ArunRocks

Buying Kesar in Kashmir

2012-05-04T08:57:43+05:30

One of the most adventurous things we did after marriage was to go to Kashmir for Honeymoon. Right opposite the Mangalore STP office we have Swastika Tours, a friendly operator whom we have trusted for many tours in the past. In 2008, when we approached him we had all sorts of exotic places in our mind like Maldives, Mauritius or Europe.

But with the memory of the Tsunami fresh in our minds, we quickly ruled out all islands and sea facing locations. The hill-stations and snow covered locales in the northern hemisphere remained. But it was Santosh from Swastika who planted the idea of Kashmir in our minds. In 2007, Kashmir was considered to be a dangerous place to visit, thanks to the media reports of fresh gun fires or terrorist attacks. We were hesitant. "Why not?", he asked, "My sister just visited the place and she liked it better than her Switzerland trip. It is completely safe these days." We looked at each other silently. We both knew that we were up for the challenge.

The one week Kashmir trip indeed turned out to be one of the best trips we have ever had. It was a land completely different from South India both in terms of people or weather. But one of the most memorable incidents involve the purchase of the much coveted spice found in Kashmir - Kesar or Saffron.

Until we reached Kashmir I had no idea what Kesar was. I came to know from the locals that Kesar is an extremely rare and expensive spice that has many Ayurvedic properties like making you fairer. In fact, they claim that Kesar is the secret behind a Kashmiri's fairness. It was hard to disprove that claim since they mixed Kesar in almost every dish like a regular spice , even in a specially brewed tea called Kahwah . Both of us became big fans of delicious Kahwah and used to have it whenever we could.

So very soon, it was obvious that the must-have souvenirs to bring from Kashmir was a small stash of Kesar. Now, we were staying on a house boat in Dal lake. By evening, as they took us for a boat ride in aShikara around the lake we used to find goods of every kind being sold by vendors on boats. You can find boats carrying milk, vegetables, fresh flowers, shawls, handicraft items and of course, Kesar.

Every day our Shikara used to change and one day it was an old man who used to affectionately call me Beta (son). Since, I managed to converse in broken Urdu (thanks to Bollywood movies), we got to know each other quite well. During our ride, a Kesar vendor approached us offering Kesar in various grades and quantities. We hesitated but the old man said that he knew the person well and you would anyways buy some so it might as well be from him. The seller showed us various grades of Kesar held in small clear plastic boxes. They looked authentic and had a lovely aroma. We bought two small boxes of the best grade he had for about two thousand rupees. The old man carried an affable smile all the time and went about extolling the virtues of Kesar.

The next day, our driver suggested that we visit a Kesar farm. Kesar blooms only in one month in an entire year. Fortunately for us, we were in the right time of the year and saw fields filled with rows of violet flowers barely above the ground. There was a small shop right in front of the farm. A very old man with an overflowing white beard sat behind a desk. He enquired if we are interested in buying some Kesar. I politely declined saying that we had already bought some from a Shikara.

The moment I said that, the old man and my driver exchanged worried looks. It was as if I did something really wrong. The old man requested if he can see some of the Kesar I'd bought. I looked at the driver and he nodded affirmatively. Fortunately I was carrying the small plastic boxes in my pocket. I handed over one of them to the old man.

He carefully opened the case and took a few stigmas out with a tweezer and gently placed them on his wooden desk. He took out a magnifying eyepiece, perched it one eye and began examining them carefully. We were all waiting with bated breath. Finally, he looked pleased and placed the eyepiece down. "Fake", he said. I did not believe him.

"Let me prove it to you. A real dried stigma of a Kesar flower never completely dissolves in water". He let a few drops of water fall on his desk and with tweezers hovered a stigma slightly above it. "With your permission?" I nodded. The stigma fell on the drops and began rapidly dissolving. After slight stirring, the stigma lent no more color and the water had a dull orange tinge.

"Now let me show you how a real Kesar dissolves". He took another, nearly identical, small plastic container and proceeded to repeat the test. As the stigma fell, at first, it barely dissolved. Slowly a yellow region formed around the stigma and then it began to turn to an orangish tinge. The process took several more seconds and the color seemed keep effusing out of the stigma. The test was simple yet shocking in its effectiveness.

What was even more shocking was what he said next. "He cheated you", he screamed. "It was a scam. He sold you colored paper and charged you by the nose. He cheated you", he kept on saying. Since we had another day left, we decided to figure out how to recover the loss later. Meanwhile we bought some 'genuine' Kesar making sure that we tested it properly this time.

That night we spoke to the owner of the house boat about the incident. He too got quite agitated (we were now getting used to the temper of Kashimiris :) ). He wondered why anyone would buy anything from Shikaras since they were targetted at luring naive tourists. After he calmed down, he suggested that I speak to the old man and try to return the goods and recover the money. Making a police complaint would not be a good idea since we did not have much time left. I realised that it was probably the only sensible option left.

That evening, the old man was summoned for a 'casual' conversation. I boarded his Shikara alone. He started moving the boat and started his usual banter with his constant smile. After some conversation, I casually mentioned that we had a change of mind after speaking to our relatives and we wished to return the Kesar that we had bought. The old man's expression changed. He started arguing that Kesar would last a long time and it would be good to keep it. But I was adamant that I wanted to return it and since the vendor was his friend, he would need to find him somehow.

At this point we were in a dark and secluded part of the lake. I could barely see the man's face or guess what he was thinking. But from the way he spoke, he was clearly agitated. After much arguing, he finally agreed to speak to the vendor. He rowed to another area next to a house and left me at the boat. I waited for what seemed like eternity. I could hear some loud and vocal arguments from inside. Finally the old man came back in a hurry.

As he rowed he explained that he can only take back one container and that was the best he could convince the vendor. Since I had no expectations, this was actually a big deal. But I appeared displeased and grudgingly accepted. He took one of the containers and repaid the amount.

I felt relieved when I returned to the house boat. The old man must have realised that we fell for his sweet words. But at least we had a partial victory now. The box of fake Kesar would be a true souvenir, reminding us of Caveat Emptor!

The Last Drop on the Planet

2012-03-22T08:22:21+05:30

"Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit." -- Henry B. Adams

It was a breezy, luminescent and quiet evening in planet Terra. Perhaps too quiet for an eventful day such as this. Perhaps that's why emperor Kilter ordered a Pan-D911. Soon random bright spots popped all over the planet like an attack of pimples. Soon it smeared itself onto millions of other bright dots turning into something like an attack of rash.

Like a huge tidal wave the dots arose and swiftly spiralled upward into the cloudy magenta skies. With militaristic precision, the dots arranged themselves into concentric rings in space. From Terra, it was a magnificent spectacle. However, it didn't impress the Queen, Triara. Made of sixty billion nanobots, Triara was by far the most exquisitely complex being in their planet. That meant she was female and extremely attractive, not to mention that she was undoubtedly their Queen. Even though Kilter was called the mighty Emperor and launched vain crusades that displayed his prowess, it was obvious that it was the Queen upon whom the future course of events rested upon. She scoffed at this ostentatious waste of Nino. Nino, being the hydrocarbon fuel, which powered everything on Terra including the nanobots themselves.

In less than a minute, the gigantic aerial structure resembling a football stadium composed of million of individual nanobots was completed. They slowed to a standstill and waited for the grand entry of Kilter. However when Kilter morphed from a giant ball of light to a octopedal being, it wasn't as dramatic as he would have hoped. That was because most of the nanobots were thinking that the ball of light was simply a huge floodlight for illumination purposes. After an embarrassing pause, the swarm of nanobots erupted into a cheery mechanical drone.

Kilter expressed signs of pleasure and allowed the cheer to take its own sweet time to die down. He loved public appearances. He initiated a multi-channel broadcast with the bots. "Bots, we have assembled here for a historic moment. For the first time in twenty hundred thousand years, we are about the witness the execution of an alien trespasser". He paused for effect. "As the most intelligent sentient beings in this galaxy, it our foremost duty to protect our planet and our civilisation. From our bitter experiences with other violent life forms we have realised that it only by containing the knowledge of our existence, that we can achieve this."

"Hence, I am sure you would understand why I ordered the immediate execution of this alien terrorist whom we found under suspicious circumstances. Behold we show you, the vile subject in question". A beam of light shone into a spherical crystalline sphere. Atop this brightly illuminated sphere was a blue-green algae of microscopic proportions. Triara grew concerned as she observed that it was not half as animated when she had last seen it.

The crowd was becoming increasingly fascinated with this exotic brightly-coloured being. Rumours say that this algae was actually first spotted by the Queen in her last inter-galactic vacation. She found it's pulsating locomotion so mesmerisingly attractive that she had to have it as her very own pet. Rumours also said that after her vacation, the Queen spent an unhealthy amount of time with her pet that it almost became an obsession of her's. This annoyed Kilter to no end. His Queen seemed to be excitedly raving about its "simple yet radiant green design", "organic fluidity" and "long filamental extremities" all day. However, what pushed him over the edge was her secretive plan to build a reproduction chamber to "conserve" her pet. Kilter declared the "pest" as a threat to his, most conveniently, civilisation leading to the current state of affairs.

As Kilter continued his long meandering monologue, back in Terra, the Queen was slowly withdrawing herself into a coccon-like crystalline structure. It was hard to imagine what she was thinking, but it might have been something along the lines of - "this farce has been going on for far too long. Maybe a little competition would do a lot of good". Slowly the exquisite form seemed to seamlessly blend-in with the hard brownish red rocks of Terra.

"And I hereby declare the alien to be vapourised with a single beam of focused rays until every part of its material being has been vapourised.", concluded Kilter rather emphatically. Suddenly a bright red laser beam hit the tip of the crystal ball. The swarm broke into a noisy drone as the microscopic algae vaporised almost instantly. In its place, a white puff of vapour slowly rose up.

What happened next few microseconds is a sequence of events, like most major celestial events, that cannot briefly explained nor fully understood. It appears that the Hydrogen clouds that covered most of Terra could become incredibly unstable even with trace amounts of water. In fact, even a drop of water could seed a chain reaction that could transform its entire atmosphere. The algae vaporised by the whim of the Emperor had just the right amount of water to unintentionally change history.

