Life...as I live through it

Mayakkam Enna...

2011-12-06T07:59:00.001+05:30

Your best friends for life need not always be in good terms with you. They can be completely pissed off with you when you introduce your girl friend to them. They soon can accept that girl in to the gang. Your best friend can be your worst enemy when you realize that he and your girl friend are in love. You can then come back to terms with them over a booze calling that girl as "galeej" and the girl would split them up. You will even curse them on their marriage "en girl friend-ayae correct panni kalyanam panran" and yet superficially wish them good luck in their marriage. And few years later when there is a huge mess up in your life, the same best friend will be the first one to show up

Selva has probably shown a very realistic picture of friendship. This is not the "nanbaen da", "surya nna yaaru theriyuma, natpu nna enna theriyuma" kind of friendship. But something that we are used to in our lives

When Dhanush walks out on the streets after getting rejected from the advertisement agency and seems the old lady sitting in the platform the entire scene is shown with a glow around the lady. There is sunlight from the left side of the frame, that diamond ring glitters and there is an element of beauty in those wrinkles of old age

The scene is completely from the eyes of Dhanush where his immense interest is in photography is not within the four walls of advertising photography but rather out there in the world. And he can see beauty in normal lives where even the husband of that lady says he hasn't scene his wife so beautiful in all these years. And for that compliment, its a simple "OK" reaction from Dhanush

When Dhanush meets his "God" Mathesh Krishnamoorthy with the photographs taken from the forest, he has a "Vibhoodhi" on his forehead. And that's the only scene where he has it in the entire picture

That's probably the most important moment that he has been waiting for. He has been shown as a simple, sensitive and probably little emotionally weak person who is desperately looking for a break. Something that a very normal person will do even if he is completely not used having a "Vibhoodhi"

The scene where Richa breaks down to Shankar in the car after the wedding mess up, she sums it up saying that her husband is a genius. To that complaining neighbor she says "en purushan kirukkana irukkalam aana nallavan". Dhanush's number is stored as "Genius' in her mobile phone. "Pirai Thedum" song has the following lines sung by the female voice "Vizhiyin andha thaedalum, alayum undhan nenjamum purindhaalae podhumae yeazhun jenmam thaanguvaen"

Shows how much she believes on him and just that she doesn't understand him completely. The reason why she never gives up on him. And a woman like that, a woman who is that strong, can definitely make a huge difference on any man's life - however messed up he can be

The climax where Dhanush comes back and says that he needs to speak few more words. He starts saying about Richa. After the first word that he utters he clears his throat and continues. The most emotional moment for him where he was not able to continue without clearing his throat.

For a moment I thought Dhanush was kind of an asshole when he thanked only his friends and didn't even mention about his wife. Probably it's one of the brilliant climax by Selva where when the friends were all on tears and proud about the achievement and few even say "He is so smart", "Such a lovely couple", "So sweet right", both the lead characters display amazing maturity in the relationship. When the friends start hugging Richa, she would just peep over them to look a the TV and Dhanush would be looking straight in to her eyes. I think that just sums it all

"Kaadhal en Kaadhal" song was probably wrongly placed in the film. I don't think at that moment, Dhanush was so pissed off with they way the relationship is. The song goes by Dhanush completely pissed of with the girl and the relationship and wants to get out of it and the friend consoling him saying that it is not worth worrying off and just move on. Dhanush and Richa aren't completely into it and its just starting to build up and more importantly the friend doesn't know that Dhanush is into something. If this song was placed right after the scene where Sundar's father offers a drink for both of them it would have been brilliant

Having said that, may be the song is not about Sundar actually consoling Dhanush but rather its Dhanush consoling himself - showing what he is going through in his head. In middle of the song when the lyric goes by "Aayiram Sonniyae Kaadhula Vaangala", you can see Dhanush hitting his heart and then pointing his head. And after the song is over when both of the were completely drunk Dhanush says "Ulla vechukkavum mudiyala, Sollavum mudiyala". Same goes to "Oda Oda" song where the comic character jumps out of his ear all of a sudden and alternatively displays the other world that he is in. It even spits on him showing the times where one would be at the weakest moments of their life. So may be it is all about himself

Of course there are numerous brilliant individual scenes all over the movie. One of the weirdest editing to the marriage scene right after the fight between the two - with a brilliantly placed long shot where you will wonder if it is Dhanush or Sundar getting married. Dhanush saying with a sarcastic smile "Goyya bayangara kaduppula irukkaen" in the bar when someone asks "Thambi love failure-a". The scene where Sundar is sitting in the forest room with Richa in the bathroom, Dhanush enters in to the room and you will actually see Sundar's feet on the fingers and not firmly placed - :)

And I don't want to mention about Dhanush or Richa's acting and GV's BGM, its all over the place that they have done a wonderful job. I personally liked GV's silence in the background scores. It just gives you that additional time to capture the emotions on the screen and this is in line with the tricks that Ilayaraja played for years to give you that feel of the film. GV definitely has got wonderful years ahead if he continues like and it holds true if he has not lifted the scores of this film from somewhere else.

My respect for Selva has completely multiplied by this movie and this movie is just a reflection of what went on Selva's head. And not everything would be explicitly put across as dialogues or scenes but you would just need to feel it - easier if you had been in similar situations. I still keep wondering what really went on in Selva's head because lyrics like "Aaathadi aadu mekka raasa vandhaaram...Aadu thinna yechi pull maeya vandharam", "Karu naakum kaara pulla, karupatti nerathu mulla, yedupatta nerathu tholla, nee kalavani" sounds brilliant and still keeps me wondering.

And women - of course, you are the emotionally strong species here. If you decide and be firm on a decision, you can completely ridicule a situation as if everything is OK when there actually is a storm around. And it would simply show on men's face. It is this simple thing for which we will never understand you. And the very same reason why we need you as well (though we may never accept it in front of you).

All we need is a change...

2011-08-22T23:09:00.001+05:30

By now, the entire nation knows about Anna Hazare and there seems to be huge huge following for him. I went to Marina beach yesterday and there were about 2000 people near light house supporting Anna. I was definitely amazed to see such a huge crowd of normal ordinary people of this country. I saw people from all walks of the life, middle class aunties, oldies and lots and lots of youngsters - people who are probably in to the first or second year of college.

And there seems to some difference of opinion amongst different set of people:
1. People like Nandan Nilekani and Arundhati Roy seems to be okay with the "right for protesting" but definitely not OK with a single man dictating what the government should do

2. The opposition (if at all we can call it one) seems to be on the same line - "we are against the way the government handled the situation" but they don't speak if they support or disagree with the bill

3. The government - it seems that it is completely indifferent to what is happening in the country. It definitely handled the situation badly but doesn't seem to be thinking about breaking the impasse

4. And the public - almost everybody is with Anna. Frustrated, having lost hope with this country, they desperately need a change and are willing to support anyone who is willing to make that change happen.

The fundamental problem today is that people have lost confidence and trust in this government. And when I say government it is not about Congress. Why I say this is because, yesterday at Marina, I saw a small group of girls shouting "We want change in power". It is not about changing this government and getting a new one. If that happens all we gonna have is a new government which is going to be UPA or NDA - and there seems to be a prediction that if election comes, UPA will win again. With a change in government, nothing is going to change in our day-to-day lives. We are going to get the same treatment from the policemen, ration shops, government offices and a dont-care-attitude from the fellow citizens. Traffic signals are going to be broken, roads are going to be bad, poor will not get access to proper healthcare, food and will sleep in roads - nothing will change. What every Indian (in India and abroad) wants is a change in our daily lives - things that we interact on a daily basis. Things that will make our life better. We want a complete overhaul of the system that we are in. And I believe that's the reason everybody is inherently in the roads.

What Nandan Nilekani said in his interview is that through technology and automation these basic interactions of the general public needs to be cleaned up - made transparent, accountable and efficient. And he said that bringing Lokpal will only create another independent committee like Prevention of Corruption Act, CAG, etc... And here are few more views from different parties involved:

1. Government
From a government's angle (I'm not talking about Congress here), I think it is actually a larger problem. For example, Team Anna were demanding for a public place to conduct the fast. And they wanted it indefinitely. Huge crowd may actually come in and the government definitely needs to think from security angle. The first thing that happened after Ramlila Maidan was chosen as the venue was that, right in the morning, we saw policemen, sniffer dogs and massive equipments sweeping the grounds. Being a country with not-so-friendly-neighbors and an equal amount of enemies within, the government will have to worry from security angle. What if a RDX blows up on the venue (Delhi being national capital too)? We will blame the government again. Secondly, we have the parliament where representatives from different parts of the country are functioning. As Nandan pointed out, there are definitely good people out there. And some serious business does take place. I do not know the ratio of good to bad politicians there, but I know people like Jaiprakash Narayan are sitting out there. And the Standing Committee seems to be very good where it healthy debates happen. And these are people representing different sections of the society - the tribal, Muslim, Dalit, Urban, Rural, etc...and the bill needs to be debated from all angles because it is going to affect the entire functioning of our country

2. Alternative theories
There is also another round of views about the people who are behind Anna. If you look at the kind of people who are behind Anna, most of them are from Urban living. That's how it started at least and now it is spreading to the towns as well. The movement has spread through the media and Internet. And people in the Cities and Towns are the ones who have access to these - especially Social Media. Now, we cannot enact a law obliging the demands of certain section of the country. And that too due to mass following. I am not for this - but for example, tomorrow, India being a Hindu dominant country, what if some other person starts an "Anti-Muslim" movement and there is a mass following to it. I mean, people are not that stupid but it theoretically it is possible - the government is probably thinking about this too? And this thinking is probably beneficial for the larger benefit of the people. Or probably this is how government is run - you cannot decide Just Like That.

3. Political Parties
None of the political parties seem to be "actually" supporting the Lokpal bill. All parties are actually raising their voice against the way the government handled the situation. Nobody is mentioning that they are OK with "these these points in Anna's version" and not OK with "these these points in Govt's version". I have read both the versions of the bill and what Anna's version is trying to create is something like a parallel government. There is going to be a central Lokpal which will look at larger problems like 2G scam, black money, etc...and every state will have Lokayukta and similar setups at district, panchayat levels. Now this is actually parallel governance. No where in the world this is present and it may be dangerous also. Let's not debate that. But the political parties - they are not going to be OK with having a parallel government.

And this is my take considering all these:

Yes, this whole movement may be started by the Urban population. And probably it will spread slowly to other places in the country. But Urban population are the ones who have seen things outside the country. They have been exposed to how proper governance happens in other developed countries. The rural population and the poor have in-numerous problems that they cannot even think about all these. When people are worried about next day meal they will not think about all these. So there is nothing wrong in the movement being started by the Urban population. It is for larger benefit of the entire country.

And the views that things needs to be changed at grass root level - like fundamentally people are corrupt and we need to change that. Yes definitely people are corrupt. I download pirated music and somebody doesn't obey traffic rules and somebody else doesn't pay taxes properly. People are definitely corrupt. Now here is where the definition of corruption needs to be made clear. Corruption in my opinion is altering a way of working/decision for the benefit of a single person or a group. When such alteration takes place, it results in a deviation from doing things the way it needs to be done which either results in sub standard service or no service. Now, coming back to the point of people being fundamentally corrupt. I download pirated music because - either i don't respect or value the service that I get or I cannot afford to buy one. And there are no proper laws to check it. Now, last week I bought an app for replacing the stock keyboard in my Android. Now, that cost me Rs.200. But I bought it because, I used it before and I found it to be helping me and making my life easier. And it was affordable to me. So I bought it. Now I pay taxes properly. In fact, I declare my Savings Account interest and pay even Self Assessed Tax. Why do I do this? Is it because I want to contribute to the growth of the country? No, it is because there is a law and I can later by scrutinized. Now this is fear - fear brought in by enforcing laws.

APJ Abdul Kalam's says that let's start by teaching the kids to be good citizens so that at least next generation will be good and not corrupt. And Nandan's view is also on the same line - instead of changing the people he is trying to change the last mile of the system that people access. This is definitely good. This is what will probably scale on the longer run. This is basically starting from ground up. But I beg to differ here. There needs to be fear amongst everybody (all walks of the life) that if someone does something wrong (against the law) then there is going to severe punishments. And this needs to start at the top level. We cannot have people like Raja, Hasan Ali, Deve Gowda, Yedurappa, Jagan Mohan Reddy walking freely in the country. The law should be made good enough to give faster punishments to people like this. Why start at this level? Why not from the traffic signals? Because if there is a law to first check the ministers - he is going to fear the system and act properly. He will ask questions to his ministry - then to his officers - then to the executives - to the people at the bottom of the chain. Now that way at every level things needs to be checked. Making people change is definitely not going to work - because of the fundamental nature of human being. Even in developed countries, people when intoxicated they run over pedestrians. If there is no one on the road, you may get mugged. Somebody might come in to the convenience store and ask for the money. If you don't give it you may get shot. This is in developed countries. So basically we human beings, given a chance would like to go over the law and do what we feel like doing - our mind is still fundamentally animal. But under normal conditions, when we are in a society, the fear of getting punished is what keeps us under control. And that needs to be brought in. Through laws. Through tougher laws. A whole generation needs to be toughly punished to bring that fear in people. And this can start only from the top.

You cannot say that "I cannot sack Raja due to coalition dharma". Now how mean is that?When the entire nation is debating and agitating about this bill, Sonia Gandhi leaves to US for some medical treatment. Okay, she is not occupying any government office. But as a leader of a political party and how influential she is in the country, she doesn't believe in the country's healthcare and flies off to the US. Because she can afford it. The power and money that can get her anything in this world. Cut through few years back, Vajpayee needed a knee replacement surgery and it got done in our own AIMS, Delhi. Now as a leader, you need to demonstrate to people of this country. People want a change right now and have no more patience.

All we ask is better roads, portable water, good shelter, affordable healthcare. To make our lives better. Nothing more than that.

Kanchana...

2011-08-15T13:07:00.000+05:30

The movie "Kanchana" seems to be a runaway hit with huge crowds flowing in the cinema halls. The movie seems to be a hit mostly in the towns and rural areas and moderately in the cities as well. I saw couple of reviews (online and in the print) which claimed the movie to be good and particularly they mentioned about the comedy sequences. It seems that "Kovai Sarala" (as mom to Lawrence) and "Devadharshini" (as "anni" to Lawrence) have done a very good job in the comedy scenes. This definitely kindled my interest and I started seeing the clips shown in TV and online.

The scenes that were claimed to be humorous definitely didn't even bring a smile in my face - I don't think I have a bad sense of humor. The so called scenes involved Lawrence going to "choo choo" and asking Kovai Sarala to come along since he is a kid at heart. Other scene was the introduction of Lakshmi Rai where they mock about the length of her skirt. Cut there and the next scene will be Lawrence jumping and being carried as a kid by Kovai Sarala, Devadharshini and yeah guessed it Lakshmi Rai too. And Devadharshini all through the scenes speaks in a worst possible modulation thinking it is actually funny.

I haven't scene the entire movie and mostly will not after seeing these scenes. People do say that Sarath Kumar has performed well. So may be those portions of the film is actually better. But what is irritating is the fact that these scenes are actually being projected as the most funniest scenes in the recent times. Add to that, today, being independence day, Sun TV is airing some special program on this movie. The interviewer is actually very intelligent in asking questions like "How did Kovai Sarala manage to hold Lawrence in her iduppu?". For which the Lawrence kept on explaining things and everybody were ROFL.

It was so disheartening to see where these guys are taking Tamil cinema to. What is currently happening is that the industry is giving all possible crappy movies and in between a little better one (read not-so-crappy amongst the crappiest ones) becomes a run away hit. This is what one of my friend told me - "dei...Venghai laam compare pannum bodhu paravala da". That's where we are now instead of comparing against "Yudham Sei", "Aaranya Kaandam", "Nandha Lala", etc...

I firmly believe on a quote by Kamal Haasan "You cannot blame the audience saying that they are not mature to enjoy high quality cinema". The audience are actually well matured and they definitely appreciate good movies. All you need these days is that little bit extra promotion for these good movies. If Kamal has thought about the same and did only the typical masala movies we wouldn't have had "Kuruthi Punal", "Virumaandi", "Anbe Sivam". Though there are so many other movies of his that can be mentioned, the reason for mentioning the above is that these movies paved way for some of the good movies that we see today. Ameer, Bala, Sasikumar and the likes saw and grew with these kind of movies and resulted in Paruthiveeran, Naan Kadavul, Subramaniyapuram, etc...

Let's not get in to a debate if Kamal copied / inspired from Hollywood or Korea or whatever. But, I would say that he was at least 10 years ahead of what the rest of the industry was thinking. And those were days where you did not have internet. Probably people didn't understand what he was trying to communicate through his script. Probably he was bad at the script. Probably he gets confused and can't give a clean screenplay. But he tried. He pushed things. If I look back now, even Alavandhan was an amazing movie.The movie introduced camera technology for close double action sequences, some of the amazing stunts and visual effects.

What if Alavandhan, Kuruthi Punal, Virumandi were released now? These would have been blockbusters for sure. From my view it's probably a loss for Kamal from the timing point of view. But I immediately get reminded of the dialogue in Devar Magan by Sivaji Ganesan: "Vedhai vedhacha udanae pazham saapadanum nna mudiyuma...innaiku naan vedhaikkaraen...nee pazham saapduva...apram un payan saapduvan...apram avan payan saapduvan...idhellam paaka naan irukka maataen...aana vedhachadhu...naan...idhellam enakku enna perumaya...?"

Google Plus

2011-07-04T14:14:00.013+05:30

Though I gave a new look to the blog about 4 months back, I never took time to post anything after that :) Sister's marriage and work took all my time. Almost. So here is another attempt to write something consistently in coming days/months. Let's see how much I keep it going :)

Last week ended with a lot of talk about Google Plus and this isn't a review about Google Plus. Rather, I was totally amazed at how Google worked out this entire strategy. It started with a month or so when Google announced its plan to support only the latest browser. And over the course of last two weeks it started rolling out changes to the search page with a new toolbar in the top. Then Gmail got changed with a similar toolbar. In fact Gmail had few more noticeable changes such as the always docked menu, people widget on the sides, etc...I personally didn't realize that Google was up to something. In fact even TechCrunch or GigaOM didn't talk about any rumors.

But now, when Google Plus was rolled and if you connect all the dots, it all starts to make sense. Now after the roll out, you will see an unified top bar with the Plus widget on the top right. So if you have many Google products opened as tabs, you are more likely to share content using the toolbar. And behind the scenes, it is unimaginable on how Google rolled out such a massive change across so many of its products - with no down time and hiccups. When users were still using their products. When data was getting stored in their servers. Unimaginable. At work, we often discuss and try to arrive at such change management/deployment practices for smaller applications. But given Google's scale, I just cannot imagine what kind of systems they have built internally.

And aptly named Google Plus, is not about a social networking product aimed at Facebook. I guess it is the next version of Google as a company. Google as how it deals with information. If you look at how Google operated before Plus - it was a company aimed at organizing world's information. It built products that enabled us search for what we wanted. And the products let user out of their sites as soon as possible. Like you don't stay on Google search results page but you click and get out of there as fast as possible. And it was only Google's algorithms that determined what results we got and what information we got access to.

With Plus, it is a fundamental change in Google's approach towards how their products work and behave. In Plus, Google has built a product where they want users to spend more and more time. They have got nice animated UI which adds few more milliseconds for every request - I heard through an inside information that a 256ms response time code gets rejected. The response time needs to be lesser than that :) The search page looks neat and Gmail has got a makeover and looks like for the first time Larry Page approved of all these changes that increases response time.

I guess the Facebook's threat of having almost every internet user hooked into their site and creating and consuming information had a major impact at the top brass in Google. Google happened to realize that the way internet is being used by people is changing - there is a people aspect to it. People are no longer searching for information. They are discovering information. The internet is becoming more like a real world. I know information that I get to know through my friends, family, co-workers in the real world. I am more likely to buy a product that my friends and family and co-workers recommend. The same goes with watching a video to looking at an advt in TV. That's how the internet is becoming too. And that's where Google was becoming irrelevant. And Facebook looked like a major threat to it.

