beware of the blog

SOPA: the first salvo

2012-01-18T20:58:00.000-05:00

By now, many more people know about SOPA. Thanks in no small part to how Wikipedia and Google pushed the day-long blackout planned for today into the faces of their visitors. They joined online fora like Slashdot, Hacker News, Reddit, Mozilla and the EFF. This crescendo had its consequences (read this and this), two more measures of success for the wave of protest that had started rising over the last several weeks from all quarters great and small in forms both raw and polished. Thanks to Wikipedia and Google, however, more people are now wondering what the big deal is about something they really had not heard about all this time. Several people have, as recommended, contacted their representatives in government to request that they not support SOPA and PIPA. Unfortunately, not all people can be expected to do this -- being vigilant, well-informed and politically active is a combination of qualities that no government, in its present form, expects its citizens to possess. The rise in the number of people who agree that SOPA and PIPA represent something bad is encouraging and this is why the grey/black page Wikipedia redirected you to and Google's innovative logo have been very useful today.

Unfortunately, it won't end here. The people pushing SOPA and PIPA are very rich, very powerful and will push them back in with different monikers or as addenda to innocuous resolutions. They can afford to wait for a short while until all this noise dies down, before they bring the twins back. One can only hope that all the vigilant forces that were active over the past few weeks will remain vigilant, active and interested should the twins return. The average person will soon forget this.

This reminds me of the case of Arun "Demolition Man" Bhatia in Pune in 1999. With a history of having fought and exposed corruption, Bhatia began his tenure as the Municipal Commissioner by ordering the demolition of illegal construction in the city. Anyone who was around in Pune then will hardly forget the sights of extensions of familiar restaurants and the like reduced to rubble near the sidewalks. A bulldozer became more commonly seen on roads than otherwise. It took less than a week for the political machinery to kick in and he was transferred. The twist in the familiar story appeared in the form of a public interest litigation (PIL) to get him back. The middle-class denizens of Pune rose as one and achieved a democratic victory when the Bombay High Court responded to the PIL by reinstating Bhatia. I remember noting a slight rise in my faith in the power of the public, should it choose to "wake up and act." Unfortunately, things were too good to last. The machinery kicked in again and he was impeached. No denizens, no victory. What the people had done once, they could not do again. Persistence in such matters is a virtue that cannot survive without strength and encouragement. The battered could only do so much. I fear that SOPA and PIPA might triumph like that machinery. I pray that I am wrong.

PS: There is enough information online for you to understand what evils lurk behind things like SOPA and PIPA (here's a Khan Academy video, if that's what will work best for you).

Your elected representatives have done shocking things like this before. Remember when most of the libraries of Cobb County faced extinction?

any which monday but this

2012-01-14T23:16:00.001-05:00

Tadka is an Indian restaurant in Alpharetta that shares space with Bamboo Garden (an interesting development in itself) and offers high-priced low-spiced Indian cuisine with ambience (if you go there in winter, choose the couches by the fireplace). What it lacks is just that extra dose of seasoning to elevate the dishes from bland and classy to lip-smacking delicious.

If you wanted to find out what time their location was open, however, you would see something that was either the product of creative genius or just the result of bad editing. You just have to ask yourself one question: which Monday will Tadka be open?

MSFT for MARTA

2012-01-14T13:19:00.002-05:00

Has MARTA considered approaching MSFT to help it survive instead of descending ever so slowly into oblivion? Evidence (see below) suggests that the big M might already have support for the ill-fated transit system in its popular operating system

too secure for you

2012-01-10T22:33:00.000-05:00

First it was something like Password must be between 8-10 characters with at least 1 numeric value/digit, 1 capitalised letter and no more than 2 consecutive repeating characters. and now we have this:

WTF were they thinking? Are you playing games with your user? Are you trying to revive the business of the human teller? If you don't have hidden fees for stepping into the hallowed buildings that house your branches, nobody would mind. Or perhaps, you've just hired a person with some ostentatious ideas of security to design this. That link for Help to the right might as well be labelled Get Me Out Of Here!.