It had been raining quite heavily in Terra for the last several days. The reddish brown rocks looked damp and muddy. Millions of nanobots were scattered lifeless all over the planet. They however didn't have their characteristic steel-blue colour. Instead, they seemed to be covered in a bluish green fur.

Footnote: Written on the occasion of 'World Water Day' (Mar 22). Rather it was an experiment to find out how far one can take the topic of 'Last Drop' ;)

Bonus Screencast - HTML5 makeover for the Django blog

2012-03-07T02:33:51+05:30

Thank you for the great feedback on my first screencast about building a blog in Django 1.3. A lot of people told me that they found the video helpful in understanding what Django is capable of.

As promised earlier, I have recorded a short video (7 mins) that explains how you can use an HTML5 template to improve the appearance of your blog. You can use any free template or create your own.

Django's (version 1.3) static files app is being used here. Unlike prior versions, there are no changes to urls.py required here. Linking to the admin site is also demonstrated.

It is best to watch it directly at Youtube in HD.

UPDATE: The blog with the updated template has been uploaded to github

Building a blog in 30 mins with Django (Screencast)

2012-03-05T22:40:05+05:30

Just uploaded a quick screencast showing how to build a blog in Django in just 30 minutes (plus a couple of seconds :) ). It shows off a lot of new features that we have in Django since 1.2.

It basically covers:

Using django.contrib.admin to create fully-featured admin pages
Adding tags to posts easily using taggit app
Class-based generic views for rapidly building pages (New in Django 1.3)
Using template inheritance and filters
Leveraging django.contrib.syndication for a simple feed

It is best to watch it directly at Youtube in HD. This was my first screencast so I apologize if something is not properly done.

I plan to add a short bonus video soon demonstrating how this bare-bones blog can be restyled into a modern-looking HTML5 site (UPDATE: Bonus video is up now).

UPDATE: The source code for the created project has been uploaded to github

Sports Day

2012-02-12T20:20:46+05:30

This is a short story that was written in three small installments

It was a blazing summer afternoon. The dusty maidaan seemed rippling under the intense summer sun. Yet, at the northern end there was a wide white stall decorated with multi-coloured festoons and balloons. Hanging from the front of the roof was a cloth banner that read 'Annual Sports Day, Vilvattam Senior Secondary School'.

Uniformed children were sitting in big groups outside the oval perimeter drawn with chalk powder. When they were not cheering for their favourites, they talked, sang songs and picked fights over sharing the precious glucose powder given by the teachers. They were having a hell of a good time. The static on the loudspeaker indicated that the microphone was turned on. Nobody paid attention to the announcer, who was in fact Malathi teacher seated behind a covered metal table inside the stall. Her naturally loud voice ensured that she was the announcer by choice, every year.

"... and ask Mary teacher to come soon", a broken piece of an earlier conversation inadvertently screamed through the loudspeakers. "Sorry. Next, we have the boys' 100 meters dash". Suddenly, silence prevailed among the noisy crowd. This was one event that everyone had been waiting for. "The participants are...". She called out the first name - Ajith, chest number 431 from the Blue team. He was short but a good runner. In fact, he was the youngest compared to others by atleast 8 months, thanks to his early admission.

Next, she called out for Prithvi, chest number 312 from the Red team. However, nobody heard his chest number because by the time his name was uttered, the crowd went crazy. The girls started cheering 'Prithvi, Prithvi, Prithvi...' from the southern end of the ground waving bright red flags. Prithvi spent the early part of his childhood in Mumbai. He looked more well-built and fairer than others in his class. It seemed that even other teams cheered for him. He was clearly the crowd's favourite for this event.

Then, she hesitantly pronounced Pra-dhyu-man, chest number 621 from the Green team. A few random cheers could be heard from the Green camp. Pradhyuman looked a bit too on the heavier side for an athlete. He was a late discovery when Jijo Sir found him throwing stones at the school's mango trees and chased him. He could run like the wind. He was surprised when they called out his name because he was busy stuffing a handful of glucose powder into his mouth. But he quickly swallowed and waved, at particularly no one, with a big smile.

Finally, she called out for Ashwin, chest number 691 from Yellow team. Instead of cheering, the announcement was received with a brief silence and then hushed conversations. 'That lean Ashwin? A strong wind blows and he will fly away', Jijo sir joked in a hushed voice to his colleague. He was indeed a surprising choice. Yellow team had no good runners this time. Sharath was supposed to represent them but his parents had called in to say that he was down with viral fever.

Ashwin was a terribly lean kid. He used to barely finish his lunch and run outside to play cricket before anyone came to claim the crude bat made from the thick end of a coconut tree branch. In fact, no one ever saw him eat anything. In class, he fiddled with pencils and fidgeted at his seat till the bell rang. He was not quite good with studies and his marks barely crossed single digits. He wasn't particularly good at anything and he didn't have many friends either.

Jijo sir, wearing a white bowler hat and an even-whiter pair of sports shoes, raised the whistle to his lips. On that cue, Prithvi struck a perfect sprinter's pose while others stood looking quite unsure. The whistle blew and everyone was off the mark.

* * *

It was five in the evening and Malathi teacher came back to her seat after the tea break. She announced the concluding program for the day - the award ceremony. The winners' podium was setup in front of the stall. The school principal stood a little ahead and a teacher holding a tray of medals and small trophies, stood next to him. "The winner of the boys' 100 meters dash is", she paused for effect, "Ashwin!" In his characteristic restlessness, Ashwin climbed up the platform that had a bit '1' painted in front and fidgeted nervously. The principal, with his benevolent smile, garlanded him with a gold medal.

Some time later Malathi continued, "The winner of boys' long jump is... Ashwin!". Ashwin quickly pocketed his earlier medal and ran towards the podium. Soon his pocket wouldn't be enough. Triple jump, High jump, Relay race and even Javelin throw gold medals would find its way into his pockets. Ashwin turned out to be the winner of the Best Athelete of the year trophy. He single-handedly elevated the Yellow team to overall champions.

* * *

The next day at school, Jijo sir lined up the students of class 6B for the Physical Education period after the assembly. 'Where is Ashwin?', he asked. 'Oh, he must be in the hospital now', someone joked from behind. The Sir replied with a knowing smile, 'Oh no, he is not'.

Encounters

The school's football ground was flanked from the north by a narrow strip of banana plantations. Jijo sir picked up the football and tossed it to Prithvi. Soon the class formed two teams and started an ad-hoc match. Jijo sir walked over the short rickety wooden bridge over the canal separating the ground and the plantation.

He strolled noiselessly into the thicket of banana trees. Further ahead was a bright sunlit open patch where he found Ashwin holding the cricket bat practicing imaginary shots.

"Noticed that the bat was missing. Guessed it would be you"

Sir's voice startled Ashwin. He was almost prepared to run. But one look at the Sir and he realised that he was not in trouble. However, he shook his head as if he would be reprimanded soon.

"Why didn't you come to class? You are almost a hero now"

"I didn't feel like coming. I don't think I am that type"

"What type?"

Ashwin looked into Sir's eyes as if searching for the right words.

"You know... I am not strong like Prithvi or bright like Vikas. Yesterday I got lucky. But I don't think I will ever be a 'Hero'"

"Heroes are not extraordinary people, Ashwin. They are people like you and me who get into situations where something extraordinary is expected. They are the ones who put their best foot forward at the right time. Just like you did. Yesterday."

"Yes, then I had nothing to lose. But now it's different. It is like a weird feeling."

"You better get used to that feeling now. It is called getting popular", Sir added with a sly smile.

Ashwin gave a rare and beautiful smile in return, "Maybe you are right. Besides, it was not my best yesterday", he joked.

The conversation became more friendly now. Ashwin seemed comfortable in opening up in the company of Jijo sir. He felt like he could trust him.

"So what does you father do?", Sir asked.

"Oh, he works in a rubber plantation at Plakunnu. I generally help him in the morning. By 8'o clock we would finish tapping. Then, Amma would call us for congee. She would dress me up for school and sometimes walk with me till the market. I walk from there."

Jijo sir visualised the scene in his mind as he listened intently. A ten year old running swiftly through the undulating terrain of Plakunnu. Speeding down the steep slopes and hopping over the tiny streams. Every morning, every single day of his life. Relentless practise. The making of a true athlete.

The entire 45 minute period they spent talking in that plantation. Then, they walked back to class together.

* * *

It looked like seven in the evening when it was only four. Skies were ominously overcast when Ashwin left school. Shortly it began drizzling and by the time he reached the market on the way home, it was pouring heavily.

He didn't have an umbrella, so he waited inside Chandrettan tea shop. Whenever the downpour mellowed down slightly he was tempted to dash homeward. Chandrettan advised him against that idea since it was too far and the road was dark anyways.

About an hour later, the rain reduced to a drizzle and Chandrettan gave Ashwin a heavy steel torch. He showed him how to use it (strobing it on and off sparingly). He told him stay on the roads and avoid shortcuts. Armed with the torch, Ashwin started out in the quiet drizzle.

After about a kilometre from the market, he felt like he was being followed. He gets this feeling sometimes and it generally turns out to a squirrel or a cat. But this time, it sounded like footsteps.

He began to walk faster. He could hear footsteps sloshing faster through the mud. He started to run. Then he noticed, further ahead of the road, two figures looking at him. He slowed down and looked at them more carefully. It was Prithvi and Pradhyuman in school uniform.

Ashwin instinctively sensed danger. He turned and ran back.

"Da!...Stop!". That was Prithvi's voice.

It was like sports day all over again. Ashwin's feet were a blur. He was speeding like a rocket through the drizzle. Prithvi and Pradhyman tried to catch up in vain.

However, Ashwin noticed someone else standing at the other end of the road. He almost slipped as he came to a sudden stop. It was little Ajith.

"Da... please don't run. We want to say something", he pleaded.

Behind them, Prithvi and Pradhyuman slowed down to a halt. They both looked flabbergasted.

"What's... what's wrong with... you man?", Pradhyuman panted as he gasped for air.

"I thought...", Ashwin hesitated, "you guys were trying to get back to me for the sports day"

Prithvi stepped forward and put his hand on Ashwin's shoulder, "Forget about that. You were better than us. You won. What's wrong with that?"

"Then why were you following me?"

"Sit down. Let's talk"

Prithvi sat atop one of the milestones next to the road. The others gathered around him. The rain had stopped.