I think Google figured this out and took a real world approach to re-inventing itself. From Circles in Google Plus to "+1" in search results, the whole lot of changes reflect this. The "+1" near every search result is really cool. If I hit on that and it gets published in my stream, my friends are more likely to check those links. Now this is gonna push the Ad rates really high. Now switch to "Sparks" where Google sends you information/videos/pictures in your Google Plus stream. Here's where Google takes an algorithmic approach to suggest you content based on your interest (Google already knows everything about us:) ). So in effect your Google Plus stream is both your social graph content (content that your friends and family share) and interest graph content (what Google's algo decide). And imagine you "+1" the interest graph feeds - Google makes huge revenue there as well.

I think Google has taken a very very long term approach towards this. It has looked at how the web and internet is going to be in 3-5 years down the line and is building products / taking strategy for that long haul. The way they have pushed the web with HTML5, Google Chrome, Android, SPDY Protocol, etc...I guess no one understands the internet business better. Of course Facebook still has a whopping 750M users and there are rumors that Facebook might launch Skype based video chat. And Facebook will be quick enough to clean up and introduce many things. Guess its sleepless nights for the folks at Microsoft.

Edit - and after posting this blog post, I happened to notice that there is a "+1" at the end of the post :)

New look...

2011-03-03T22:27:00.003+05:30

Came across a Bing search widget for blogs and websites. It's a nice widget that can be easily added to any website or blog. You can get it here. Once it's added, a nice search box gets added to your website/blog and viewers of your website can search the website. The search result is non-intrusive and appears in a nice pop up. You see the box on the right hand side of this blog. Since few weeks, I have started getting a feeling that Google is becoming the web's Microsoft by trying to be a monopoly here - especially after the stupid drama it played against Bing. Hence I decided to add this Bing widget and let Bing also index my blog more (not that I create massive content here:)).

So, when I added this widget to the old layout, it became messy and I decided to change the layout of the blog. That's when I was really impressed with the way blogger works. I just had opened Blogger in Firefox and my blog as an anonymous user in Chrome. As I choose a layout and start making modifications, re-arranging widgets, changing the color and things like that, I just keep refreshing in Chrome and I could see the changes in real time. I am pretty sure that blogger is running Google's cloud and I am sure they will have replicated data to serve content faster to all users. With that kind of architecture and enabling on the fly changes to the blog's layout - I was really impressed. Definitely a nice product and same with the way the widgets work too. It was pretty easy to add that Bing search widget - even a novice, non-techie user can do that.

Anyways, I set to try something and ended up changing the blog's layout. So I hope to write more here...

Why Facebook?

2010-11-20T20:05:00.003+05:30

Been discussing about Facebook lately with many people and there is a lot of action on the internet as well in terms of how powerful it is and how it is transforming the web and the way we use the web.

I was originally using Orkut and before Facebook there were plenty of social networking websites such as MySpace, Hi5, Orkut, etc...I used to wonder why there is such a big deal about Facebook that everybody is talking about. After all it is a casual website where people mostly share photos and post things like "My cat ran away", "Don't feel like getting out of bed. Lol", etc...In fact I read an article where one Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist called Facebook as nothing but a photo sharing website. And yeah, now there is a movie about Facebook and a book released. And one Russian investor bought 1% stake for $330 millions valuing Facebook at $30+ B. And that is about 1/3 of what Ford or GM is valued today (they are more than 100yrs old) in about 10yrs since it was built in a dorm. And yeah, the CEO is 28 years old and it has 500M users. Dot.

I was really very curious as to how such a simple service can be massively hit and why so many people love using it. When you really look at how users interact with Facebook, probably you get a hint why Facebook really matters and there are reasons why people spend like 40B minutes a month in Facebook (as claimed by FB engineering).

When I post a comment on one of my friends' post, FB tells in my wall post that "I commented on his post" and it appears on others' wall as "Raghu posted on that person's post". Similarly, if you look all around the way the posts, comments, photos, likes, videos appear in the feed you will notice things like "You and Amit like this post", "Kumar shared a video", "You and 330,000 people like Starbucks". Even though it is just a way of letting the information display on a page, I think this is the whole deal about it. It gives a whole human feeling/touch in terms of saying "I like this", "He said this", etc...Now that's how we interact with people and things in real world.

Few years ago, we used to maintain an address book online where we used to have the email ids of people. Now Facebook is our address book. And people in our friends list are real people. We used to have Yahoo IM friends like cooldude007, sweetgirl92. But in Facebook our contacts have a real identity. They are our college friends, co-workers, relatives, etc...And Facebook gives us a platform where we can interact with them easily. Now that was something missed out in Orkut, MySpace and a bunch of other Social Networking websites. They probably never got Social right.

And to realize the true power of Facebook and how it is transforming businesses, Honda India has a Facebook page where its customers regularly post complaints and Honda's representatives respond mostly within a day. Now that's a traditional manufacturing company being so active in Facebook. I read somewhere that a massive Colombian people revolution against the Guerillas started as a single Facebook page created by someone who was utterly angry against the Guerillas.

And Facebook can probably give a very tough life to Google too. Google today is probably the single company that has access to all the data that is getting created on the web. They make their money through the advertisements that they place on the web by crunching all these data created in the web. Google's vision itself is about organizing information on the web. But the question is, what if all the information that is getting created in the web is created inside Facebook and Google has no access to it? For example, if you look at the companies that Google has bought in the past, like Blogger, Youtube, etc...these are products where internet users were creating data and Google wants all the data that is created on the web. What if people are creating Facebook Pages instead of blogging...Video links being posted in Facebook instead of Youtube. Facebook already has massive amount of organized data. Google invests so much amount of time in figuring out who created what kind of data, who is looking at what pages, etc...But Facebook already knows "Raghu likes this Page", "Aamir likes Sachin Tendulkar". It already has access to organized information and that is probably a big deal. These days, your competitor need not always be from your own domain. Microsoft would have never thought that Google will be its competitor and Sony wouldn't have even imagined about Apple (iPod). Probably the same thing might happen for Google as well (Facebook).

And as a software developer, I am really amazed at the scale Facebook is operating and how their systems are built. I am already a fan of the "Facebook Engineering" page in Facebook. I am amazed at even imagining the kind of social graph that Facebook will be storing in their servers and how it will go through those graphs to tell me one small information like "You may also know Sunil" based on the "n" degree of connection in my social graph. And if I am a fan of "Sachin Tendular" page and there is a post on Sachin's latest six in the Nagpur test, probably I and 330,000 other people would have "liked" the post. If it visit that page again and when Facebook says "You and 330,000 others like this" that is actually massive operation behind the scene at run time. Cannot imagine the data storage and caching that Facebook has built.

I am really amazed at how Facebook is actually transforming our lives and the social, political, economical impact that it can have in the future. And this is something that will be interesting to watch out as more and more people stay always connected.

Mannipaya...

2010-05-02T14:24:00.004+05:30

...from Vinnai Thandi Varuvaya. Another awesome melody from ARR. And probably the only song that I know till date which has piano running through the entire song. Guess its Stephen Devassy at work. The song starts with lots of piano and as Shreya Goshal picks up stunningly it would appear as if the piano stops. But if you happen to listen using headphones and give closer attention to center-right of your head, the piano portion stay almost for the entire length of the song.

And I don't know how Shreya is able to render this song such flawlessly. I used to remember when she started singing in Tamil she used to miss a lot of "zha". But that is probably because of Yuvan since he himself doesn't pronounce "zha" properly. Since then, Shreya has improved a lot and I am really wondering how she is able to change her pitch / tone according to the lyrics and sing this one so beautifully. I am even more wondering how ARR would have explained all these to her and got the job done.

Needless to mention about ARR's portion of the song. He almost picks up fast numbers or high pitched songs when it comes to singing by himself. When it comes to melody where most of the songs are sung at lower pitch, ARR does it at slightly elevated pitch - examples include Dil Se Re, New york Nagaram and this one. And when he gives a fresh tone for the "Anbirkum Undo" thirukkural, it creates such an impact on you. And guess that "Anbirkum Undo" and other thirukkural portions are probably samples of the "Thirukkural" album project that he and Blaaze are working on.

God Father...

2010-04-14T23:11:00.009+05:30

Like most of the people out there, I am a big fan of Hollywood films and I like to watch a lot of action and Sci-fi movies. I go to these movies more for the visual and sound effects. And I never enjoyed comedy, romantic comedies and drama kind of movies - the slower ones I mean. One of my friend started watching some of the classic movies and kept telling me about them. Had always heard about Al Pacino and Robert de Niro as one of the greats but never managed to see their movies.

Everybody told me about God Father as a must watch movie. A year back, I managed to get the DVD and put it on. I stopped it after 30 mins since it was very slow for me. But recently I started seeing some of the classic - as told by my friend. Started seeing movies like "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly", "Good Fellas", "Dog Day Afternoon", "Heat", etc... I kinda started liking Al Pacino's performances and started seeing his recent movies like "Insomnia", "88 minutes", "Devil's Advocate". I thought he was doing little bit of over acting - comparable to Sivaji Ganesan in his late 80's movies. But I started like this Gangsta, Mafjavascript:void(0)ia movies.

One fine day I happened to see "ScarFace" and that's when Al Pacino completely blew me over. A story of a Cuban refugee rising as a Mafia leader, Al simply gave an outstanding performance in this movie - his slang, body language and everything. I am not gonna get in to details about this movie but this one made me watch God Father again. I just finished watching till Part II of it and now I know why it is #2 in IMDB top 250 movies of all time.

The first part shows an aging Don (Marlon Brando) handing over the control to his reluctant son (Al Pacino). The movie runs for close to 3 hours and it was a wholesome movie. It shows the life of the Mafia leader, their families, enemies, how the govt plays with them, how they are ruthless. Wonderful performance by Marlon Brando, the movie shows how Al Pacino transforms from a young war hero to a Don. The music adds a lot to the movie and if you happen to patiently sit through the movie - at the end of it you get the feeling of watching a wholesome movie...Al Pacino underplays a lot in this movie and he didn't really wow me in this one. But the last scene where he takes control of everything, sits in the chair and one of the guy kisses on his forehand and the door of his room closes - wow, one of the best endings for a movie and it creates that impact on you.

The second part...its completely Al Pacino all over, though Robert De Niro gives his best performance in his first movie itself. Towards the end of the first part only Al Pacino takes control of the family and becomes the Don. In the second part he is an experienced Don now and completely controls the family, business and Nevada. With complete under play of his character he manages to show the power the Don has. For example,

1. When the Senator visits Al and stands up in front of him and points his index finger and gives order to Al Pacino, Al is sitting crossed legs and looks at the finger and moves his eye ball for direct eye contact with the Senator. That shows the power he has and in one eye ball movement he scares you off saying "Nobody points finger at me". Marlon Brando shows it in the opening scene of first part in a different way by saying "Why do you come to me now? You do not offer your friendship anymore".

2. When Al Pacino learns from his wife that she actually got an abortion done and it wasn't a miscarriage, he shows his anger growing inside and gives a slap to his wife. Till this moment he would have talked very patiently with his wife telling that he is making changes in his life.

3. Scenes where he reunites with is sister and forgives is brother (who was a traitor to him) were so heavy with Al showing how much family means to a man and the background score that adds more fuel to the fire.

The characterization was just too good in the entire movie. All the brothers were contrast to each other - Michael(Al) being calm, composed and cool, Sonny is the hot headed guy and Fredo is the stupid, dumb guy. But the best part is that these characters live in the movie and they undergo changes in the due course of the movie. In 5 plus hours of the two parts the director shows the life of the main characters and how they evolve.

And yeah, in the second part, Robert De Niro plays the young Vito Corleone. I heard this is his first movie - but it doesn't look like. Simply pulled it through wonderfully. Almost everybody plays their role with perfection in this movie - Kay(Diane Keaton), Tom, Roth, Frankie, Fredo, the Senator...

One can clearly find out that Kamal and Mani Ratnam were greatly inspired by this movie and had some of the scenes straight into Nayagan. Scenes where the old Kamal runs his hand over his oiled hair, the DIG telling Kamal about his molested girl are direct lift-off from this movie. And yeah, the scene where Kamal successfully unloads the "stuff" and comes and gives it off as a gift to Reddy brothers - it is from ScarFace.

I am actually not able to express fully after watching these two parts - it is more of a feeling. It definitely would test your patience initially. But it is just a matter of time - once you cross that hurdle this movie would just amaze you. In fact towards the end of second part I was looking at the time left and was upset that the movie was going to end soon (after watching a 3.15 hours hollywood movie). I heard the third part isn't this great - but having watched this much, I don't think I would skip it.

And yeah, the sub titles made a lot of difference this time.

Killing time cost effectively...

2010-04-12T09:56:00.003+05:30

1. Go and drop off your vehicle at a friend's place in T.Nagar
2. Start walking towards the Mambalam railway station (through some crowded Ranganathan streets)
3. If you are a person who always has that extra space in your stomach to send something inside, you can send in some dosas and coffee on the way (20 mins killed and probably couple of minutes of your life too)
4. Reach Mambalam station and get a ticket to Park Station - this would cover almost half of the EMU (local train) route
5. Skip one train and catch the next one (20 extra mins killed)
6. Meanwhile you can check your weight in the weighing machine. Quietly ignore the number being shown on the card and start reading the "well-wishing" message on the back of the card
7. Get in to the train
8. On the way discuss on what's to be done after reaching Park Station
9. Come up with the wonderful plan of getting MRTS ticket for Park to Velachery (That's the complete route of MRTS)
10. Reach Park Station - by this time you would have killed another 20 - 25 mins
11. Try to figure out where this MRTS station in Park Town is - get info from nearby shops
12. Reach Park Town Station and get a ticket to Velachery
13. Wonderfully kill another 45 mins - the train goes through the heart of the city - Mylapore, City Centre, Mount Road (near the new Secretariat building), etc
14. Get down at Velachery and walk slowly towards the bus stop - on the way you may grab couple of Mirinda bottles
15. Reach the bus stop and leave couple of buses - reasons may vary from "too much crowd", "don't like the yellow color painting" to anything under the roof
16. Catch a bus to T.Nagar
17. In another 40 minutes types you would have reached T.Nagar back

Total distance covered - 40+ KMS
Total cost - 16 Rupees
Cost per KM - less than 50 paise

You can easily kill 3hours and if you get more creative can spend half a day like this. You can reach Central station and go till Ambattur side or may be Chengalpet. And once you reach there or on the way you can think of connecting routes and the next plan.

You end up with a happy feeling of going around the city and the best part of "no-dent-in-your-pocket"

Aaromalae...

2010-03-25T15:08:00.006+05:30

...means "beloved" in malayalam and is a song in Vinnai Thandi Varuvaya. When VTV audio was released, I wasn't really impressed with it immediately. But as the saying goes, you really got to listen to ARR songs again and again and it will fill you and elevate you completely.

This Aaromalae is another masterpiece from ARR. The song starts with a slow guitar and has a deep base in it. The wonderful part I liked is that the song depicts some kind of sadness and happiness alternatively. A deep cry of soul for the sadness and on the other side the person undergoes immense happiness for some kind of achievement - that's what I could make out from the song. The song mixes Indian classical music and Rock towards the end. The song which starts with the slow guitar transforms towards heavy guitar in the end.

More reference to the song at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaromale and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/arrahmanfans/message/129768/

And I haven't seen the film yet and will not be seeing it in all probability, but I guess this song appears when Simbhu gets a director chance from a producer and at the same time Trisha must have ditched him - and he must be traveling. A wild guess having known the crux of the movie.

Here is the lyrics with translation - takes me immediately to the beautiful world of Kerala

Mamalayaeri Varum Thennal (O Breeze, blowing through the mountains)
Puthu Manavalan Thennal (O Breeze, decked up like a bridegroom)
Palli Medayae Thottu Thalodi Kurushil Thozhuthu Varumbol (Coming after worshiping the cross at the altar)
Varavelpinu Malayalakkara Manasammatham Choriyum (The Land of Kerala would grant permission for welcoming it)
Aaromale…, Aaromale…, Aaromale…, Aaromale… (O Beloved… O Beloved… O Beloved… O Beloved…)

Swasthi Swasthi Su Muhurtham (On this very auspicious occasion)
Sumangali Bhava Manavatti (O Bride! May you be blessed with a long wedded life)
Swasthi Swasthi Su Muhurtham (On this very auspicious occasion)
Sumangali Bhava Manavatti (O Bride! May you be blessed with a long wedded life)
Shyama Rathri Than Aramanayil (In the inner sanctum of the dark evening…)
Maari Nilkayo Tharakame (O star! Why are you so reserved?)
Pulari Manjile Kathiroliyaay (Like a ray of light in the morning mist)
Akale Nilkayo Penmaname (Are you standing afar… my lady?)
Chanju Nilkuma Chillayil Nee, Chila Chilambiyo Poonkuyile (O Cuckoo! Did you shake the bent branch of the tree?)
Manchirathile, Malaroliye Thediyethiyo Poonthennal (Did the wind of fragrance come in search of the flames in the mud lamps?)

Swasthi Swasthi Su Muhurtham (On this very auspicious occasion)
Sumangali Bhava Manavatti (O Bride! May you be blessed with a long wedded life)

Aaromalae… Aaromalae… (O Beloved… O Beloved…)

Kadalinu Karayodiniyum Padan Sneham Undo? (Does the sea still brim with love to serenade the shore?)
Mezhukuthurikalayi Urukan Iniyum Pranayam Manasil Undo? (Is there still love in the heart to melt like candle wax?)

Aaromale…, Aaromale…, Aaromale… (O Beloved… O Beloved…O Beloved… O Beloved…)

Aaromale… Ohh… Ho ! (O Beloved…)

Swasthi Swasthi Su Muhurtham (On this very auspicious occasion)
Sumangali Bhava Manavatti (O Bride! May you be blessed with a long wedded life)

Swasthi Swasthi Su Muhurtham (On this very auspicious occasion)
Sumangali Bhava Manavatti (O Bride! May you be blessed with a long wedded life)

Shyama Rathri Than Aramanayil (In the inner sanctum of the dark evening…)
Maari Nilkayo Tharakame (O star! Why are you so reserved?)
Pulari Manjile Kathiroliyaay (Like a ray of light in the morning mist)
Akale Nilkayo Penmaname (Are you standing afar… my lady?)
Chanju Nilkuma Chillayil Nee, Chila Chilambiyo Poonkuyile (O Cuckoo! Did you shake the bent branch of the tree?)
Manchirathile, Malaroliye Thediyethiyo Poonthennal (Did the wind of fragrance come in search of the flames in the mud lamps?)

Swasthi Swasthi Su Muhurtham (On this very auspicious occasion)
Sumangali Bhava Manavatti (O Bride! May you be blessed with a long wedded life)
Swasthi Swasthi Su Muhurtham (On this very auspicious occasion)
Sumangali Bhava Manavatti (O Bride! May you be blessed with a long wedded life)

Aaromale… Aaromale… (O beloved… O beloved)

Oh ho…

Why? And What?

2010-02-25T14:48:00.003+05:30

It's almost 12 hrs after the entire internet / TV spoke/emailed/FBed/tweeted about Sachin creating history. Let the record speaks for itself - more than 20yrs in crease, closing in on century of centuries, etc, etc...This is not about that...

After all these records and the benefits that it brings along with it, Sachin now is one of the highest tax payers of the country...Has enough money for generations to come, can afford a lifestyle that anybody would aspire for, access to all the gadgets in the world (a Ferrari 10 years back!!!)...Talk about respect / fame / influence - the whole nation worships him... Simply put, he would have got almost everything that one can get in this world (at least the materialistic ones). Still he comes to the crease for every other match and takes each match seriously... Still keeps himself fit and enjoys playing for the country.

He is such a nightmare to all the bowlers despite the fact that a whole new generation of bowlers have come. The whole game has changed so much - it is so aggressive now, the schedules drain you out, the fitness requirements are more demanding, etc... Yuvraj or Dhoni do not look as fit as him...And many of the team members today and the aspiring cricketers have many things as motive beyond just playing cricket - money, fame, lifestyle, etc...But he is somebody who is still playing for couple of important reasons - the passion for the game and the opportunity to represent the country.

If you are to apply this to another field or a job, what would one typically do after he/she gets so much? They would definitely like to retire and take things easy. I know some of my friends who are ready to retire now (at 28yrs!!!)

