel when you don't understand why people stopped visiting other people and choose instead to visit with them? When did visiting with start getting used for the "visitee" instead of the sidekick? Your brother no longer visits your aunt with you; he visits with your aunt (and you are presumably left playing games on the Wii at home).

If you thought that was bad, consider what happened to meeting people. You may no longer meet with an accident; your efforts are no longer permitted to meet with failure or success. This is because people no longer merely meet their friends; they meet with them. Friends are accidents; friends are epitomes of success or failure. More is right. Less is ancient. Any efforts to thwart this winning streak of incorrect lard will be met with failure.

now it's 7: husband one locked in

If the buzz is to be given credence, Vishal's next will be called Seven (or 7) and not 7 Husbands. Given the insurmountable strength of David Fincher's moody piece on the Internet, one can see problems when using Google to find out more. The buzz also tells us that Vishal has, after much persistence, signed up the first of the seven: Mohanlal. Given Vishal's track record, this might undo the damage done by RGV's fiery in-sippy-d flick and bolster the ouevre established with Company. Now muster your best Malayali impression and repeat after me लोहा गरम है.

[Cross-posted on the Vishal Bhardwaj blog]

geekish crapspeak

Apache POI 3.5 hit the stands last month (woo hoo!) and infoQ had a nice post about this that talks about the implications of and concerns about Microsoft's participation in the support for OOXML. Near the middle of the article we get a quote from Vijay Rajagopalan, Microsoft's technical lead for the POI project. The quote begins with this interesting line (my emphasis):

Enabling developers to accomplish their common tasks with OpenXML file formats is our highest order bit.

Those of you who managed to make sense of the binary world of computers will have, no doubt, figured out that highest order bit is nothing but the most significant bit, which happens to be the bit in the position of greatest value. The number 2 gets the highest power when you get the highest order bit or the most significant bit of a binary number. In plain English (a variant on its way to extinction) this means that "Enabling developers to blah blah blah" is the most important thing for them (Now why didn't you say so?!). I can't help thinking of signed binary numbers -- the most significant bit acquires veto status, flipping the number above or below 0. Does that imply vacillation? Or "constantly changing priorities?"

On an unrelated note, does anyone know why you would want to call a zip file an installer?

welcome to thackerayville?

Since I'm not a newsmonger, the bit of news about Raj Thackeray's Misguided Nationalist Scum showing up to throw a tantrum at MAMI 2009 in Bombay a few days ago escaped my eyes until a random search for news about Anurag Kashyap took me a video on Youtube. Herr Kashyap is quoted as using the adjective अश्लील for HeWhoInsistsOnSpeakingOnlyInMarathiButEndsUpUsingEnglishOccasionally. The tantrum was because the MNS had decided that a certain Danish film at the festival was obscene. This is a case of sticky fingers, of course unless the confedracy of dunces had decided to pronounce judgement based on random selection.

What came as a big surprise for me was my inability to find a news article that contained the title of this "guilty" film. "Danish film" made me think of Lars von Trier's latest film Antichrist, which has been the critical hot potato this year and which also qualified for a summarily dismissive stamp of "obscene." The screening schedule tells me that the film was on display. Should I just connect the dots or did I just miss the definitive news article?

bollywood RFC

Real-life beau Saif Ali Khan and peep Kareena Kapoor are reportedly turning up the steam in Kurbaan -- the audience draw coefficient of them as an on-screen pair has been augmented by flashes of skin (don't believe the rumours -- Ms KK has already shown her bare back in Omkara, which also starred Saif Ali Khan). The CD bears an interesting soundtrack from Salim-Sulaiman mixing rock -- Vishal Dadlani returns after singing for the Merchant brothers in 8 X 10 Tasveer, Sufi, hindustani classical (puriyaa dhaanashrii, unless I'm mistaken). The photographs adorning the sleeves of the CD tell you that things are going to be bolly-dark, bolly-bloody (some love stories have blood on them -- the blood of mosquitoes swatted on the storyboards, no doubt). It's that desaturated colour scheme with an emphasis on the sanguine.