Intentionally Bombastic and Misguiding

2012-01-10T20:09:00.002-05:00

I love some of the pages in the IBM Support Portal. They are exhibits of sheer audacity. Can you imagine continuing to pay these guys after the way they treated some of the tickets that people log for their products?

Consider this APAR. An APAR is one of the many acronyms that you get for free when you sign up to swim in the IBM pool. It stands for Authorised Program Analysis Report (aka "yeah, whatever") and (reference) is "an IBM-supplied program that allows you to create a diskette or tape file that contain information from your system to help software service representatives to correct programming problems."

But I digress into the marsh of minutiae. This APAR has been classified as a Permanent restriction. Also known as a feature. (You remember that lovely cartoon, don't you?). In plain English, "we are not going to fix this, so suck up and deal with it. And, by the way, don't forget to send us that cheque for quarterly maintenance and premium support"

As if to assuage the wounded soul who had boldly dared to log this ticket, the conclusion reads After analysis of this APAR we have determined we will not fix this issue due to: low priority/severity. A priority decision has been made that this defect cannot be addressed without neglecting issues of higher importance. Thank you for your understanding. In other words, another three-finger salute while gleefully taking payment for another round of sadism.

once a pun a film

2012-01-05T23:56:00.001-05:00

If Imtiaz Ali had made Rockstar in the 80s with Govinda instead of Ranbir Kapoor, Farha instead of Nargis Fakhri and Dharmendra instead of Shammi Kapoor, the title would surely have been Pop ko Jalaakar Rock kar Doonga

a nitpicking new year to you too: a review reviewed

2012-01-02T00:04:00.003-05:00

Stephen King's fiction enjoys a large readership not just in the US but abroad and especially India. His forays have primarily been in horror and Indians love horror. He also manages to take interesting ideas, observations and characters and explore them in a rather simple welcoming style. Despite almost always working with a few genres, he manages to churn out books that are notches above the average bestseller.

Unfortunately, reviews of genre fiction in India still have miles to go before they reap. There are the unfortunately few reviews like this and then there are people who don't understand the works of Stephen King and foolishly dare to review them. It seems fit to begin my new year in this neighbourhood by ranting about a piece of fluff that, when all things are considered at Judgement Day, will be quite inconsequential. Yet, it is to griping about people and things that don't even deserve a modicum of attention that I am destined to devote my time.

The exhibit for the occasion is a review of Stephen King's recent novel 11/22/63 in the Deccan Herald by someone named Payel Dutta Chowdhury. If this public LinkedIn profile is the right one, the reviewer is a professor at Garden City College in Bangalore and also the head of the English department. This also makes a lot of what follows even more unpleasant. This is someone who should have known better.

We are off to a flying crash with the opening

Stephen King's latest magnum opus, 11/22/63, promises to be a rare juxtaposition of facts, fiction and much more.

The use of magnus opus is troubling. Does the reviewer wish to imply that King has been churning out great works for a while? There is no doubting that this is a work on a larger scale than perhaps anything that King has tried before, but have there been others?

Does anyone know any of the other rare juxtapositions of facts, fiction and much more? (I know only one: the coefficient of the linear).

The second sentence darkens the lentils even further

A master of the science-fiction genre, King's recent novel blends historical fiction and real life events.

Let's pick the grammatical nit first. Any editor worth his or her salary would have fixed this sentence. As it stands now, A master of the science-fiction genre refers not to King (as it should have) but to his recent novel. Let's now look at a problem that's arguably a more important one. I wonder if anyone familiar with Stephen King's ouevre would call him a master of the science fiction genre. It's a perfunctory label that only suggests that the writer's knowledge of King's work might be limited to a subset comprising either his works like The Gunslinger and Firestarter or absolutely nothing at all.

What follows next is a complete synopsis in précis, which reduces King's novel to basic elements of the plot, stripped of everything that actually made the novel interesting. The synopsis also pays tribute to Taran Adarsh in its completeness. It also constitutes the majority of this review. That should tell you that if you were looking for an interesting examination of the novel, if you were looking for reasons to read this novel (or not), if you were looking for a useful point of view, this is the wrong county to be in. Unless a grammatically incomplete line like Definitely, an interesting and insightful read is enough for you (in which case, just scroll down to the bottom of the page, read that line and get on with your life). The synopsis owes a lot to the Wikipedia page for the book (search for "recently-divorced high school English teacher"), King's reason for abandoning the idea in 1971 and other bits about the background of the novel (search for "price of a pint of root beer").

