I noticed that four out of the ten richest people are now Indians. Is this is a sign of India’s growing economic power? Is this an indicator of the overall economic disparity in the country? Has this happened before? Am I asking too many pointless questions? Maybe.
Here is the billionaires list from Forbes website as of today:
The list features many Indians like Nandan and Azim Premji. Hope this is a growing trend :wink:
Dasavathaaram or Dashavathaaram or Dasavataaram has a premise that could have worked. Kamal’s retelling of the 10 Avatars of Vishnu to the modern audience (if you think I am crazy, please click here ). Each Avatar (like the legendary Avatars) contributes to the sustenance of the universe (ok, just Earth in this case). It would have been a classic, but here is what probably happened over a plate of idli and filter coffee:
Kamal: I have written a rough script that will be the mother of all scripts. It will be my biggest project of all time and it will have the budget of a Hollywood movie…ummm… around 70 crores.
Aascar: 70 crore? (Stops chewing) Sounds huge. But why 70, sir?
Kamal: I dunno. 70 crore sounds really big, you know.
Aascar: Yeah, good point.
Kamal: I mean, it will be colossal. Should take at least 10 years in the making and I should have 10 different roles, more than anybody else has ever tried before.
Aascar: Errr… 10 years? what will we do for 10 years!!!?
Kamal: Makeup, of course
Aascar: Oh, that’s true… but, err…. we would still have time left!
Kamal: Build some hype around for a long time. The buzz will be good for the publicity.
Aascar: Hmmm, ok…. but we might still have little time left
Kamal: Oh, then postpone the release a couple of times. Tell them its Post-production delays. Filling in jazzy visual effects and stuff, you know
Aascar: (Chuckles) Yeah. I like the sound of it. Sounds like a Sooper Dooper Meggga Hit already. Lets work out a rough budget for the producers and finally we can figure out the visual effects budget.
Kamal: Oh, I almost forgot. We need to hire only Hollywood folks for all the lead technical stuff. This one is for the Oscars. They might be a bit pricey though.
Aascar: (Face brightens when Kamal says Oscars, but saddens when he hears Pricey) hmmm… okay
(Several furious punches on the calculator later)
Aascar: (Yelling) Got it, sir! The Visual Effects budget figure is also done.
Kamal: (Excitedly) Really? How much do we have? 30 Crore?
Aascar: No, sir!
Kamal: 20 Crore?
Aascar: Nope!
Kamal: 10 Crore?
Aascar: No, no, no….
Kamal: Huh? (Angrily) 1 Crore? 10 Lakhs? What is it?
Aascar: No, dear sir… its only 1 Lakh. These days even Tsunamis can be created on laptop computers. Besides, due to our global offshore animators, the entire film can be done in India at low cost.
Kamal: But thats the budget for a TV serial’s special effects these days. I wonder if the output will be any better. Isn’t there any other area where we can cut costs?
Aascar: Hmmm… well sir, then there is your pay package….
Kamal: (Interrupts) Oh… 1 Lakh you say? That’s should be fine, then.
Yes folks… the visual effects are an eye sore. Even a 2 year old will be able to make out that the stadium was computer generated, the ship carrying the idol is a 3D model and Kamal is not present in many of the stunts. The grotesque makeup of some characters have tones that remind you of plastic and dough rather than skin. The only saving grace is Kamal’s rendering of some characters by imitating their accents and body language (Bush was truly delightful :lol: ).
In short, don’t have any (Hollywood? :roll: ) level of expectations.
This is copied from a forward and I lay no claims on the authenticity of its contents. But kudos whoever wrote this, he understood more than I understood in 3 hrs and 10 mins
One thing we had noticed is why people didn’t get the real subtext and reason for the various roles and hence the title. If you knew the real dasavatharams of Lord Vishnu and their characters you can appreciate the script more.
Let me explain, starting with the best adapted role:
Krishna avatar - Vincent Poovaraghavan Lord krishna is actually a dalit, he is dark-skinned [shyamalam]. He saved draupadi when she was being violated and he was the actual diplomat in mahabharatham. Lord krishna dies of an arrow striking his lower leg. Now look at how vincent was introduced.. he appears when asin is about to be molested and he saves her like draupadi. Vincent is the dalit diplomat, fights for land issue [soil issue to be exact] and dies from the metal rod striking his leg. Oh even five of vincent’s men are drugged at P. Vasu’s.. sounds familiar???
