Movie Review: Halla Bol

My first impression on leaving the theater was that I liked Chak De India better, but I changed my mind on further reflection. Right from the initial scenes where the cynicism of Bollywood society is laid bare, to the gripping finale, Halla Bol grabs your attention and doesn't let go (alright, maybe it does let go a bit during the inevitable, but mercifully few songs).

This was my first Ajay Devgan movie (sue me), and I must say, he has presence; lots of it. He may not be as good looking as the Bollywood hunks who cannot act their way out of a paper bag, but makes up for it with the intensity he brings to his role.

Some of the scenes are over the top, like when Ajay Devgan's character pees on the Persian carpet at the minister's house (where did they get hold of this guy, BTW? They might as well have replaced him with a cartoon), or when Pankaj Kapoor's truck develops bullet-proofing capabilities when he makes his dramatic appearance to save Mr Devgan. There are also some made-for-cinema coincidences (including the above-mentioned appearance of Pankaj Kapoor at the right place at the right time) like the old director's granddaughter being a forensic pathologist who plays a vital role in the revival of the murder case, but these can be overlooked in light of the movie's other redeeming qualities.

The movie also ventures into controversial territory, with party cadres (Shiv Sainiks?) going on the rampage against Devgan, and leaders of the Muslim community offering support to him (BTW, his refusal to accept their help because he believed that he could get justice in a secular country seems more like a nod to political correctness than a portrayal of how things are in real life).

All in all, definitely a must-watch movie.

(In other news, hell froze over at 19:21 IST today. The met department attributed this event to an oath a certain individual took re: Bollywood movies about a decade or so ago).

Joel, Meet CMM

From Joel on Software:

To reach this sweet spot, we borrowed an idea from Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota. He calls it Five Whys. When something goes wrong, you ask why, again and again, until you ferret out the root cause. Then you fix the root cause, not the symptoms.

Fishbone analysis by any other name smells just as CMMy. To be fair, blogging about all the outages and what you're doing about them is a novel, Web 2.0 wrinkle.

Maybe it's just the cynic in me, but doesn't it sound like a way to save money instead of blindly giving a rebate to all customers who suffer a downtime?

We let the customer decide how much they want to be credited, up to a whole month, because not every customer is even going to notice the outage, let alone suffer from it.

And Joel, you might do well to keep an eye on Michael; his email seems like he's doing quite a nice job of managing his boss, if you know what I mean.

Simplicity

Yesterday I was at the Trivandrum airport, waiting to catch a flight back home, when a friend pointed out that the Chief Minister of Kerala was about to board a plane. I looked around, and sure enough, there was a doti-clad person, walking purposefully towards the boarding gate. What caught my attention was that there was just a single policeman accompanying the Chief Minister; no retinue of self-important sycophants jostling around. I know nothing about Kerala politics -- levels of corruption, development, and so on -- but this was a refreshing change from the personality culture that is prevalent in the rest of the country.

Ironically, I witnessed something completely at variance with the above scene, just two days ago at the same airport: a huge retinue of supporters expressing their adulation (via man-high garlands and slogans shouted at the top of their voices) for a bishop of all people.

The Jallikattu Controversy

Public opinion seems to be in favour of the ban on Jallikattu, as evidenced by the letters to the editor in The Hindu. There are a few voices opposing the ban too. Here's one:

Animals suffer at the hands of human beings in many ways. They are overloaded and tortured in agricultural fields, used in transportation in inhospitable terrain and circumstances, and held captive in zoos and homes. They are sacrificed in religious functions. Considering all these, the so-called ill-treatment of bulls, which are nurtured throughout the year, one day is nothing.

Consider this analogy: Two people are beating up a person, one with a heavy club, the other with a much smaller stick (but big enough to cause pain to the victim). Per the above logic, we might as well allow the second guy to continue his actions. Here's another one:

The apex court verdict does not take into consideration the views of the stakeholders, in this case the villagers, bull-owners and tamers

Conveniently leaving out the uber-stakeholder, who's getting chilli powder thrown into his eyes and being set upon by ten or twenty 'tamers'.

It's different this time

From The Economist:

The authors show that, although details may vary, banking crises follow the same broad script. Each blow-up is preceded by rising home and equity prices; an acceleration in capital inflows driven by optimistic foreign investors; a rapid build-up of debt; and--immediately before the storm hits--an inverted V-shaped path for the economy, with growth first picking up and then faltering.

The quote refers to the American economy, but it could as well be referring to India.

