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

You were merrily hopping through a lush green garden when you notice a giant grey pipe sticking out of the ground. Always ready for some action, you leap into the pipe without a second thought. You fall into a dimly lit underground passage. As you look up, you notice the sparkling gold coins hanging in the air. You realise there are probably hundreds of them. You can barely contain your excitement as you jump to pluck as many coins from the air.

Dreams in our childhood were sometimes made of episodes such as these. All thanks to extended bouts of playing Mario on our TV screens. The adorable plump plumber turns 25 this week. However, he is as fit as ever as one would notice from his acrobatics in his latest game ‘Super Mario Galaxy 2’. Mario and his sidekicks like Wario, Lugi and Pauline have appeared in over 200 titles over these years. This is a testament to Nintendo’s vision and innovation in creating the game industry’s first Superstar.

There have been various funny variations of one of the world’s most popular game title - Super Mario Bros (240 million in lifetime sales and still selling!). One game designer’s resignation letter was a Mario game titled ‘A Message for 2K Australia’ (his employer)! A geek proposed to girlfriend inside a Mario-like video game by spelling out the words “Lisa Will You Marry Me?” using gold coins. There are several other instances of Mario fans creating a 8-bit wedding invitation game to an entire room designed after Mario’s colourful world.

There are no signs of Mario retiring atleast for the immediate future. Whatever be tomorrow’s technology be it 3D or full body motion sensors, you can expect Mario to be there and kicking some posteriors! :)

Disclaimer: Mario and all related characters and elements are copyrighted to Nintendo

Early adopter: An early adopter is a person who embraces new technology before most other people do. Early adopters tend to buy or try out new hardware items and programs, and new versions of existing programs, sooner than most of their peers. According to a theory called Diffusion of Innovations (DoI) formulated by Everett Rogers, early adopters make up 13.5 percent of the population – Johns Hopkins Inst.

I am not an early adopter when it comes to gadgets. But ever since Kindle was introduced, it was pretty clear to me that I am going to buy an Ebook reader. For me, moving around books has been always a problem. Moreover, I am allergetic to old print.

Three months back, close to my birthday, I ordered an Infibeam Pi ebook reader. At that point of time, for ten thousand rupees, it was considerably cheaper than Kindle in India. Also, I did not like the idea of Amazon playing “Big Brother” where your book collection was stored in the “cloud” and subject to the mercy of their deletion policies. Pi didn’t have features that I didn’t need and it had some which I felt were missing in Kindle. More on this later.

Three months later, I would make the bold assertion that Ebook readers are the future. For a voracious reader, it is a must-have and with falling prices, it will replace paper books almost completely. I would expect students to be the most evident benefactors making it unnecessary to carry heavy textbooks and allowing even remote locations to have a wider collection of books than ever before.

In case you are interested in a detailed review of Pi reader, read on…

First Impressions

The package arrived in two weeks with several friendly calls reminding me that the package is “on its way”. When it arrived, I was happy to find that Infibeam has invested quite some time and effort to make the packaging attractive and safe for transit.

What surprised me upon opening was that the Pi logo on the screen. At first I assumed that it’s a decal or a sticker. But it seems the screen is always ‘on’ in a standby state! This shows how little power it consumes while displaying a static image/text. The only power consumption that happens is when the display changes. The display change takes around half a second of flicker. But this is not as annoying as it sounds and one quickly gets used to it, like turning the pages of a book.

In terms of appearance, the closest I can say is that Pi is like holding a piece of unwrapped white Milky Bar. Except that it is one giant booksized flat smooth chunk. It is thinner than most phones and being light quite easy to hold. There is a silver four way directional pad at the bottom right, which is similar those found in most phones. Most of the other keys are on the left leaving the bottom part mostly vacant and underutilized.

Interface

The user interface is excellent with big bold icons. You don’t need a manual to understand most of its functions. Again, this was real surprise for me for an Indian product.