This brings us to the rest of the bits in the review, which, thanks to that very popular search engine called Google, were clearly swiped without attribution from elsewhere. A few bits come from Janet Maslin's review in the New York Times: the opening (which means that I must redirect my criticism above to Ms. Maslin), the premise (search for "revisit and even revise"), the description of the book's cover (search for "happy and unscathed").

With all this plagiarism, one wonders why the number of pages of the novel according to this novel (850) is different from the actual number of pages (849; 842 pages for the actual novel starting from chapter 1 and 7 pages for King's afterword). When both Ms. Maslin and the Wikpedia page agree that 849 is the right number, why would someone invent a different number? If you add the extra pages between the hard front and back and subtract the two protective thicker sheets, you get 864, which matches the number listed on the book's official site. Since no official paperback edition appears to have been released yet, the plot, as they say, only thickens.

The seemingly original contributions only offer more evidence that the amateur writings on Rediff are not alone; consider this:

King wants to remind his readers that the past does not want to be changed and in order to reaffirm his views, he examines the "butterfly effect" — a phenomenon whereby a small change at one place in a complex system can have large effects elsewhere.

Something tells me that King's novel is likely to lose a few readers thanks to this review. I only hope that the book reviews in the Deccan Herald do not have a large bunch of faithful readers.

Meanwhile, let us mourn the fact that someone got paid for this sorry piece of plagiaristic piffle.

PS: I wish someone from the New York Times would fix the date in the title of Ms. Maslin's review; the date (and the title of the book) is 11/22/63 and not 11/23/63.

a piece of py: renaming files

2011-12-28T20:57:00.000-05:00

I hate spaces in the names of files. It's a quirk of my personality. I prefer CamelCase as an alternative. I used to like a mix of lower case letters, hyphens and underscores, but that was before my world of Unix and Python was dominated by Java.

However, I am a member of the minority and so I often end up with folders and files whose names aspire to be sentences (or at least parts of speech like nouns, prepositions, pronouns and the occasional verb [To be DELETED: ugh!). Today was one of those days. I had a folder full of PDFs, each with a name of the form Last, First.pdf. I would have preferred a name like FirstLast.pdf. The easiest way to do this was with some shell-fu or Python-fu (with due apologies to the GIMP). I tossed a coin and chose Python. I fired up PythonWin and started working on fragments that would eventually unite into a single one-liner to rename them all (sorry JRR). I wasn't smart enough to reduce it all to one line (I needed the imports and I was not a lambda knight).

import fnmatch, os
# basedir is a string representing the full path to the folder
# containing the poor PDFs
for pdf in fnmatch.filter(os.listdir(basedir), '*.pdf'):
  new_name = ".".join(["".join(reversed(pdf.split('.')[0].split(', '))), 
                      pdf.split('.')[1]])
  os.rename(os.path.join(basedir, pdf), os.path.join(basedir, new_name))

Of cours,e I could have skipped using new_name completely:

import fnmatch, os
# basedir is a string representing the full path to the folder
# containing the poor PDFs
for pdf in fnmatch.filter(os.listdir(basedir), '*.pdf'):
  os.rename(os.path.join(basedir, pdf), 
         os.path.join(basedir, 
                 ".".join(["".join(reversed(pdf.split('.')[0].split(', '))), 
                 pdf.split('.')[1]])))

I think this might be the first time I used reversed(), but since it was a relatively recent addition (2.4 to be precise), I didn't feel too bad. Had I written this code before 2.4 had been released, I would have been forced to use reverse(): this also reversed the list, but did it in place and did not return the list; I would be forced to reverse the list first and then send it onto the join conveyor belt.