It is not just Sachin for that matter. Why would Steve Jobs still come to office? Why would Ratan Tata work so hard for Nano - he has got billions by just inheritance. Why would still Maniratnam make movies and why would kamal still act?

Just one reason - passion and enjoying what you do.

It is so important that you should do what you like or what you enjoy the most. If you do not know what that is - make an effort to find it at least.

Gentleman...

2010-02-15T15:17:00.003+05:30

This was the first movie of director Shankar and still one of my favorites. It has an amazing screenplay and there are very little mistakes in the movie as such...

Was seeing this movie recently in TV and the movie actually makes more sense now. The crux of the movie is "education for all" and how education is being sold like pure business - only reachable to the rich. Today, if you need to get your kid admitted to L.K.G in one of the good schools in the city you first need to get your kid in to the play school run by the same school. And that is going to cost you 50K for 6 months. 50K for what? - the kid getting used to going school. And one of the parents need to accompany the kid during that time and the timings are some 9 - 12. 3 hours a day and 6 months you pay 50K? I remember my term fees - it was 1200 for 3 months. And I am talking about 12th Standard.

I don't have the break up for all the classes from L.K.G till 12th standard, but if the kid spends L.K.G to 12th in the same school (the reputed one) you actually end up spending 23L - a straight 3.5L for 12th standard alone. I hear some strange stories wherein some schools in Mumbai have tieups with Adidas, Nike and all - the kid needs to wear only their shoes, t-shirts, caps, etc...

There can be an argument like it is only the case with reputed schools and not with every other school. If reputed school charges 50K, then normal schools would charge 35. And you don't get access to good teachers and may be exposure in these normal schools. It is more like real estate - big builders charge premium, small builders charge less but compromise on quality. In all we don't get what is worth the money.

I still don't have a kid (not even married :) ) to worry about all these...but things are bound to get worse in future... I still remember crying in front of my dad for getting that 400Rs for the school excursion. And I couldn't go to one of the excursion because that 300 - 400 Rs was way to expensive. And I am talking about a decade back.

ARHS

2010-01-08T17:57:00.011+05:30

ARHS is the abbreviation for Amplified Reverse Honking System that I am proposing for modern day Indian traffic.

Objective
As Indians, amongst of the varied things that we enjoy doing in our roads, like, Sighting, Shouting, Stunting, Spitting, Pissing, all of us enjoy this thoroughly - Honking. This proposed system is to make the best use of Honking for the Honkers, The Honked and the rest.

Design
1. An indigenously built device will be embedded in to the steering wheel (or somewhere near) of every car, truck, buses, autos, share autos, call taxis
2. The device will have multi-frequency sound emitter, amplifier, some processing logic components, GPS integration.
3. The device main purpose is to detect if the driver just honked - if true, emit at least (2-n)X of the same sound (why same sound is explained later) inside the automobile, aimed at both the ears of the driver. I call this sound as "Honk of the Monk (HOM)". This also sounds similar to pom (of pom-pom, aka horn)

What follows below is the detailed requirement and logic based on which the sound emitted will differ dynamically according to external stimulated factors, past history and the Indian ways of doing things.

1. The device is actually an AI (will take help of James Cameron) and has got a self learning / adapting system. Every honk by the driver along with other parameters like place of honking (using GPS), time, traffic density, distance from the signal / crossing / junction, type of road (heavy traffic, highway) will be recorded by the device
2. If the driver honks during busy traffic hours (7AM - 11AM and 5PM - 10PM) then a sharp HOM at 3X will be emitted from the device. During busy traffic hours, it is expected that the traffic movement would be slower and the driver is expected to know this common sense
3. Similarly the device keeps track of the vehicle movement (GPS) and if the vehicle is in areas like "Madhya Kailash", "Vadapalani", "Koyambedu Jn", etc where traffic jams are expected anytime then same logic as above would apply
4. There is a monthly max limit of honking that is allowed beyond which the device starts working on alternate routes, such as
a. Starts monitoring the blood pressure and other vital params of the driver and says "If you honk again, you will hear a 4X HOM which is very very different from all the ones you have heard before. This noise can instantly boost up your BP to higher levels there by increasing your chances of finding answers for your life such as where you will go after this life?"
b. The device will keep changing the FM station making the driver to listen to only Advt.
c. When the driver is engaged in some conversation with co-passengers it would start answering automatically like "yes, oh noo, no-no-no,mmmhmmmm,abs-f#$king-lutely, etc". This is the Natural Language Processing ability of the device - will use some Google Engineers for this
5. The device acts more like the God's books - you can negate your wrong doings by doing some right things. If you do not honk for a day, it would automatically cut down one of your honking entry
6. As a bonus-goodwill feature, if the driver didn't honk for quite some good amount of time then a registration number appears in the driver's dashboard. This number is the nearest, next available driver who is the notorious-top-honker. The good driver has the option of going in front of that driver's car, pissing him off and making him hear that HOM. The onboard device will help in navigating to that vehicle. On successful pissing off the other driver, the same can be updated as status message in FaceBook.
7. The device syncs up the data real time with its distributed server and the data gets replicated in real time for multiple backup and availability. We will use Nandan Nilekani to design such a huge backend system. The data would also be tied to the UID system.
8. The tying-to-UID can help in getting through people who change cars and think they can get rid of their past. Next car will be imported with all the past data.

Some part of the code will be released as API, on top of which users can build FaceBook apps. Extensions can be built where the device can start abusing the driver in the driver's own language

Now, on why the same sound but amplified version is emitted from the device? Some of these crazy people have these "dog-clearing-its-throat" kind of sound kept as their horn. They should definitely hear it how irritating it is for others.

I am also in the process of designing something similar for motorcycles / bikes especially the TVS-XL / M80 sounds. There is a design complexity where the vehicle is actually not an enclosed one.

Things that really matter...

2009-09-28T09:53:00.004+05:30

Last Monday I made sure I reminded my bosses that this weekend (26-27) and the next have to be a long weekend due to pooja holidays and Gandhi Jayanthi. We just don't have a leave calendar (start up!!!) :) So last Saturday I was just lazying around at home (had some neck pain and decided not to step out of house). Towards the evening we were expecting guests for the kolu...Our family friend was expected to come and yeah he came just before the dinner time :) It was nice to meet him after quite some time (read years) and generally we were socializing...This family friend has two kids and one of them is doing her Std 10. I wasn't like really talking to her but my parents were pulling her leg a lot... By then one of my sister's friend had also joined for the kolu. Soon there were lots of talking and my mom asked this kid to sing a song. Looks like she has just started planning to learn :) But my sis' friend readily accepted and started singing a carnatic song...It was a song about lord muruga and it was really nice...The modulations and the genuine interest she had in singing it was definitely impressive...

Sooner it was time for this family friend to bid adieu and I accompanied them to the near by but stop...I got them a auto to drop them at the next bus stand from where they have a direct bus to their place. When they got in to the auto and I waved them goodbye, this girl was waving her hand like anything with full smiles and saying "Bye anna". She had this innocent smile on her face and she was waving her hand till the auto went out of our sight...

Towards the end of a boring day, these two small incidents definitely made my day. As I walked down back to my house the thought that struck me was that may be we (I and most of the people I know) are trying to find happiness by going after things like car, house, lots of disposable income, weekend getaways, etc...But I feel you get this real happiness in small things that happen in your day-to-day life. We mostly ignore such things and take it for granted. We want to buy that expensive mobile phone (N97?, E75?, HTC diamond?, G1?), a home theatre (25K Onkoyo?, 1.1L Premium Digital?, 2.5L Klepsch?), house (3 BR?, 4BR pent house?, independent villa?), car (punto?, City? Q7?)...As you see there are just no limits to each of these things that we generally chase...

But the real happiness lies in things like the smell of the freshly baked bread as you cross that bakery, giving a bike ride to that person desperately looking for it on a rainy day, holding the elevator for another 4-5 seconds as someone is running to catch it, giving a smile back and saying "thanks nna" to that security guard of a mall who directed you to another route as the usual one is water logged, catching up with the maintenance guy in your company and seeing that smile (as nobody else talks to him due to hierarchical stuff) when you are done with the conversation, telling your mom that the vada she made is really good (even if she makes it good every other time she cooks)...these are things that really matter...

One of the best heard BGMs...

2009-08-16T21:49:00.003+05:30

Everyone would have heard "The Good, the bad and the ugly" theme music and I am no exception. But I never got a chance to see the movie until recently. No doubt the movie was pretty good. Every one played their part to the best and I liked Tuco's character the most. And yeah Clint Eastwood was the man of full style, I could make out where Rajnikanth derived all his style elements from :)

Of all the things in the movie, what impressed me the most is the music. Most part of the movie has lots of silence in the scenes and it is the BGM (Background music) that fills them and adds to the mood. For example, towards the end of the movie, this Tuco reaches a massive graveyard and starts searching. This scene is actually pretty long and runs for about 3 - 4 mins...

Just put on a good ear/headphones and watch this video. The way the music progresses from slow to a fast one clearly would bring out what's going on the actor's head. Now that's exactly what I am talking about and this happens throughout the movie. And I liked it the most at 0.26 of this video where the piano, trumphet (?) and a chime like music comes together. I would just hear to it repeatedly...

That was just a sample. There are many such scenes in the movie where the music definitely impresses. And I think this movie as such is a perfect example for all the best things coming together. Like the acting by the three lead characters, the camera, the narration, the music and editing, etc...I believe everyone who was involved in this film making would have put in their best to give this wonderful product.

redbus.in

2009-06-04T22:39:00.003+05:30

Today, I had to book a ticket for by uncle and this was the first time I used redbus.in and I am pretty impressed with the service. I gave all my details including the credit card information and clicked on final confirmation and I get a error screen saying that there is a technical glitch. And I was like another failed attempt in my online booking (after the ever famous irctc). But the error screen gave me a "Case Number" and requested me to contact the customer support. I immediately dialed the number and bang...the rep picks up in first ring. He asks for my details and says there is a problem with the "Travels" side; he would check and call me back. In 5 mins he calls me and says the "Travels" side problem will get solved in 10 mins, he will do the booking for me and call me back. Meanwhile I got busy with my work and he calls me in the next 10 minutes. He says he has done the booking for me and I would be receiving my ticket in email. I refreshed my email account and the ticket was there.

OK, may be whatever said above is expected out of any paid service. But me being part of a startup and getting a product done from scratch, I could really appreciate the amount of effort and thought those guys have put in.

1. The user interface was pretty simple. Max three screens till I reached my final screen (even if its an error screen :))
2. I did my booking without creating an account with redbus. Whenever I clicked continue in the first two screens, I was expecting the login / signup screen to be presented. But was surprised that the booking went through without that. Because I don't like the idea of signing up at so many places and remembering different login and passwords.
3. When there was an error, I immediately got an email saying "We took money out of your card but we couldn't book the ticket. But hey, here is the cash coupon for same amount. Use this to do your booking in future".
4. And wow, I never had an experience with a customer care which actually called me back. And they did the booking by themselves and also updated me on the same.
5. They have tied up with so many travels in India and it certainly is not an easy task.
6. The CEO of that company is of 27-28 years of age. I met him at a start up meet in Bangalore.

So on a whole it was a wonderful experience for me and I could really appreciate it from both a customer and developer point of view. And I can try out these in my company :)

Wolfram Alpha

2009-05-19T10:27:00.006+05:30

Wolfram is the new computational knowledge search engine that has become public alpha yesterday. This one was projected to be the Google killer next gen search engine and yesterday morning I tried it for some time. First thing, there is a difference between the way Wolfram searches its database from Google does. Everybody knows Google does a keyword search on all the web pages it has crawled, cached and kept in its servers. What wolfram does is answer natural language questions instead of keywords, computes it real time and produces the results. The results are not just website links but presented in text and graphical form including graphs and charts. Some of the queries that I ran include:
When did man land on moon? What is Wolfram? Who is the american president? sin 30 / cos 30, What is the value of pi? square root of 2, pottasium nitrate, what is laughing gas, etc...

It was amazing to see the way results are presented for mathematical values. For example, when you look for the value of pi, it gives the decimal approximation (with option of showing more and more digits), series and integral representation, etc...When you search for location (where is bangalore) it brings up Indian map and shows Bangalore (Google does too, and satellite image link takes to Google maps :)) and when i ask for stock comparison (Goog Yhoo) it shows a lot of information about the two companies (not in Google). So pretty neat for all these queries. But for natural language queries, which Wolfram is trying to address, I think it is not there quite yet. Queries like "When did man land on the moon", "Who shot kennedy", "What happened on September 11, 2001" it was not able to produce results. Or did i read Wolfram wrong? I am not sure. But if it is trying to address natural language queries I expect these questions to be answered.

In my opinion, I don't think Wolfram can be a Google killer. Both would co-exist. But what Wolfram has started is a very big step in terms of answering questions in natural language and real time computing of the answers. There should be millions of lines of code and a wonderful algorithm behind Wolfram which actually does this. And the way the results are shown are also pretty good. One can interpret and arrive at conclusion easily. Keywords search is still very much required until we build systems that can understand all of human queries. And that day would be the beginning of the Judgement Day when computers understand us a whole lot better :) (Yeah I am in the mood of watching Terminator: Salvation :))

At last some action...

2009-05-18T09:59:00.002+05:30

...yes, after some dry months of Hollywood not releasing any decent action flick, looks like the coming months would see some real action movies coming in. Starts with X Men Wolverine, followed by Angels and Daemons which I heard is better than Da Vinci, we have "Terminator: Salvation" and "Transformers: Revenge of the fallen" quickly following. I am big fan of action / Sci-fi flicks (no surprises) and I have seen Terminator 2 countless number of times. Though Terminator 3 was very disappointing, reviews say that Salvation is better than Terminator 3 but not up to the mark set by Terminator 2. I think James Cameroon needs to come in and give something better than T II. The trailer of Salvation looks impressive http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcg5t0mT8V4

Watch the video at 0:47 for a bike sequence and the famous T II BGM at 2:18. This BGM was missing in T III but now looks like its back in Salvation. Its getting released on May 21 in the US. But looks like Indian release would be little late. Hope to catch up the action soon in RDX at Satyam Cinemas :)

And the next one is Transformers 2. I loved the first part for the amazing visual effects and the awesome sound effects. In fact its the sound effects that impressed me a lot and I had seen the movie couple of times at the theatre itself for that. So I am expecting the sequel to be equally good. But the trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb2fUOW1ne4) gives me a feeling that they have gone little bit higher on the visual effects. I mean, it gives an impression that the bots are everywhere on the screen. The first part, though had the bots in action, had the human touch too. Anyways, its another RDX one at Satyam :)

I guess before these, I would be watching X-Men Wolverine and "Angels and Demons". Would be waiting for one of my friends to come back from the US. He too is a major movie freak. I hope these movies forget me the haunting days of watching Tamil movies at theatre.

Fasttrack call taxi

2009-05-07T12:29:00.003+05:30

Have been completely out of writing for about 6 months now owing primarily due to hectic work schedule. Had tight schedules for the product we were working on and we went live by April. I have so many things to write on and starting on right away.

Last Sunday, my sister went back to Ahmedabad to continue with her training and I had booked a cab with Fasttrack for airport drop and coming back home. And I am pretty impressed with their service. Whenever I require a cab, I always call up Fasttrack though there are umpteen number of service providers in this line. This time when I had called up and told my mobile number they were readily able to pull up my data from their system. After the representative took my details, she suggested couple of packages that are available and finally gave me a confirmation number. Till this, it is pretty much expected out of any service.

Next day morning, 30 minutes before the pickup time, I got an SMS from Fasttrack saying that the cab is on the way and the SMS had details on who is the driver, the driver's mobile number and approx time by which the cab would be present at my door. And the cab was present right on time. In the past, the cab actually comes in well before the pick up time and the driver would start the meter exactly at the pick up time. On the way back, just minutes before the cab reached home, I get another SMS saying "Hope you enjoyed your trip. For any assistance, please call at...". That was just two simple SMSes but from a pure customer experience point of view, it gave the feel good factor and I would definitely go back to Fasttrack.

Had a word with the driver too and was enquiring about their model. Looks like Fasttrack doesn't own most of the cabs. The driver's themselves own the cab and they run it for Fasttrack. Fasttrack does the advertising part, running the system, coordinating different routes. Drivers' would get allotted a pickup - drop route and each cab has an ID attached. When the trip starts, drivers' update Fasttrack through the in-car equipment and when the trip ends they update again so that the next trip can be assigned.

Though the rates are little on the higher side, the experience was pretty neat. They could do something about their website as Google reports the site has malicious. If that gets fixed and one can book through internet too, then it would definitely add a lot of value to the customer.

ctrl-c ctrl-v

2008-11-30T18:31:00.003+05:30

Watch this and then this.

Except the fact that the singer has done a good job, I do not have any further comments. Didn't expect this from Vijay Antony.

p.s: couldn't embed the video in to the post as youtube was giving some errors.

Kaaranam Aayiram

2008-11-16T22:38:00.008+05:30

Warning: If you watch movies just for entertainment - just go to the hall for 3hrs of time pass and relaxation, then you should be leaving the theatre when the interval card gets shown.

There could be thousands of reason why one would like Gautam's Vaaranam Aayiram. But I guess the single most reason why he made the film is his dad. He seems to have drawn lots of inspirations from his dad and has tried to make a film out of it.

You could watch this movie more than once, because its really worth spending that money to experience what Gautam does to you at least in the first half of the movie if not the most part of the movie. He just fills the theatre with love in the first 90 minutes of the film. Fill as in full of love...:) Starts with the dad Suriya chasing Simran it goes on till the other Suriya sweeps Sameera of her feet in the US. By the time "Mundhinam Paarthaenae" and "Nenjukkul Peidhidum" songs gets over, supported by the evergreen numbers of Ilayaraja songs there are just three possibilities of things running in your head.

1. If you are in love, you would go even more crazier.
2. You could be thinking of that first love that didn't happen. The memories of good old days when you were actually crazy about some one.
3. You would be cursing yourself, why you wasted so much of your life without experiencing anything like that. And why things just don't happen to you alone :)

Certainly I would rate the first half next to the 30 minutes of Karthik/Revathy in Mouna Ragam when it comes to how Tamil movies have portrayed love/romance. The Mouna Ragam 30 minutes is something that can be watched over and over and every other time it would bring a smile in your face invariably. Well its the same case here too. Somehow Gautam does this very easily.

Yeah I am coming there. It is an out and out Suriya show. This guy has shown the real meaning of commitment and it clearly shows that he has put his heart in to this film. Right from the expression on his face when he sees Sameera for the first time, the 70s Suriya going behind Simran, the school boy who starts drawing inspirations from his dad, showing some guts to his senior, the typical college guy who feels responsible for his family and also having Sameera on the other side...The 40 year old Suriya, the Major Suriya, the shell shocked Suriya on the death of his girl, the drug addict, the 70yr cancer patient, the inspirational dad...You seamlessly get lost in the different Suriyas you see on screen and he does every role perfectly. The home work he has done definitely shows in the screen and all girls would certainly be jealous of Jothika :) Especially with the six pack he has got which probably gets shown only for max 15-20 seconds in the movie. He certainly has moved on to the next league and if he continues to do so, can definitely take Tamil cinema to next levels.

Dad plays a very important role in any guy's life. He is the first person whom a guy looks up to draw inspirations, set role models and imparts certain quality of his in to himself. As a kid one sees dad as the man-to-be and looks up to him for lot of things. The same is valid for even girls because dad is the first man in their life too. Whenever they choose their life partner too, girls I think would compare certain attributes of the guy to their dad. And Gautam has tried to tell exactly the same thing. Probably one common attribute to all the dads is that they don't want their kids to know with what difficulty they are being raised. You could see this in any middle class family, where the dad could be working in a bank/public sector company/govt trying to meet both the ends. But he won't even let the kids know what all he goes through to get that first bicycle, the first excursion fees in school, that engineering seat, takes a loan on his provident fund to do your MS App/flight ticket, sees you off in that train/flight when you start to pursue your dreams and the list goes on. And all these without a single element of selfishness, the only thought of "my son/daughter should be in a better position than what I am in".