In terms of features, it has a music player and a sudoku game built in. Playing music can reduce the battery life considerably. It supports the EPUB format which is an open ebook format popularly used for the iPad. It also recognises Kindle’s (.mobi) book format, PDF, RTF, HTML and even most images. The latter makes it really a great option for reading comics (with smaller page sizes) even thought it will appear in greyscale.

The most common question I hear is - How good is it for PDFs? The answer is - it depends. If the PDF is mostly text, then it can reflow the text and handle the zooming of text pretty well. If the PDF is mostly images or scanned text (without OCR), then it would not look that great when you zoom. This is a deal breaker if you are going to read a lot of technical books for e.g. programming books or mathematical works. It is perfectly fine for general reading and comics.

Use cases

I have found myself reading a lot more due to the Pi reader. In fact there are many situations where Pi’s long battery life and portability came handy. Here are some such scenarios I could think of:

• Extended Power cuts: The reader can last you days not just hours on a single charge
• Documentation: Learning a lot of project docs
• Students: As mentioned earlier this an excellent device for a student with lots of ebooks.
• Clean Desks: You can keep reading multiple papers without the mess on your desk
• Travel Companion: A lightweight companion in your laptop bag carrying thousands of must-reads
• Comic Geek: Reading comic series compilations at a stretch

Ebook formats

There has been quite a bit of discussion around ebook formats like ePub or Kindle’s mobi. If you are a normal user who would directly download books from Infibeam/Amazon, read them and forget about it, then you can skip this section. On the other hand if you are a geek, who prefers ogg over mp3 or vice versa, then you might have many questions. Like which is ebook format is the most open, whether these formats are easily interconvertable etc.

EPUB is the likely future standard than mobi. Kindles cannot open EPUBs, which has resulted in many holding back their buy decision. EPUB is the most open format; it’s basically a zip file with xhtml and images. Just unzip and read with a browser! Even Google has recently offered over a million free e-books in EPUB format.

EPUB supports features like table of contents which is very useful for longer texts. EPUB allows for “richer” formatting. You can, for example, have things like “drop caps”, pictures with text that “flows” around them, or embedded fonts, none of which Mobi supports.

Personally, I have converted most of my ebooks into EPUBs. Using a tool called Calibre it is quite easy to convert from and to ebook formats.

PROs and CONs

Of course, the Pi reader could be better, a lot better. Here is a quick list of things that I feel are its pros and cons:

Pros

• EPUBs: Supports EPUB quite well. In fact, the reading experience of EPUBs is the best compared to all other formats on Pi (even better than .TXT!).

• Pages Numbering: Page numbers are maintained as in a real book. Good for teaching

• Screen: The screen is the same Eink technology as the Kindle. For people who are lusting after iPads need to see this screen- you cannot make out the pixels. It is really gorgeous!

• SD Card Support: Infibeam has both internal memory as well as swappable SD card support. SD cards are cheap and keep getting cheaper. You’d never run out of space.

• Indian Languages: Lots of Indian language books at Infibeam bookstore

• Battery life: Once charged, thanks to my occasional use of 1-2 hrs per day, it lasted two months! The lack of WiFi probably helps in this case.