I also like how just adding brackets as bookends to items separated by commas, I get a list:

["".join(reversed(pdf.split('.')[0].split(', '))), pdf.split('.')[1]]

Mission accomplished. With some learning to boot. Not bad for a few minutes of work.

pentahexed: the tale of a misleading manifest

2011-12-26T10:33:00.001-05:00

If you have worked with Oracle's JDBC drivers before, you are no doubt familiar with ojdbc5.jar and ojdbc6.jar.

Oracle tells you that ojdbc5.jar contains Classes for use with JDK 1.5. It contains the JDBC driver classes, except classes for NLS support in Oracle Object and Collection types and that ojdbc6.jar contains Classes for use with JDK 1.6. It contains the JDBC driver classes except classes for NLS support in Oracle Object and Collection types.

Take a class oracle/core/lmx/CoreException.class from each JAR, send it to file and you are not surprised with what you see:

(for oracle/core/lmx/CoreException.class from ojdbc5.jar): compiled Java class data, version 49.0 (Java 1.5)
(for oracle/core/lmx/CoreException.class from ojdbc6.jar): compiled Java class data, version 50.0 (Java 1.6)

Open the manifest of each JAR, however, and you see something interesting. The value of Created-By is the same in both JARs: 1.5.0_30-b03 (Sun Microsystems Inc.). How can a JDK 1.5 compiler know about JDK 1.6? Surely, this has to be something lurking in the scripts that needs to be fixed. It also wouldn't hurt to use a newer version of Ant (the value of Ant-Version) is Apache Ant 1.6.5 (the latest version is 1.8.2).

dhanush unleashes linguish

2011-11-26T00:02:00.001-05:00

The viral attack of why this kolaveri has found a very unlikely (and rather unfortunate) victim: The Language Log. Why? Surely not because the Tabloid of India had something to say about it. Was it because the WSJ had a piece on it? Sigh.

revisiting wallace

2011-11-25T17:11:00.001-05:00

After I had tried to catch up with the works of Sidney Sheldon and Robin Cook, it was inevitable for my attention to turn to Irving Wallace, another name familiar to fans of Sheldon, Cook, Ludlum, Cussler and Clancy. Wallace, if you didn't know it already, was responsible for encouraging Sidney Sheldon to publish his first novel The Naked Face. This might explain why s*x features a lot in the works of both writers. Research was more important to Irving Wallace than to Sheldon and he made sure his books were full of its fruits (consider books like The Seven Minutes and The Word); the experience for me as a reader was hardly as unpleasant as it was when I was unfortunate enough to read the works of Dan Brown, another purveyor of research.

But I digress. I just finished reading an old hardbound copy of The R Document that I had picked up at a book sale organised by the public library. I was surprised at how fast I had finished it, but I was also relieved that it was not as painful as The Pigeon Project. The latter also tried to be a travelogue of Venice while we follow Tim Jordan in his attempt to save the formula for yet another elixir for youth. The biggest problem with the novel is that it isn't hard to predict the end and once you have done that all the suspenseful goings-on are just not suspenseful anymore.

The R Document, on the other hand, is a conventional thriller with the appropriate twist and surprise tossed in ever so often to season the proceedings. The novel follows Christopher Collins, the Attorney General of the United States, as he races against time to find out more about a mysterious "R Document" that seems to be a rather nasty side of the 35th amendment (which is a new amendment to the Constitution that allows the powers-that-be to suspend the Bill of Rights during times of national emergency). Once again, you can predict how this is all going to end. But this time, Wallace does not try to do more than deliver a standard thriller while showing off his research on politics and the constitution of the United States. There is no travelogue. There is no sequitur into unrelated sub-plots. This is the stuff of efficient black and white low-budget thrillers (and in the hands of a competent journeyman that black and white thriller would have been a far better piece of art than this piece of pulp). Since this is fiction for the masses, it would be unfair to expect complex characters or a genuine sense of intrigue and dread. This novel was written 45 years ago, but could easily have been written today about the Patriot Act of 2001. That topical stroke of luck makes The R Document more memorable (is that too strong a word?) than The Pigeon Project.