Balarama avatar - Balarama naidu This is an easy given. as the name suggests and the role personifies you can easily get it.
Mathsya avatar - Ranagaraja nambi nambi is thrown into water in an act of trying to save lord from being thrown into sea, though vainly. what more clue do you want?
Varaha avatar - Krishnaveni paatti During the mukunda song, krishnaveni paatti does varaha avatar in the shadow puppetry. The frame freezes on it for a second. there is the clue. Moreover, in varaha avatar lord actually hides earth so as to protect life forms. Here too krishnaveni hides the germs - life form inside the statue so as to protect.
Vamana avatar - Kalifulla khan remember in vamana avatar, lord vishnu takes the vishvaroopa, that is the giant form! Hence the giant kalifulla here symbolises vamana avatar.
Parasurama avatar - Christian Fletcher Parasurama is actually on an angry killing spree and killed 21 generations of the particular kshatriya vamsa. Hence the real KILLER… Guess what thats what our Fletcher is! He comes around with the gun [modern upgrade for axe] and kills everyone around. I have to check if he kills 21 people though. :-D
Narasimha avatar - Shingen Narahashi first of all the name itself is a play on the words singam [means lion in tamil] and narasimha [the avatar being symbolised]. Lord Narasimha manifests himelf to kill the bad guy and he also teaches prahaladha. In the movie, he shows up to kill the killer fletcher! and is also a teacher.. Lord Narasimha had to kill the asura with bare hands and hence the martial arts exponent here.. get it?
Rama avatar - Avatar Singh Lord Rama stands for the one man one woman maxim, kind of symbolising true love.. Here Avatar portrays that spirit by saying that he loves his woman more than anything and wants to live for her.
Kalki avatar - Govindaraj Ramasamy As you know, the hero in kaliyug can be none other than the Kalki avatar!!!
Koorma avatar - Bush This is the most loose adaptation I couldn’t clearly comprehend. But if you look at the real koorma avatar, the lord is the turtle/tortoise that helps in stirring the ksheera sagara and bringing out the amruth. This essentially creates war among the devas and asuras. Similarly today Bush facilitates war between you know whom… May be Kamal also indicates that this avatar is a bit dumb like the tortoise…
If the over-descriptive title was not enough, this is another one of my tips to use my favorite editor - Emacs. Some of you really liked my earlier post on Emacs tips on Windows, so here is one more tip to improve your productivity.
Most of the time while editing a document, we need to quickly browse the folder of that file. Add the following lines to your .emacs files and so that by just pressing function key F12 you can immediately view its corresponding folder:
;; explorer
;; ----------
;;; Windows explorer to open current file - Arun Ravindran
(defun explorer ()
"Launch the windows explorer in the current directory and selects current file"
(interactive)
(w32-shell-execute
"open"
"explorer"
(concat "/e,/select," (convert-standard-filename buffer-file-name))))
(global-set-key [f12] 'explorer) ; F12 - Open Explorer for the current file path
A nice extra is that the opened explorer will have the current file automatically selected. Press F12 once in a while, it quickly becomes addictive ;)
Ittesbin is truly a spectacular time each year. It feels like college all over again. And many would swear that’s not always a pretty sight. Sleep deprived zombies can be spotted around the campus at midnight tired from practice sessions. There are also the worker ant types who would be trying to collect every scrap they could get their hands on for making variety of props. And there are also the insomniacs who are just there to have a preview of the show and blabber some profane advice under the pretext of ‘suggestions’.
Whatever it is, Ittesbin has always been an explosion of homegrown on stage entertainment within Infosys Mangalore. However from this time on, they introduced a new off-stage event called ‘Video Making Competition’. The theme was ‘My Infosys, My Mangalore’.
I took charge of our team and penned and directed a video over a period of three weeks (yes, almost whole of April!). It was a massive covert operation to shoot almost all of Mangalore without other teams getting a whiff of it. To see the result click on the link that follows
It was a fantastic learning experience and I felt it would be only fair to share my production notes for all those aspiring film makers out there. Here goes my post-mortem:
When I started I just didn’t want to make another documentary video, I wanted to make a movie. Slowly everyone got excited with this idea. From church scenes to playing cricket, people pitched in a lot of very filmy but very large scale ideas. We were basically a bunch of movie crazed folks.