"Ashwin, what we are going to tell you next is a secret. You must promise not to tell anyone else."

"Ok", shrugged Ashwin.

"It's a flashback", quipped Pradhyman.

"Yes, it is a flashback", Prithvi continued gravely, " I don't know if you know this. But the land where our school is and everything surrounding it was once owned by a Menon"

"Parameshwaran Menon, who lives behind our school?", asked Ashwin

"No. That is his son. It belonged to Madhavan Menon. He is no more. Unlike his son, he was really nice man. He used to love children. Long time ago, he offered the land for our school and playground."

"However, during his last days he was very ill and was treated by his son quite badly. Though, he had prepared his Will gifting the school property to the school trust, his son did not want to let go of that land. So he prepared another Will and forced his father to sign that"

"People say that he killed him soon after", Pradhyman added in a hushed voice. Ajith shuddered when he heard that.

"Ashwin", Prithvi lowered his voice, "we need you to get that new Will".

"What? Me?"

"Yes"

"Why Me?"

"Because you are the fastest among us. We have tried before and failed. Do you think Pradhyuman was caught near Menon's property because he was trying to steal mangoes?"

"Well, not just the mangoes", Pradhyuman quickly corrected.

Ashwin fell silent. He remembered what Jijo sir said in the morning. Extraordinary situations. Stepping up. Being a hero.

"How do I know that you guys are not taking me for a ride?"

"We will be with you at every step"

"And what do I get?"

"You will join our club - the Daredevils"

Ashwin gave an amused look.

"We call this operation - Blue Star", added Pradhyman enthusiastically. He pulled his sleeve and held up his arm for Ashwin to see. It had a star drawn with a blue ballpoint pen. "Blue-Star, get it?", he chortled.

Ashwin gave a genial smile. They knew it was almost a silent consent. He loved the idea. He always wanted to be part of a gang. A band of brothers, of some sorts.

Prithvi stretched out his hand towards Ashwin, palm facing upwards. Ashwin carefully placed his hand on it. Soon others joined.

And in that cold and damp night, they hatched a plan

D-day

Inside the classroom, someone passed a bundle wrapped in a handkerchief to Ashwin. After he made sure that no one is watching he eagerly opened it. It contained an old Nokia cellphone, a small ball of twine, Odomos mosquito cream and a black ring-shaped toroidal magnet.

While the Science teacher's voice droned on, Ashwin's eyes glazed over and yesterday's conversations played back in front of his eyes.

"Ok, this is the final plan", said Prithvi. "Every Tuesday, Menon goes to Coimbatore to collect the weekly dues from his shops. He leaves early in the morning and comes back by around 2 pm. He has a Nepali watchman who guards near the gate. He takes a lunch break around 11:30 for about thirty minutes. That is the only time window we have."

"How do you know all this?", Ashwin remembers asking.

"We have our sources", Prithvi answered enigmatically, "Menon also has a huge British Bulldog unchained at that time. It's bigger than any of us. We once tried drugging it by mixing sleeping powder with rice. But it gobbled it all and walked away nonchalantly. So the only option is to distract it. That will be my job. I will try to make noises from the west-end across the canal. Since the dog doesn't swim, I can hold it's attention for sometime."

"Ajith was able to enter Menon's property through a small fox hole in the evening. He found a wooden ladder near a mango tree and kept it against the tall brick wall towards south. Tomorrow, during the P.E. period, Ashwin and Pradhyuman will have to climb the mango tree on the school side. With the ladder, you will be able to cross the wall without touching the glass shards on it."

"Pradhyuman will stand near the outhouse behind the bungalow and Ashwin will have to climb to the balcony from the outside. If Pradhyuman hears the guard approaching he will give Ashwin a missed call. As soon as Ashwin finds the Will, he will give a missed call to Pradhyuman. It will give him a headstart to run back."

"Ashwin!", shouted the Science teacher. "Yes, sir", he answered. "Which world are you in? Pay attention!".

It was 10:45 and time for Jijo sir's class. The football match was going on with nearly the entire class in the field. Prithvi had warned that if everyone disappeared at the same time it would raise suspicion. So they left, in turns.

Finally it was Ashwin's turn and when nobody was watching, he slipped into the banana plantations. He took out the Odomos cream and quickly applied it all over himself. It was Ajith's idea to avoid leaving any smell trails for search dogs later on. He pocketed the contents of the handkerchief and used to it to mask his nose and mouth.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, the football fell just a couple of feet ahead of him. It seemed to roll towards where he was hiding. His blood froze. In a flash, Jijo sir appeared and kicked the ball back into the playground. He didn't seem to have noticed him.

He lifted the whistle and signalled everyone to move further on. That was when Ashwin noticed something strange when Sir's sleeve drew downwards. It was the unmistakable mark of a blue star. Sir was in it all along! Without even sharing a glance, Sir moved on in a practised jog.

Ashwin felt more relieved now. He met Pradhyuman near the wall. As they quietly climbed down the ladder, they could hear the woofs of the Bulldog from afar. They exchanged a knowing smile. They waited till the guard stepped into the outhouse.

Ashwin found the climb to second floor easier than he had expected, thanks to the numerous parapets. He entered through the balcony door and found a spacious bedroom. After a bit of searching around, he found the office. It had a Godrej safe almost the size of a small fridge.

As he was told, he found a bundle of keys hung on a nail. He took out the twine with the magnet tied to one end. He swung up the magnet a couple of times till he was able to pull out the keys. He picked the key marked 'Godrej' and inserted into the safe's keyhole. It opened with a satisfying click. This is too easy, Ashwin thought.

Suddenly he heard a noise outside. He rushed to the window. Menon was back! He briskly opened the front gate and entered. Ashwin was almost paralysed by fear. He still did not have the document. He and Pradhyuman would almost certainly get caught and even arrested.

Ashwin made up his mind. He pulled out his mobile and gave a missed call. It seemed like the right thing to do. Time to step up.

* * *

Menon was agitated. It was a hartaal in Coimbatore and nothing went as planned. In fact, the trip was almost wasted. Then, he heard someone running in his backyard. He rushed to find out what was happening. By the time he reached, he noticed a stout boy with a covered face running away in a distance.

The Nepali guard wearing a lungi and a rifle in one hand, came running out of the outhouse. He looked confused and at the same time he was surprised to find Menon in the backyard.

Just then he heard another person running away. This time it seemed slightly closer but the pace was definitely faster. With a look of disgust, Menon snatched the rifle from the guard and started chasing the person.

He realised that the thief was planning to escape into the banana plantations. It would be impossible to trace him once he entered those dense plants. He took aim and fired. The person stopped running. Menon quickly positioned himself at the wide clearing before the plantations. Now, there was no way anyone can escape without getting shot at.

* * *

Ashwin's back was pressed against an old mango tree. The Will was tightly clutched in his hands. He could hear Menon from a distance. "Da... you are dead, you know that?". He remembered Menon's bloodshot eyes he saw a few minutes back. It was the eyes of a murderer. He instinctively knew that he meant every word he said.

He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. He remembered his father recounting a swine hunting trip to him. He was accompanying a foreigner who knew how to use the rifle. They almost cornered a massive swine. But it simply ran towards them. The foreigner fired and missed. The closer the swine, he had explained sagely, the harder it is to shoot.

"So you are not going to come out?", he could hear Menon's voice. He was about twenty feet away now. Looking over the rifle perched on his shoulders, Menon began to take measured steps towards the tree where Ashwin was hiding.

Ashwin's eyes were still tightly shut. As the sound of footsteps drew closer, he kept repeating in his mind - "The closer the swine... the closer the swine... the closer the swine"

Menon was now just six feet away from his target. He gripped the handle of the trigger tighter. Like a cat, he noiselessly took another step. Suddenly to his left, something rolled down from behind the tree. As he rapidly aimed the rifle, he realised that it was just a boulder. A decoy. The boy had already made a blinding dash to his right.

Ashwin ran like the wind. He felt the cool breeze on his face as he was moving farther and farther from his intended exit. Would the ladder be still there, he wondered. He surprised himself by smiling at that thought. His run seemed so surreal.

He could hear the indistinct barks of the bulldog, the yelling Nepali and the hoarse cries of Menon. It was all a blur now. He stopped and looked down. The peaceful gurgle of the water in the canal seemed inviting. He dived straight in.

* * *

TWO DAYS LATER

Lunch break had only twenty minutes left. The boys were busy driving the stumps on the ground and standing in their positions. Ajith was lucky and got the first chance to bat.

Just as the bowler was about to throw, he stopped. At the far end, Ashwin was slowly ambling towards the ground. He noticed that everyone was looking at him now.

"Do you want to bat?", asked Ajith loudly.

Moments later, Ashwin stood inside the crease holding the bat. As he surveyed the field, he noticed that almost everyone was looking at him admiringly. He understood that they knew. He couldn't help smiling.

Atari and Gaming History

2012-01-30T18:54:02+05:30

Imagine your 8 year old cousin, who is learning to use computers, asking you about the Save icon on Microsoft Word. The image of a floppy disk is almost universally used to denote 'saving a file'. But with floppy disks gone, would the coming generation understand the symbolism?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I had the same problem with the joystick icon commonly used to denote Games. Typically it is drawn as a stick pointing up, protruding from a box. Most of the consoles that I was familiar with had much more elaborate game controllers or gamepads. However this simple black-coloured gaming device remained a mystery to me.

Until I read the book 'Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System' that is. I started reading this book out of curiosity and due to a certain interest in gaming history. But soon realised that it is a must-read for anyone interested in Game design or even the roots of Gaming culture. It covers not just the historical context of the Atari VCS and its popular games but some of its nearly impossible technical constraints.

One of the most amazing thing about Atari games were that they could use only 128 bytes of RAM. Yes you read that right. It is not Megabytes or even Kilobytes, I mean Bytes. To give you a better idea, I have italicised the first 128 characters at the beginning of this blog post. Yes, it is that small.

To program an entire game with graphics, sounds and gameplay with several levels would seem impossible given such constrains. But remember that RAM refers to the working memory or the read-write area. Atari would store most of the game content in removable cartridges containing about 4 kB of ROM or Read Only Memory. Now, 4 kB is not much either. Today, even the smallest images, say an icon, would be bigger than that. Imagining packing an entire game in that space. Incredibly cool!