commerce versus process

2011-11-25T15:40:00.001-05:00

I asked Google about "my passport" and the first link in the results is Application Status, which is a page hosted by the Bureau of Consular Affairs telling visitors how they could check the status of their application for an American passport. Results about Western Digital's products appear only later.

dirty ditties

2011-11-05T19:07:00.001-04:00

Bappi Lahiri famously insisted that A. R. Rahman had lifted the ho in Slumdog Millionaire's Oscar-winning jay ho from his hit rambhaa ho from Armaan. In Anuvab Pal's book Disco Dancer (dedicated to the cult classic starring Mithun Chakraborty), he is even quoted as proudly claiming to have brought the ho to Bollywood. Would he then concede that Vishal-Shekhar's ooh la la from The Dirty Picture owed a debt to a certain song composed by A. R. Rahman for Rajeev Menon's Minsara Kanavu?

Regardless of such trivial quibbles, Bappi seems like the perfect person to warble this lusty duet with Shreya Ghoshal (who would have thought she'd pick a song like this instead of a strain of romantic yearning?). The song starts off feeling like an uncensored alter ego of R. D. Burman's chunarii sambhaal gorii before shifting into a nostalgic paean to the disco-laced 80s dominated by Bappi-da. Bappi gets to pay tribute to himself in (as far as I can remember) his second song for Vishal-Shekhar. He couldn't have asked for more.

it was a pleasure to be amma

2011-11-05T18:30:00.001-04:00

I was pleasantly surprised and very impressed when I visited the Anna Centenary Library. I love the public library system in the US and always wished that something similar had existed in India (the British Library in Pune was the closest, but it offered only paid subscriptions and a catalogue mostly limited to the United Kingdom). For the first time, I saw hope as I explored the floors of the library.

And then Amma's crusade against all the edifices erected by her predecessor headed to Kotturpuram. The library was Amma's next salvo against Anna. Once again she wanted a hospital in its place. So far, such a hospital has not been set up in India. By establishing a super speciality hospital dedicated to interests of children, it is certain that Tamil Nadu would [sic] emerge as the top ranking State in protecting the interests of children, she was quoted as saying.

And what happens to the contents of the library? Amma plans to move them to the proposed Integrated Knowledge Park on the DPI (Directorate of Public Instruction) campus in Nungambakkam citing some reasons for this being a very ideal place. Nobody said anything about whether her government plans to be fair with space. I find it hard to believe that they're going to match square foot for square foot and floor for floor. Books in a bookshelf are likely to end up packed in boxes.

But I exaggerate. I shouldn't be cavilling about this. After all, a hospital is a noble thing to have (I trust that the hospital will be generous to all children in need of medical assistance). But so is a library. Surely there are condemned structures around town that can be torn down and replaced with her hospital. Surely there are other locations in the metropolis that deserve a facelift for the better.

But Amma must have this building.

Not because its location works better for a hospital than for a library.

Not because its interior design and layout are more conducive for hospital beds, labs and offices than for bookshelves, reading desks and couches.

But because Anna made it.

How people can elect such bickering people into office is beyond me.

Mercifully, the Madras High Court has restrained the State government from moving the library. Perhaps good sense will prevail and I'll still expect to see books on shelves and see people sitting at the desks reading and studying instead of dealing with the smell of disinfectant.

(the title of this post paraphrases the opening line of Ray Bradbury's most famous book, which seems quite appropriate for the occasion)

eternal riders of pune

2011-10-26T11:04:00.000-04:00

After a fresh experience of the roads in Pune lasting several days, I am ready to conclude that the average Puneite on the road (on foot, gripping the handle of a motorised two-wheeler or a bicycle, helming an autorickshaw, car, van, bus or truck) has three significant qualities: he or she is discourteous, he or she is selfish and he or she is suicidal. Despite this lethal combination of qualities, he or she seems eternal. untouchable by death. amar. imagine that. The font of eternal life must exist in the murky miasma of the traffic jams in Pune: how else does one explain the lack of significant fatalities on the roads when everyone (regardless of their size or the size of their mode of conveyance) is trying to squeeze into every available space of every size at any imaginable speed? That woman sliding between a bus and a jeep passed through without a scratch; that scooterist swung cleanly a breath away from the noggin of a large van; those two cars crissed and crossed by a motorcyclist without affecting his path or angle at all. Unbelievable.

you pay for the space: the annoying things are free

2011-10-21T14:43:00.001-04:00

Cellphone screens in the dark. Think of fireflies with Asha Parekh-ian (or Nanda-esque) derrieres. They are annoying. Distracting. Especially when you are trying to watch the movie.