And Gautam gets amazing numbers from Harris to open that champagne of love and spill every drop of it in the movie hall. "Mundhinam Paarthanae" set in the 70s is the initial gush out of that champagne bottle. As Gautam shakes the bottle more and more "Nenjukkul Peidhidum" and "Oh shanthi" carries the feel over to the interval of the movie. "Anjala" tells you that if you shake the champagne in full enthu it gushes out real fast and gets over in a blink of the eye. Harris has given a pretty decent BGM and does well in the re-recording area too. Somehow Gautam was able to see the today's girl next door in Sameera. Never liked her for whatever she was doing in bollywood films. But here she is just the modern yet simple girl you meet in your today's colleges and offices. Can't blame Suriya for going crazy about her :)

I don't think the movie is going to do well in B & C centres. There are conversations that happen fully in English and terms and life style that you would understand only if you were brought up in the city. But people in the cities would certainly like the movie. Of course there are flaws in the movie like the US consulate guy getting moved by the explanation Suriya gives to go to the US (gets a 5 year visa:) ), not much emphasize on the ill effects of smoking/drinking, thin portrayal of Divya ( noway I am talking about her size here:) ), how the old Suriya went in to advanced stages of cancer and the family didn't even care all through the days, no convincing scenes on how Suriya comes out of drugs, with all the loans that the dad Suriya had, the son flies off to US for 3 months to just meet his girl (yeah, cmon Gautam), etc... At the same time, if you are in 20s or 30s you would be able to relate the movie to your life. At one moment in the movie you would have thought about how inspiring your dad has been for some part of you, for whatever reason it could be.

Anjala...

2008-11-10T19:50:00.006+05:30

...is the first "Gana" attempt of Harris Jayaraj. And I would say he has done it pretty well. It is certainly not the typical Deva "Gana" type song. It's kind of a blend between "Gana" and "Venmathiyae" (Minnalae) type Harris song. What I liked the most is the way Karthik has sung this song. Out of all the songs that Karthik has sung, I would rate him well for "Kadhal Sonna Ganamae" from "Boys" and "Aval Ulaga Azhagiyae" from "Lesa Lesa" and of course "Oliyilae" from "Azhagi". But this one stands equally against those songs for the way he has sung a "Gana" song. Especially in the second stanza when the lyrics goes like

"Velicham thandhava oruthi
Avala iruttula neruthi
Jora payanatha kelappi
Thaniya engae ponalo...
Thaniya engae ponalo... "

Creates a great impact on you especially with the kind of words the poet has penned. Why I like Karthik in "Kadhal sonna ganamae" and "Aval ulaga azhagiyae" is that he clearly gives life to the words in those songs. If you listen to them in headphones in a quiet dark room, you would definitely have a smile on your face. He clearly lifts your mood off and shows how a person feels in love. You just gotta listen to

"Avalathu azhagellam ezhudhida oru baashai illayae
Avalai naan adainthadhum uyirin mael oru aasai illayae"

in the second stanza of "Aval Ulaga Azhagiyae".

This "Anjala" is on same lines clearly expresses how a guy feels when his girl has left him. I could already visualize Surya with the "one line moustache" and curly hair singing in roads in a lungi and yellow banian after his girl died/left him.

Gautham somehow manages to get awesome songs from Harris. Though "Mundhinam" (Another great work by Naresh Iyer), "Oh Shanthi" and "Adiyae Kolludhae" (Shruti Haasan's western voice, oh man!!!) equally impresses anyone, Anjala steals the show for me :)

I just cannot stop..

2008-08-10T22:11:00.011+05:30

... talking, thinking, get in to a different world...A world of mottais music...Well, every one listens to music and I am no exception. I have listened to so many songs from all these music directors from different languages (predominantly Tamil, Hindi and English). But it is Ilayaraja (IR alias Mottai) who can take me to a different world through his simple music. From most of the people whom I have interacted with, they like a song because of the words in it. Because that has the maximum impact in terms of expression of emotions. Many people still appreciate IR for letting the words heard. I mean, latest music trends suppress most of the words and only the music is given much of importance. Well, that's what most people say. Though I kinda accept that argument, I feel it is IR who gave a lot of importance to music. He had so much of music in all his songs but at the same time the words were clearly audible.

But I don't care about those words too. I don't exactly remember all the words of my favorites songs. But I can reproduce the music part of it. That's the impact of IR's music, especially the violins he uses. "Rakkama Kaiyya Thattu" from "Thalapathy" is anyone's first example when it comes to how well he has mixed the violins. In the first 30 or so seconds of the song, there would be two groups of violins playing in different pitch and they would seamlessly blend and then SPB starts it. On a similar note, one song that lingers in my mind most is "Engirundo Ilam Kuruvi" (SPB version) from the movie "Brahma". It starts with a bass guitar and Piano, next 5 seconds is two violin track in parallel in different pitch, a flute too in parallel and the Cello(Big sized bass violin played by keeping in the floor) starts in the background...Now this pattern is repeated 3 times in different tunes to express the shock of "Kushboo" hearing her dad's tune.

This "Cello" instrument has a major impact on me. This being the bass element of the violin family creates that strong impact where words cant express the feelings. This instrument is used typically in background musics when lots of violins are playing and this is played in parallel. And IR has used it extensively. You gotta listen to the songs using headphones to really appreciate this. If you listen to the back ground scores, for example, Anjali BGM or Padikkadhan court scene where sivaji collapses when he realizes Rajni is his bro...a lot of such scenes have this Cello in background. And when you listen to the songs of "How to Name it" (specifically "Do Anything" song) you would definitely appreciate how good this instrument is and how well he has used it.

Violins, violins, violins in all of these..."Karpoora Bommai" song from "Keladi Kanmani", "Anjali Anjali" from the movie "Anjali", "Kalyana Malai" from "Pudhu Pudhu Arthangal", "Poongatru" from "Moondram Pirai"...Yeah I know, I can't complete this list without "Kaala Kaalamai Vaazhum Kaadhalukku" from "Punnagai Mannan"... :) This actually is a huge list; I have mentioned whatever struck me right away. Well, you certainly gotta carefully listen to this "Poongatru" song where he creates and approaching train's sound using violins.

Almost every song of his has lots of violins between the stanzas and they literally take you in to a different world. A world where you just float with music filled everywhere and wish you at least had once chance of being in IR's recording studio witnessing how he composes and organizes. I once heard that this "Kanmani Anbodu" song from the film "Guna" got composed right away when Kamal was sitting in Mottai's studio and reading out the lyrics and explaining the situation. Well, it is not that it is just violins in his music. Best example is "Mandram Vantha" song from "Mouna Ragam"...Absolutely no violin there and anyone would agree what a good song it is...And then you can talk about how well he uses chorus and the best part of silence in movies. He just leaves like 10 seconds of a emotional scene in silence and then starts his BGM and you would be moved by it.

Certain things you learn from others, there would be a guru who can teach you stuff. The rest of things you learn by yourselves mostly by experimenting. But with IR I guess it is there in the genes. I think the DNA code is filled with "Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Da Ni Sa". Science says there is so much information in the DNA, for IR I guess those are just tunes. People say that he has lots of ego and lot of directors and producers had many issues with him because of that. I guess every artist has that element of self pride on his creation. Probably it is true in IR's case too. Or may be it is not. But it certainly doesn't matter to me as long as he gets those violins and pianos and guitars playing. I keep wondering what would you actually feel when you are in the recording studio where, say, IR is sitting with his "Harmonium", Vaali/Vairamuthu is penning down lyrics, Kamal/Maniratnam/Balachander narrating a situation.

Just couple of lines from some songs which I feel are very much relevant to IR
Mayakkam Thanthadhu Yaar...
Tamizho, Amudho(music), Kaviyo(poet).. of "Sippi Irukkudhu" song from "Varumayin Niram Sivappu" and

Pirakkaiyil ennodu pirandhadhu valarndhadhu paatu
Nadakkiyil ennodu nadanthadhu kalandhadhu beat-u
Irukkudhu guitar drums-ugal trumpet flute-u
Ivaigali onraga isaippavan yevan ingu kaatu

Vidha vidhama vagai vagai sugam sugamai suram padipen
Imayam mudhal kumari varai idhayangalil idam pidipen

That's from the song "Pudhuchery kacheri" of "Singaravelan"...And that's mottai for me and for the millions of people who sing in silence one of mottai's song whenever they are happy, sad, jubilant, crying, remembering their old love, missing their parents, having tougher times in life or just in a road trip with close buddies. And as I publish this post, "Engirundo Ilam Kuruvi" is running in a loop in my Winamp and I wouldn't get sleep for quite some time...

What a day!!!

2008-07-01T22:20:00.012+05:30

Yes yes yes...after so many years I had a great sense of satisfaction today. I, briefly, for about 2 minutes felt like the happiest man on earth. Yes, I was able to get some petrol filled in my bike after waiting for 20 minutes. Oh cmon, 20 minutes is not a big deal. I got petrol!!!! Can you believe it? I was one amongst those Chennaites/Indians who achieved this astonishing feat.

Well such is the hype created by the Oil Marketing Companies/dealers/Mr.Chidambaram & Co. They successfully instilled the feeling that we are consuming the last few drops of available crude on earth. Yeah now every one in this country tracks crude prices on a daily basis. And inflation has become a house hold term. I never used to understand that term for some time until I realized that the 100Rs credit in my bank account is actually worth 90Rs when I withdraw it from the ATM a week later. The beggar at Teynampet signal no more accepts one rupee. He says "Sir, the one rupee you give becomes 90 paise when it reaches my hand. I can't buy even a water packet for that amount". Thanks to US dollar and crude prices, we understand economics a lot better these days. Well no one actually knows how much of crude is left down below. But available estimates (read "under estimates") says Saudi has supply left for 97 years, Canada has reserves for another 80 years or so and there are other nations like Iran, Russia, Nigeria, etc with supplies left. That gives us ample time to switch to alternate sources of energy. With current demands, we still have lot of time to invent technologies for alternate energy sources before earth depletes out of crude.

So, it is an obvious question on why so much of panic? I guess it is just because US economy is in a bad shape, the dollar following a south trend, few of the investment guys want to earn their share of profit, are playing this game. Since oil is traded in US dollar only, to get more return for their investment in crude they obviously would like oil prices to be on the higher side. Now Kamal can take his next film on chaos theory with this concept:
One manager at Country Wide Home loans in the US takes a decision to hide certain facts about home loan interest rates/hidden charges and frames a policy - People start buying homes like crazy with high EMIs - War crazy Bush sends troops to Iraq and Afghanistan - US sub prime crisis hits the street - dollar starts falling - investment guys not happy - speculate crude prices - crude jumps from 65$ to 144$ a barrel - India's 70% crude imports takes inflation to 11% - stock market keeps falling - automatically forces me to become long term investor - can't invest any more in stocks as I donno the bottom - so keep the cash at bank - 100Rs in my bank is actually worth 90Rs - with 3% interest rates and 11% inflation my net loss is 8% by just keeping it at bank - beggar not accepting 1 rupee as it is not worth a rupee. According toe butterfly effect some one in the weird hours of work at Country Wide is the reason for Teynampet Signal beggar talking about inflation :)

Uff, and the truth is that 11% is not the actual inflation number in India. Because I heard that in India inflation is calculated based on Whole Sale Price index which is not the price at which you buy at the departmental store. That's the whole sale price of the commodity you buy. So the actual number is somewhere around 25% is my guess. And yeah the biggest worry for Manmohan Singh & Co. is convincing the left for the nuclear deal. I mean, probably nuclear deal can give us little bit of energy security. Still, India would be importing heavily on the crude side. You are not certainly going to run your two wheelers and cars with nuclear energy. So why not first solve the problem on hand? And why not heavily invest on technologies for alternate energy sources to make India energy self sufficient, say, by the year 2020?

But I think the only worry point of the UPA government is whether to go for elections in October 2008 or May 2009. The Oil Marketing Companies have already switched to 7AM - 7PM working hours in the city; I am not sure about the highway scenario. And some companies sell only premium brand of petrol on which there is no cap at max price. Every one understands that this has a multiplying effect to the amount of rice and dhaal one eats every day and in some cases the number of meals one eats in a day. Of course you just cannot control crude prices as it is an international factor. But certainly you have to look at other options that are within your control. I am sure you can clean up a lot of things in domestic market. Like the whole sale price is fixed by the government. This is the rate at which farmer has to sell it. From there are on so many middle men speculate the market and dictate the price of food items. And there is so much of food items blocked just to be sold at higher prices. I am just giving couple of examples where cleaning can happen. I am sure there are many more such scenarios.

But I know the reality. These things are not going to change. The change would be in IT professionals' salary structure. Along with CPI (Company performance variable), VPI (Vertical performance variable), IPI (Individual performance variable) we are going to have one more: ICPI ---> International Crude Performance Variable.

Kamalavatharam

2008-06-25T22:15:00.005+05:30

First thing first: I like Kamal for his acting/effort he puts on each film/knowledge base. But I am not a crazy fan of him who would blindly say Rajini movies are crap :)
And, this is not a review about Dasavatharam as a lot had been already written about it. But of course it is about the movie :D

So, I had been waiting for quite a long time for this Dasavatharam movie and I was so sad that I couldn't watch the movie in the first week. Finally I saw it and I am certainly not impressed with the movie if at all satisfied. He took a good subject called "Chaos Theory" but made the narration chaotic. I certainly appreciate the amount of effort he had put in getting those 10 roles done. I wish he had put equal effort on the narration front especially when it comes to dealing with Chaos Theory and Butterfly Effect. The chaos theory is as such well explained in the movie depicting how an event in 12th century can contribute to something like a Tsunami. He even shows the butterfly flying in 12th century and at the last scene. But what about the in between 150 odd minutes. Having taken a complex subject, the narration became a lot more complex in dealing with Sand Quarrying, Religion, God, and, God only knows what else... The real part (story) and the imaginary part (screenplay) together maketh the complex movie and as such the screenplay became invisible :)

My guess is that he would probably scripted it with 3 or 4 characters but eventually someone in his circle might have told him "Why not make 10 characters and create a world record?". Anyone would easily agree that he could have avoided 3-4 characters in the movie. And certainly I didn't get the kind of satisfaction one would get watching movies like "Indian", "Michael Madana Kama Rajan", "Anbe Sivam" and the likes..."Anbe Sivam" had a very long lasting impact on me and made lots of sense even though it dealt with a complex subject called God. But here in Dasa I wow at a lot of individual scenes, especially the first 10 minutes of the film. They are just independent scenes and when all of them flow through as a movie, somewhere the link is lost. If it is so difficult for people who can immediately Google and Wiki and find out info about Chaos Theory, I couldn't disagree with the saloon wala and auto walas I met who said the movie is a crap. Now this is where Rajini differs as a mass entertainer.

OK. I think I have blamed Kamal a lot in this post than all these years. Having grown seeing his movies and acting skills I guess I have the right to say these when all his hard work goes unappreciated. I would sit and watch "n" number of times movies like Nayagan, Varumayin Niram Sivappu, Moondram Pirai, Punnagai Mannan, MMKR, Apoorva Sagodharagal, Devar Magan and the list goes on till Anbe Sivam. The precision with which he acts in every frame, the sheer brilliance he shows in adapting to a character and just living through his entire life for cinema surely stands as a great inspiration for me. Cutting down on height, increasing on weight, sporting an 80 year old guy, running around in a "Madisaar" he has shown variety in every film. Having studied around class 10 or so, his knowledge base is comparable to a researcher in any field. Getting to know so many things, keeping them indexed in his brain, he can start talking about any topic on earth. And when it comes to cinema the quick adaptation of technology and complex story telling techniques he certainly has taken Tamil cinema to the next level during any period.

Even in Dasa, you would definitely notice how much research he has done for each character. Getting trained on George Bush accent and mannerisms, unique walking style for the Dalit guy, punjabi accent, speaking Japanese, Iyengar "bhaashai" for the paati he has literally crafted every frame of the movie. He has taken Visual FX to the next level for Indian Cinema. In fact he tried that in Alavandhan itself when he got special motion controlled cameras for scenes having both the Kamals. People don't even want to talk if I mention Alavandhan. But in my opinion even that movie was like Dasavatharam. A lot of scenes can be enjoyed individually. On the other side, as my colleague says Kamal fails miserably when movie is just seen for entertainment purposes. Like, there is a business side of it. A lot of people's career, hard work and most importantly one guy's huge huge money at stake. That's where Rajini excels; Sivaji having just a moderate story with mere marketing and Rajini's screen presence became a runaway hit. I am not saying that people only like masala movies. Of course a lot of movies that were serious have done good at the box office too. But 90% of such movies dealt with relationships, not the ones that handled complex subjects.

Another big let down in Dasa is the music (Songs, BGM and Re-recording). I do not understand the rational behind having Himesh as the composer and choosing Devi Sri Prasad for BGM. If it had been ARR or IR (my personal preference) that would have helped the movie a lot. Both of these guys are capable of creating themes for each period/character in the film and the BGMs will have a long lasting impact on the audience. I am not sure if it is just the dates problem of something the producer had in mind for marketing purposes (when the movie is released in Hindi). Also I missed Sujatha a lot in this movie. His dialogues would have surely made a difference.

I now wish this: if K.S.Ravikumar had directed Sivaji and Shankar directed "Dasa" it would have been really wonderful. Ravikumar rocks when it comes to masala movies and Shankar can create that impact in audience by emphasizing the social message in the film. But wait, I haven't given up on Kamal. No one would for that matter. I have already started waiting for "Marma Yogi" and I want a Kamal - Mani Ratnam - ARR combo pack in some time... :)

Life at 50MPH...

2008-06-07T21:37:00.002+05:30

...well that's the theme of the movie Speed, one of my all time favorite. I have seen this movie so many times that some two weeks back when I was brushing my teeth, I heard this "Sam...Sam..." voice of a female and immediately I could recollect the scene where Sandra Bullock would be driving the bus and Keanu Reeves would be addressing the passengers. Though the movie theme is quite simple I liked the way the movie was taken keeping you interested for the full length (except some of the conversations between Sandra Bullock and Keanu, she would be asking some really dumb questions). The movie got released sometime in 1995 when I had just come to Chennai. Devi theathre, then the biggest and best theatre in Chennai, had got itself renovated with Dolby Systems. I in fact watched the movie with a brand new VCR player that we had bought at my aunt's place when two of my cousins studying abroad had come for vacation.

The freeway scenes were just awesome for me those days. I couldn't believe that roads could be that wide and long. Scenes from helicam showing the bus number as 2525, cops blocking certain access roads for the bus to take a sharp right turn are still fresh in memories. The scene where a helicam just pans out from the top of the bus showing the police vehicles retreating and the bus accelerating at full speed trying to cross the 50 feet gap in the freeway is still awesome for me. And it was a brilliant performance from the villain too controlling everything from his living room. He just depicted a typical mean character and just meant business. Though I didn't like the elevator and train drama of the movie, the sequences that happen in the bus and the long freeway shots compensated for them. Even after some 13 years since it released I would still sit and watch it if aired in one of these movie channels :)

God's own country to my own city

2008-05-20T22:51:00.004+05:30

Well, we were in the last day of our trip (with no return tickets yet:)) and took a early morning bus to Thrissur to attend a friend's marriage. We reached Thrissur at around 9.30, had breakfast and asked for the marriage hall. None of the auto walas knew where the hall is and I was not able to reach my friend too. Initially my friend had told me that any one in Thrissur town would know where that hall is. I could immediately recollect one of Singara velan's dialog. Kamal would ask "Ennaya mano veedu unakku theriyadha. Chinna kozhandhaya kaetta kooda theriyum nnu sonnar". Autowala replies "Naan enna chinna kozhandhaya?". Anyways, after roaming around for 20 minutes we finally got an autowala and we were in the hall when it was just opened by the contractors who were arranging things for the marriage. The bride, groom, relatives...mmhmm...no sign of them yet and it was like 11.30 when finally they came. I didn't know that mallus keep their marriage timing this late. Back in TamilNadu it is before 10 O clock at any cost.