But the promo bears the real goods. You have Om Puri's voiceover to tell you that he's probably a terrorist and this is slated to be another film in the "Bollywood 9/11" genre (see also: New York). Skip the skin and watch the captions (the scarlet fetish continues). The best one works not just as a warning to the cautious reader but also, if you think abbreviations, a tip of the hat to computer science: Feel The Pain.

deus ex musica: kollywood kenodoxy

It is time now, O faithful followers of Kollykrap, to return to uncovering the gems of Englishkaran. We turn our lens to two other people on the cast roster. The first is la femme Madhumitha (for those unfamiliar with the South Indian fetish for the 'h' as a suffix, please read this is Madhumita). She plays a lass named Sandhya who bears the conventional undiscovered great voice (aka Shreya Ghoshal). For the first half of the film, she's also our heroine. She happens to sing a song surrounded by pastoral props and that song manages to make it to a CD that plays in the car of a famous music director named Deva played, dear attentive reader, by Deva himself. Deva is also the second person, who interests us today, because he also happens to be the music director of the film; put another way, dear reader with a nose of navel-gazing nods, Deva gets to pretend to be impressed by a voice carrying a tune that he composed. It comes with complete orchestration, of course -- something that, in the world of desii-wood, you get for free (especially in farms, fields, jungles and any other place that was chosen to host a ProTools exhibition). Of course, Deva appears pleased with the discovery and makes an attempt to sign the lass up (She don't look like no Shreya Ghoshal, but she shoor sounds like 'er).

Now, with your permission, dear bearer of a patient pair of eyes, I will leap across the intermission to the tail of the film, where, to our bountiful befuddlement, we find that the lass has managed to flit past all obstacles and made it to the recording studio to sing (gasp!) another of Deva's compositions. This song, dear anxious ones, is what you have been waiting for. Here is the complete unadulterated dump of the subtitles accompanying the fictitious warbling in a fictitious world.

oh friend! oh friend!
my dear friend!
touch the peak sans wings!
oh friend! oh friend!
my dear friend!
touch the peak sans wings!
oh friend! oh friend!
my dear friend!
bundle the sorrow and
throw into the fire
moon doesn't have legs
still, isn't it walking in the sky?
clouds doesn't have hands
still, isn't it swimming?
streams doesn't have a mouth
but don't they sing?
oh friend! oh friend!
my dear friend!
touch the peak sans wings!
without curves
can we climb mountains?
flowers smile even
if they live for a day
don't the kites fly sans wings?
waterfall doesn't bother for
the fall and yet it smiles
oh friend! rubber tree has
many wounds on its body
oh friend! it secretes milk
despite the wounds
whatever vanishing in the west
doesn't mean death
east has never forgotten to brighten
the stitching needle
has only one eye
it doesn't feel for its disability
but it stitches clothes
troubles are not thorns but
a ladder to a forthcoming success
even if a torch is held upside down
it would glow upwards
no heights sans sorrows
rainbow won't be visible
if you bow down
make a floor design
after the full stop
sleep with one eye until you succeed
oh friend! oh friend!
my dear friend!
touch the peak sans wings!
oh friend! oh friend!
my dear friend!
bundle the sorrow and
throw into the fire

it's all in the details

It happened when I was watching Three Days Of The Condor a week ago. I had caught the film on some cable channel years ago and surprisingly seemed to remember most of the important details and events in the film. I had completely forgotten what Condor (Robert Redford) managed to find out through the course of the film; I had also missed the 70s thriller earmarks the film bore: All The President's Men (Redford was in that too), The Parallax View are just two other examples. I also hadn't earned my share of viewed films to understand the various techniques employed in the film. Watching it again was thus, in several ways, quite rewarding. I have also started noticing all those little details that excite trivia-mongers: licence plates, phone numbers (both fake and the unfortunately real), posters, marquees, commercial brands (subtle product placement) and little things that pop up in the wee corner of the frame. That annoying tic surfaced during the scene when a clean-up crew arrives to "dust" the American Literary Historical Society (the cover for a CIA hub whose crew lay dead). As the van passed I noticed the name of the company: Augean Cleaning Service Inc. Although clearly a front in the context of the film, the firm probably doesn't exist in real life (Google gave me nothing). If it's an invention for the film, it's a great one. Here's why. Augean clearly refers to the King Augeas in Greek mythology, most famous for his stables that housed the most cattle in the nation. These stables were never cleaned until Hercules got his famous assignment (the 12 Labours). The fifth labour was cleaning out these stables. Now you see why the name makes sense. Bravo.