Cellphone ringtones. They are annoying. Distracting. Especially when you are trying to listen to the dialogue uttered by the characters in the movie that you have been trying to watch.

Inconsiderate. The people who paid for the seats they are sitting in and insist on continuing to use their cellphones to send text messages, receive and check text messages, make calls and receive calls without being courteous enough to switch their phones to silent mode. The cinema hall is just another place to hang out and presumably what transpires on the screen is akin to the unfortunate band that plays music while you dine in some faux star restaurant.

Except that the film and the band are not the same thing.

Could you please take your call outside?, I lean over and say to the girl sitting next to us, who, after a conversation louder than the booming sound of the film playing in the hall, has decided to talk on the phone,

It's an important call, she replies, failing to see why I should have a problem with this. I continue to be polite and inform her that the volume of her conversation is louder than the volume of the film (which is why I have a problem -- because I paid to listen to the film and not to her). Her reply is priceless: You could have said it in a more polite way (or words to that effect).

Is it time to take a leaf from Falling Down and go watch movies with a baseball bat in tow? Is that the only way to get such inconsiderate, discourteous (and seemingly clueless) people to behave? Why doesn't the management of the theatre/multiplex request people to be courteous? Why aren't there any ads like the Don't spoil the movie by adding your own soundtrack ad that plays at the AMC theatres? Why doesn't someone take a hint from the Alamo Drafthouse? (the uncensored PSA is here)

entomical cojones

2011-10-17T11:26:00.000-04:00

Look carefully at the glass wall for the customs office (or some office dedicated to a similar function) at the airport in Pune as you walk from the check-in counters to the place where the security check is conducted and you will be informed (among other things) not to take khus khus and (I kid you not) beetle nuts into Dubai (or the Gulf, unless I am mistaken). Surely they meant betel, unless those parts of the world regard the family jewels of the members of the Coleopteran order as either a culinary delicacy or something as precious as a rhino's horn.

jobs all over

2011-10-06T23:33:00.000-04:00

Last night, when I read that Steve Jobs had passed away, I switched to the Hacker News tab and refreshed it to read what the world had to say. I saw something I had never seen before: every single one of the 30 items on the first page was about Steve Jobs. It was worth a "screencap":

My favourite tribute so far (aside from the austere bold link on google's main page) was the image here.

super seven: the fox is on fire

2011-10-04T22:20:00.000-04:00

All hail Nicholas Nethercote!

When Mozilla launched Memshrink to finally do something about all the memory that Firefox never seemed to let go until it had to shrug, I discovered Nicholas Nethercote's blog. Since then I have been reading every new post on his blog, enjoying his writing style and also learning a lot about performance tuning and about the innards of Firefox (I didn't know just how much sqlite was used in all those add-ons). I also waited eagerly for Firefox 7 so that I could see the results of all these fixes and last week I didn't hesitate a moment when I saw the pop-up in the system tray telling me that Firefox 7 was available. Mercifully, the only hacks I needed to get two add-ons working were familiar ones that I had effected when Firefox 5.0 was rolled out.

A few minutes later, after Firefox was back up and running, I could see the difference. I spent some time playing with about:memory?verbose, because the output now contained information about the various compartments that were using memory. Firefox was not lurching to chomp away memory. Instead, it seemed more well-behaved and offered strong testimony to everybody who had worked hard to plug all those leaks and free all that heap.