Constraints bring out some of the most creative solutions. There could be no better example of this than Atari games. Not only were Atari games enjoyed by millions of gamers, they also boast of many pioneering achievements. The 1979 game Adventure is considered to be the first action-adventure game. One of the great grandfathers of games like Warcraft, the game allowed the player to explore multiple rooms with the ability to pick up, carry or drop items, a first at that point in time. It was also the first game to have a widely known 'Easter Egg.'

Yar's Revenge, released in 1981, takes place in space and uses game code as game data. Taking place in space, the game screen is dominated by a striped randomly coloured neutral zone. Rather than use a random number generator, the game's creator brilliantly converted the game's own binary code into a psuedo-random pattern, saving precious ROM space. In other words, you are looking into the game's own code while playing the game. How many games have you played that can claim that?

Not all firsts mentioned in the book are technical innovations. It narrates how Atari employees broke off to start Activision, the first third party video game company. Of course, Atari's first game Pong was a cultural phenomenon. Atari is also considered as the longest living game console spanning a duration of 14 years and 2 months in US gaming history.

As a side note, if you have read Steve Job's autobiography then you must be aware that Steve Jobs was Atari's fortieth employee. He was a technician paid at $5/hour. They sent him to India to help him do 'spiritual research'. Later it was their $100 bounty for each chip removed from the design of Breakout that triggered Jobs to reach out to Steve Wozniak. Interestingly, they eventually offered Apple II to Atari and they were not interested. Imagine that, Atari could have actually bought Apple!

Today, one can still buy Atari Flashback, a successor of the original Atarai 2600. It contains two of the iconic joysticks bearing a close resemblance to the original joysticks. There are many recent accounts of parents rediscovering such legacy arcades. Small children don't seem to mind the simple graphics thanks to their active imagination. Adults also love the competitiveness of two-player games.

Sometimes to better understand the present, one needs to dive into the past. Knowing Atari's past was not only instructive but also inspiring.

This is a Game. There are rules

2011-12-07T21:49:52+05:30

I have been recently reading a book on game design that primarily focuses on non-digital games. It is called Challenges for Game Designers. It distills the art of game design to using easily available materials like paper, dice or playing cards. They call it a non-digital approach.

We have all played such games at some point in time. Before video games, as kids, we used to play snakes and ladders or chess. In Kerala, we have several indoor games using easily available materials like pebbles, cowries (kavadi in Malayalam), circassian seeds (manjaadi in Malayalam) and irkili sticks (stiff mid-ribs of coconut leaves). The rules were simple - say, remove the smallest stick without disturbing others or align the seeds in a row. These 'eco-friendly' and 'low-cost' games used to provide hours of fun to children and adults.

Compared to modern video games these games lack high production values marked by hundreds of detailed 3d modelled characters and unfolding of several hours worth of intricate plots and storylines. These traditional games don't have any stories, they are mostly tests of skill or chance. They were fun interactive experiences fuelled by imagination.

What's wrong with my digital game?

The biggest advantage board games have is the trust factor. They exist in a familiar world - the real world. A world with familiar laws of physics and hence predictable outcomes.

Whereas a digital world is essentially a make-believe world created by the game designer. It may or may not follow the rules of the real world. If you touch this strange flower, it might wobble or it might balloon into a giant carnivorous plant. You are not quite sure. If the game designer did not leave tell-tale signs on the flower, the only way to find out is to risk touching it.

To players who are adventurous, this sounds like fun. After all, exploration in a safe world ought to be a fun experience. But you cannot leverage all the experience you had in the real world (which certainly took you several years) into this new world immediately. It is an alien environment and you must invest some time in getting familiar. Even then, there is always an element of Deus ex machina lurking the dark crevices of a digital game.

Board games on the other hand involve familiar or even everyday objects to create experiences which are much greater than sum of its parts. A token on the board will not mutate into something else if you move it to the next square on the board. Nor will it affect the real world you are playing in (unless you are playing Jumanji ).

This principle of least surprise primes you to play the actual game once you finish explaining the game's rules. Unlike a typical video game, there is no unneeded exploration to get a feel of the environment. In other words, you don't need to learn to stand up before you can start running.

Another great advantage these non-digital games have is the ease of modifying them. Changing a fundamental game rule such as whether you can use the joker in pack of cards requires just a simple consensus between players. The game rule changes and, in turn, changes the game experience.

On the other hand, a digital game is built using programming tools which in turn builds a rigid mathematical model of the game world. The rules and character behaviours are generally fixed. With the exception of a few games like SimCity or Minecraft, free-style play is discouraged in favour of a mission-oriented game design. For instance, you cannot turn a fire-breathing dragon into a pet.

Rise in popularity of the game-modding community however highlights the desire to do so. Thousands of enthusiasts who like to customise their game experiences from tweaking a game character's face to reprogramming the enemy AI behaviour enjoy playing and sharing these modifications. However, these modding tools have steep learning curves and need considerable investments in time and effort.

What's right with my digital game?

What digital games sometimes lack in content is often made up in presentation. Colorful and animated worlds are often the hallmark of digital games. The latter aspect i.e. animated movement is a key element for explaining their appeal.

Computer games and in fact TV screens appeal to the T-Rex part of our brains. This reptilian cohabitant gets easily mesmerised by rapid movements and flashy lights. It expects something essential to survival to happen when there might be none. It is simply a trick on our evolutionary instincts. However, the trick doesn't work for long as a boring game will not sustain continued interest.

Nevertheless, this initial impression gives digital games an edge over traditional games. A well designed digital game might be more appealing than a well designed board game, especially to young adults.

Digital games also enjoy the advantage of easy distribution. Even within the PC game industry, digital distribution by online purchases is overtaking retail sales of boxed games.

Once made available on the internet, a digital game becomes universally available and ready to play once setup. On the other hand, even if a board game is made free to print-and-play, it takes a lot of cutting and setting up to start playing.

In addition, non-digital games with extensive rules requires someone to read and understand all the rules even before the play begins. Even then, some of the rules might be missed or misinterpreted by an inexperienced player.

The rigidness of the digital game's world avoids all these pitfalls. The game world is setup as soon as you begin playing and the rules being inviolable can be learnt by exploration. This lowers the barrier of entry to start enjoying the game.

This is a crucial advantage to a causal player who would like to start playing the game as soon as possible rather than get involved in the formalities of learning the game.

Can we have the best of both worlds?

We can certainly imagine a marriage of both worlds - digital and non-digital games. The digital avatars of typical board game like Chess or Cluedo attempt to do just that.

They offer the convenience and packaging of a digital game, yet they use familiar game objects like dice or tokens. However, the end result might not always be well executed. The entire user interface needs to be as intuitive as a board game. Often touch screens like iPads are a good platform for such hybrid games. However, the flexibility of a board game inevitably loses when it enters the rigid world of digital games.

In conclusion, board games are an invaluable legacy that imparts a lot of fun with familiar objects. But would the legacy survive the onslaught of digital revolution in its present form? Or will it evolve into a hybrid variation of both? Only a throw of the dice can tell :)

PS: The headline is paraphrased from a dialog in the cult-classic film The Big Lebowski (1998), "Smokey, this is not 'Nam. This is bowling. There are rules."

The Jobs Biography

2011-11-15T03:04:35+05:30

After I finished reading the last page of Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography yesterday, I heaved a sigh of relief. The experience of reading was like getting intimate with an extraordinary genius who had a highly abrasive personality. We get to meet a young billionaire who either insulted people on their face or highly praised them. This arrogance has less to do with his wealth and more with the rebellious and artistic side of his personality.

The extraordinary thing about his life is that despite several close calls with death, he never mellowed down and accepted status quo. Wherever he saw imperfections, be it badly designed products or inefficiently run businesses, he tried to change them, often radically. When most people would try to shrug off saying 'Well, nobody seems to have a better way of doing this', Jobs turned the question around and reduced it to simplistic solution, making you wonder, 'That is so obvious. Why didn't I think of it first?'.

Though we don't get much insight into Job's process of simplification, it certainly took several rounds of iterations and rework till he was satisfied. He would rather abandon months of effort than ship something that was not intuitively perfect as in the case of completely redesigning the iPhone's glass face. He believed in producing products that met his high personal standards and led to his personal satisfaction. In contrast, while other CEOs were trying to please the market by somehow meeting customer expectations, Jobs completely ignored what they think they want and followed his instinct. This explains the tremendous passion he invested in building them and defending them no matter what the circumstances. Unlike any CEO, he could talk about his products at the highest level and quickly zoom into the minutest detail without batting an eyelid.

We also get to know Apple and Pixar - two great companies that are not just innovative but have had tremendous cultural impact. Some of the interesting characteristics that explains their success are:

Collaboration: Pixar's building is marked by a large central atrium that facilitates collaboration by literally bumping into people. At Apple, various business unit heads have long meetings every week and take decisions by discussing every detail even at early stages.
Questioning: Jobs loved to argue and obsess over every detail with everyone. It was not just a matter of convincing him as much as demonstrating that you have really explored the problem from every angle.
Passion: Like its customers, Apple's employees truly believed in building something 'world changing' and this made them stretch themselves to limits, unlike other companies.

In short, the book is a great read as it doesn't try to glorify Jobs. It tries to give an objective and well-researched account of a technology legend. Highly recommended.

Sony Bravia CX 420 and a Guide to Flat-panel TVs

2011-10-16T14:53:00+05:30

It is Diwali time and the retail shopping excitement in India is comparable to Christmas season in the West. Everyone seems to be praying for their old and fat CRT TV to stop working, so that they have an excuse to buy a brand new flat screen TV.

We were on the lookout for a flat screen LCD TV sometime back and deliberated various brands for a while. Actually, for me every gadget purchase takes 'a while' due to the amount of research I generally do. Since, I do not watch TV regularly, I had to practically learn all the TV jargon from scratch to understand the sales-speak.