I have been subscribing to the Economic Times for a month or so, with a view to making some money in the stock market (changed priorities and all that). It's been a pretty mixed experience; not investment-wise -- I am yet to dip a toe into the waters -- but in terms of gaining insight and understanding. Will probably post something on this later.

Alright, Stop it Already

I have written previously about jokes in Reader's Digest that are predicated on taking a well known idiom or expression and rewording it in order to produce a punch line. Here are two more examples of this despicable technique from recent issues:

A rope walks into a pub. The barman says, "You were in here causing trouble. Go on, get out."

The rope shuffles outside and winds his top half round his bottom half, vigorously rub his head against a lamppost then goes back into the pub. "Oi!" shouts the barman. "Didn't I just throw you out?"

"Nah, mate," says the rope. "I'm a frayed knot."

I'm afraid not. Get it? Ha ha. The next one:

One man hated that his wife was always nursing sick birds. At home he found a crow with a splint on his beak sitting in his favourite chair. On the dining table a feverish eagle was pecking at an Aspirin, while in the kitchen his wife was comforting a shivering little wren that she found in the snow.

"I can't take it any more!" he said. "We've got to get rid of all these darn..."

His wife cut him off in mid-curse. "Please, dear," she said. "Not in front of the chilled wren."

Oh, I get it. Not in front of the children. Bwahaha, stop it, you're killing me.

Movie Review: I am Legend

[Warning: spoilers]

Let's start with the name of the movie: I am Legend? What kind of a crappy title is that? Talk about egomania.

The movie piques your interest initially, what with the scenes of overgrown New York streets with not a human being in sight, deer and lions having a free run, and all that, but this wears off quickly, once you are filled in on how this miserable state of affairs came about. The rest of the movie is very depressing, with no turning-of-the-tide moment, with the protagonist going through one misfortune after another [the family pet gets killed, for God's sake (a totally unnecessary Old Yeller moment thrown in for good measure, too) -- how much more dystopian can you get?].

There are so many holes in the story:

1. How does Dr Neville get to set up a well-barricaded house, with a state-of-the-art lab in the basement, in the face of all the turmoil and confusion (we are told) that accompanies the virus outbreak?


2. What's up with all the folks who get turned into 'mannequins'? Why have their bodies not decomposed/turned to dust/whatever? (Update: Well, it turns out they are mannequins, probably set up by Dr Neville to tide over his feelings of loneliness.)


3. Couldn't the doctor have hooked up earlier with any other persons who are immune to the virus?


4. Where does the electricity come from? I'd have asked the same question about the fuel, but they show Dr Neville pumping it from a gas station, so I'll let it go and assume that he has not run out of gas for three years because he is getting his supply from various gas stations all over the city.


5. Why doesn't he escape with the woman and the kid at the climax? Why the need for sacrifice and martyrdom?


6. Why does he leave the dog to roam around freely when there is a real danger of the dog running into the den of darkness seekers (or whatever the heck they are called)?


7. We are told that the bad guys have de-evolved completely, i.e., they have lost all their human qualities and have become like animals, but they still retain the intelligence to device a clever trap to try and capture the good doctor.

Minus two stars out of five.

Aamir Khan on Black

Well, if I'd sat through the entire movie and had done a full review of Black, it would definitely be in alignment with Aamir Khan's take (sorry, the quote is from DC, so no link):

The sensibility wasn't right for me, I couldn't make out if they were living in a museum or a library or a church. The performances were over the top.

No doubt referring to Big B's fricken British accent.

Most importantly, it was about a child who had these problems, an alcoholic person comes and says you have to leave her alone with me for forty days, and he slaps her around. I don't know of any parent who would agree to that.

Ouch. And I wasn't even thinking of the pedophile angle.

Dish TV Sucks: Part 9564

1. You log in to the web site and are asked to change your password. You change your password, but when you try to log in using the new password, you get an error saying that your password contains invalid characters. You disable this validation by turning off JavaScript temporarily, and voila, you're able to log in. Sigh.


2. You enter your credit card details and click on Submit. Payment gateway error. Against your better judgement you repeat this three more times, and hit the same error each time. A part of you is worried that you've actually paid them four times, but a phone call to Citibank reveals that no transaction has gone through. Whew. Come to think of it, I think I should consider moving this to the (non-existent) "Why Dish TV is Great" list.


3. You try the credit card payment the next day, and it goes through. Only problem is, the default option in the renewal screen is for the basic package; therefore you do not get the full complement of channels. And it takes you one hour of arguing with the call center person -- after waiting patiently for 24 hours for the activation to kick in -- to figure this out.