Cons

• Need for PC: It’s not a standalone device. You need your PC to add books or a friendly neighbourhood geek.
• Illumination: Recommended to use under plenty of light. Opposed to iPad’s or Laptop’s glossy surface which works best in the dark. This one is best read near a window or under a tubelight, just like a book.
• Button Placement: Back button made more accessible, say upper right would have avoided a lot of fumbling around. It’s awkwardly placed at the side.
• Headphones Incompatible 3 mm earphone jack is not compatible with your favourite headphones
• No Dictionary
• No net browsing With a screen that takes half a second to refresh I am not sure if its the best device for browsing. Kindle comes with an experimental browser. But with spotty wifi in India, I’m not sure how much you would miss this feature.
• Contrast: The contrast could be slightly better. The grey background reminds you of a filter-paper-like texture of a paperback, but the gorgeous typefaces conveys its classy pedigree.
• Auto rotate - No auto-rotate based on gyroscope like iPad. Won’t this be annoying? I’m not sure.
• Lack of Color or Touch Display - This is a limitation of all ebook readers. I miss color only while reading comics. Touch screen is a nice to have.
• No full keyboard - A full keyboard is useful if you want to make notes, annotations or searches. Personally, I won’t find much use for it.
• Oversmart .txt Handling: If you open text files esp from Gutenberg.org, the reader tries to identify headings and quotations. This sometimes goes wayward resulting in multiple sized fonts. There should be an option to disable this “intelligence”.
• Cheap Cover: The Infibeam comes with a faux leather cover that is sturdy but uses a cheaper felt on the inside. The reader often slides out while reading within the cover. But it can be easily secured with a double sided tape :)

Summary

Ebook readers are great devices. Infibeam Pi is an excellent device for its stated features. If the prices came down like the Kindle, there would be a lot more adoption in India.

Gallery

Here are some photos of Pi reader (visit the Flickr page for higher resolution shots with captions):

These days whenever the topic of corruption or malpractices within our political system is discussed, some strange retorts have come into vogue even after half a century of gaining independence. It is not the anger of blind patriotism or even resigned feeling of helplessness. It is pithy remark, ‘Why don’t you change the system, then?". This comment is perhaps based on the dwindling voting turnout by the upper middle class and declining participation of the youth in politics.

This is a very broad generalisation perpetuated by popular literature and Bollywood films. The so-called educated and socially responsible citizens do exist in our country. But they form a minority of our population and do not win any elections in our “democratic” system.

In a democracy, numbers matter. A well-educated English speaking youth wearing western formals will not appeal to the uneducated masses. The political appeal of a khadar wearing vernacular speaking shrewd and manipulative politician will continue to exist until the majority the Indian population enjoys education and cannot identify with such people anymore. The vast majority of the politicians are merely selling pipe-dreams to the naive population while exploiting their regional differences claiming better representation. The legitimacy of such claims are rarely questioned or debated by majority of the masses.

Till that transformation in the society as a whole will happen, we cannot blame the middle class for not taking steps to become more involved in the political process. In fact, there have been several independent parties by students from prestigious colleges like IITs who have never won elections. Everyday, the average middle class person protests against corruption and nepotism which falls into deaf ears and eventually have to succumb to it grudgingly.

I strongly believe messages like “Don’t Talk, But Act” are over-simplistic and even harmful. The people who voice their opinions are genuinely interested in improving the system and expose issues present in the society. Their voices are needed to stimulate change and must not be suppressed. Awareness for greater involvement in the political process is necessary and often justified. But their means of expression must not be ridiculed and taken as weaker substitutes to action. Political will is often influenced by greater citizen awareness rather than by direct vigilante action.

Here the so-called perpetrators are also the most severe critics of the political system but feel helpless. They are victims of a system which purely believes in the opinion of the bigger numbers. Unless the illiterate and underprivileged who form majority of our population have better living conditions and education, the system will continue to elect perpetrators of such a decadent political system. This vicious cycle can be broken not by standing in elections and asking to vote for yourself, but by helping in creating a social change. The real change lies in improving the living conditions of an average Indian. Our real and possibly only hope lies there.

Happy Independence Day to all Indians!

How many times have someone forgotten an important line in your email despite it being bold, highlighted and underlined? How many times have you come across a mail that the sender himself has not read even once? How many programmers you have seen in online forums who ask the same basic questions that were earlier answered again and again?

The geeks have a word for this apparently inability of the end-users to read a manual - RTFM or Read the Fine Manual. The impatience of getting to use a brand new gadget quickly wears off once you cannot get it to work despite several attempts. The immediate reaction seems to be to reach out for the phone than to read the manual. You begin to raise queries to Tech support when the instructions have been clearly given in the manual. This is where the problem starts. The waste of your time and the Tech support’s time is exactly what the user manual tries to avoid. We will try to explore why this happens.

Why don’t we just read?

It is not the technology users or programmers who are guilty of committing the “Ask before you check” crime. This a common malaise and can be seen everyday while mailing or sending documents for review. It seems there is hardly anyone who does a thorough job of “Reading” these days. In fact, if you know someone who actually reads every line that’s send to him/her, I am sure that person is a quite valuable asset to your team for that particular “skill”.

The vast majority of us are either skimmers or ADHDs (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). The former prefer to gloss over the details and absorb the high level details from 30,000 feet. Once their 5 minute power-read of a document is complete, they bask in the satisfaction of having completed an arduous task of understanding the document in a fraction of the normal time. These superhuman feats are often fraught with the hazard of missing significant detail, but often skimmers are influential enough to disregards such minor details completely. The ADHDs are the ones with coffee coursing through their veins. They often try to start reading and few seconds later, completely give up hope. They procrastinate endlessly about the pile of documents waiting for them at their table. They might eventually turn to skimming but even then it turns boring pretty quickly.

These specimens of our species have been evolved by the forces of nature at work in the last few decades. Call it “Information Overload” or the “Twitter Effect”, there are simply too many streams of information competing for our attention at any given time. The email pop-up on your mail program, the tweet from a celebrity, an SMS from your friend and your phone rings at the same time on a particularly crazy moment. This multitasking is immensely taxing for your brain and in a desperate attempt to cope up, your brain tries to focus on the high-level details rather than the smaller details. The smaller details sometimes get overlapped with each other or completely forgotten and lead to embarrassing situations. Nonetheless we seem to be trapped in this multiple-thread hell as a necessary evil of modern life.

Can we ever truly multitask?

We often think that we are good or bad at multitasking depending on our assessment of ourselves. But the question remains as to if we are even capable of multitasking? This might sound like a silly question at first. Surely we can eat while talking over the phone. Or even listen to a radio show while driving. But have you ever taxed your brain for activities that involve thinking simultaneously? Have you tried writing something while talking over the phone? By writing, I don’t mean a routine chore like signing a cheque. I mean writing a prose or a report which is independent from the telephonic conversation. It might be extremely hard or even impossible to focus on both at the same time.

This leads to an interesting school of thought that our brain works best when there is a single thread of thought. To explain it in analogous terms to computer geeks, our brain is a single processor ¹. The only way we can multitask is by time sharing. We convert each activity into tiny slices which require our attention and quickly juggle through each slice like a skilled juggler. But at any given point of time there is only one slice on your mind, one ball in your hand. The rest are, so to speak, in the air and waiting for their turn.

Many Indian and oriental meditation techniques try to train your mind to develop focus on one particular activity at hand. There might be several other activities but treat them temporarily as distractions and try to train your mind to take the current activity to a logical end-point. The distrations can be blocked mentally, however it is best to actually prevent such distractions in the first place.

Next time you try to read a long document, turn off all the potential distractions. Most mail programs can be disabled to supress pop-ups. You can also turn off your twitter client and put your phone on silent/vibrate. Resisting the temptation to switch to a new activity is the key. Even at an early stage, the rewards of such focussed sessions are easy for one to see. The clarity it brings to your communications is also quite noticeable.

TL;DR

There is prevalent practice in most online forums to write a short summary of a long passage or comment for impatient readers called TL;DR i.e. Too Long; Didn’t Read. I might say that the TL;DR for this writeup is that one’s reading comprehension can be vastly improved if you can focus solely on the task of reading. But that would defeat the purpose, as you would miss the exploration of the problem, classification of the worst offenders or even the analogy of a juggler to the brain elaborated in this writeup.

But then, if you have reached this far, you are not the one who should be reading this!

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1. Technically our brain is a huge parallel computer. However when we conciously try to manage two parallel tasks, our brain switches from one task to another ↩︎