After a month of 'superficial research', some of the elementary findings were:

The old CRT TV is completely out of the market. You might be able to find, at best, a 21" CRT TV.
There are no plasma TVs in the 32" category. They only come in bigger sizes and guzzle a lot of power.
The market leader in Indian TV market is Samsung followed by LG. The Koreans also dominate the world market this way with low cost yet high quality TV sets.
LED screens today are a gimmick. It's just LED backlighting and true LED TVs are a few years away from an average consumer's reach. Their saturated colors in the showroom is just clever tweaking.
32" is a reasonably large screen for our apartment living room. Any bigger and you will feel you are literally inside the screen. (This is subjective, of course)
The higher end TVs have higher frame rates for sports action. This is called by different manufacturers by different names such as Tru Motion or Flo motion. This is very annoying while watching movies as it makes them look like TV serials. This might not be perceptible to many, but personally I couldn't watch my favourite movies being 'interpolated' this way
HD Ready (720p) would be cheaper than Full HD (1080p), but they will be obsolete soon. Interestingly for screens smaller than 36", the difference in picture quality is not quite evident but to the trained eye.
In most modern TVs, there is no need for a DVD or bluray player if you prefer to keep movies in your pen drive or hard disk. You can simply plug in the device directly to your TV set. The TV presents a file browser and you can play the video if the file format is supported.
No comments on 3D TV as it was not a requirement for us.

All these facts were gathered after multiple visits to various showrooms and from the Internet. Initially I had visited a couple of stores in April this year and found out that, among the leading brands, only LG offered IPS displays at that point in time. Now, I know a thing or two about IPS displays because it is the same display technology used on Apple Cinema displays and even the iPhones.

IPS displays have the widest viewing angles and excellent color reproduction. In fact, I was so impressed by IPS displays that I bought a 23" DELL IPS monitor specifically for desktop use. Hence, I was almost certain to buy an LG.

Around May, LG and most leading brands did a refresh of their lineup of TV screens (i.e. 2011 models). LG no longer offered IPS displays for their 32 inch screens. This was extremely disappointing as this meant that I have to visit the stores again to view and reevaluate the sets.

Visits to the nearest Samsung and LG showrooms resulted in quite a bit of disappointment. Their 32" LCD models were a shadow of their predecessors. The color reproduction was weak or dull. The sound appeared to come out of a closed box. The sales representatives were not very clear in explaining these "improvements" such as why LG decided to abandon the IPS display. I was even tempted to buy an older CRT instead!

We then visited the Girias outlet near our apartment, from where we have made most of our purchases. The sales representative was quite patient and knowledgeable. He explained that the non-IPS displays like Twisted nematic (TN) have been improving in the past couple of years and the color reproduction was almost at par. We were able to visually compare the viewing angles and experience this for ourselves.

When I explained to him that I found the LG and Samsung audio and video quality as being not satisfactory, he demoed a Sony Bravia model - CX 420. Now, personally, I detest the Sony brand due to their tendency to create their own standards like the Memory stick, Betamax and UMD. Also, they charge premium rates for the same feature set simply due their brand name (in laptops, for instance). Besides the number 420 does ring a bell in India :)

But I was genuinely surprised when the model actually had significantly better picture quality, color reproduction and excellent sound (with bass) for a price premium of 3K compared to other brands. However, the most impressive feature was the wide variety of video and audio formats that was supported out of the box. Even today there are TVs that can support pen drives but not harddisks; or ones that can play .avi but cannot open .mkv videos. But the 420 could play virtually any type of file lying in my harddisk except for videos with 5.1 channel audio tracks (because, duh, it had only 2 speakers).

So we finally settled on a Sony. Once home, we wall-mounted the unit and now its almost like a colourful window in the living room :).

Sony Bravia CX 420 - a Post-purchase review

What follows is a review of the TV written after 5 months of use. It goes into greater detail regarding some of the aspects covered earlier.

Unpacking / Appearance

Unlike the good old dabba TVs, today's TV boxes can be carried by one person. The box contains a stand if you are mounting on a flat surface. The assembly takes about 10 mins and the printed instructions are quite clear. Wall mounting would need additional screws so it's best that you ask the Sony personnel to wall-mount at no additional cost.

The TV is a classy all-black model with a slightly glossy bevel. However the screen is, thankfully, matte. So a mirror-like reflection will not be present from various light sources in your living room. The steroe speakers are located at the bottom. The remote is quite long and slender. It is quite easy to hold and the button are well spaced out.

Picture Quality

The Bravia series models use Live Color technology which makes pictures more vivid without making them unnaturally over saturated. This combined with various noise reduction techniques makes watching non-HD content such as Cable TV channels quite enjoyable. The picture is also intelligently resized to stetch the entire HD screen without letterboxing.

The color reproduction of HD videos is similarly quite superior to comparable brands (we did spend a lot of time in the showroom comparing this aspect alone :) ). However, Sony leaves very little room for tweaking by giving you only 4-5 preset modes like Theatre, Sports etc. Other brands might give you more parameters to fiddle with.

The viewing angle was quite good considering that it is not an IPS display. However, the difference in vertical viewing angles seemed to vary quite a bit. Hence, it might be a factor to consider while determining the height to wall mount the set.

There is a noticeable blur while taking photographs of the videos being played back. Hence it may or may not be the best choice for watching sports. I don't watch much sports anyways.

Sound Quality

As mentioned earlier, I was not interested in connecting an external sound system like a home theatre system to the set. Hence, I was keen on a model that had good built-in sound. Compared to LG or Samsung, Sony sets seemed to have good sound reproduction even at high volumes without distortion.

The bass enhancing technology was not very effective but it did give sufficient bass to enjoy action movies. The stereo separation is not that great considering that both speakers fire downward, but it is definitely there!

Summary

Overall, we are quite happy with the purchase, though we realise that our needs were quite limited to start off with. Interestingly, we found ourselves spending more time watching movies from the hard-disks (yes plural, I have quite a collection :) ) rather than watching boring television programmes. I am yet to connect my Android phone which has a mini-HDMI output to the TV yet, but I hear that it's an excellent idea.

Couldn't be happier!

Rockstar Soundtrack - First Impressions

2011-10-12T19:46:21+05:30

Warning: May contain traces of satire and humour

This is, unfortunately, an unpaid review. Hence, most of what's written here is not made up. This can be very disappointing to some of you who read mainstream media, so please take it slowly. Media is after all a business and a source of bread and butter for many people. And bread and butter is definitely expensive, especially in India.

Don't get me wrong, I am not the unbiased vigilante blogger. In fact, I tried my best to get paid for this music review. Apparently, Rockstar's PR was not in a mood to humor a small-time blogger like me. Completely unfair, since being fond of Rehman's music I would have written a pretty nice review anyways!

So, this review wouldn't be too nice. Because it is written for free. So Mr. Cheapstakes, you can wipe that mocking smirk off your face. Let's have a look at Rockstar's playlist:

Jo Bhi Mein - Mohit Chauhan

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah... I can this one sing too. Have to appreciate the sense of humour of the lyricist Irshad Kamil (even better than me in this regard). The album starts with the 'Rockstar' yelling 'Oh yeah, yeah' and the audience, accepting the challenge, yells it back. This goes back and forth till you can guess who wins in the end (Hint: it's the guy with the mic).

The song is heavily set on guitar strings and the mimicry abilities of the singer (cost-cutting measures?), while it introduces you to the apparently always-misunderstood-protagonist. You cannot imagine someone better than Mohit rendering this rock-pop composition. The song immerses yourself into a rock concert minus the sweaty t-shirts.

Kateya Karun - Harshdeep Kaur & Sapna Awasthi

Can music tickle your ears till you smile? Yes it can. Listen to this one. Not sure what vodoo music engineering that Rehman employs but the opening of this track is a quirky yet hilarious stereo experience. It is great for testing your new 200 buck earphones and be unjustifiably happy about it too. How do I know that you have cheap earphones? You are reading a free review, aren't you?

Countless Punjabi Bollywood numbers have been created filled with 'Ahuns', 'Oyes' and 'Brrrrraaahs'. So what makes this one different? Glad that you are wondering the same thing as I did. Funny, how that works. I guess it has to do with the innocent naughtiness in the lyrics and an equally fun rendering by Harshdeep.

This song made me wonder why I like Rehman's music. I realised that it's because I understand what he is trying to convey through his music. To my musically untrained ears, when he foreshadows the ending of the track with deescalating string chords I anticipate that we are slipping into a dream. Ending on that dreamy note, I believe that the entire song is a roller-coaster ride suited for a coming-of-age situation.

Phir Se Ud Chala - Mohit Chauhan

There he goes up again... well, that's what the song's title literally means. I am not sure what he does up there but I guess it's an occupational hazard with rockstars. They are high up there all the time. So probably that's what this trippy, trancy song is all about. Not bad for, emmm... those meditative moments.

Saadda Haq - Mohit Chauhan

This the song that screamed from the top of our set-top boxes. The lines that were intentionally strong to create that intentionally strong effect. The song that was set to be the youth anthem. Except it didn't.

Saadda turned too saada in the wake of dozens of oh-so-anguished-wanna-be rock songs preceded it. Every producer wanted to cash in on the rock-craze, I guess. Hence to the DK-Bose generation the impassioned lyrics might sound a bit... tame? However, it does stand apart from the recent rock ballads with Mohit's raw energy. Oh yes, there is that signature "Oh yeah" all over again.

Kun Fayakun - A.R.Rahman, Javed Ali & Mohit Chauhan

How many hit sufi-style devotional songs can Rehman create? Unlimited, apparently. Like a crazy fan, we fall completely in love with the soulful music and philosophical lines sung by Rehman and team. BTW, why is Mohit in every song? Is Mohit - the 'Rockstar'?

Sheher Mein - Mohit Chauhan, Karthik

Enjoyed this parody of a typical dhink-chak Bollywood number complete with a sleazy producer interrupting from time to time. It's a literal slap in the face by Imtiaz's team on the crass commercialisation of the music industry that adds masala catering to every demographic, suggestive lyrics for the controversy factor and catchy jingles for higher ringtone sales.

Thoroughly enjoyed the entire track where you can hear a toned-down mushy Mohit, who breaks out in the interludes to his wild raw form. This song would probably show the inner turmoil of a rebel artist bending backwards just to pay his bills. The result is fantastically comical.

Hava Hava - Mohit Chauhan, Viviane, Tanvi, Suvi Suresh, Shalini

Ever happened that you had to listen to a foot-tapping Middle-eastern number with all the cheering and clapping, but never managed to understand a word of why or what they are so happy about? Ever tried to fill-in the words with an imaginary storyline of why they are so happy? Come on, you must definitely have. That's exactly what is happening in this track.