We spent like 45 more minutes, wished the couple, took a pic too:) We got the next available bus and came back to Chalakudy. Rukku wanted to shop those mallu set sarees and so we took Unni along with us and we got like some 10 such sarees. Rukku had a long list of women to whom he had to present. I just had my sister:) From there we went straight to Unni's house and met his family, gave one of those set sarees to his wife as our token of appreciation. We then sat in a near by shed owned by Unni. We had, say, one hour chat with Unni and his friends. Unni as promised gave a ticket to us. We were surprised that he could get us a ticket. At the same time, there was a catch. The ticket was booked in some other person's name and we would be traveling in their name. The ticked didn't have Souther Railway printed in it. It had some local jewellers name printed instead. Unni said I have travel on "Dixon" name and Rukku has to travel on "Nirmal" name. We got their approximate age details too. We were initially skeptical about the whole thing as this is completely illegal and railways can punish us for this. But then we decided to take a risk as we didn't have any other option; all buses to Chennai too were booked.

The train was at 6.45 and we packed up our things and met Unni at the bus stand at 5 O clock types. In fact we have to board the train only at Thrissur, so we have to travel again to Thrissur and that would take solid 50 minutes at least. So we bid adieu to Unni, gave him some more money for the help he extended. In fact we took his contact number too so that we could keep in touch; the kind of help he extended during this trip to some strangers is really immense. We wouldn't have done so many things in those last 3 days if we had said a big no to the autowala who approached us when we landed in Chalakudy. With that, we got out of Chalakudy with loads of memories and reached Thrissur well before the train time. We checked the PNR status and got to know the seat number and coach number. The ticket didn't have that info too, some alpha-numeric code was scribbled in that. By this time, me and Rukku had rehearsed the answers we might have to give to the ticket inspector if we get caught. We like rehearsed some 3-4 times before we got in to our coach. The train is actually coming from Trivandram and it already had so many people boarded.

There was this mallu guy who recently got transferred to Chennai and is shifting his family there. He occupied rest of the seats in our bay and we started talking. After some time he asked our name and Rukku promptly replied "Nirmal". He then looked at me and I was like "uh"...Wat the heck, I forgot the name I am supposed to travel in and I was doing a look up of my Christian name index. Jacob, Jackson, Philip, James....nope I am not able to get it. That guy was still looking at me and I said "I'm sorry". He then said "I asked your name". And I am like, yeah, well, yes it is Raghu and turned on to my left to get a stare from Rukku. We continued the chat for some more time after which we excused ourselves for some fresher. Rukku was firing me and till then I hadn't recollected the name. He was asking me if I couldn't look at my palm to know the name....it was written in Capital Times New Roman font 14... "Dixon". We then hoped that the ticket inspector would come after this guy had gone for sleep. And we were talking about all possible consequences this could led us into if the inspector finds out or this guy protests. Even if both of them didn't have a problem, how would I react when this guy over looks me when I say to the inspector that my name is "Dixon" . We even thought if "Dixon Raghu" or "Raghu Dixon" would make sense... :)

Finally we decided to face the situation as it unfolds and had our dinner peacefully. By this time this mallu guy was preparing his kid and wife to sleep and ticket inspector had come to our compartment. We were again preparing ourselves to all possible questions from the inspector. The ticket didn't have southern railways, no coach number or seat number mentioned there, we are traveling on some other's name and we have one person to testify that my name is not Dixon...The inspector got our ticket, he marked something in his sheet, scribbled something in our ticket and went to next bay. Ufff, that was it, that just was it...We had a hi-5 and it was like...hey mallu..cmon..talk me...talk to the hand... :) We had a small conversation with him where he was saying how people get tickets somehow from Chalakudy. Like there would be some broker who would block all tickets at Chalakudy and would then sell it for a premium in black market. Everything unfolded in front of us as to what Unni had actually done and why the inspector didn't ask anything. We thought what we did was wrong but consoled ourselves seeing two people lying in the floor in our bay. Yes, the unreserved guys have come in to our compartment and the inspector didn't even bother to question them...This is India Inc...

With that note we went to sleep with loads of memories. What started off as an adhoc trip with no idea on what places to visit, with just two of us, we have traveled many places with just public transport. We had used different modes of transport, got to know about these places and most of it the experience you get when you interact with the local people. Amongst all these what stands on top is that we made many friends in this trip. We learned so much from them. Like how the cab driver from Pollachi to Top slip drives more than 48hrs continuously with just a 4 hour break to support a small family. Still he had so much values attached with him and customer service was on top when he took us for the trip. The guide at Parambikulam couldn't send his kids to school because the school fees is 480Rs annually and he cannot afford that; the tourism department gives him 50Rs per visitor he takes along. The autowala who took care of everything from taking us to Adhirampalli to arranging a ticket back to Chennai, he got us introduced to all his friends and family and we were talking like childhood friends...

There is so much in the world out there...You just gotta step out of your home.

Alapey - Kottayam

2008-05-16T12:29:00.000+05:30

When we planned for the trip, my mallu friend told me that if we get time it is worth visiting Alapey and taking the backwater ride to kottayam in a boat. So Alapey was in our list and Kerala is famous for backwaters. The penultimate day of the trip started off with a bus ride to Alapey. We met Unni at the Chalakudy bus stand and he got us in to a Palakad bus which goes to Alapey. That was some solid 2.5hrs of travel from Chalakudy to Alapey and it was around 11.30 types when we reached there. We just got down somewhere in the town and just walked down the streets looking for some information. We hit a tourism office where we came to know that the ferry boat to Kottayam had left and the next one is around 1.30. The tourism guys were also giving some gyan sessions to couple of foreigners...Sure they made some good money that day.

The town had lots of foreigners and also people from different parts of India. Alapey is famous for the oil massages and that is one of the main attractions there. There are these government ferries available at cheaper rates which is a main mode of transport for localities there. Also there are private boats that you get which starts at some 500. You can hire these for your family and have a good ride in the backwaters. Yeah you know which one we took...The government ferry is pretty decent enough and when we reached the ferry station the ferry was almost full. We decided to do a foot-board in the ferry... :)

We could do a foot-board only near to the engine side of the ferry as the other foot-board was already occupied... :) There was quite a good sound coming out of the engine and there was this weird smell of the fuel that gets burnt (The kind of exhaust smell that comes out when you burn impure fuel). That didn't matter much to us as were enjoying the ride. It was solid three hours ride from Alapey to Kottayam through the backwaters. As we continued our journey we were surprised to see so many small towns(islands) in the backwaters. People live there just like how one would live in a small town with all the facilities like cable TV, telephone and we even saw a Maruthi 800 parked in one of the houses. We were wondering where they would use this M800. I guess they would take the vehicle in a ferry to Kottayam and drive from there... :)

The other thing that would surprise you is the house boats. You get house boats of all sizes and there were like hundreds of them at one stretch. This is the main attraction there as lots of honey moon couples hire these house boats. We did see some families probably celebrating their anniversaries and foreigners taking a nice break. I have been in a house boat before when I was in Sydney and know the experience. But here we saw a house boat with a Split AirCon. That was heights and anyways needed in hot county like India. These boats are really huge in size and you get couple of people who would drive the house boat. The one we hired in Sydney is a self-driven one where we did all the driving/mooring/anchoring stuff. These driver guys themselves would do the cooking/cleaning and other stuffs. You just gotta enjoy your time with your loved one(s)... :)

The entire ride has enough opportunities to click lots of pictures and I was busy with my camera while Rukku was enjoying the ride (probably getting bored too:))...As we were nearing Kottayam we could see massive agricultural land on the other side of the backwaters and such a plush green sight it was. You will know why Kerala is called God's own country... We reached Kottayam at around 5.30 and we were damn hungry as we didn't have lunch too...It was just Kerala chips and good day biscuits for lunch...As we approached the Kottayam bus station we sighted a restaurant and send some parotas inside...We ordered some tea and we got in such a big glass...We never had so much of tea in one shot before...And then it was solid 45 minutes of waiting to get a bus to Chalakudy... There was one guy standing next to us and we first asked him if that bus standing in front of us would go...He said no and we asked him to let us know when Chalakudy bus comes in. When 10th bus came there it was like we turn to our left and he would nod his head saying a big no. We tried hard not to piss him off, but we didn't care too. At last he nodded vertically and we got in to the bus. We double checked with the conductor to make sure he hasn't got us in to a bus that would go in opposite direction... :)

We reached Chalakudy at around 9.30types and went in search of something to eat. The entire town shuts down at 8.30 or so and you don't get anything to eat...At least thats what we could conclude...If you don't get anything to eat near the bus stand, then we understand that the city shuts down. There was a highway near the bus stand itself and we walked down there and found a local hotel. We ate whatever we could (mostly dosas) and that was our final dinner in Kerala...We didn't realize that our trip was coming to an end with the marriage that we gotta attend next day at Thrissur and we still don't have tickets in our hand for the return journey. We had given some 1000Rs to Unni and he said it would be done. We were hoping that somehow we would reach Chennai on Monday morning as I had to go to office on the same day...

Adhirampalli falls

2008-04-28T21:42:00.001+05:30

Unni (the typical mallu name and our auto wala :)) was at our room at 7AM sharp. He had come with one of his friends called Suji. He works for some plantation in Munnar. We went to a hotel known to unni and had our breakfast...I tasted the famous and default breakfast...aapam with green peas masala..that was a good start for the day... :) Unni had promised to take us to places which normal tourists don't go. And also we never thought we would do a trip in auto..So we were really kicked about it...First we reached a place which is the downstream of Adhirampalli falls from where the river bifurcates...It was kinda off season and so we could see a lot of hard rocks and with the help of the auto guys we spent close to 2 hours exploring under the hot sun...

In fact no one was around us and we four were exploring as much we could with the given amount of time.

From there, we went up crossing Adhirampalli to reach a dam. This dam is the source for Adhirampalli and we thought we could check out the source itself. As I said earlier, it was off season and hence there was less water at the dam too. We met couple of people there too who are of Adivasis origin. With their help we intruded in to places where normal tourists are not allowed... :) We also managed a small ride in simple bamboo boat. I was damn scared as the boat just had two bamboo sticks running over the length and say 8 smaller ones across the width. You just got to sit in on the cross bamboo sticks and balance. I couldn't balance properly and was way too scared, a moment of truth for me to realize that I am overweight and can't balance my own weight.
Rukku being slim and slightly underweight balanced properly and had a good ride:)

It was almost 1.30 types and we decided to get back to Adhirampalli. We had lunch at one of the hotels there which had a direct view of the falls and we were quite excited to get there. We quickly had some parathas and went to the top of the falls. Unni and Suji had completely explored these places I believe. We stopped at many places on the way and explored little bit. We finally reached the top of the falls and our plan was to cross the falls and reach the other side and get deep in to the forest. Since it was off season and water flow was reasonable Unni suggested that it shouldn't be a big deal. Me and Suji took one route while Unni and Rukku was on another track to cross the breadth of the falls. But after an hour so we decided not to proceed as it was dangerous even with not-so-much-of-water. And given my track record with water bodies, here too I slipped couple of times and had to get the help of these guys. So we came back to the left side of the falls and started to descend. Before that we tried to reach the edge of the falls but then the government had promptly put a security guard there... :) It was a beautiful view from there. What appeared to be a slow off season water suddenly split in to three and was falling at high speed. Well, that's nature...it can defy any laws... :) We were thinking how much water would be there during peak season.

And now we understood why security guards were placed, especially after the Punnagai Mannan movie...In fact for people coming from TamilNadu even the tourist guides address it as "Punnagai Mannan Falls"... :)

From here there are two ways to reach down. One being a proper cemented steps which many of the tourists took. The other one is the steep-no-proper-steps route. I don't have to tell you which route we took... :) Even this route finally merges in to the proper route and we were standing at the bottom of the falls. Rukku was freaking out to bath in the falls. I strictly told no to him as it was dangerous and I know how notorious he can get...But still he was firm on getting wet. Luckily they had put barricades and security guys were whistling not allowing people to get near to the falls. We clicked couple of pics there and then decided to go to the top and take bath. We took the same not-so-famous route and oh man me and Rukku were panting like anything. I never had any stamina, Rukku had some which is also gone owing to number of fags he has on one day...Unni & Co were climbing happily and we were waiting to reach the top and sit down.

The sprite 1L bottle got over when we finally reached the top...We relaxed for some time and walked to a place where we could take bath. I said no to get wet and I was taking care of the belongings while others got in to the water... I was watching some local kids (Four girls and lucky one guy:)) who should be studying class 11 or 12 walking across the falls fearless. They were bare foot and were so used to the falls that they were talking and having fun and didn't do any calculation on where to keep the next foot...Realized what I missed as I grow up...the fun part of doing anything and not to complicate simple things... There were these Sabharimala saamis who make it to this falls every time they visit Sabharimala...I guess this is their return route to TamilNadu...

It was around 5.30 types in the evening and it is time they close down the falls for visitors. In fact there were whistles from security guys signaling people to leave the falls. We too decided to get out and started our return journey. We went past one security guy who was getting in to a small bamboo house with one small stove and kettle...Yup, chaya for the whole night...I am sure its a long night for him daily...We started our return journey and we reached Chalakudy around 7.30 types. We told Unni that we had planned to visit Alapaey and Kottayam the next day and had asked him if he can arrange for some tickets for Chennai. He said it's no big deal and said he can get it for sure. We had little hopes since we had tried to book online throughout our journey at different places and tried even tatkal booking. So we thought he is probably being over optimistic and let's see what he can do...Unni said he would come next morning too to pick us up to the bus stand where he can get us in to a bus for Alapaey...We paid him say around 650Rs or something and we were happy that we spent less than what would have probably cost us more if we had taken a cab or something...And the best part of having seen places that we wouldn't have if we had gone by ourselves or through some travels...
With that note we were happy that the trip had gone really well given the fact that we wanted it to be adhoc and weren't sure of places we were visiting too...

God's own country...

2008-04-20T21:17:00.000+05:30

Been little busy since I shifted my company and now that I have got settled in the new company thought I should at least finish off this trip log. So here it goes...

After asking couple of people on what is the nearest place in Kerala from Vaalparai we came to know that Chalakudy makes a lot of sense as it was close to places that we wanted to visit. Next day we took the 7 O clock bus from Vaalparai and this bus too broke after 20 minutes or so. We spent quite some time at the outskirts of Vaalparai as the bus was getting fixed and there was a small family with a newly married couple, the girl's sister probably and few more people in the bus. They were having the time of their life with too much shouting and all...We also had good time checking out the girl's sister... :) The journey to Chalakudy was really tiresome as it goes through bad terrains...On the way the driver stopped for breakfast at one of his regular places and we got some kappa or something to eat...We cud eat anything for the hunger we had...And all of a sudden we heard two continuous horn from the driver and off he started pumping his accelerator...And we hadn't even finished off our tea...We had to literally run and get in to the moving bus and the driver and conductor didn't even bother to check if every one got inside...It was like if you are lucky you would reach Chalakudy... :)

But the driver did really good job in driving through those narrow and bad roads...The roads were better once we reached Adhirampalli as the tourism department had laid proper roads to attract tourists...Lot of people got down at Adhirampalli (the famous Punnagai Mannan falls), we just marked the place as we had planned to come there next day. By the time we reached Chalakudy it was around 12 O clock and we were damn tired...Once we got down from the bus we were approached by an auto wala and he promised us to take to a good lodge. We were skeptical initially since we thought probably he was trying to cheat us. But we decided to take a chance and he got us a decent enough lodge close to the bus stand itself..As per our plan we were supposed to visit some place on the same day but we were so tired and decided to stay at Chalakudy itself. We had informed the autowala that we need to go to Adhirampalli next day and he said he can take us in his auto itself...Generally every one takes a cab or something but we thought this could be a different experience and asked him to come to the lodge at 7 AM next day. We took some typical Kerala style lunch with those fatty rice, came back to lodge and were off to sleep till 5 O clock...

We got freshened up and checked out Chalakudy in the evening...We basically thought could go to some movie and spend the evening but no Tamil/English/Hindi movies...So we asked couple of local guys and we were directed to some holy world nearby...That's actually a church which has built the entire Jerusalem as models and had showcased the entire life history of Jesus...They had done it really good...We came back, had some food and went early to sleep...We would have hardly some 8-9hrs time and start our journey of 100KMs or so in an auto... :)

I cudn't control myself...

2008-03-11T09:47:00.000+05:30

...from posting this before the trip log is completed. I had been postponing on writing some other thoughts since I wanted to complete this trip thing. But "Anjadhae" just pulled me over. This recent flick of Mysskin and co had been the talk of the town for quite sometime and I saw it last saturday. I seriously don't know how to put it, but I am very much impressed and I felt a sense of satisfaction of having seen a sensible movie. The movie, in fact it is the BGM, the camera angles and narration that is still in my head.

As such, the story is a normal story of friendship, love, deception that happens between two friends . What stands out tall is the way the whole story being narrated and the way the director involved the audiences in the plot. A lot of scenes have been picturized carefully with different camera angles. The scene where the villain crawls in the bed room to peak through the bottom of the door when the heroine gets her clothes changed is just a sample. When one of the allies (one who is handicapped) of the villain is shot by the police is another scene worth the mention. The police would stop his son from reaching his dad while this person's leg trembles and looks at his son with a feeling that he is leaving behind his son and family. The other scene where a girl is dropped of a car after getting the ransom from her father, the father walks down in shock, the camera moves at a low angle from a distance captures the hero running parallel in the frame to reach out to the girl.
When kuruvi (common friend for the two friends) takes the bullet that was aimed at the hero, he falls down and holds the bush with one hand and his other amputated hand trembles he innoncently asks why his friend shot him. Just before the interval when Kripa comes to Sathya's house and claims that he would take revenge for what Sathya has done to him, the camera pans out a low angle at slow motion in frame where the family is standing as a group in bright yellow lighting with Kripa walking tall, wow it was a instant wall paper composed in front of my eyes.

There are many such scenes throughout the film and the reason why I would be watching the movie again is for the BGM (Back Ground Music). Every scene that stays in the audience's mind has a brilliant BGM which would have had a great impact on the audience. For me (for that matter any one else), it has always been Ilayaraja when it comes to BGM. Frankly admitting, Sundar C Babu has done a great job after IR especially with the violins. IR has used violins extensively which gives the life to a frame in the movie. The same has been thought through and implemented in this film. And just like IR, the back ground score has silence in some scenes which adds to the impact that the scene would create. In fact the BGM of the movie is the one that impressed me first and is pushing me to watch the movie again. There are scenes where the police is searching the villains, the villians escaping from the police and the audience wondering how the next frame is going to be. The BGM has three different music going in parallel capturing the mood of all three perspectives involved.

While the movie fulfills you from different angles, with only couple of songs that don't bore you too much, a big let down is the characterization of the investigating officer who looks dumb in the screen. When he seriously looks at the map, discusses with his fellow officers and says "That's right, we have to head north", the theatre was full of laughter. He is portrayed like a next gen officer and says " a.k.a Dhaya" it sounded like this person's akka (sis) is Dhaya. On a similar note the heroine's role is wasted but compensated by the mottai whose face is not show in the entire film and same with kuruvi's wife who always covers up her face with her saree. As a whole I could sense a great team work with the director leading from the front, not on the masala lines, not too much of heroism and shouting (which is the trend in action films) and a film worth watching more than once.

Vaalparai....Vattapaarai...

2008-02-17T19:36:00.000+05:30

As we came back from Top Slip and Parambikulam, we told the lodge guys that we would be vacating next morning and head to Vaalparai. We packed our things (read, putting everything you find in to a bag) and slept early so that we could catch the first bus next morning. We got to know that the first bus is at 7.15 types, but we missed it even though we were at the bus stand on time. After 30 minutes wait or so, we got in to a bus and we could just get the last two seats in the bus. I am not sure why every other bus gets crowded there. Rukku said he would get something to eat and went down. While he stepped down itself I had a hunch saying how would the conductor and driver would react if I ask them to stop while Rukku returns. And that exactly happened in few minutes and the conductor was about to loose his patience. But just then Rukku stepped in and we were off to Vaalparai. I was relieved for two reasons, one was we didn't get much of the shouting from the bus guys. Secondly, we had something to eat :D.

