The Prestidigitator

Every time an Indian with a Y chromosome delivers a tirade fueled by patriotism, he is bound to tell you that the Indian culture stands tall amongst all else because of it’s unrivaled respect for women, for the female form, for the working woman, the daughter, the sister, the mother. He will tell you how fortunate a woman in India is for she is not subjected to the evils of an amoral western society. He is the epitome of hypocrisy.

• Guwahati men strip, beat up women protesters: Local men strip and molest protesting tribal women in broad daylight while the police watch. What is most bothersome is that journalists managed to click photos whilst the atrocity was in progress. Are we so passive? The government feels that a 1 Lakh compensation will make up for the emotional and physical torture these women were put through.
• An Infosys employee in the US pushes his 23 year old wife out of a moving car for being unable to come up with enough dowry. Apparently, you don’t have to be uneducated to be an imbecile. The news came to light thanks to a Pakistani doctor.
• 26 year old Ashwini Mohite from Pune gets raped and murdered on her way back from work.

Add to that, a 300% increase in violence against women in Kerala, Taslima Nasreen being harassed for her views and reports that suggest violence against women is at an all time high in Asia.

The blame for these lie not with the victims, like most claim but with a judicial system that unabashedly sides the insecure ego maniacs who perpetrate such acts and let them go away with punishments hardly befitting the crimes. Isn’t it sickening when the moral brigade sticks it’s head out to uphold the culture and tradition of the country while doing nothing to check violence against the fairer sex? Isn’t it high time to stop making lame excuses by blaming films and the media? Is not every woman someone else’s daughter, wife or mother?

(Picture sourced from The Hindu: Online Edition)

Now that it’s out of the beta phase, I got myself to try out Flock 1.0. I am blown away, so much that I think I’ll be sticking with it.

Flock takes away the pain of searching for all those extensions you need for Firefox or even IE and simply integrates them into the UI of the browser. The UI itself is pretty neat to boot.

Blogger and Wordpress users can upload their posts directly via the Flock editor which sadly cannot be used to upload pictures to be used in the post; you can only link them.

There is a sidebar for Facebook which is pretty nifty come to think about it as is the Flickr and Youtube widgets. One of my favorite things about the browser is the integrated feed reader; beats using Google Reader every time I want to check out my feeds.  Managing saved passwords and sessions is also fairly easy and organised.

The one thing I find a bit disconcerting is Me.dium which allows you to see what your friends are browsing. Why would I want to do that?

Every time something like this comes along, I think I’m getting more organized. But the truth is, it’s just another tool that takes me one step ahead along that path of lethargy.

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Tags: Technology, Flock, Me

Johnny Gaddar could have been a brilliant film. It could have been an Indian answer to the Coen Brothers, it could have been the smartest Hindi crime caper in recent times; but it’s not.

Johnny Gaddar is a play on the name Johnny from the eponymous Dev Anand film Johnny Mera Naam. The proceedings are peppered with various pop culture references, mostly involving the early films of Amitabh Bhachan; particularly a film called Parwaana that according to one of the characters, nobody remembers Bhachan for. The story involves 5 men who get into a scam to, well, get a lot of money. Vikram (Neil Mukesh) gets greedy and hatches a plan of his own to collect the entire moolah himself. As is always with schemes like these, things go wrong and people die. This is where the film closely resembles a Coen Brothers picture; the plot gets overly complicated and the main characters are motivated simply by greed.

The film is determined to be smart and hence tries to include as many references to  other films and books as possible. James Hadley Chase novels make frequent appearances as do scenes from Hindi films from the 70s. You even get to catch a glimpse of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. But the problem is none of these references serve much purpose. Watch Kiss Kiss Bang Bang to see how it’s done properly.

You have to give the film credit where it’s due; the film had me glued to the seat from the word go. It was clever, the humor was understated, the characters were interesting but alas, the tone was inconsistent. To top it off, you have shoddy camera work (What’s with all the weird angles?) and Rimi Sen who gives the word “Drama Queen” new meaning. Then again, it’s better than most of the crap that comes from the industry these days. 6.5/10

Also, is it me or does Dharmendra look like an aging porn star?

If social networking sites weren’t absolutely necessary to keep alive fading (and in most cases banal) relationships, I would have distanced myself from Orkut, Facebook and the likes. However, I find myself reluctantly holding onto them simply because too many people I know (and would like to keep in touch with) are on it.