Beware though, the enthusiasm in this track in highly infectious. When you set to listen to this on your 5.1 home theatre speaker, it's likely that you would have gotten up and started dancing in Turkish folk steps. Possibly, your neighbour would be also doing the exact same thing.

Aur Ho - Mohit Chauhan, Alma Ferovic

This is a song that takes itself too seriously. It talks of breakups and sadness. Apparently, there is a certain following for such songs. They love the 'depth of emotions' in such numbers. Sorry folks, this isn't really my cuppa here.

Tango For Taj - Theme

Reminding you of the background scores of late-seventies movies like Bobby or even tamil movies like Mouna Raagam, this instrumental score carries an endearing nostalgia about it. However the Turkish dance troupe (whom we met a few songs back) gate-crashes into the party. From then on, as you can guess, it's all clapping and cheering. Gotta hate their cheeky enthusiasm for that.

Tum Ko - Kavita Subamaniam

Finally! A song without Mohit! I was beginning to wonder if there is one. This is one of those so beautifully rendered female numbers that draws you in completely. Rehman has done this before, most recently, with Sherya's Mannipaya. In that song, the apology rendered by her is so touching that you end up weeping at her feet, pleading forgiveness. Ok, who was apologising again?

The Dichotomy of Fame - Ft.Balesh on Shehnai, Kabuli on Guitars

A fusion of Indian shehnai, middle-eastern strings and western violins is all I can say. Yes, I am beginning to get lazy with this review thing. Did I mention that I wasn't paid?

Naadaan Parindey - A.R.Rahman, Mohit Chauhan

A mellowed down rock song where Rehman's voice is surprisingly soothing.

Tum Ho - Mohit Chauhan, Suzanne D Mello

The male version of Kavitha's song. Not as exceptionally good, but great for long-drives nonetheless!

The Meeting Place - Ranbir Kapoor

Ok, this is not even a song. I am definitely not reviewing this one!

It's risky to write about first impressions for Rehman's creations. His music tends to grow on you on repeated hearings. Time to stop the tape and rewind. Maybe I will change my mind and be nicer.

BTW, you are welcome.

Growing up as a programmer

2011-10-09T23:26:18+05:30

Whether to build or to reuse is a classic dilemma for most programmers. If you choose build, then you would have to spend a lot of effort designing, coding, testing and debugging your creation. If you choose to reuse, then you would have to pour over all the documentation which would be typically outdated or inadequate in many places.

Initially, most programmers start out as cowboys. They are fearless and fiercely independent. They believe that they can build anything and need not waste time struggling to understand somebody else's horrible piece of code. It works for a while because they have the skill of programming and we all can program our way out of anything, right? Wrong.

There are many things a beginner programmer cannot do because of the sheer lack of understanding of the domain. Notice that I did not use the word 'Experience'. You might be able to write a search engine from scratch but it would takes years to return even remotely relevant results for all use-cases (say, something like Google does). You might be able to create a Sudoku solver but a Chess solver is out of the league even for the most experienced programmers.

As you gain experience, you realise that reading code is a skill as important or rather more important than the skill to write it. Similar to any work of literature, you need to understand the classics and read works of legends to become a better practitioner. Extending the analogy a bit further, it would take quite some time before you assimilate all these 'influences' and become ready to write in your own distinctive 'style'. This might take several years.

Even though the industry is slowing recognising the fact that it might take longer to become an experienced programmer, the career path they offer for successful programmers is indeed unfortunate. A successful programmer is generally required to become a manager in order to pursue a successful career. Even if he/she chooses to become an architect, they would be far removed from being a practioner and would be asked to make plans or designs in thin air instead.

In the extremely rare case of a programmer continuing to pursue this domain and excel in it, he/she rediscovers the art of building simpler code. The simplicity aspect must be emphasised here. Great programmers identify simplicity and minimalism with beauty and continue to focus on it.

This explains the almost cult following of LISP among experienced hackers. The lure of Apple products among geeks is not in its shininess but rather in its simplicity. Most software geeks love to tinker with simple microprocessor boards like Arduino or PIC as a hobby project. Possibly with the highest number of computer scientists in its payroll, Google is virtually an ecosystem of multiple small and large projects, each mostly focussed on a singular functionality.

The experienced programmer is not trying to built an impressively complex system that solves many problems here. Instead he is trying to solve a simple problem with simple tools. Why would someone with so much experience do something so counter-intuitive? Younger programmers often use much more complicated tools (such as graphical IDEs) or languages (such as Java or Perl) to attack a problem.

This is not (just) because they are lazy. This has to do mostly with the fact that their goals have changed. They do not find the task of creating something as an end to itself. They would like their creations become a means to achieve some purpose or solve a unique problem. The more simpler the tool they use, the more focussed they are at trying different approaches.

Rather than learning several tools to attack the problem, they employ the most elementary tool possible and try approaches that have never been tried before. Indeed, the solution might be underwhelmingly simple and it might even be obvious. But only when the problem was reduced to its core that such an innovative solution was possible. It might have been obvious all along but the answer was hidden in all those multiple layers of abstraction.

So here is a piece of advice, in case you are looking for one, to anyone who is embarking on a simple project - Choose the simplest possible implementation and build it yourself. If you fail, you can alteast iterate quickly. If you succeed early on, you haven't tried hard enough ;)

Lured to Bengaluru

2011-04-14T11:37:36+05:30

As of last week, I have completed my move to the technology mecca of India - Bangalore. I have had a lovely 3 year stint in Mangalore. Have so many wonderful memories with the place that the decision to move seemed impossible. But finally we took the plunge.

My waking hours have been shifted to ensure that I experience less peak time traffic. So this means early mornings and early evenings. Not sure how this would impact my Blogging. Hopefully for the best.

First Impressions

I have worked in Bangalore in 2004 and have visited the city several times before and after that. An easy observation to make would be the explosion in population of people/vehicles and the deteriorating weather. Certain areas which were considered "outskirts" like Bannerghatta Road are now prime locations with every major retail outlet you can think of. I am currently staying in Bannerghatta Road.

The traffic jams have somewhat reduced thanks to projects like the Silk Board Elevated Tollway and NICE road. The commuting time at around 8 in the morning is just thirty minutes by office bus via NICE. This is quite reasonable compared to many horror stories of two to three hours of commuting time in certain areas. I would say that shorter commuting times significantly improve one's work-life satisfaction.

Out of curiousity, I enquired with a lot of people on how they spend their commuting times. Even if it's one hour one-way, it adds up to around 40 hours of lost time. Most people replied that they either sleep or listen to music. A few catchup on the daily newspaper or rarely a book.

I have opted to take my Infibeam Pi along. It makes the mundane bus journeys a lot more interesting. There is a huge, huge backlog of books that I have always wanted to read. With many free ePubs being available, its always a pleasure to have several million pages of literature and technology at one's finger tips. I was not a big fan of reading in a moving vehicle (sometimes causes motion sickness). But thanks to good roads, I don't find reading in the office bus to be much of an inconvenience.

Any move is hardly a pleasant experience. We are still in the process of settling down. The nice thing is that Bangaloreans are quite active in many online communities and it is quite easy to get tips and essential information online. This makes the settling down process a lot easier.

There are my early impressions, but I'm pretty sure that they will change over time.

Learning OOP Programming in C++ - A Horror Story

2011-03-27T23:18:41+05:30

During my school days, we had a subject called Computer Science in our +1 syllabus. The CBSE syllabus had been just updated that year to teach people to programming in C++ as their first language. This was a horrible decision in many respects:

OOP is not the best approach for all types of problems: I know that most of the readers would be surprised by this statement. It's not very hard to prove that OOP was originated to model certain kinds of problem spaces resembling Simulation. The granddaddy of all OOP languages is a self-descriptively named language called SIMULA. But in the nineties people began to take up OOP as a religion. Every problem seemed to best modelled only in Object Dis-oriented Programming.

Back to my school where most people were learning to program, they had to tackle the dual challenges of - understanding a programming language and learning to model problems in OOP. So, a simple 5 line calculator program would turn out be pages of class definitions like Calculator, Operator etc. A recent article shows why New Programmers get distracted with OOP.
C++ is a nightmarish language: I presume that the curriculum board must have assumed that C is a widespread language and C++ being its successor, it would a suitable choice for students. However, a quick look at the language reference would prove them wrong. The canonical guide to C is the slim K&R book having 272 pages, while the C++ Annotated Reference spreadout in cryptic 480 pages is a monstrosity.

C++ was the language even experts couldn't fully master then and the situation has barely improved now. Many organisations use only a subset of the language (including Google) due to the immense complexity of the entire language. My advice to newcomers, unless you are the rare exception, is definitely to: Stay clear of C++ or get bogged down.
Interactivity: For learning a language, nothing works better than a fast write-run cycle. We used Turbo C++ compiler on Windows 3.1 back then (most Indian colleges still use them *shudder*) and it had a pretty decent turnaround time for small programs. But as the programs grew, the compilation time used to take several seconds. This puts off the impatient learner quickly. An interpreter is a much better choice for students. Not only the feedback is instantaneous, you can examine or modify state at any point in time.

I learnt programming in BASIC. Though the language was not the fastest or the most expressive, it responded nearly instantly when you entered commands. It was almost as if you had a machine that you can instruct to fetch something or do some trivial task like that and it would immediately do it. As long as you can tell it enough smaller such tasks to accomplish bigger tasks, it can happily keep doing exactly what you want it to do. This, in many ways, is exactly the essence of the act of programming.

Most of the time, I miss the interactive experience in a compiled language as it seems that the feedback loop is unnaturally long. I can only imagine how boring it might have been to learn programming in them.

My advice to people who want to learn or teach programming would be to pick either Python or Processing. These languages have been specifically designed for pedagogy and hence, will ensure a smoother learning curve. Don't focus on OOP from the start, encourage them to solve problems with the least amount of code. Even going forward, they would realise that less code often translates to less errors.

OOPs I did it again!

Actually I had written this rant about OOP a few weeks back. I am not sure how ~~MIT~~ CMU folks caught the wind of it (must be those damn Paparazzis :)), but they have completely removed Object Oriented Programming from the introductory ~~MIT~~ CMU curriculum. I am sure some of the best minds in Computer Science are at work here and I am glad that they have taken the right step.