Well, Vaalparai is about 45KMs from Pollachi and the best part is its an uphill climb. Like you got to cross some 40 hair-pin bends and we were quite excited about the climb. We just asked the guys sitting next to us to give us some room so that we could get to see some of the view from the top as the bus took some great turns in the hair-pin bends. We could see the Azhiyar dam from the top and it was such a wonderful view from the top. Now, another lesson here is we shouldn't use public transport for everything. If we had come by a car or something, we could stop at some view points during this uphill climb, spend some time and enjoy the scenery. Well, things like this were noted down in our memory so that next time we make it a real good trip. As we crossed all the hair pin bends, we got in to the Vaalparai town and wow it was just tea estates everywhere. Tea and Coffee plantations are the only source of income in this town I guess. There were so many of them and each of the estates had some tall trees amongst the tea plantation. We didn't know why they grow them too, but the conductor clarified saying that those trees are actually for absorbing the water from the ground. Like, the tea plants cant take a lot of water it seems, and these trees would absorb some of the water so that the tea plants don't die of excess water.

We got down at the bus stand and got in to a hotel room near to the bus stand. It was for only one night and we just took a double room. We put down our bags there and immediately came back to the bus stand to board a bus to "Solaiyar Dam". We heard that apart from the estates, there is this dam and another Balaji temple as the tourists spots there. We weren't interested in the temple so we went to the dam. It wasn't such a great dam, as such the dam was closed due to some maintenance work. When we inquired, we came to know that the dam has served its life and is about to break down in 3-4years. It would either fall down on its own, or the govt guys got to bring it down. So there was this work to strengthen the dam. We just sat down there for some time and then started to look out for some food. There was one small hotel kinds near to the bus stop itself and we had our food there. The rasam they served us, I still can recollect the taste of it. I think that's the best rasam I had till now... :) After the food and little bit of wandering here and there, we boarded the bus to go back to Vaalparai. We had to go for a wedding of one of Rukku's friends. After 10 minutes or so, some smoke was coming out of the bus near rear tyres.

The driver tried his best to get us back to Vaalparai, but on the way there was a road block. One truck with full load of logs had broken down right in the center of the road and vehicles cannot cross the truck and we were struck. Every one started to get down and we also got down thinking that we should help the guys to move the truck aside so that the traffic can flow through. So we went and started to push the truck with full enthu and somehow some 10 of us with local fellows managed to move the truck to the side of the road. We turned back thinking that we did something good, only to find that those who had got down with us actually got down to board the bus that was standing before our bus and they had moved. Well...well...no comments...the driver told us to go in that bus warning us that this bus would move very slowly. We decided to go in this bus only and enjoy the ride (A bus only for two of us). We stopped in between, had some tea and clicked some pics too!!!

We were chatting with the driver throughout the journey and asked him to get us down say about 3 KMs before Vaalparai. He got us down and the remaining 3KMs we walked in the tea estates. That was the best part of the day as we went through the tea estates with a cold breeze and you could just walk like that any distance. Just before we entered Vaalparai, the driver who dropped us down was waving his hands as he took the next trip, of course in a different bus this time. After reaching Vaalaparai, we got tried to get the phone number of Rukku's friend so that we could ask him the direction and all. But we weren't able to get it. But we decided to go ahead with the information we had and took a taxi to reach that place. We reached the correct place as we could see Rukku's friend there... :) It was a Christian wedding and they had formed a group and were singing songs in praise of the lord. It was a good evening as the night fell down we could feel the cold. It was actually a sports club kinds where the employees of Tata Estate can host their functions too!!! We spent some time there and heard stories on how a Cheetah was spotted last evening just near this sport club where it took away one calf!!! In fact we were frequently walking to the entrance of the club which is about 200m from the club in pitch dark. We didn't come out after hearing that story!!!

We had dinner there (well that was our hidden motive:)) and the host had arranged a cab drop back to the town. We took that one and reached our lodge. It was actually too cold outside and we thanked the lodge guys for giving us the woolen blankets. We went to sleep straight away as we had to board a bus at 7AM the next morning. Rukku was sleeping sound and one cat freaked me out the entire night. The cat was making the cry sound, like it was trapped in somewhere and it couldn't get out. I was thinking it would stop some time and was trying to sleep. I didn't want to go out also as it was pitch dark and in the entire floor ours was the only room occupied. And after hearing the cheetah stories, I just couldn't imagine going out and didn't want to wake up Rukku too as he was sleeping tight. I don't know when I slept, but was worried because the next day we had a quite a lot of traveling towards God's own country...

Top slip & Parambikulam

2008-02-10T19:01:00.000+05:30

We boarded the cab that was booked for us at around 7.30 IST (IST means an assumed delay of 20-30 mins) and headed straight to Top Slip. The driver was a nice person and he really works hard for a living. He has been driving for continuous 12hrs and took a 4hr nap and started again to take us and roam around the whole day!!! We reached the toll booth at Top Slip and we were the 8th cab to enter tat day. There is a cap of 30 cabs that can enter beyond Top Slip in to the Parambikulam forest. As such we were told that there are couple of places to see in Top Slip but Parambikulam is a lot better place and a whole day can be spent inside the forest. So we drove further and reached the Parambikulam check post. We just could register there and couldn't proceed further. As per the new rules they allow some number of vehicles every 30 minutes and for the whole day they allow only 30 vehicles. This is the new order by the forest officer to protect the forest.

So we registered there and came back to Top Slip and went straight in to the canteen to eat something. The canteen had only one item and that is Pongal. We were told that if we need any food we gotta order them a day before. Anyways, we ate whatever was available and spent some time there watching some wild pigs grazing around and reached the Parambikulam check post on time. We payed the toll and drove in the dense forests to reach the reception office. We paid few more hundreds and got a guide there (guide is mandatory!!!). The guide accompanied us throughout the day and showed us places around. We drove in the forest and on the way we could just see some deers and crocs. Actually the guide told us the best time to see the animals is early in the morning as they would come out to drink water. We drove few more KMs and reached a place where there was a tree called Kannimara Teak. That's one of the biggest natural teak trees in the world measuring at 48.5mts in height and the girth is 6.5mts. Like, it would need 7-8 people forming a chain to cover the tree in a circle. And the myth behind the tree is that there used to be 7 more such trees which were actually angels are something and this the last one of them surviving. Even this was supposed to be cut down, but blood was oozing out of the tree when the axe fell and they stopped cutting it down. And from there on it has been standing tall for 100s of years.

After spending some time there, we reached a check dam and the guide told us that this is a small dam and you have the second largest dam in India few KMs from there. We stopped here and there to find some animals that could be spot but we were terribly unlucky. But still we continued with some hope. We had lunch in between in a hotel known to the guide. And the best part is, they do not eat curd because no cow is available inside the forest. Yeah, if they bring up any cow it would be eaten by the animals that would roam during the night. After lunch we went to the boat house to take a boat ride. There are no motor boats available for tourists and we have to go only in the bamboo boats. This is a measure taken to keep the water pollution free. In fact we drank the water directly from the storage and it was just too good!!! Was thinking the kinda treated water that we get in the city :( The guys who were driving the boat were telling stories on how the forest is damaged for some few thousands of money. Like every year the government allots some amount to protect the forest from wild fires. This forest is being shared by both TN and Kerala government. These guys were showing the area that belong to TN where the forest was in black color because the forest officers just ignite fire every year intentionally and show it as a natural wild fire and get the amount from the government. We were hearing such kinda stories during the ride that took us some one plus hour. Obviously we rowed for some time :)

After this we went to the main dam and it was a mind blowing sight there. It was such a huge dam and there was so much of water around. This dam was conceived in the late 60s by then TN CM Annadurai to save the southern TN from water shortage. We were amazed at the kind of vision this person had. He constructed a huge dam 5 decades back to save people in the future!!! And the guide was explaining us how a rail track used to be there where the dam is currently. The brits used it to transport woods from the forest!!! In fact from the dam, there was water gushing out and it was just the seepage. We just couldn't imagine how much water would be coming out of the dam when it reaches full level. We were told that every year the dam gets full and so much water is released that it goes above the distant bridge that we could see from the dam (Check the bridge in the pic...) In fact the guide tried to get the keys of the dam so that we could go inside and check the generators and instruments inside and he was telling that it would be too chill inside (naturally, without any A/C). But we couldn't reach the guy who had the keys (lady luck was never with us)

Well, after doing all these things, we gotta know the actual thing one is supposed to do at Parambikulam. You gotta book a log house for two days (Call them 2 months in advance and book it). You reach there on day one, take a boat, a guide and two security guards with you to the log house in a boat. These log houses are situated in islands in the water body. You stay over night there, the guides themselves would cook food for you. After past midnight, you start on a night safari with the guide and the security guards (who will have guns). You go inside the forest and you can see all the animals that would be roaming around. There are more than 350 leopards, lots and lots of elephants and all wild animals. You do the safari whole night and come back to the log house in the morning, take nice food and rest and do some more boating in the water body and leave the place. We got the contact numbers of the guides and reception and lots of info about the place and phew it was such a experience!!! We decided to come back for sure and stay in the log house sometime. My friend said he is planning his honeymoon there...(getting wild in the real wild :D)

We came out of the forest by 5 O clock types and did some shopping in the eco shop there and came out of Parambikulam to reach back Top Slip. We spent another 30 mins of our time there as we were supposed to get out of the check post before 6. As we drove past the check post, we had started singing "Vaalpaarai, vattaparai...."

Can only water fall in a waterfall?

2008-01-29T09:38:00.000+05:30

The next place in our trip was the "Monkey Falls" near pollachi. In fact it is just 3 KMs more from the Azhiyar dam that we visited the previous day. So we set out in the same bus that took us to Azhiyar, got down at Azhiyar dam itself and decided to walk the three KMs to see if we could end up in something interesting on the way. Just about a KM from Azhiyar, there was a small place off the road where we could hear the sound of water gushing out of something at high speed. So we jumped off the road and did a small trek over the hard rocks, spent some time out there and obviously clicked some snaps too!!

Then we walked couple of KMs more to reach the monkey falls, wondering how many monkeys would really be there and how much of trouble they would cause to us. Just in couple of minutes we reached there and understood what really those monkeys can do. It was jumping over the cars and bikes, dancing over the helmet that was locked to the bike, few small monkeys went under the cars and were playing like anything. And we assumed that the monkeys don't do any harm to the tourists and entered in to the falls. We decided during the start of the trip itself that we wouldn't take bath in the falls and stay away from the waters. So we decided to do things that wouldn't get us wet. But somehow we managed to get wet...No no not by taking bath in the falls, we fell down with full style. We were clicking some snaps, while I was posing, Rukku was handling the camera. He asked me to go to the center of the falls so that he can take a better snap. I thought I was carefully keeping by feet, but just when I was about to position myself for the snap I felt something hit my head hard. Yeah I realized I fell down after hitting the hard rock. For few seconds I couldn't even help myself getting up... There were couple of college students standing near by who gave their hands and saved me from sliding down. After standing up and coming back to normal state I was looking for this Rukku whom I thought would've started to come and see how I am doing. But I could see him standing at the same place and asking me to pose. I was like what the hell man? And went down to ask him if it was funny. But after I went down only I came to know that he had also fell down at the same instant when I fell down. In fact he had fell of a small cliff like thing and luckily he had his bag on the back which had saved his head hitting the ground and he was holding the camera up to save it too!! Thank god noting happened to the camera:) And then one guy came and told him, "enna sir photova indha angle laendha edukkaradhu...paarthu sir..." Ada paavingala naanga enna P.C.Sreeram-a, K.V.Anandh-a...edho memory stick ellam cheap-a irukkudhae nnu photo click panrom da...idhuvae film roll naa motha trip kkae naanga 40 photo dhaan da eduppom...If you closely observe the photo you can see the wet T-shirt...:)

After this incident my confidence with waters went really down and for the whole trip I was very hesitant towards stepping in to water, though most of the places we went were like falls, dams...After spending another hour there we decided to head straight to Tirumoorthy falls which we heard is another good falls around. So we went back to Azhiyar, had food there in some local shop and inquired about going to Tirumoorthy falls. We were told to take a bus to a intermediate place from where if we could take a bus which would go to Udumalaipettai then we could reach Tirumoorthy falls. We did the same and reached the fallls at around 3.30 types. We wasted some time in waiting for buses. Only after reaching the falls we realized that we should have come to Tirumoorthy in the morning and could have easily spent the whole day there. Just as a falls, it is only about climbing say about a KM up and reaching the top spot where there is one Panchalinga temple. And probably you can take bath here too. There were lots of sabarimala saamis who were coming back after the darshan. On the way they come here, take bath and head straight to home.

But what would make it interesting is taking the off route. Like you have steps to climb to the top, but you gotta just jump out of the parapet, step in to the hard rocks, and from there you can spend hours climbing here and there, taking the hard routes and some risks. We did things like that and there were no security guards around. So you can do anything that you would like to that makes sense to you. We did things like that and reached the top of the falls. It was definitely off season I guess otherwise there must be like a heavy gush of water from the falls. In such times these hard rocks would have been submerged in the waters. The pic is the end of the trek we did where we went down some big rocks to climb another big one...

There were only couple of buses running between this place and Pollachi it seems and we were told that if we were lucky we could get a bus at around 6.45 types. So we had to cut down the time to be spent there and got down like in 10 mins flat just to find a bus standing there and it was a bus to Pollachi. We just picked some cauliflower pakoda and went in to the bus and it starts just we sit down. We were totally happy as the first day itself went really well. Around 8.30 we were back in Pollachi and again it was Gowrishankar for dinner. We spoke to the lodge guys and told him that we need a cab to take us to Topslip the next day. He spoke to the travels guy he knew and said he has arranged for a Indica and it would come at 7 O clock itself and asked us to be ready. We were also told that only some 30 vehicles are allowed beyond Topslip and we gotta be quick in getting in there. We quite didn't understand the funda but just made sure we went to sleep early. We were quite excited about the next day as we have heard a lot of Topslip...

First day first place

2008-01-17T15:26:00.000+05:30

After refreshing up at the lodge, we set out to visit the first place of our trip and got impressed with Gowri Shankar. If you know me well you would have guessed it right. Yes, that's the hotel where we had our lunch :) For Rs.40, they provided a very good lunch in a A/C hall which was very impressive. And then we boarded the bus to visit Azhiyar dam.

This place is about 45-50 mins travel from pollachi and this dam is the primary source of water for pollachi. There is a park at the entrance of the dam where kids can have a good time. And then you climb some 100 odd steps to go to the actual dam where you can see the storage. We could actually go only till a point in the dam after which it was closed for tourists. But some people who knew the PWD guys managed to use the influence and got in. We were talking to the watchman there for about 10 mins and 5 more mins he would have accepted some money to let us in. But we decided to move away as it was getting late. There was a boating option available which again we didn't take. Instead we decided to walk down the dam structure and do a little trek in the surrounding forest kind of setup. It was pretty decent for the given amount of time we had. We clicked some snaps here and there and it was getting dark. So we decided to wind up for the day and board the next available bus.

We were talking to the local tea shop guy enquiring about the bus timing. Actually we had to get a bus in front of the park. The bus which comes from pollachi drops people at the park and goes to one more stop further, takes a halt and starts again for the return journey to pollachi. The tea shop guy told us to board the bus when it drops people at the park itself, get a ticket till the next stop and then take the return ticket from there. We were actually thinking probably its too much to do such things and we could board the bus only when it returns. But then we just saw one bus coming fully loaded and we couldn't even get inside. So we thoguht probably this guy is right and we crossed and were waiting for the bus from pollachi.

To our surprise, there was a huge crowd waiting there and we found that it is a practice there and we got to do the same. We got in to the next bus that came and found that the bus stopped in between to make sure every one got the ticket for that one extra stop. Imagine how much revenue govt would be making out of this concept. Anyways, we managed to get a seat till pollachi, got down at pollachi, bumped in to Gowri Shankar again, had a nice Chilli parota. We went to bed early around 9.45PM itself so that we could start early for the next day. We had planned to visit couple of falls the next day...

Off to Pollachi

2008-01-03T13:02:00.000+05:30

I had been planning for a trip down south for quite some time and my friend I.S(Arun) had been telling about doing a trip to Pollachi. Somehow it was always in planning stage and I.S left for the US during middle of the year. Thanks to the leave policy of my company, I can just carry forward 6 days of my annual leave, rest would lapse if not taken. So I told one of my close friend Rukku (Rukmangathan) that we would do a trip for about 10 days during the year end and had asked him to block leaves (he also has similar leave policy). We thought of doing trip to Goa, Karnataka and other places but we never sat together and planned anything. So I decided and told him we would do a south trip and land in pollachi and finish off at a friend's wedding in Thrissur.

We just knew the landing point and the final destination and left out the in between part. We said we would plan it on the fly. So we just went ahead and booked tickets for Chennai - Coimbatore on 22nd night. I had visited CBT sometime in 1999 and at that time it took me 10hrs by bus. So I assumed it should be around the same travel time or probably improved by and hour or so. The bus timing was at 8.45 in Koyambedu bus terminus and the bus didnt get out of the terminus till 10.15. There was a damaged sewage line and the entire stretch was jammed.

We were sitting in the last but one row of the bus and the guy behind us was full time on the phone. Okka makka 8.45 kku kadalaya poda aaramichavan midnight thaandiyum neruthala...engalukka sema kadi..naangalae rendu pasanga porom..idhula ivan appa appo "illati..chumma dhaan sonnaen...yaendi chelllam serious-a eduthukkara...chi azhadha..." appadi appadi nnu sollitu irundhaan...pesattum...vaendam nnu sollala...bus la avan avan kadi la irukkanae..nammoloda volume kammi pannalamae oru yosanai vaendam...and more over after vizhuupuram the roads were very bad...some times we even had doubt if we were goin in a bus or a boat...full-a side ways la dance dhaan...idhukku naduvula indha dog-oda kadala vera...suthama thookam pochu...

Oru vahizya next day morning 10.15 kku we reached Coimbatore and at that time many hotels stopped serving breakfast too. We just went to the ever famous Arya Bhavan and had couple of left out Oothappams...and then pushed off to the Okkadam bus stand to get a bus to Pollachi...Coimbatore and Pollachi are well connected by road and there are lots of private buses running between. But the problem is there is too much of crowd. In fact people still use the old method of throwing handkerchiefs through the window to reserve seats and in fact we saw one guy sending his kid through the window and you should see the happiness in his face after the kid reached and sat in the seat...So we left couple of buses thinking that most of the crowd would have gone by and we could get some seat. Since it was a long weekend there was huge rush. So we restored to our ways of getting seats. Just push through the crowd and dont care about what they are yelling. Somehow Rukku managed to get two seats...the last two seats of the bus.

The speaker was on full volume with all kuthu songs and the driver never took his legs off the accelerator. My guess is he would have kept some stone:) In flat 50 mins he reached Pollachi and there was not even a single stop in between and he almost never changed gears or even slowed down. Rukku's friend is from Pollachi and he has booked rooms for us. We went straight to the lodge and told that friend's name and got a room. The lodge owner was telling about how Rajnikanth, Balachander and all had stayed in the lodge and its one of the biggest lodge in Pollachi. We got our keys and went straight to the room and wanted to see how the rooms are in the biggest lodge of Pollachi. The room though was quite ok (cos we would be staying only for 8hrs in the night) didnt even have a latch for the bathroom door. For the remaining three days the other person used to lock it from outside when some one is taking bath (We didnt want to take any kind of risks :P )

We got freshen up in an hour or so, had lunch and boarded the bus to visit the first place in our trip...

Mottai Boss

2007-10-28T19:06:00.001+05:30

No, this is not the Sivaji "mottai" boss I am talking about. This mottai is known to Tamils all over the world. He has mesmerized them with his notes. Yes I am talking about Isaignani Illayaraja, "mottai" for those who love him and the Big Boss of music to me. Any number of ARR, Harris, Himesh and others can pitch in and provide good music to our ears but it is Illayaraja who can give life to a movie. The greatest hits that Tamil cinema has seen over the years include Nayagan, Anajali, Thalapathi, Mouna Ragam and many more and IR has played a very important role in their success. I am not talking about the songs alone, it is the BGM he has scored for these movies.

When it comes to Mouna Ragam who can forget the famous BGM played whenever karthik does some naughty thing and the same BGM played slowly can bring tears to your eyes (when karthik dies). Karthik comes out after getting beaten up by the police, revathi looks on...there goes the slower tone of the BGM with violins...Then karthik winks his eyes and runs away...same BGM in a faster note...Audience in all smiles..

And Nayagan? Well "Thenpandi Cheemayilae" is still one of my favorite song and that's an evergreen BGM anyone would have listened to...

Its first the chorus, then the big violin (don't know the exact name, you have to place it on the floor to play it) and then few more violins...Maniratnam has no dialogues for the scene and with this music the audience understands what the kid feels in Anjali and the agony of the parents.

The same big violin music is still ringing in my ears from the court scene of "Padikkadhavan" when sivaji sitting as a judge comes to know about his brothers. Who can forget the first computer music in "Punnagai Mannan". The love theme song is undoubtedly one of the best theme music ever produced and it is still famous.

The "Chinnathayaval" song from Thalapthi which in itself is a great one, when used as a BGM whenever Rajini sees his mother...can't get any better.

Going to a registrar office only to find out that he is going to be a witness of the marriage of his love, Kamal gives an awesome performance in Aboorva Sagodharargal...and when his mother argues to Mouli saying the girl has not married a disabled person, kamal's expression changes and starts walking away...Behind these scenes its IR who is doing the magic with this violins. Another unforgettable BGM...

There are 100s of such BGM's we can talk about. And I don't have to talk about his songs. Rakkama Kaiya Thattu from the movie Thalapathi was amongst the songs listed in a BBC World Top Ten music poll. I think that says it all. Gifted are those Violins, flutes and the pianos...

I think we have not given the right amount of recognition for this genius. If I am not wrong, he has been given national award only once (for Sindhu Bhairavi) and I feel he deserves a lot more. With today's technology it is probably pretty much easy to compose with multi track recording where you can first record the male voice, then the female voice and then the music part and later mix them up. Imagine IR's days where every one needs to be present in the studio, be in sync and finish off a song in a stretch. That takes a lot of talent, co-ordination and patience too.

He is scoring for very few movies these days but he sings in his son's(Yuvan) movies. I just want him to live longer so that I can at least listen to his voices, if not his scores.

ATM

2007-10-27T09:48:00.000+05:30

That's Azhagiya Tamizh Magan, the Vijay flicker getting released for this Diwali. The songs were out last week and the music is by ARR. On the first hearing I liked couple of songs. There is this "Marlyn Monroe Cloning-a" which is a good peppy number and its sung really well. I think the voice is a new one and it sounds nice. I am addicted to the way ARR uses bass guitar in his songs and this one too got added in my fav list. When the first stanza of this song starts, the lyrics goes like "Kadarkaraiyil beach house irukku...". The way it was sung is too good; the singer breaks the word and gives a soft touch.

The next song is a remix of "Pon Magal Vandhaal...". It's a remix season and "Vasandha mullai" was a great hit in Pokkiri. So probably going by the trend Vijay wanted a remix in this one too. And ARR does it neat. The beat is good and the song has a rap part too. Actually you get to here only few lines of the original song and a whole lot of rap included in it and the entire song is just about three and a half minutes. I don't know if ARR's new interest is in rap. He has used a new rapper, not Blaaze this time.

There is a song sung by ARR himself and my guess is it would be the opening song for Vijay. It goes like "Ella pugazhum oruvan oruvanukkae...". It starts with a heavy guitar tone on similar lines with Bryan Adam's Summer of '69 but a different variant. When I heard that guitar part I could map it to Summer of 69 immediately. But then ARR uses that throughout the song. Although I liked the initial part of the song, I quite didn't like the finish. It was like a typical ARR style, where suddenly the pitch of the song comes down and then ARR would sing in top of his voice. In my opinion, ARR is very stereotype on this format and probably is obsessed with it.

These are the three numbers I liked immediately. And since its ARR, one would have to listen to other songs couple of more times to start liking and appreciate it. So let me listen to them more and I am eager to see how these three songs are shot in the movie; especially the Marlyn Monroe song.

Shhhhh....

2007-10-03T14:55:00.000+05:30

For me that's the short form of "Satham Podadhey"... :) This latest flick from director Vasanth definitely is a silent hit amongst the recent releases. An off beat movie from the regular mass hero subjects, this one is a thriller. You don't feel the thrill in the first half of the movie. It starts with an alcoholic marrying a girl and shows no interest in sexual life. The girl and the family think it is just a typical arranged marriage problem that could be solved without taking any extreme steps. But as time passes, they come to know that the guy is actually impotent because of excess alcohol intake. They also come to know about the arrogance inside the guy when he beats the girl and starts torturing her. All these leads to a divorce and the girl separates from the guy. Probably now you would be wondering sitting in the theatre if it is going to be another sentimental Tamil movie.

The girl shifts to her brother's place for a change and there enters Prithiviraj, the smart software professional with lots of sense of humor (isn’t it contradictory :D) and who displays a character. These two start going around and they marry. They both land in Kochi for Prithivi's one week assignment and in a strange encounter Prithivi meets the girl's ex-husband. The ex-husband kidnaps the girl, keeps her in a sound proof room and plans such that others believe the girl died in a gas leakage incident in her house. While Prithivi and others believe that the girl actually died in the accident, this guy tortures her in that sound proof room. Did Prithivi rescue the girl? What happened to this psychopathic guy? is the rest of the story.

The film has limited number of characters and every one plays their role well. Prithivi excels in that smart character role with his sense of humor. The soft spoken guy would definitely be liked by girls. Padmapriya and the psycho (Chennai-28 guy) do their job really well. But I liked three more people in the movie. They are Vasanth, Yuvan and the camera person. Vasanth has taken a difficult subject which could have been a disaster even with couple of wrongly chosen dialogues and scenes. But he gave a thriller with message out of this subject. Giving a thriller out of this subject would definitely be a difficult task and he has done it really well. The screenplay is damn good and he keeps the audience to the seat, especially in the second half.

Music definitely should be good for a thriller and Yuvan does it neat. I am sure he has improved a lot over the years and the climax of this movie speaks for it. There is no dialogue for the last 15 minutes or so and it is just the visuals and BGM that keeps the audience tight. The songs are good on its own but I would blame Vasanth for placing it at the wrong points in the movie. Though they are good numbers, especially "Azhagu Kutti Chellam", "Oh Indha Kaathal" and "Paesugiraen", they irritate you when they appear all of a sudden without any relevance. I was wondering how great it would have been if it was a 2 hours thriller without any song sequences. It could have been a good attempt and probably could take Tamil cinema to next levels.

The camera person did a pretty good job with the lenses. The lush green scenes in "Oh Indha Kaathal", some 100 odd smiles of kids in "Azhagu Kutty", the long bridge, old buildings of Kochi instead of traditional Kochi port definitely needs a mention. In one scene where the psycho tortures the heroine, the camera just stays in the hall at one position. There would be no frame where the psycho beats the heroine. But there would be shadows of heroine going around the house, plates and cups getting scattered. A different try where the audience would feel the gravity of the situation without actually seeing it.

Overall a different Tamil cinema, a thriller showing bad effects of alcohol and neatly packaged. It definitely shows the kind of experience and maturity Vasanth has got over the years.

Stinkara Chennai

2007-09-04T12:56:00.000+05:30

Well, Madras became Chennai and the mission was to make it "Singara" Chennai, something comparable to Singapore. I am not sure whether that mission is still in place and we would be alive to see that day, but I am sure, as of today, we can call it as "Stinkara" Chennai. The seven or so years of contract wtih CES Onyx, the Singapore based Waste Management company expired on 25th August and ever since Chennai streets were full of garbage. Garbage piled up in most part of the city and it was definitely stinking for the whole of past one week. Add to that, the intermittent rains worsened the condition. And the reason given by the Mayor is that the next contractor; Neel Metals; was not fully equipped to handle the situation.

Such a statement from the Mayor just means that whether it is a foreign contract or a work done by the local body, the government engine does not work. Their job is to just sign the contract and go home with all the crores of commission and relax. I think we need to get in to such a stinking situation to appreciate the kind of work Onyx had done all these years. They were just too professional for these guys I believe. When the contract got over on 25th of August, Onyx had cleaned up the garbage of that day also. Meaning next day it was a clean city for the Neels. Is it not the duty of the corporation to see if the transition from one contractor to the other has happened or not? And whether the next guy can pitch in and handle some 1600T of garbage daily?

Garbage collection is not something new to have such kind of fallback. Since day one government is cleaning streets and handling the waste management. If you can call the garbage collection, segregation, disposal as an industry by itself, then it is definitely not an immature one. When we take any work, be it a bank, some PSU job or an IT, whenever some one is relieved of the work, a proper transition phase would be planned where the next guy comes and works in parallel and gets trained on the job. Why is this not done in garbage collection? There are 3 zones in the city that Onyx handled. The corporation should have given a zone for Neels to take care while Onyx oversee the operation and give feedback. Onyx should have handled the other two zones so that there is not much of a backlog in the garbage clearance.

Apart from the commission that goes to the politicians, I do not see a necessity to outsource the garbage handling to some foreign company. Can't the corporation import all these compactors and bins and handle the garbage by itself? This is not some rocket science we are dealing with. Some simple processes which when followed effectively would do the trick. And the main problem with all these contract switching glitch is lack of something which no one can teach; its common sense.

Way to go...

2007-08-13T12:47:00.000+05:30

The school kids look for the chocolates they would get, the young fellas would throng the cinema halls, office goers want to take a day break and relax, and a vast majority would spend their time watching the varied entertainment programs aired in different T.V channels. A few portion of the population wake up to see the parade. Yeah, this is how the Independence day is celebrated in India.

This year we would be stepping on to the 60th year of Independence. 60 years is definitely a long time for a country to show prosperity across sectors. But what do we have India? At one side the booming IT (which is currently worried by the appreciating rupee!!), telecom, retail and real estate industries which increased the spending power of middle class. On the other side we still have farmers committing suicide, poors still don't have access to basic needs, female infanticide, corruption at every level, states fighting for water, states in havoc due to floods, etc, etc...

Well, we would have a lot of things to complain right from the very traffic and transport systems to everything else in this country. At the same time we should be able to realize that we are free to complain at least. Currently the historic nuclear deal is the hot topic in the political system of the country. While the current security advisors, scientists of the country welcome the deal and support it one hundred percent, the retired scientists are against it. The left is totally against this and plans to storm the parliament in the winter session. This by all means is freedom, you are able to oppose one of the greatest decisions that is being taken in the country.

We are often compared with countries like China, Singapore, US and others to show the scale of development that has happened. If we take a closer look we are comparing a 1 billion populated country which is democratic, diverse and secular with countries which would fit in only one of these. China has the population but not democratic, US on the other hand doesn't have the population to this larger scale.

India when we proudly claim with such attributes like democracy, diverse and secular is complex because of these very own attributes. When the Brits left the country and gave the freedom they also left back a corrupt bureaucrats which has spilled over decades and generations and is still prevalent. Right from the day one of independence the scenario has always been "Rich get richer; poor get poorer". With opening up of the economy and all the booms this country is witnessing now, richer are just getting richest and the poor don't have a way to go. The real estate prices are going uncontrolled, first it was Mumbai and then it slipped to Bangalore and now other metros are witnessing the new highs in this industry. So who is becoming rich? Definitely not the new home owners, they have their rest of their life slogging out to pay the EMIs. It is the real estate developers who are already rich. And government is still thinking of providing concrete houses for the poor.

Inflation went up to a record high and RBI had to take a lot of measures to keep the prices under control. It hiked up the CRR twice and the banks passed on the burden to its customers; the interest rates increased. Now the other worrying factor is the appreciating rupee!!! If the rupee appreciates we should be proud that we are getting better value for a rupee in the international market. But the boom that has happened was primarily driven by the IT sector which in turn depended heavily on software exports; a heavy dependency on the dollar to rupee conversion factor. Other exports including textile and pharma are also hit because of this.

When news like TATA acquiring a company (Corus) larger than its size and almost in the final phases of acquiring Jaguar would make us feel "Way to go India!!", we also need to think that the reformation has to occur across various sectors of industries and people and the standard of living of the people has to come up. We need to have more innovation in the country which would drive a whole range of new products. Agriculture should not be a neglected sector where we need to industrialize more to increase the productivity. Energy needs would be of a prime concern for us and acquiring energy safety is the need of the hour. With increasing oil prices and the global warming a key issue to address we need to tap alternate sources of clean energy on a large scale. Some scientists now say that instead of investing heavily on the nuclear energy with this "123 agreement" India needs to invest on the alternate sources of energy like solar, wind, etc... That could be an interesting point for the decision makers to think considering the future.

Today in this flat world it is almost impossible for any country to develop and sustain without depending on others. The development that is happening in our country started with heavy dependency on the dollar prices as all the services that were off-shored were billed in dollars and same with all the exports too. While this is an advantage we could take as a launch pad, slowly we need have fuel to fly the rest of the journey. And that would be the in house innovation, engineering across all sectors. This would result in new range of products and should make the west to depend on us. We need to think really big and come out of this small circle. As of today we have a pretty young nation when compared to others with the average age below or around 30. But this would not be the case for ever. Soon we would have a population which cannot contribute in huge numbers to the economy as these people would get in to their retiring age.

Though we could say "Way to go!!" by looking at some of the reforms that is happening, in terms of becoming a super power, influencing economy with corruption less governance and better standard of living for a billion plus people we still have a long way to go...

So where do I start?

2007-07-19T19:10:00.000+05:30

Gifted are those who find at very early ages of their life about what they want to do in life. Even otherwise, if you have some one who finds out your talent and tells you to go in a certain direction, I would say you are lucky. People who fall under these two categories have a clear cut path in their life to travel. In fact they control the way they live rather than life controlling them. They decide what to do at different stages and ages of their life, they do not get distracted from their goal and achieves it finally. Even if not achieved, there would be a sense of satisfaction end of the day on the attempt. Of course there would be some hardships in reaching the destination but they strive towards that.

Well, the other side of the story is about the "I don't know what I want to do" people. Somehow these people spend most of their life time in searching what they really want to do. During the course some succumb to the so called practical pressures life puts on and they stop their search. They start cribbing about what they are doing (but can't get out of it also), after some time start adjusting to it and later settle down to it saying "I love what I am doing now" (Read, "I don't have an option dude"). The remaining crowd keeps searching for what they want to do in life. In a typical middle class Indian scenario, they are most likely to have spent around two decades of their life in doing what the majority of the crowd does. If taking science as major in your higher secondary is what majority do, say "Science is exciting" and enroll for the courses. If the next buzz word is engineering degree, go for the kill...Spend lakhs of money in earning one..."Computers are exciting you know", "Communication engineering is gonna change the way we live", "Mechanical engineering is an evergreen field"...You get to say any one of these statements based on the course chosen.

After 4 years of spending time at the college, you don't have your basics strong, no core engineering skills developed, again you do what the majority of the crowd does...At this time in the country its joining some IT company...And it goes on from there on keep doing what the crowd does...aim high during the first year of job, then slowly start disliking the job, look for promotions every year (doesn't matter if you haven't acquired skills for the next role), switch 3 companies in 2 years, slowly decide that you have to be in the managerial line and it goes on...

So when does one break out? As long as there is a comfort factor of staying in a job and getting a minimum 30 grand salary every month, these people belong to the so called elite crowds of the country...the crowd that is driving the economy...the crowd that has the most spending power in the country...Something needs to really hit hard at the person to stop cribbing about the dislikes of the job and start doing what he wants to do...and to find out what he wants to do, the only way out is to do different things I believe...by that way one day or the other he would figure out what his real interest his...but what if that one day is too late...? If at the age of 35 I find that my interest is in cinematography, it could be too late to enter in to that field and be successful...and if I had committed other things in my life I wouldn't be able to take many risks...

Of course at every time you could develop a liking to what you are currently doing even if that is not the thing you want to do. There is absolutely nothing wrong in that. But I am not sure how much of a satisfaction that would drive in you end of the day. It is just a trade off. I believe it is just about sacrificing your interests (if you have found) or having stopped the search due to some practical difficulties (some other priorities in life).

IIT...

2007-06-26T19:44:00.000+05:30

...a dream for so many ambitious students. The top institute in India to study Science and Technology and so many students prepare for years to get in to this. Preparations start as early as Standard 9 and students study for 3-4 years to clear the entrance test. And once you get through, your life changes altogether. You get the best in class education in the country and once you are done with the course you get to work or study in the best company or university.

Well it was never in my dreams to enter in to IIT as a student for I did not hear the name till I was in standard 10 and nobody I ever interacted with even talked about it. I think I understood the seriousness of getting in to IIT only when I got in to engg. college. But in my engg college days my dream for IIT started. Naah, not to do M.Tech or something. One of my closest friend used to live inside the IIT campus and we used to visit him often. No no, he is not an IITian, at least I wouldn't be having an IITian as my friend (namma range kku...). His dad is a prof there. We used to go there to play volleyball primarily and wow what a huge campus it was.

From the polluted roads of Chennai when you enter the campus after getting a gate pass from the security guard, it is heaven inside. You get to breathe in fresh air which in itself is something great. There are so many trees inside, in fact I guess they have built some buildings inside a forest:) The roads are pretty neat without any pot holes, speed breakers are smooth; not like the hard breakers found in the city roads. You might spot some deers inside and monkeys are a regular scene there, sometimes they scare you too:) When you take your bicycle or ride your two wheeler at a speed of 20-30kmph, with the gentle breeze on your face you tend to wonder if you are in Chennai.

The campus has a school inside, huge grounds wherein literally you can play any sport, swimming pool exclusively for people residing inside and an Open Air Theatre. OAT as it is called would show all new movies in a projected screen and you get to sit relaxed in the grasses and enjoy the movie with your loved ones. And every year IITians host their technical symposium and the cultural events. Of course I never went to the tech symposium and when I went in the final year I participated in the Network games section only to get fired by the IITians in the final round of "Unreal Tournament". Later some one told me how the IITians play for hours together in their hostel LAN and master every map of the game. But the cultural event is a mega event for all the colleges in Chennai. Almost every engg college student would come and watch the event and enjoy the evening. And apart from the events we go there to check out girls from other colleges...hehe.

I am sure the campus was located in deep outskirts of the city when it started, but now it is a prime area in the city with a two bedroom apartment costing around 1C. Whenever I cross IIT, I always dream of living inside this huge campus, where I can go for a morning jog or probably an evening walk, catch up with friends during the weekend and go around the campus and there are so many other things that can be done peacefully inside. Especially you get to breathe in pure air... I sometimes feel I should have studied hard during my school days and got in to the campus.

National portal

2007-06-22T20:01:00.001+05:30

Recently I came across this website: http://india.gov.in/. This is the official Indian government website and to my surprise it has a lot of information about our country. When there is no belief in governance in our country with corrupt politicians and ineffective bureaucrats, this website stands different. The various sections in the website has information about the most common things anyone would like to know about our country.

Information includes various sectors in our country, policies, the constitution, how to file tax (updated to the current revised tax laws), how to apply passport, driving licenses, a webcast section where even the latest budgets is shown as streaming video, local weather (temperature available in celsius and fahrenheit:) ), latest press releases and the list goes on...

Actually this site should have been the one stop for any information pertaining to India but I am sure many prefers Google...:) Content wise the site is pretty neat and organized well and it definitely meets a typical website standards and user experience. What I really appreciate is the effort that has been put in. In a country where we don't expect things to be in place when it comes to interacting with government, this website stands apart. I guess the website is designed and maintained by National Informatics Centre and they have done a pretty good job. There is even a e-greetings section... :)

The man...The movie...The Boss...

2007-06-18T19:14:00.000+05:30

The most expected and hyped movie of the tamil film industry was out last friday and it created waves across the globe. With almost every news channel giving special coverage for this movie (some had live coverage from theatres across the country) the excitement increased multifold. I was not interested to go to office at all on that Friday but had no other option. Once I reached I just could not manage to hold my excitement and did not work much for the entire day. I had tickets to watch the movie next day. The pantry in my office had a TV and we just switched on the news channels and kept watching the coverage to hear any latest updates. By noon there were mails coming in giving official reviews about the movie and the excitement went out of control. I was calling all of my friends who had gone to the theatre to watch the first day first show and was getting hourly updates.