college hijinks: kollywood style

It all started with finding the wrong DVD in a case that purported to contain the digital dreck of International Khiladi. Sathyaraj doesn't look like Akshay Kumar; Namita and Twinkle Khanna are sufficiently unsuitable as lookalikes. And Tamil script does not look like English (what was the last Bollywood DVD that had devanaagarii on it?). Still, Englishkaran (loosely translated: English dude, aka अंग्रेज़ीवाला) had supposedly been a big commercial hit. Since successful mainstream cinema -- be it any flavour of देसीwood -- usually promises to be rather easy on the brain and high on vacuous ambition and a misplaced sense of greatness, this movie didn't seem like a bad alternative with a pinch of iodised salt.
As it turned out, the film was a minor gold mine. As a paladin of piacular pictures, I am compelled to share some of this wealth with you, dear reader. The songs make the most accessible offering. The subtitlers clearly learnt their language in some IT park and nursed lofty ambitions of being poets in the vein of an unholy union between the Romantics and Borges. Without further ado, I present, the title song. As a bonus, there's a shot at the end from a moment in the film during which a rather unusual prop makes its appearance.

these are hard, medial and nasal consonants respectively
good tamil, rich tamil, threesome tamil i can talk all types of 'tamil'
nicely
still i am an english person
whatever you can give, offer it
don't refuse whatever offer
don't advertise your wealth
don't lose confidence
shouldn't attain studies
accept criticism
disgusting!
in water scarcity
our nation is struggling
but a nursery rhyme says
'rain rain go away'
a movie song says 'digital gandhi'
movie climax would have cops coming in the end
scientists are our guys,
...go and check it
sprinkle some pepper and ...
it is said to treat sneezing problem
still i am an english person
all tamil nadu ornaments are off to speak hindi
ask the kids to sing
'best dear it is the best'
if the road side neem tree
sports a dot
an hundi is hung on it
like a fast food joint...
... egg and milk are poured into snake mounds
even if hundred periyars come...
...the nation wouldn't reform
there were 3 tamil academies earlier
but now there are umpteen caste parties
i am a chaste tamil
still i am an english person

logo bar, search baar baar

Google's new logo is dedicated to the bar code. It's as good as being a tribute to The White Album or Led Zeppelin's fourth album. Two in one. Just for fun.

nominal atavism

After hitting the marquee Wake Up Sid is making news not for being a clone of Farhan Akhtar's ouevre but for having caught the ears of Raj Thackeray, the paladin of puerile pugilism and ringleader of the band of boeotian baboons called the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. All because, predictably, for having characters in the film refer to the city now officially known as Mumbai as what it was formerly known as (Bombay). In the interest of commerce, Karan Johar rushed to make amends. MNS isn't happy and wants more. The chief minister Ashok Chavan insists that "Raj Thackeray is not a constitutional authority. Karan Johar should have come to the state government if he thought that the issue was so serious." The issue was serious and Raj Thackeray has, in the practical sense of the word, more power than most constitutional authorities (whatever that term means). After all, Raj Thackeray can still stand after pronouncing that "no film producer had the right to change the name of the city from Mumbai to Bombay."

the turning of the phrase

I finally managed to get to The Reel Truth: Everything You Didn't Know You Need to Know About Making an Independent Film, which contains lots of information about the things you have to worry about when you are trying to make your movie. I jumped right to chapter 8, which is all about what you have to do just to use your favourite song or piece of music in your film. The nuggets of trivia, however, did not grab my attention in the chapter as much as a couple of phrases I don't remember seeing before and some unfortunate examples of lazy talk and English abuse.

A quote from Rosalind Lawton ended with "Of course, you can try to negotiate, but if it's after the fact, they have you completely over a barrel." Despite having understood what she was saying, I was curious about the phrase. It turns out to have its origins in America and means that they (she is referring to companies that hold rights to the music you want to use) have you at a disadvantage; you are helpless and in their power. Although the local flavour was welcome, I wish she had just chosen simple words instead.

Adam Fields, the producer of Johnny Be Good describes how Chuck Berry got paid $100,000 for the use of his song in the film. He starts with "We could never get in touch with him, and we were down to the wire on the movie." This is one of the numerous contributions from the world of sport and has evolved to describe a tense situation whose outcome is impossible to predict until the end.

Finally we get Jennifer Lane talking about the problems involved in getting rid of a song from the film prints. Her quote ends with a sentence that reeks of laziness: "It's a tremendous hassle financially, emotionally and timewise." Times like this make you wish "timeally" was a word (or would she have settled for "temporally"?)