Surely concepts of OOP would be useful to their students in the future and they would need to learn it at some point in time. But, as I have realised, it is too much of an overhead to use OOP while learning programming. There is nothing better than typing in a few line of terse code and watching it immediately turn into something magical . In that respect, OOP is neither terse nor magical.

PS: Even when MIT switched from Scheme to Python for their freshman courses, I remember having made a post about Python a few days before the announcement. The timing of these announcements are getting freaky now :)

PPS: Thanks to the sharp readers for pointing out that the curriculum change was in CMU rather than MIT

She is my... umm...

2011-02-18T12:58:40+05:30

The earliest memory I have of Facebook, the social-networking phenomenon, was its innovative relationship status of "It's complicated". What did it mean exactly, I used to wonder. Is it committed? No. Is it available? Not really.

Despite the seeming ambiguity, it perfectly described the relationship status of thousands of folks in the current generation. As this transition happened quite rapidly within our friend's circles, it was bound to happen that someone or the other was not fully in tune with the times.

"Hey, what did you guys do this weekend? Me and Tina went to Kaup beach and it was awesome!"
"Cool! Well, not everybody has a girlfriend like you, man"
"What are you talking about? Tina is not my girlfriend!"

Such conversations alway end in long embarrassing blocks of silence with nobody looking at each other directly. In fact, this guy and Tina have been seeing each other for the past 15 years!

Well, since the terms "girlfriend" and "boyfriend" have been relegated to the late eighteenth century, people have been looking for better terms to describe their complicated-relationship-counterparts.

Sometime during late 2005, the word partner was quite common. "I have phoned my partner that I'll be late for dinner, so it's fine", sounded perfectly fine, then. However the term was felt to be too generic. There are business partners, dancing partner, partners-in-crime etc.

The term went quickly out of fashion due to too many unrelated connotations (nothing to do with 2007 Bollywood film of the same name, however :)). Towards early 2009, the word Significant Other or SO, in short, became more common. This seemed to be a quite satisfactory alternative as it covers any kind of relationship.

So, I guess that's where we are at now. So don't be surprised when you ask a couple "How are you guys doing?" and get the answer "We are SO-SO" :)

One-Handed Browsing

2011-02-15T17:02:18+05:30

There are some productivity tips, that are so simple, yet they'd have lived forever under your nose just waiting to be discovered. Over the last couple of years, I have noticed that I (and I speak for most of us) spend a majority of my computer time on the browser. So any means to improve my browsing experience directly translates into a significant improvement in my productivity.

The biggest slowdown any experienced computer user faces is the constant switch between the keyboard and the mouse, or in the case of laptops - the trackpad. So my first attempt was to eliminate the mouse from the equation. This turned out to be a false start. While coding or writing, one can be significantly faster by solely relying on the keyboard. However, the act of browsing is more of a two-dimensional activity.

Allow me to explain - the relevant hyperlinks are scattered across a page which might be tedious to navigate with a keyboard. Firefox allows one to perform an incremental search on the link text using the "'" (quote) keyboard shortcut. But most of the time, one spends tabbing through the links while browsing with just the keyboard.

The mouse is a much better option as I have recently found out. On my desktop and my laptop, I use a mouse with a scroll wheel. The scroll wheel vastly improves one's browsing speed by allowing one to quickly skim through the page and dive into the interesting parts.

But what surprised me was that the scroll wheel, in fact, performs another function. It is the third mouse button! Yes, the scroll wheel is in fact an improved reincarnation of the middle-button common in older mices. So, how is this useful for browsing?

Apparently, middle clicking a link, in other words depressing the scroll wheel, opens the page in a new tab in the background. The page you are currently reading would be intact. Earlier, I used to perform this action by pressing control key with one hand and clicking on the link with the other. Middle clicking is much more convenient to use.

Right after opening a link in a new tab, the second most common activity on a browser would be closing tabs. Middle button again comes to the rescue. Just middle-click on the tab title on the browser and viola, it closes*.

I found these tips to greatly improve my browsing experience. So when it comes to browsing, it's best to skip the keyboard and grab a mouse!

*- Yes, I know we can click on the close button on the tab. But this is much faster. Try it yourself!

Avatars - How we did it

2011-01-24T22:26:19+05:30

"Avatars" is our ~~nomination~~ multiple award-winning short film to a movie making contest within our organisation on the theme "Digital Consumers". Rather than make a boring mockumentary about mobile computing and social networking, I thought we should do something more ambitious. We wanted to make a decent short movie about technology that had characters, dialogues, storyline etc. Basically you know, all the works.

If you haven't seen the movie yet, play the embedded video below or click on the vimeo link to see it in high-quality HD:

How it all started

I have been part of a handful of skits and short films. The process inevitably starts with a core idea. A skeleton plot is built on top of it and later a script fleshes out the details. The initial script goes through numerous iterations before and during the realisation. In other words, the script is a key working manuscript for the entire team. Most of the time, it's a simple Word document with the dialogs in an free-flowing manner.

In the case of "Avatars", I wanted the script to be more visual-oriented and less on dialogues. In other words, we wanted the script to mention scenes, locations etc. After a lot of research, I found the standard screenplay template extensively used in Hollywood. Despite being slightly cryptic to write, it proved to be quite presentable and handy while shooting.

When I got the invitation for the movie making contest, I had dropped a mail to my old movie club pals, Manu and Nithya. I shared my outline script with them and they liked my elevator pitch of "one guy waking up in the morning to find a stranger in the apartment who turns out to be his avatar".

Once I finished the draft screenplay titled "Doppelgangers" and shared it with them, they were already visualising the movie in terms of how it would look and how the treatment of the subject should be.

Next we were hunting the actors and planning out the logistics. We had only four days in our hands and practically zero budgets. A number of factors helped us and we were very lucky to find some good acting talent and superb locations. We made a few modifications to the script and retitled it to "Avatars", corresponding to the meaning of "online identity". Now is perhaps a good time to delve into the concept behind "Avatars".

Symbolisms in Avatars

The entire narrative of Avatars can be divided into three parts - The Dream, The Avatars and Catching the Taxi. This is a conventional three part narrative arc used in majority of films and even books with a - beginning, middle and end. The dream establishes the characters - Ranjan and Jo.

The dream also tries to convey their flagging relationship through several hints - the meeting at sun-set, Jo's uncertainity by plucking the petals in a he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not fashion, her looking away when Ranjan comes etc.

There are also various hints to convey that we are in a dream. Being late is a common motif in dreams. Dreams have incoherence in location and words (hence the shaky shots and abrupt edits). They have elements of the real world just before you wake up. "Train station" was a deliberate crossover from real-life (Jo's message was probably being played while he was asleep) to dreams. It also added a certain humour element to the script.

The symbolism of having Avatars is probably the most obvious. After considerable thought, each Avatar was given a different personality. One was geeky, another was chatty etc. This was based on the fact that each Avatar represented an identity within an online service or a social networking site. We may manifest ourselves in different ways in each of these sites, perhaps forming distinct individual personalities. After all, our Avatars will not be an exact mirror of the real you. Conversely they might collectively represent you.

All in all, the visual treatment of the script will reward you well in repeat viewings. Considering the four minute limit of a short film, a lot can be said through images. However, to the casual audience, we needed to have something jazzy. That's where the effects come into picture.

Special Effects

Perhaps you came directly to this section. Wouldn't blame you, as we intended "Avatars" to be effects-laden to highlight the use of modern and even futuristic technology. When we realised that the showing multiple avatars in the same frame, being key to the believability of the story, we realised that we needed to perfect those scenes.

Being completely new to special effects, we did what most software engineers do - Prototype! I did a test shot of being in two places in two different shots. Manu took these shots and blended them on Adobe Premiere using masking tools. The result looked much more "believable" than the Green screen effect. In fact, Green/Blue screens needed a lot more effort and correcting the interplay of light and shadow would have been a nightmare.

Given the limited time, we decided to opt for masking for these trick shots. There was considerable effort in getting the lighting correct in these shots so that the videos would blend correctly without noticeable artifacts. One three-second shot needing the three Ranjans in one frame, took seven extremely long retakes across two days.

A major time-saving step was testing these trick shots immediately on the laptop at location. By this approach, we could quickly check if the shots matched correctly. This helped us avoid disappointment and saved a lot of time potentially lost in post processing corrections.

Most of effects were simplified due to careful planning before shooting. So by the time we shot the scenes with the overlay effects we knew that the camera angles had to leave some room for showing the dynamic menu selections.

Movie Making 101

Given the competition deadline, we had to finish a lot of things in the extremely short deadline. There are a lot of good resources on the web about short film making. But from our personal experience, here are some of the elements that went into "Avatars":

Storyboarding 101: Avatars' storyboard was pretty much about the camera angles and how the relative positions of the characters were maintained especially in conversation.
Camera-work 101: The widescreen frames helped a lot especially when 3 characters came together in the triangle seating for the trick shot. Some of the funny angles we tried were camera-in-the-bag and running-with-the-actor shots. Realised time and time again that hiding the camera from all the reflections is a big pain!
Screenplay 101: Shooting happened out of order and its very difficult to keep track of what's not covered without a screenplay. Sometimes continuity-errors would crop up in editing (such as the bouquet in the final shot) and the scene would be reshot.
Acting 101: The more the number of actors, the more retakes is a good rule of thumb. Sometimes simple shots like opening eyes and waking up took an incredible amount of time to look "natural".
Directing 101: A simple line like "OSCON went bust" can be said in a zillion different ways - comical, matter-of-fact or even condescendingly. A director needs to imbibe the spirit of the script and apply his imagination in these areas.
Lighting 101: Proper lighting will take 60% of your time. Avatars predominantly used bounce lights supplemented by free hanging fluorescent lamps and incandescent bulbs. Fluorescent lamps have a noticeable flicker.
BGM 101: The background music defines the mood and the tempo of a movie. The rock music in appropriate parts really helped.
Editing 101: Editing probably took way more time than I thought leading to all-nighters towards the end. It was entirely done in KDEnlive, a fantastic open source editor. Throughout the workflow, care was taken to keep in the intermediates in high quality HD.
Effects 101: There is an entire section on Effects above. Later, Manu got really good with the animated overlays and soon he couldn't stop making them enough! :)
Titles 101: The titles were a 3D rendering of Google maps with cloned Google-pointers floating over a map of Mangalore. The entire modelling and compositing was done in Blender. Took 3 hours to render.
Compositing 101: We did minimal compositing for Avatars. Some color correction was added from Kdenlive to give the appearance of a film rather than a digital camera.
Marketing 101: The posters were done in GIMP overlaying the title renders on the film frames.

What Worked What Didn't

Now that the movie is completed, it is probably a good time to do a post-mortem of what worked and what didn't

What Worked

Having a full screenplay: Great communication tool and sometimes a management tool
Having a team: Having your friends to collaborate makes the process more fun and focused at the same time. Late night mailers on gmail does keep you focused!
Prototype: Checking the double-effect shot first
Natural Lighting: We didn't spend anything on lighting. We chose locations that were brightly lit. The living room and bedroom actually belong to different houses :)

What Didn't Work

Sound recording: I have always found dubbing to be an issue in indie film making. We used a good mic and decent noise cancellation software, yet it was always unnatural sounding
Learning Curve: When you have a deadline, its not always the best time to learning a new piece of software like KDEnlive. But Windows Movie Maker wouldn't have cut it (pun intended).

Conclusion

All in all, it was a fantastic experience doing something creative with such a brilliant team. Avatars is a work that we are all proud of. Hope you enjoyed watching it as well!

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Which camera did you use? A. We used a Panasonic Lumix DMC-Z3. This is an inexpensive point-and-shoot with HD video recording capabilities. We also used a tripod in some shots.

Q. What software did you use? A. We used mostly open source tools like KDEnlive, Blender 2.56 and Audacity. It was completely edited on Ubuntu 10.10.

Q. How long did you take to make the film? A. It took one day to make the screenplay, followed by 2.5 days of shooting and finally, 2 days for editing and dubbing.

Q. Where all did you shoot? A. The entire movie is shot in Mangalore. The exterior shots were taken at Bondel Road and near Infosys. The interior shots were shot in Binary Homes and at my residence.

Q. Is there a bloopers video showing all the mistakes? A. You bet there is. The bloopers and some behind the scenes stuff is here: http://www.vimeo.com/18817334

Q. What was your budget? A. We filmed on nearly zero budget. We reused as much stuff as we could. The only things we bought for the movie were props like the bouquet and the coffee cups.

Q. Where did you get the name 'Oskon'? A. I had named the poor target of the Chinese mega-corp as OSKON without much thought. Later, I noticed that the toilet flushing system sensor at office had the letters ASKON engraved on it. So subliminal, huh?

Strongest People Are The Ones With Passion

2010-12-24T11:42:18+05:30

"What is the most resilient parasite?", the protagonist of 'Inception' teases us with this question. It is an Idea, he finally concludes. Once planted, he points out, it is almost impossible to completely eradicate a fully formed idea. The titular character of 'V for Vendetta' declared with a steady voice facing almost certain death "Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof".

Yes. We are all driven by ideas. We are not talking about just about any idea. We are talking about ideas that tease us, inspires us, drives us and ultimately consume us. Yes, we are talking about passion here. There is no better word to describe the best in a human than the word 'Passion'.

Yet, Passion sounds animalistic and almost debasingly primitive to the casual observer. Perhaps, that's why writers and even Hollywood scriptwriters choose the more higher abstraction of an idea. We may be influenced by various ideas, but the ones that instill passion are the truly dangerous ones.

When I say dangerous, I mean in a positive, world-changing way that everyone of us should aspire. We often measure success by various yardsticks - Wealth, Fame or Power. Yet, time and time again, History has told us that the truly successful men and women are the ones who has left a lasting impression i.e. a legacy behind.

There is perhaps nothing to living an ordinary life, for it is mere existence. We spend a good part of our early life learning skills that enable us to earn a livelihood. Once we start earning, what do we do with that money? We acquire various goodies from new clothes to a new vehicle. We are happy until we compare ourselves with our peers and chase even bigger goodies - a car, an apartment and so on.

We chase ephemeral happiness and in the process realise that we no longer feel the joys of this 'leveling up' exercise. This is when you realise that the means had become an end to itself. The rat race that you got sucked into has inevitably turned you into nothing but a rat.

This is a place that I sincerely hope that you don't find yourself into. Once we realise that there is a finite time that we live and to make a legacy, one's world view changes. You don't get consumed by envy when you see your peers basking in their new shiny toys. You realise that that's not your rat race. You choose the race you want to be in. That choice will define your passion.

Be it trivial or profound, it doesn't really matter. Your life is too precious to be wasted on a treadmill of Consumption. Go find what excites you. Excitement is infectious. If something genuinely excites you, there is no way that it can be contained. You might turn out to be an inspiration to others. Even if you change the life of one person, that is an enduring legacy.

So, look around you. Look into the mirror. Do you see passion with a capital 'P'? If not, it's probably time that you've found the courage to seek those burning embers within you.

Leaving you with these wonderful lines from Norah Jones' latest "Young Blood", a track I highly recommend:

Watch is ticking like a heartbeat gone berserk
Lost the chance to wind the key
Roosters are nothing but clucking clockwork
Our fears are only what we tell them to be
Our fears are only what we tell them to be

Delicious.com Shutdown: Perils of Cloud Apps

2010-12-17T10:15:37+05:30

First it was Geocities shutdown by Yahoo! without enough warning, now it's Delicious.com and a bunch of others like Altavista, MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Picks going the way of the Dodo.

I have been a long time user of Delicious with more than 2000 bookmarks. It might be the only Yahoo service I use with the exception of Flickr. Its idea was simple yet powerful - Make your bookmarks public and find like-minded people.

This was a key service for people researching on a particular field or simply hobbyists who spend an unhealthy amount of time obsessing over board games or gardening. Perhaps, Yahoo has been unable to monetise it well. But it has not even tried, as evident from the neglect it has been getting ever since it was acquisition.

As it might happen, Yahoo might open source the Delicious source code. I have heard that it's written in Erlang. Perhaps this is the reason it has been difficult to modify or maintain. Nevertheless they could have open sourced the code earlier as Reddit has done and might have still monetized it.

Personally, this raises grave concerns for cloud apps that I use. Recently Stallman warned that "Google's ChromeOS means losing control of data". What happens if one morning you hear than gmail, facebook, orkut or flickr will be shutdown? What happens to all your data? What about the implicit interconnections you had formed and the communities that you had been participating in?

The clouds are getting ominously dark!

UPDATE: Yahoo! has clarified that they are planning to sell Delicious and not shut it down. However, the concerns raised about cloud apps still holds good.

The Real Endhiran Review

2010-10-08T04:49:42+05:30

This review has spoilers

Saw Endhiran yesterday in a theatre full of people many of whom didn't even understand Tamil (you know, when they laugh only at the jokes in English!) It was a wonderful experience, minus all the wolf whistles and dancing seen in a typical Rajini starrer film. Partially due to the fact that it is a relatively tame multiplex audience in Karnataka and partially because it was not a typical Rajini movie with cliched punchlines and mannerism. Instead, it was a good Indian sci-fi movie.

Even though the theme is as old as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Endhiran shows the complexities that a sentient android robot, if ever built, brings in a form understandable even to the masses. It is a genuine attempt at bringing the moral issues of advancing AI technologies and how it can possibly impact our lives. The story or plot is rather an excuse to put together various engaging scenes and brings nothing entirely novel.

To say that Shankar has left enough interesting bits and pieces for the above-average audience would be an understatement. More on that later. I was expecting to a visual effects driven blockbuster movie and was instead surprised by the science fiction aspects of it. There is a lot of detail in the manner the robot manoeuvres i.e. magnetic attraction rather than dumb jet-packs.

The rest of the review has even more spoilers

The Geeky bits

As alluded previously, the movie is sprinkled with plenty of geeky stuff. The problems posed are really hard problems from the fields of machine learning and AI research rather than gimmicky questions. This shows the kind of homework that Shankar (or is it Sujatha?) has done for the movie.

Here is a sample of what the "Robot" can deftly handle and some other geek trivia:

Hard AI and machine learning problems

Hard Robotics problems

Bi-pedal motion
Accurate speech synthesis

Hard Math problems

Largest prime number
Determining if a large number is Fibonacci

Computer Programming

Hello World!
Worms for infiltration of a network rather than a Virus (Take that Hollywood!)

Science Fiction References

Asimov's Laws of Robotics - The scientist has a clever explanation why it doesn't follow them. Otherwise this would have ruined the plot.(Thanks Rindo!)
Various Star Wars droids - R2-D2 anyone?

Kudos to the Endhiran team for the laudable attempt.

PS: I wasn't too far off :)

Endhiran (Robot) Spoilers

2010-09-23T01:57:19+05:30

I have some semi-informed notions of the Endhiran storyline and even the climax. Don't worry, the boot-leg copies of the film are not yet out and these are just speculations. However, I have more than 2 decades of film-watching and popcorn-munching experience to back on. My guesses are:

Rajini's dual roles will be as a scientist and the robot which he will build in his own image.
The robot become 'self aware' and will download and assimilate entire Indian history post independence in a scene with jazzy graphics and the camera rotating around the robot Rajini's face. It will develop stronger moral absolutes compared to the scientist. It will understand through it's AI brain that the root of India's problem is... wait for it... Corruption
The scientist realises that his creation has created enemies out of his corporate sponsors who want it to be shut down. He turns 'villian'.
Meanwhile, Aish the evergreen teeny-bopper develops a crush on the scientist Rajini. However, the scientist being a 'nerd' doesn't have any such feelings towards her.
One fine morning, Aish meets the Robot and mistakes him to be the scientist himself. The robot too develops a special 'emotional' attachment towards her. Soon, sparks start flying (... literally).
The robot's vigilante actions soon attracts national attention and he is feared and praised for his actions. This leads to climax where a major boss-battle with blinding computer graphics take place.
The real climax - Aish later finds out that she was also a robot, which explains her wooden expression throughout (the movie or her entire acting career? ;) ). The mechanical pair live happily ever after.

I can't wait to see how right/wrong I am ;)

Disclaimer: This post was written purely for humorous purposes. This may or may not reflect the actual plot or storyline. No offence meant to anyone real or imaginary :)

** I have seen the movie now and here is the real review