4. You ask to be put through to the supervisor so that you can complain about the poor service, and are asked to give your phone number; the supervisor will call you back. You do so, not really expecting a call back. Your expectations are met fully and completely.


5. The IVR system is faulty; it works with certain mobile phones and not with others.


6. Staying on the subject of the IVR, you select the option for English, and are connected to a representative who impresses you with his chaste Hindi.

Alright, maybe there is one item that can go on the "Why Dish TV is Great" list: for all their other shortcomings, the set top box's interface is miles ahead of Tata Sky in the usability department. Ironical, when you consider how badly their web site's usability sucks.

Blackwill Booga Booga

From The Hindu:

Indian cities could be targeted by extremists who could lay their hands on nuclear weapons once Iran develops them, the former U.S. Ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill, said here on Monday.

“If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, some Arab countries may follow suit and who knows what western city or Indian cities such as Delhi or Mumbai could be a target,” he said at a session at the India Economic Summit

.

ClearTrip.com

My first impression of cleartrip.com was a negative one -- their TV ad where a person sees a good looking woman in a bar and removes his ring so that he can pretend to be single (what's up with these brain-dead advertising folks? [*]) -- but a visit to their web site left a positive impression on me. Clear design, works fine in Firefox, an excellent summary page where you can mix and match flight options... what more could one ask for? Not to mention the fact that you can use said excellent summary page and identify the flights you want to take, and then mosey over to the airlines' own web sites and book your ticket, saving yourself at least a couple of hundred bucks <evil grin>.

[*] Before a certain commenter (I know who you are, BTW) jumps on me and calls me dumb, let me make myself clear: it's the inappropriateness of the wedding-ring-as-marital-status indicator in the Indian context that I'm ranting against.

And the winner is...

Open source software.

For some reason, I couldn't open my Gnucash data file after installing Kubuntu. A post to the gnucash-user mailing list produced suggestions from some helpful folks, but they didn't fix the problem.

An hour or so of digging into the sources (made possible in no small measure by the log messages in /tmp/gnucash.trace) and tweaking the XML validation code, and three years of data accessible once again. Phew.

I still don't know what the long term effects of the tweaking will be, but for the moment I'm happy that I am able to make changes to the file and save them successfully.

I also have to figure out for how long am I going to be running my own fork of Gnucash. I guess the best option would be to use the 'forked' Gnucash to open my current data file as an archive file, but use the plain vanilla Gnucash and create a new file for everyday use.

Resident Non Pakistanis

Well, it's now the turn of the Pakistanis: there was this picture of a bunch of them crossing the Wagah border to attend the India-Pakistan ODI at Mohali, at a time when their country is in complete turmoil. It beats me how can these people sit in a stadium and cheer their team when their fellow countrymen are spilling blood on the streets, opposing the military crackdown.

Resident Non Indians

I've always wondered what to call folks in India who are Indians only by name and nothing else; the kind of people who go to wine and cheese parties, greet one another with pecks on the cheek instead of the traditional namaste, celebrate Halloween in Chennai (gag) and so on. A lot of colourful expletives come to mind, of course, but I'll settle for RNI: Resident Non Indians.

I came across this moniker a couple of days ago in Deccan Chronicle. Though I know it's practically impossible to search for any article older than 24 hours in the DC web site, I googled for the phrase all the same and found that it has been in existence for quite some time -- the hijacking of the original phrase (NRI) seems obvious in hindsight -- but has not exactly been used in the context I'm referring to.

Staying on the subject of Deccan Chronicle, some obligatory DC-bashing: their daily supplement contains a section called 'Party Whirl', where a stringer with a cheap digital camera goes (probably uninvited) to various parties in town and clicks pictures of guests for tomorrow's edition. The 'journalist' doesn't even bother to take down the names of some of the party goers; instead you find pictures with captions like 'This lady was seen enjoying herself' or some such tripe. Somebody just shoot me.

Sheesh

I left the sound on during the commercial break for a change, and regretted it immediately: a car carrying a bunch of beach bunnies stops near a surfer dude; the girls break into song -- I don't remember the lyrics, but the gist is that they are feeling naughty, and would the surfer dude like to rub some sun tan lotion on them?

How many times must it be drummed into the heads of the bozos who come up with such crap? Indians are not looking to acquire a sun tan. We want to look Fair and Lovely (tm) or Fair and Handsome (tm), depending on whether we are beach bunnies or surfer dudes.