A week back I stumbled across a profile that looked suspiciously similar, save the name. The Interests section in particular had the exact same books I had on my profile once. Coincidence? Kindred spirit? Pretender. He even put them in the exact same order with the exact same spelling errors. The enlightened few among you may know that the technology for this exists today. CTRL+C. CTRL+V.

They say that imitation is a form of flattery, but I disagree. Imitation is the result of the lack of drive to pursue an area that one deems interesting. Imitation arises out of laziness. Sadly, the internet is as much a bane as it is a boon. Pretenders with the attention span of an autistic chimpanzee can look up Google or Wikipedia for dumbed down data regarding slightly denser information. I’m not against democratizing information per se, but the way I see it the likely result of “wannabe intellectualism” is the progressive weakening of the human gene pool. Or at least have the decency to follow through. Call it arrogance, call it whatever you want. But the fact is that good number of people seem content going through what was once akin to understanding Sartre by reading the Cliff Notes version. I personally know a handful of people who wax and wane about existentialism and Picasso based solely on what they have read on Wikipedia.

Angry as I was at this particular pretender, I confronted him (albeit politely) about his profile. After feigning ignorance, he proceeded to pass it off as coincidence and later came out with a half assed explanation that would make Dubya’s War on Terror seem like a masterstroke of genius, reason and logic.

I shall now refrain from further pseudo intellectual masturbation.

It’s been two weeks since I came across this film and I still can’t get over the initial sense of exhilaration that followed my first viewing of what will most likely go down in history as a cult film. The film piqued my interest only because of the name Jerome Bixby attached to the title. So I sit down expecting nothing more than a shoddy treatment of a mildly intriguing premise. I was right about the treatment but the premise was far from just mildly intriguing.

John Oldman, a history professor holds an impromptu goodbye session along with a few of his colleagues who themselves are experts in the fields of archeology, anthropology, biology and Christian literature. He remains oddly secretive about reasons surrounding his sudden move but upon being prodded, he poses, what he calls a hypothetical question. What if a man from the upper paleolithic era continued to live till the present day?

What follows is the scholarly playfulness with the idea leading up to devastating realizations for everybody in the room. The film explores (at least tries to) reactions of people whose beliefs are challenged to extraordinary lengths. Discussions flit across anthropology, history, philosophy, death and religion. The conversations are highly stimulating although not overly intellectual. If I said anymore, I’d be giving away far too much. Think 12 Angry Men and a science fiction premise.

The film for most part doesn’t disappoint but sadly, there are flaws aplenty. Bad lighting, uninspired editing and a very conclusive ending. I would have preferred if the ending was more open ended allowing the viewer to make assumptions which would have made the experience a whole lot more interesting. But it’s unfair to nitpick here as it is quite obvious the film was shot on a shoestring budget.

Incidentally, the film is finding large audiences thanks to internet piracy. But like most films (Read Crash) that gain acclaim upon release, I have a feeling this film will become far too popular and  slowly audiences who loved the film initially will distance themselves from it. Anything too popular can never be cool can it?

The last time I was this excited about a conversation piece was when I watched the far superior Richard Linklater experiment, Tape.

http://www.manfromearth.com 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0756683/

One of the perks of having your office on the 41st floor is the view.

Not.

Melbourne like any other place has it’s fair share of weirdos; you have your garden variety mutterers, road side evangelists, doomsday mongers, middle aged Goth fans and drunken hobos. No matter how nonchalant you are to your surroundings, you still end up staring at the half naked, hairy, old man dressed in nothing but knickers singing ”We Are The World”.

As I pondered (yes, I’m known to occasionally ponder) on the kind of life he led, his social circle, the childhood he had, his dreams, ambitions, tastes and general perception of reality, a guy in a pin striped suit gives me a nudge and smirks. Holding a beer can, he exclaims, ”Crazy old f**k huh?”

I nod and smile hoping he’ll go away. He then bursts into song, clearly imitating the old man. He must have thought he was being clever, amusing even.

Leaves you wondering…sanity is just a point of view isn’t it?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0445922/

I confess. I love musicals and I love The Beatles. Mediocre reviews didn’t deter me from watching this psychedelic spectacle at the cinema. The film is eminently forgettable but sitting there for those two hours, one cannot help but marvel at the meticulously directed frames and the rousing score, all inspired by the fab four and the political and generational turmoil of the 60s and 70s.

The film is far too cliched but come to think about it, how many twists can you really put in a love story? The characters all have names that allude to Beatles songs and with a protagonist named Jude, you know ”Hey Jude” is pretty much a certainty.

A whimsical, gritty, flawed yet fun experience.