I invented some camera movement using a tripod and paper sheet to create a dolly effect used in movies. Worked quite well
We didn’t want blood to look like ketchup, so we did a lot of research. I tried different easily available chemicals due to non availability of corn syrup. We ruined a couple of vessels at home in the process. But in the end, with lots of food color and cornflour the effect seemed to work.
The crab was spotted in an unexpected place. I had picked the wrong angle to shoot the bridge scene and it was near a open field. I came across this crab on my way back. I followed it for a long time while the rest of the crew was waiting for me to shoot the sunset at the bridge before the sun sets!
Voice intonation is never right because its very difficult to emote with voice more than with the visual. Voice is mostly too loud like a studio recording due to suppressing lower freq by an inferior mic. This stands out.
Made a evening shot look like a night shot by color correction
We faced a lot of problems while shooting:
Movie making is like Software Development. The final product is purely dictated by time, there is never a perfect release. Everything has to be managed to fit in the available time without compromising the quality. There are lot of areas where I feel I could have improved like lighting or visual effects. But the shoe string budget and lack of time (almost all of us were slogging with aggressive deadlines at work) were the constraints. But the constraints themselves led to creative ways to overcome them.
In a way the language of cinema requires a different way of thinking. The shots, scenes and transitions are the alphabets, words and punctuations of the language of movie making. I was surprised I was able to almost easily pick it up. The end product rarely deviates from the original written script. But I do realise that there is still a long way to go. And this is definitely not my last attempt :)
The videos produced by the JVC camcorder are in .MOD format which are nothing but .MPG files. The finally edited MPG file was too big for upload both in terms of video file size and resolution. But if I compressed it to say Xvid it would be recompressed by Youtube. Also they don’t add the black bars automatically, making my 16:9 videos squashed to fit the 4:3 aspect ratio.
In the end I had to download the latest windows build of mencoder and use the following 2 commands which resized the video, added the black bars, gave me the best results:
d:\mplayer\mencoder.exe "My Infosys, My Mangalore.mpg" -o myinfy.flv -mc 0 -ofps 25 -srate 44100 -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=2:q=8:aq=0:mode=1:lowpassfreq=17000 -ovc lavc -of lavf -lavfopts format=flv -vf scale=320:-2,harddup,unsharp=l3x3:0.7,crop=320:240,expand=320:240 -lavcopts vcodec=flv:vbitrate=236:keyint=125:mbd=2:trell:v4mv:cbp:last_pred=3:predia=4:dia=4:preme=2:vpass=1
d:\mplayer\mencoder.exe "My Infosys, My Mangalore.mpg" -o myinfy.flv -mc 0 -ofps 25 -srate 44100 -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=2:q=8:aq=0:mode=1:lowpassfreq=17000 -ovc lavc -of lavf -lavfopts format=flv -vf scale=320:-2,harddup,unsharp=l3x3:0.7,crop=320:240,expand=320:240 -lavcopts vcodec=flv:vbitrate=236:keyint=125:mbd=2:trell:v4mv:cbp:last_pred=3:predia=4:dia=4:preme=2:vpass=2
As you can guess from the length of the commands, it took me a long time to figure out. So its worth mentioning it here for reference
AccoladES is a labour of love (and a little boredom) for the past one year. It is a website that I have be designing for the HR department of ES, the largest unit within Infosys. Yesterday it was inaugurated by none other than Mr. N. R. Narayana Murthy. Infosys doesn’t have a 20% rule like Google, but sites and solutions like Accolades are getting more and more recognition these days. It is great for Innovation at Infosys and I hope will go a long way in helping Infy move up the value chain.
Sorry for the poor mobile-cam quality! NRN is on the projected screen (top-left). I am behind the lectern (top-right)
Some of the features of the site:
Coincidentally, I was the MC for the event from Mangalore. People seemed to enjoy the way it was presented. Designing websites which was initially just a hobby of mine is already becoming a hot skill these days. I have designed several static and dynamic sites in the last 9 years and consider myself to be fairly good designer. But the real deal seems to be the dynamic aspect of it. Already almost the entire software development community is moving towards web based development. Soon all applications will be purely web based. Developers would be required to be skilled in managing web servers and/or Javascript. Personally, I see a tonne of work coming my way ;)
Not that I am complaining but I also see a lot of MCing coming my way as well!
The views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer