At The Edge

Mausiji had a little Chomen

2012-10-17T18:19:00.000+05:30

Leela Mishra in Sai Paranjape's Chashme Buddoor (1981).

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Not often remembered fact about this film is that the main motif of this more than thirty year old Delhi based funny film made by a woman was violence against women. I believe the reason for that could be that for a certain generation, driven by nostalgia, "the Room" and the life of its occupants defines a certain era, a certain phase in life. While a lot may have changed since then, but if walk on this city's streets now, you can see how the Delhi motif still persists.

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2012-10-18T16:02:00.001+05:30

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Khyber Pass

2012-10-19T18:54:00.001+05:30

From title credits of Carry On film, released in 1968

Life Magazine 12 May, 1941

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Jala Do Isey, Phoonk Dalo

2012-10-26T21:04:00.000+05:30

Above: A Dussehra ad supposedly for TOI. I don't know if it was published on not, if it was just something that some ad maker came up with and the paper never used. But it somehow reached my Facebook wall.

Below: Ravan I shot at Ghaziabad. 2010.

I feel like collecting TOI issues from my neighbors, make a little Ravan out of them and set it on fire. Only the thought of global warming is keeping me from doing it. Why can't they just ask before using? And why can't they just use some photograph from their own collection? Are they like 12 year old school kids relying on Google to compete their summer holiday projects?

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Dinkar's private war on China

2012-10-29T15:38:00.001+05:30

A note on one of the most violent modern Hindi poems.One more reason to hate wars. It makes old people blood thirsty.

"From 22nd December 1962, the composition of the poem called Parshuram ki Pratiksha started and it was completed on 7th January 1963. Stirred by the Chinese invasion, he wrote several poems, but in this poem the anger of the whole country was articulated. By 25th December, 1962 most of the passages had been written. When his friend Manoranjan Prasad Sinha heard them, he thought that the poet was showing arrogance. But Dinkar was not at all receptive to such a comment. He wrote in his diary,

Sivaji Ganesan in Ratha Thilagam, 1963.
The Tamil China War movie.

The poem has burst out from the abstruse part of the situation; it has emerged from its basic centre. If one is face to face with the centre, it becomes clear that a grave mistake has been committed.

Those days he sat on the third floor of his house on Arya Samaj road at Patna, shed tears and kept writing. his limbs trembled, every pore of his body stood on end. On 28th December, some portions of the poem were broadcast from Aakashwani, Patna. When the Director of Bhartiya Jnanpith, Lakshmi Chand Jain, heard this poem, he told the poet, if he expurged the line, Chhagiyon karo ab abhyas rakt peene ko (Lambs, cultivate the habit of drinking blood), it would be better. You may have to repent later for this.' Dinkar replied, 'This line is wonderful. It will in future spread the news that once India was in such a rage that one of its poets was not ashamed of writing a monstrous line like this."

~ from 'Ramdhari Singh Dinkar: Makers of Indian Literature', Sahitya Akademi.

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Also, as an experiment in hypertextuality, let me introduce an old Dinkar to present Kashmir just for the fun of it.

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Calcutta built partly on lottery funds

2012-10-30T04:26:00.001+05:30

1984

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be glamouress

2012-10-30T04:31:00.001+05:30

1983

but don't think of visiting Kashmir wearing that.

previously

Learn to worry about the bomb

2012-11-07T21:39:00.002+05:30

Recently finished reading a slim booklet based on a series of lectures given in 1989 by K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar titled 'The Man of Letters and The Doomsday Clock'. The thing that I found interesting is that while the words from west presented on this subject had all kind of emotions like indignation, guilt and almost paranoidal fear, the only corresponding Indian voice on the subjects offered is that of
Sri Aurobindo. And lines from his poem 'A Dream of Surreal Science' kind of sums his opinion on the subject:

"Thus wagged on the surreal world till
A scientist played with atoms and blew out
The universe before God had time to shout"

It seems that while writers in west people were almost loosing their mind thinking about the bomb, mystics in India were predicting doom that was in any case was foretold. While the influence of Aurobindo on Iyengar is known, still it all sounds dubious and all these words mumbo-jumbo considering India had already gone nuclear by then and in just ten years after the lecture was going to do it again. And what is more funny, just a year before the lecture, in 1988, plans for Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant were first set afloat. So while some people were discussing nuclear holocaust, quoting endings worthy of everlasting literature, there was action afoot that would in around two decades give rise to questions like, "Civilian nuclear projects in a densely populated country but at what human cost?" I don't think any mystic saw that coming.

Now I wonder why didn't any writer, or artist, some film-maker, in India go really really mad over the bomb? I mean its a good topic to go mad about. If you leave out Mahabarata, which was written quite a while back so doesn't actually count, not much literature on nuclear Holocaust has come out of India. For a county with nuclear weapon, it's a disgrace. For admittance to a nuclear club they should ask questions like, 'How many artist in your country went mad over the bomb?' That would be the end of the case for India and Pakistan.

Which makes me again remember that almost ten years ago some angrez woman from BBC radio asked me what my thoughts were about India and Pakistan going nuclear over Kargil. I laughed.

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People with Epileptic condition, please do not proceed.

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Princess Pazeb, 1902

2012-11-11T13:00:00.003+05:30

The foot of a princess

From 'India, by John L. Stoddard, illustrated and embellished' (1902)

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Daradiyo Na

2012-12-02T16:21:00.000+05:30

from Basu Bhattacharya's Tumhara Kalloo (1975)

A folk song used in a bunch of Hindi songs but right now online I could find only one: Shabbir kumar song Jawani Ki Rail Kahin from Coolie (1983). Can't recall others. As for the original, online the Chutney version is the closest one can get.

Indian folk instruments

2012-12-02T16:53:00.002+05:30

A few pages from 'The music of India by Herbert A. Popley'. Published 1921 by Oxford University Press.

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ek seekh kabab aur doosra Waheeda Rahman

2012-12-11T14:46:00.001+05:30

"Do cheezon ke liye main banoo musalmaan. Ek seekh kabab aur doosra Waheeda Rahman"
~ Tom Alter in Kashmir

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2012-11-29T00:02:00.000+05:30

Ghungta Bricks. Noida.

yeh toh hum bhi jaantay hai shehar kaisay bantay hai

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warmth

2013-01-07T03:02:00.000+05:30

On a cold winter night.
Gurgaon, January ~~2012~~. Damn it's already 2013.

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Previously:

In Summer

collective conscience of the society

2013-02-09T14:11:00.000+05:30

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Jahan Ara Kajjan

2013-02-14T01:41:00.001+05:30

Came across it in 'A Pictorial History of Indian Cinema' by Firoze Rangoonwalla (1979).
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Google Play blues of Indian Developer. Are Over!

2012-10-19T00:51:00.000+05:30

[Update: Oct 19, 2012
India is now included in the Google Play Developer merchants list. Which means you can now sell app on Google Play's vast android market while developing the app in India. So the blues are hopefully over! This post is now a log of milestones in the development cycle of the game that I am working on. Hopefully, it will be of help to someone in future.]

[This a rant. And only meant for tech geeks, And maybe for people who wonder if my job isn't making me mad. Well it is. And it is making me hell mad! And yet I blog...]

I have spent last three years developing/designing MMORPG games for social networks. And right here in India. It was a small game development company. One of the games I worked on had millions of installs on two different social network portals (targeting two different demographics, US and Netherlands). It was a simple mafia based game. This was a time when Myspace was in. Then Facebook became the in-thing. So I worked on two city building games for Facebook. Not a great success in term of numbers but good enough to get a favorable industry review and first of its kind made entirely in India. But maybe not enough to take on big developers outside of India. After a long cycle that involved talks with various investors about acquisition, the studio closed operations with all apps on auto-run mode. Most of the investors seemed more into e-commerce which seems to be the in-thing right now for them. And investors who would be looking to invest in games, actually knew very little about games.

But since games are all I know, when a friends [coding genius, Jim Jose and designer Ratnesh] suggested that instead of looking for a job would I be interested in helping him make a game, I jumped right in. Smart phones are the in-thing. Right. So after a couple of hard long months, we made a mafia themed MMORPG game that will run on Android, an app that talks with Facebook, will run on Chrome Store, run on a standalone site for mobile browsers and on IOS. We released a Beta on Google Play around a month back, got around a thousand installs, and some nice feedbacks. Fixed bugs and added features. Yesterday, we released a live version it on Google Play. Discussed plans on India themed MMORPG. All nice and good.

Today we realized that in our development frenzy we missed one big hole in our venture. A bloody black hole at that.

After talking to someone from investment tribe, we realized, if you are in India you can pay to download paid apps, you can certainly pay a developer fee to develop apps in India but you just can't develop paid apps or make apps in which people would be making in-game purchases.

For receiving payments you need a developer account with Google Wallet tied to a bank account. This bank account can be only from specific 31 countries and India is not one of them. Now, as a work around you may tie your Wallet to an off-shore bank, but later you will not be able to change to an Indian Bank if in future Google Wallet for developers starts supporting Indian Banks.

The scale of the joke gets bigger. Recently, people noticed Google had quietly added India to the list of supported nations. Indian developers were virtually dancing with joy. Later, it turned out it was just an error on part of Google. A galti say mistake ho gaya. India is still on hold indefinitely.

So know you know why a lot of Indian coders stick to safety of outsourcing jobs while our government saintly says Bacha apnay paer par khaday ho jao, why Indians remain massively just consumers and not producers, why Indians opening Google Play market in their phones mostly see ad cluttered 'XXX Stories' and 'Bhagwan Bhajans' as top India centric apps even though Indian can be seems massively commenting and rating all kind of games.

Anyway, it's a good thing we aren't focusing on Android alone. We have a long way round around using Facebook credits as our game offers a Unified gaming experience, a single game running on various platforms, which means if a player purchases in-game currency on Facebook version of the game and later open the game in Android version, he will see his currency. It's a Jugaad. But hey, we remain a Jugaadu country.

For people interested in checking out the game, here's the download link for Google Play: http://goo.gl/rzHqS
QR Code:

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[next post is going to be something I would have normally posted instead of this. And that's the way I have been running my blogs.]
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Update: Oct 5, 2012
Now available on Chrome Store too. Here

and on website

Update: Oct 10, 2012
Now available on Amazon App Store for Android too

Update: Oct 13, 2012
App submitted to Apple for approval. The mail say's we will hear back from them in 24 hrs. But the internet say's it may take weeks to get the approval.

Update: Oct 16, 2012
What a day for Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai! Since morning the game was seeing an abnormally high downloads. But we could also see that the bulk of them were not coming from Google Play as users were downloading an older version apk. And we had no clue where they were coming from (as till now we were only relying on stats provided by Google Play). After scratching our heads for sometime we used old reliable techniques like image based web counters to realize these users were coming from China. After some more hours of searching we entered the vast hidden world of Chinese Game market where they directly send out apks to the users. Some Chinese app listing site had listed our game, sending us lot's of free downloads. That tells us about the tremendous rate at which mobile games are consumed in China.

Too bad these are Chinese users, as thanks to language barriers the actual conversion rate of these users isn't very high.

And yes, we did experiment with Google's Mob Ad, running a campaign for a week. Not very good. Although the impression rate and reach is very high at only 0.1 cents but the actual user install costs something like 1.25 Dollars. Also, the first time we submitted the app Ad, it got rejected for using word 'Kill'. That's reminds me the app got an 'Adult' rating on Amazon for reference to smoking and stuff. But it is now available no Amazon Kindle devices too.

Update: Oct 19, 2012
Think the blues are finally over! India is now in Google Play Developer merchants list! Think we launched the game at perfect time

Update: Oct 24, 2012
The game went live on IOS. [here]. It took about two weeks for the approval to come through. The rate at which people found the game in apple store was almost double of Google Play. Probably they have some listing of recently released apps. Also, the rating system in Apple Store is different than Google play as here the ratings are country specific.

Update: Oct 31, 2012
Released in-app purchase in Google Play. Got our first paying customer.

Update: Nov 6, 2012
Saw a drastic reduction in daily number of people installing the game through Google Play. It turns out that this is common after a game competes one month. Maybe the game stops getting feature in some "new" listing. But the good thing was the actual number of people converting was way better. So the game was now reaching out to more interested players possibly through 'related apps'.

Update: Nov 14, 2012
Saw a sudden drastic spike in number of people of installing the app on Google Play (almost 10 times rise). Turns out most of this traffic is coming in from Brazil. Must have hit some kind of feature list there. Although we are getting some great increase in total install count, but the conversion isn't very good (language problems as most of these player are speaking Portuguese). Also, some of the reviews (from around 150 it went down to about 130) just disappeared, may be google put in a check to see if the reviews are coming from the same device.

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Update : January 19, 2013
Broke into a top grossing list on Google Play Market.

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What have I been up to lately?

2013-02-15T19:28:00.001+05:30

October last year, I wrote about the problems one faces trying to develop a 'Game' product in India that can compete at a global level. [Development Log].

Well, in January this year, the product broke into a top grossing list on Google Play Market for US. And it has stayed there since.

All it needed was six months and a team of three guys - one Developer, one Designer and one Game Designer.

Android is the thing for small developer. For us, between Android and IOS for Installs and Revenue, the ration is almost 4:1. And that too without relying on any major Ad Spending.

I guess I just wanted to prove, it can be done.

In other News:

In December last year, I found identically out that a popular kitsch store down south in Chennai made a bag out of my blog's header. Of course, they didn't ask me! The way internet works here!

What else...

In December last year, Bart Plantenga wrote in to inform that his book 'Yodel in Hi Fi: From Kitsch Folk to Contemporary Electronica' (The University of Wisconsin Press) was finally out. It was a thank you mail. He had found an old post on Kishore Kumar's Yodeling helpful. Back in 2010, even though I don't know Tamil, in an email, I had helped him decipher words ALR, LRE, TMS, SBP, IR, SJ and MSV.

What else...

In January, Rahul Pandita's book on Kashmiri Pandit Exodus, 'Our Moon Has Blood Clots' came out. The author acknowledged my Kashmir blog for reminding him of home.

My experiments with information are still on.
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naukri, chakri, tankha, betan

2013-02-15T21:05:00.003+05:30

Picked this from someone from U.P.land.

Pehlay Naukri Thi
Nau Log Khate Thay
Phir Chakri Hui
Char Log Khate Thay
Phir Tankha Hui
Sirf Tan Kha Pata Tha
Ab Betan hai
Ab Tan Bhi Nahi Kha Pata Hai

Naukri,
nine could sustain
Chakri,
four could sustain
Tankha,
only body could sustain
Betan,
not even body can sustain.

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Oka Oori Katha

2013-02-20T03:36:00.001+05:30

Mamata Shankar in Mrinal Sen's Telugu film Oka Oori Katha (The Marginal Ones/Story of a Village, 1977) based on (and in some ways built around) Munshi Premchand's short story Kafan.
[Youtube link]
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Jukti Takka Aar Galpo, 1974

2013-02-26T03:02:00.001+05:30

Ritwik Ghatak in his film Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (Reason, Debate and a Story), 1974.

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Youtube link

Kochi

2013-03-04T02:48:00.000+05:30

Sunset at Cherai Beach

Early Morning Fishing in backwaters near Cherai Beach

Graffiti from 2012 Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Fort Cochin

Cat and fish relations at fish market of Fort Kochi

Chinese Fishing Net

Gods and artist. Fort Kochi.

Girls day out at the beach. Fort Kochi

School picnic. Fort Kochi.

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Fishermen of Kochi

2013-03-05T13:14:00.000+05:30

Sun rises over backwaters near Cherai Beach.

Two fishermen are at work.

Laying net

Getting into water to trap fish into the net

Movement is water causes a shrimp to jump out of water and onto land.

They work.

The catch. Or, what I assume is the catch.

The fish have some kind of spike growing on their body.

The fisherman uses these spikes to pile them up.

And before leaving throws them back into the water. Which attracts more fish, the fish they actually intend to catch.

Then they walk away with the actual catch. They walk to another spot and repeat the process all over again.

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Lice Pickers

2013-03-31T11:16:00.002+05:30

Neighbors at Jammu. December, 2012

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Banjaras at Fort Kochi, February ,2013.

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Read a Comic, become an expert on Kashmir

2013-04-09T23:31:00.001+05:30

Cross-posted from my Kashmir Blog

With expert inputs from yours truly...first part of the last concluding part of Sumit Kumar's 'Kashmir Ki Kahani' is out. Read and become an instant expert on Masala-e-Kashmir. Check it out at newslaundry.com
In this part the story gets even more intertwined with story of India.

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Previously: Educating Indians on Kashmir through Comics