Next day the show was at 10.30 at Mayajaal (some 20 KMs outside the city on the ECR). The journey would take some 30 mins only but I started from my home at 8 itself, picked up my friend and reached the theatre early to catch up the festival...:) At 10.30 sharp we were inside the screen 5 of the multiplex and the movie started immediately. They showed the trailer of "Sultan - the warrior", an animated movie produced by Soundarya Rajinikanth where thalaivar lends his voice for the animated hero. Then came the "S..U..P..E..R....S..T..A..R.." letters in the screen and people went crazy from there on. It was a special show for one of the IT companies in Chennai and it was full of "decent" IT crowd and hence there wasnt too much of shouting in the theatre. My row had more girls than guys and they were quietly watching the movie. The row behind and in front of me had people shouting and I was equally shouting as well whenever there was some dialog or for that matter anything on screen. I am sure the girl who sat next to me would have got pissed off. But who cares?

It was awesome to see thalaivar on screen with different getups. Thalaivar's intro and the song (Ballaelaka) that followed was not that impressive and didn't make quite an impact. His intro in CM, Muthu and Baasha were lot better. The first half was a bit slow but it was fun to watch thalaivar's comedy and romance with shreya. Thalaivar and vivek combination was good and it was hilarious till the interval. Thalaivar and Vivek ottified vadivelu and many others in the first half. There were three songs in total and the "Style..." song was the best among them. Thalaivar came in different looks and his style was awesome in that. With Computer Generated Imagery which made thalaivar as a European with blonde hair and white skin it was a visual treat. In one scene the frame had 6 different getups of thalaivar and it was a wow...truely shankar is the most creative director in tamil.

After the interval the movie was like the high speed mag lev train loaded with crackers. It was a wholesome extravaganza where thalaivars screen presense sent a clear message across the board...He is the ONE and ONLY super star...And then comes the "Adhiradi..." song and it was the best song of the movie. The style, the set, the choreography, thalaivar, shreya, everything was just great in that song. It was total domination by Rajini in the second half where he starts with one rupee and goes to make crores of rupees. Just when you think you are reaching the climax and you feel all the fun is over, the "mottai" boss comes in...Yeah clean shaven thalaivar in "Morpheus" style with a long coat, frenchie and coolers. The next 15 minutes "mottai" just rocked...The way he gets out of the copter, taps his head and with a cunning smile, the way he sends his coolers to the backside of his head...no one can match thalaivar's style...

The credit goes to Shankar for taking rajini to the next gen audience. Truly shankar has thought about the current generation of audience who are spread across the globe and are adopted to different life styles. He has projected the super star image of rajini to them. Every song is a visual treat...With a full glass pyramid set and a romanian set it clearly shows where most of the money has been spent on...And the Style song shows the star in a blonde hair european look with white skin. The secret behind white super star is a Computer Generated Imagery where they made a white skin lady dance the same steps of super star and then each frame is embossed with the lady's skin tone. The news said it took one year to finish the job which comes as a 5 minutes song in the movie.

And then Shreya...she looks damn sexy in the movie and unlike other rajini movies she gets a bigger role to play and some importance in the plot. With Sim's and Jo's exit, Asin moving to bollywood, shreya has got the right kind of break in her career. Her costumes in the movie are too good and she fits in perfectly except the traditional ones like saree and half saree...:D

Definitely the music and back ground score needs a mention. ARR has done a wonderful job in both. All the songs are good, they did not take the risk of keeping away SPB. For thalaivar SPB needs to sing the opening song and he does it well. The Style song which is a rap, adhiradi which is sung by ARR himself just rocks in the theatre. The punch dialogue song which comes in the background during fight scenes creates the right kind of build up for thalaivar. Sahana sung by udit narayanan, vaaji vaaji by hariharan are on the softer side. The BGM during the fight scenes and during the "mottais" entry are just awesome and adds fuel to the fire.

On the flip side, the stunts could have been better. Anyday "Anniyan" matrix style fight, "Mudhalvan" fight scenes are better than this one. Also shankar's previous movies had a better plot and there were a lot of substantial reasoning behind his plot. To project super star's image he has let down the plot. In 60 seconds the entire black money becomes white. Sure this wouldn't have been the case in his previous movies. He would have shown enough scenes which would explain how it is possible. Probably he could have cut down a bit on the first half with all those "Pazhagalam" scenes and taken the story more seriously.

Over all its a unusual festival season for tamil nadu and a treat for all rajini fans and rajini movie lovers. Though it doesnt look like a shankar film, all the credit goes to him for showing the star some 20 years younger and taking him to the next gen audience. The movie has broken many records in terms of box office collection and it satisfies everyone...needless to mention AVM too with an estimated total collection of 150Cr.

When things go wrong...

2007-06-11T16:57:00.000+05:30

...they go wrong left, right and center. After I was sick for about 5 days, it was just two more days (the weekend) for me to head back to the place I hate the most. Yes you heard it, its my aapeece...So I planned to go for one S.Ve.Shekar drama so that I have some jokes to remember to pass at least one week at office. The drama was on Sunday evening at 7 and me and my friend, just two of us were planning to watch it. So after a strong after noon nap, I decided to go to my friends place at around 5 in the evening, probably do a little bit shopping and then go to the drama.

I reached my friends place at 4.45 and then we drove to the infamous renganathan street area thorugh couple of one ways(hehe). One good one way is where things started to take shape(!). There was a different movement in the vehicle. I was telling my friend "machi aadadha da, road vera galeej-a irukku". He refused any acts of dancing in the vehicle. So we just stopped the vehicle and had a look at the back tyre. Yes, back tyre punctured. Without further thought we started to push the vehicle. And we were in middle of the shopping area, t.nagar on a sunday evening and it is difficult to find a mechanic. Few more steps and it occured to us that the tube would get punctured more if we keep going like this. So we stopped the vehicle and got in to the arduous task of "aaniya pudungaradhu". Five minutes with the help of the kit in my vechile and some dirty looks of passer bys we got hold of the root cause of the entire mission. Yes, instantly we became the proud owner of "aani".

Now what? Nothing, keep pushing the vehicle and ask couple of auto wallas about near by mechanic shops. One says go straight and take left, next one says left wouldnt be open take right. "Dei, naanga enna jolly ride-a poittu irukkom? ooru suthi paarkaradhukku?". "Okka makka, we have to push some 135Kgs + some 160Kgs".(technical details: 135Kgs is the dead weight of the bike. 160 Kgs is the combined weight of the duo.) Now two more technocrats join the journey. Both of them say that the mouth of the tube would get damaged if u continue to the shop like this. We were (are!) engineers and we dont listen to such comments. So we kept on going till we got tired and couldnt find any more mechanic shop. So we quietly parked the vehicle and started walking towards T.Nagar bustand and found one shop.

Just when that guy agreed to come with us, he spotted an auto on the way and convinced the auto guy and us to use the auto to go to the site! Since we were tired we agreed to the idea. We reached the spot where the bike is parked and he takes the back wheel out. Back in auto we headed back to the shop so that he can fix the tube. He takes the tube out of the tyre and shows me a damaged mouth!!! Mouth poidum nnu vaai vecha maga janangalae...unga vaayila theeya vekka....but polambi enna panradhu....? The mechanic says replacing the tube is the only option. The vehicle is just 3 months old and when I purchased it, the showroom guy said the tube is called tuff-up tube wherein it has got a solution inside such that whenever tube gets punctured the solution would come out and close the damaged area so that further damage doesnt happen. But adhukkana arigurigalae kaanum...Mechanic just kaari thuppied when I mentioned it. He said its just a marketing idea and how can a liquid be present inside and all those...

By the time when we came back to our spot and got the vehicle ready after paying some 350Rs for the tube + labor + auto it was 7.30 and happily we missed the drama. Since I have come to T.Nagar I thought I would at least shop for something. Another hour spent and we went back to the friend's place calling it the day and were just chatting. I was just playing (Seriously...I was just adjusting it for the right position) with the helmet lock in my vehicle and 30 seconds it came in my hand. Yeah it broke. Okay great, start the vehicle and head to the helmet shop in mount road. 10 mins of riding the bike at 80KMPH I reached the place and was happy to see the shop open. When enquired the shop owner said billing counter is closed and asked us to come the next day. Go to next shop to find that he has a helmet lock for the newer version of my bike. All right take a U-turn and head back to friends place to drop him and without any further delay (which would increase the chances of other parts of my bike breaking) I just started to my home.

Just when I was about to park my vehicle I noticed that there was another vehicle (Splendor) kept on the way. When I somehow managed to sqeeze in, my rear tyre just touched the other vehicle and it started making some sounds. I just ignored and parked my vehicle and went to close the gate when I happen to touch the vehicle. Thats it, it started making louder sounds and I could sense some people looking out of their windows. In a normal situation I would have got a lot embarrased but now I was too tired for those. "Ada pongada" nnu I just climbed up and called it for the day. I mean ate nicely and slept off...

Oru drama paakaradhukku aasai pattadhu ivvalavu periya thappa...? Illa one way la varravangala pudikkaradhukku time illama namma city police dhaan indha madhiri oru aani sprinkling strategy la erangittangala...?

Saroja helmet nikalo

2007-06-08T16:18:00.000+05:30

Three months after the tamilnadu government framed the rule for mandatory wearing of helmet for both the rider and pillion of two wheelers in the state, it came on to effect on June 1, 2007. Of course there were people who welcomed the move and people who protested against. But what followed after a day of enforcement of the law was such a bad scene for a government. The last week of May saw good amount of crowd in all the helmet shops and the thousand lights place in mount road which is famous for helmet shops had good business going. Separate queues, policemen were in place to control the last minute crowd.

When the government clearly said that everyone including women and children who sit at the backseat need to wear helmet, the middle class people who generally do not disobey laws shelled out close to 4K to purchase helmets; assuming a family of four. While helmets of different sizes were available for men, women and especially children found it difficult to get one for their head size. And a helmet of wrong size doesnt help the cause and would turn damn uncomfortable under the scorching sun at 40 degrees. But then most of them managed to one as the dawn would see traffic constables collecting huge fines for people without helmets.

When I turned on the television on June 1, the regional news channel was showing clips where traffic police were collecting fines on the early hours from people who took the rule easy. The police were also checking if the helmets had an ISI mark. When I took my bike (I had a helmet for a long time) to my office, I could just see helmets everywhere in the road. Everyone who was on a two wheeler was wearing the helmet and I was happy at heart for more than one reason. The first being how common man is respecting the law of land in this case despite of many concerns raised like over sweating, hair loss and so on...I was happy that he considered the law and the safety more important than trivial things like sweating...Secondly I was happy that government despite protest from many sides implemented the rule as there were growing number of accidents every day!!

The sun sets and when chennaites wake up the next morning, the news papers quote a warm gesture from the chief minister that police would not go hard on people who are not following the rule. Instead, it would be verbal warning for two days and then the actual rules would come in place. Incidentally my friend who was riding without a helmet saw a policeman and maams also saw this guy. Immediately this guy dodged behind a car and was trying to hide. Maams caught him and said "Oliya vaendam sir, innaiku warning dhaan...kelambunga..." Friend said a hehe and continued.

Two days later another Government Order. Helmets are not mandatory for women and children who sit at the back seat. What the...? This was heights...there were so many campaigns that went on the city for three months, so many neurosurgeons stressing the need, the government was strict till the D-day and then suddenly it makes a revision...of course many were relieved(!) for not having to wear the gear in the hot sun...but not just days after they were forced to buy one. It looked as if the government had a tie up with helmet makers, sold their stock and when they went home with all their profits, government happily says no need to wear helmet for pillion riders. This is not a childs play that you enforce a law on one day and revoke it the other day. Being a government at least you have to make sensible rules and regulations and should have thought about all the pros and cons before enforcing.

No one bothered all these years about the lives that got lost in accidents. Suddenly one rule, lots of advertisements, campaigns, make people shell out money, no price control on the helmets too and then you implement the rule for one day!!! Awesome....it happens only in India...

The gap of all times

2007-04-27T14:20:00.000+05:30

Off late I have been in to many discussions where the previous generation people are very much displeased with the current generation. The reasons cited include but not limited to no respect for elderly people, not knowing the value of money, no culture, etc...While they have every right to criticize the younger generation and guide them I think it would be the duty for the young ones to let them know their side of the story.

First of all it is very important to understand that we are in the middle of a revolution. India having missed the industrial revolution is now going through the information revolution. This information revolution has a unique property that it makes the world look very small and flat. This means that all the countries are in the same playing field and the economies are now highly inter dependant. While it is good for the economy of our country (we just joined the 1 trillion dollar GDP group of countries) we have to look at the culture aspect. This is the time when different culture meet very often and each one tries to get the best of the other. When the western culture are seeing our tolerance levels, strong bonded family, high educational values as advantage we as Indians are interacting more with an open society. This gives a lot of freedom in thinking and makes this generation to criticize all old ideologies and superstitions. The younger generation is criticizing the beliefs and superstitions of the previous generation; not the elders. Every young Indian today respects APJ and Ambani and take them as a role model. At the same time they would give a damn if they are dumped with old beliefs and superstitions.

The next thing I often hear is this generation spends a lot of time in cellphone, internet and other means of social networking. This is not something new which this generation alone is doing. When you look back couple of generations you would find youngsters spending most of their time in watching movies, going for dramas, etc...When any such advancement happen the youngsters obviously are attracted towards that. Today we might see a lot of youngsters spending time over phone and internet. But they do it only for couple of years where it would look as a entertainment, a way to relax and catch up with their friends. But as live moves on with added responsibilities they become more mature and use these technologies only as a matter of convenience. The youngsters now spend endless hours at office totally detached from outside world would definitely need to catch up with their friends. Technology comes handy at these times. These technologies help people to remain in touch with their loved ones despite of the distance between them. This is definitely a boon to the generation that is always on the move and lives in a fast paced world.

Well another complaint: too much money at too early age. Yeah agreed. The salaries that this generation starts with is almost equal to the retirement salary of the previous generation. But I would say this has done more good to the society than any harm. I would strongly suggest the previous generation to come out of their four walls and look at the revolution that is happening in Retail, Real estate, Telecom and other industries. Your sons and daughters are having houses at the age of 26 wherein you probably would have started your career. I am not finding fault with the previous generation but I am trying to emphasize on the change that has happened in less than 30years. At the age of 21 when our young Indians are shown the gateway to a better life through lucrative salaries and world class work environment they are obviously excited about the whole thing. Added to this they interact with other cultures, many of them are open in nature. He enjoys his youth, wants to make the best use of it, live every moment of it and the higher salaries helps him in doing that. But couple of years later he starts thinking about settling down in life, having a stress less future and comfortable life for him and his family. He then makes the best use of the hard earned money. Look at the middle class family now. You visit any home and you can hear conversations on stock market, mutual funds and real estate. I can without any doubt say, the previous generation knew how to make money and save it for future. But young Indian not only knows how to make money but he can multiply it in a shorter time frame, invest in different avenues for future, do better tax planning and at the same time live life to the fullest extent.

There are lot other developments that are happening right in front of our eyes. We no more get labor for doing household job. We do not get labor for ploughing fields anymore. Because every one wants to live a better life now and they have better avenues like joining the house keeping department of a IT company or work in a super market. We have machines now to do the house cleaning jobs and ploughing fields. These definitely are improvements in our way of living. There is more respect to every individual now. You go to any of the services company, the house keeping guy gets the same respect as any other employee. Because the young ones believe every one works for a job to earn a living and they deserve the respect for the work they do. Look at the open market now where private players are giving stiff competition to the government run services and because of which the govt services improve; BSNL is a good example in this. Look at the retail banking revolution. You can now do a funds transfer from your mobile phone. There are endless such developments across different sectors.

When all such developments bring lots of good things to the society and the lifestyle of people there is obviously another side of it. A whole lot of people who do not get access to these facilities are more frustrated than ever and this in turn leads to a lot of crime in the society. We hear increasing crimes of mobile phone thefts, street robbery and so on. And many investigations have revealed that people commit such crimes because they wanted a better lifestyle but were not able to access them. You cannot blame the young for these. An elected government, the cops and the judiciary are in place for doing this job. Better policies have to be framed so that every sector and every individual is thrown open to these opportunities and have every access to improve their life style.

For all the elderly people who are very much disappointed with the younger ones, I see this as the evergreen phenomenon of "generation gap". So open your eyes a little wider and look at the world from your son's/daughter's perspective. They have not lost the culture and values that are deep rooted in the society. They still prefer a bonded family. Every son loves his mom as much his dad loved his mom. If there was a "Amma endru azhaikadha uyir illayae" song some time back we have "Kaalayil dhinamum kan vizhithaal kai thozhum devadhai amma" song now. There are so many responsile daughters now who have access to the high salaries only to provide a better life to her parents. And every young Indian in fact is proud of his previous generation. Because for all his childhood when his parents said "Study...study...study hard so that you could live better", he did not understand the advantage of it. But today India sells more brains than anything else. The knowledge that got imparted in all those childhood days is now beginning to fructify. People now retire at the age of 45. Probably the previous generation started off with a company and served it for 30 long years and retired as a pensioner. Now, three jumps in 2 years with every jump increasing the salary by 30% is quite normal. Look at the number of entrepreneurs in India now. When friends meant relaxing times and emotional attachment a decade back there are lot of examples where friends can mean business too. A lot of successful businesses run by people who retire from salaried employment at early ages are by catching up with friends who have a common vision.

Before blaming or complaining I would suggest the previous generation to have a look at the other side of the coin and understand the big picture. The young ones definitely need your guidance for you would have almost lived through your life and he would have just begun. You can definitely help him out with the experiences you earned all these years but then do not stand as an obstacle for his future.

Memories and Dreams

2007-04-19T15:39:00.001+05:30

We all know the meaning of these two words - memories and dreams. The first one talks about the past and the second one is about the future. Our life is filled with memories and dreams. Dreams when realized would become memories sometime later. Every individual lives with lots of memories in his/her life and people have the tendency to always compare their"present" with memories to see where they stand. Often we would compare how we were happy during our school/college days, enjoyed every moment of our life being with friends and family to the current state of our life where we push ourselves to extremes to earn and live a "decent" life. We also have our dreams of achieving better things in life, have a goal set for ourselves and work towards that. Dreams are the ones that drive our life and give meaning to our existence and often dreams gets converted in to hope - hope that things would be fine some day.

Well I am not here to talk about memories and dreams as every one knows about it. But I was just wondering if we can extend this concept to a wider angle and apply it at a society level. Just as an individual, each and every society lives with memories and dreams as societies are nothing but collection of individuals. Let us consider a society which has lots of memories. If a society has lots of memories than dreams then what it basically does is relate things that are happening now to the past. Yeah, we can always say India was flourishing in the 14th century and there were lesser crimes and people were living happily. And then came the French and Brits who ruled us for couple of centuries and took away a lot of wealth. These are the memories we have about our country. But these are just memories. What do we get out of this? Often when we think of the memories and compare ourselves we tend go back. We do not think about the future which is basically dreaming about living better in days to come. We say "I am earning the salary which my dad earned at the time of his retirement". Well,one can get satisfied with the change that has happened, this should not stop him/her dreaming about earning 10 times more than this and living happier. No one is going to forget about 9/11 in centuries to come. It is going to stay in memories for ever. But that should not stop the advancements in air travel which is making world smaller and smaller every day. Who is going to forget Hiroshima bombings, SARS outbreak, Gujarat earthquake, Indonesia earthquake? But who will not stop from using safe nuclear energy for generating electricity, more international travels for businesses, build earthquake resistant homes, develop tsunami sensing stations?

Memories are good in the sense that we can benchmark ourselves on where we stand today. But dreams would lay foundation for the future. I feel a society would not develop if it lives on with memories of past. Rather it should have dreams of future. It should dream about better lifestyle, better values, better culture, better generations to come. Imagine a society which has lots of dreams. People right from the one who is running the government to the one who elects the government has dreams about the future. It is even ok to dream about oneself. Be selfish. Dream for yourself. But dream ethically. Dream within the laws of land. Dream for the betterment of a society. One can dream of flying high. It depends whether you want to fly a Boeing in to a 110 floor high building or fly the deep in to the space and run a marathon at zero gravity. When every person in a society dreams and dreams get aligned together, dreams become vision, vision becomes a reality. And do we stop there? No...We need to dream more...

My point is not against having memories of past. But we should have more dreams than memories. For India, which is going through a major economical and social change, more dreams and dreamers are required for a better nation tomorrow and thereby better lives for all of us. Ours should be a society where dreams outnumber memories.

Let’s dream more and do more.

I dream of India being a land of dream comes true, not just a land of dreams.