What's your point?

There's an article about terrorism (nope, don't bother with the link) in today's DC by Kuldip Nayar. Nothing wrong with this, except that a) the article adds nothing to the discourse b) it doesn't add any new bits of information c) it does not provide any insightful commentary. Then what *does* it do? Here are some samples:

Every Indian must ask himself why terrorism is rearing its head in the country.

OK Chief, why is terrorism rearing its head in the country?

The terrorists who attacked the dargah are hardly concerned with Jayaprakash’s message of non violence.

No sh*t, Sherlock.

It has a bit to do with poverty or lack of education, but more with fundamentalism.

You think?

What happened in Ajmer or Ludhiana may have been a violent protest against pending cases of injustice.

Sigh.

New Delhi’s problem is that it has no well-thought-out, long-term strategy to tackle terrorism. There are ad hoc efforts, with little coordination between the Centre and the states. The United States, a larger country than ours, has not experienced any act of terrorism after 9/11. The reason is that the intelligence agencies there work hard, not like those in India which do not follow up even prior warnings. India is a soft state which requires to change its attitude, but it does not need another special police force or a harsher law.

In other news, the Sun rose in the east today.

Not a bad idea when you think about it

Here's a way to make the "more educated and initiated class in India" participate in the electoral process in greater numbers: make voting via SMS possible.

The idea is from Arindam Chaudhuri's "column" from one of the full page ads for IIPM that assault our senses periodically (the saving grace is that they seem to have changed the "Dare to think beyond the IIMs" to simply "Dare to think beyond").

Gutsy Gibbon

Ubuntu has taken all the fun out of installing a new version of a distro. Whatever happened to the thrill of discovering via Slashdot or Reddit that a new version is out, patiently downloading the ISO, looking at the current installations and deciding which distro/partition to jettison for the new version, going through the actual installation, finding that the new version has nuked your wireless networking (just kidding)...

Gutsy Gibbon is out, and the only indication I had of its availability was a message in Update Manager to the effect that a new version (7.10) was available for upgrade. Well, the blame is actually mine, as I've not been to Slashdot and Reddit for something like two months.

Anyway, 946 MB worth of downloads later, my desktop is more or less the same (heck, it's practically the same) as it was before the upgrade. I know that there are new features -- the login screen that appears on waking the laptop after hibernation displays an additional button called 'Leave Message', for one thing -- but they aren't readily apparent.

I ended up changing my windows theme to Slate Horn Blue just to remind myself that I have upgraded to 7.10.

OMG I got an email from Kareena Kapoor

Here's an email I received yesterday (some content edited to prevent the accrual of thoroughly undeserved publicity to the folks involved):

Hi Rajesh,

Right from the time I was a little girl, I looked forward to the festive season.

Friends, family, parties, the festive aura and looking your best – that’s what makes it so special. Things are no different today. And to make sure I am fashionably festive this season, I have the young and talented designers at <deleted>.

I have personally experienced the latest fashion collection which revels in a riot of colors from the bold to the earthy and a variety of silhouettes and cuts. See how I look and download some vibrant wallpapers and screensavers by clicking on the links below.

Dip into this ocean of innovative and colourful fabrics and prints, which will be difficult to find anywhere else. Most of these are already my favourite possessions: Shirt-dresses, Printed dresses, Kalamkari Ghagra Skirts and Cool Embroidered Tunics. I am enjoying every bit of it and hope you have your share of fun too. I am sure you don’t want any misses in your wardrobe.

You can share the hottest fashion trends and your personal experience at <deleted>,at kareenakapoor@<deleted>

Let <deleted> and me help you get fashionably festive this season.

Wishing you and your Family a Very Joyous Season!

Kareena Kapoor

The sad part is that there are enough clueless people who will actually think that they got a personal email from Kareena Kapoor.

Congress' Death Wish

The Congress Party's insistence on pushing the nuclear deal through even at the cost of losing power at the center has always been puzzling; the single word that kept coming to mind was 'blackmail'. Now Bharat Karnad (don't bother going to the link; Deccan Chronicle's enlightened web designers have successfully ensured that the link will become stale tomorrow) weighs in with a somewhat similar opinion:

It only deepens the mystery about why it is that the ruling Congress party is trying so desperately to shove this deal down the nation’s throat, even at the cost of being thrown out of power. It must be some very powerful set of personal and collective motivations indeed, which the US official documents declassified 30 years hence or sooner (courtesy the Freedom of Information Act) will no doubt reveal.