The only cloud in this silver sky was a news article screaming that Chrome was poised to take over from Firefox as the second most popular browser. Perhaps all these fixes have come too late. Perhaps the article didn't analyse the data correctly and fairly. I don't care much right now as long as Firefox 8 promises to shed even more lard.

non-vegetarian vegetable

2011-09-24T23:22:00.001-04:00

The local Indian store has a modest section offering vegetables each labelled in English with often liberal spelling. Redish was just something to warm you up and prepare you for Bison Bites aka Snack Gaur. Rest assured, O shocked vegetarians. This was not the bison served up to complement a sip of cold carbonated cola; this was just a typo too much for trichosanthes cucumerina, also known as your friendly neighbourhood snake gourd. You may now breathe again.

old-time poetry

2011-09-11T17:59:00.000-04:00

I found some amateur verse from the old electronic archives today. I seem to have written it in October 2002, when I used MARTA more often than I do now; here goes nothing:

walking steadily to keep time
with a bus approaching
it's a race to survive
the fumes and fury
of rush hour

why do they desert me
when I'm in a hurry
i see too many of them
when I'm not

PS:: The title is a play on the name of a rather interesting store that I discovered some months ago (the only branch in Georgia, as it turns out)

operation yellow boots

2011-09-11T17:21:00.000-04:00

Anurag Kashyap does it again and this time around he's not the producer, but the director and one of the writers of the film. Having already been witness to one of the most unlikely places to hear a quote from Jim Morrison, we are not as surprised when, after she asks Chittiappa Gowda the gangster when she should come (to pay off the gangster in happy endings), the gangster, already oozing comic menace, goes if you come today, it's too early; if you come tomorrow, it's too late; you pick the time; tick tick tick tick tick tick; tick tick tick tick tick tick. This not only fits his character because he is a Kannadiga ganster, after all but ensures that those who have never been lucky to have heard (and seen) the cult favourite from Operation Diamond Racket get a chance to right the wrong. Priceless!

PS: Earlier in the scene, when we first see Chittiappa, he's watching the video of a film song (that sounded like a Kannada version of Ilayaraja's raajaa raajaathi from Agni Natchathiram) on the tube. Does anyone know which movie that was?

deeply ambiguous

2011-09-01T08:51:00.000-04:00

The poster for Deep Blue Sea features two living creatures -- a shark and a lady in distress. Does the tagline "Bigger. Smarter. Faster. Meaner" refer to the shark, the shark's gaping maw or the threatened rack?

bearable exposition

2011-08-26T21:03:00.000-04:00

I get the feeling that all writers churning out candidates for the mainstream bestseller lists have to deal with exposition a lot more often than writers of works that are less mainstream. Some of these writers turn this devil around and decide to take the opportunity to show off all the research they have done (Crichton did this well; Dan Brown does not).

Intermission: Can you imagine Anthony Burgess writing A Clockwork Orange in the style of Dan Brown? The book would have been thicker and loaded with interleaved explanations of nadsat and descriptions of the prison, its architecture, its history and who knows what else. A title like Fruits and Mechanics would have topped this cake of futility.

I'm on a Michael Connelly buffet right now and the 8 books I have read have introduced me to exposition of various flavours and of varying levels of subtlety (or the complete lack of it, in some cases), but his exposition never strays beyond the realm of the police procedural and the court room. This, I think, is a good thing. It would have been unbearable to wade through a mini-treatise on the architecture of the courthouse just as we were about to begin an interesting trail.

Some of the books are written in the first person. This allows the writer to be more liberal in the exposition, because, after all, this is supposed to be a man or woman telling you a story. The more details you get, the better. A lot of exposition that might otherwise stick out like a sore elephant in a regular third-person narrative goes down easier when Jack McAvoy or Mickey Haller is writing to you, dear reader.

I tend to prefer little to no exposition (which is why I admire the bold stroke of the glossary in Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games: you read the tale with its natural rhythms and later use the glossary to understand the vernacular), but I can understand the need for it in mainstream fiction. Besides, fitting it into the narrative without losing the reader is not trivial. Given this, I liked the few examples from the 8 books I had read so far, where the exposition was adroitly placed just like a shot/reverse shot scene where the cutting didn't bother you. Here's an example from The Brass Verdict (I have taken the liberty of marking the relevant sections):

"Two arrests. ADW in 'ninety-seven and conspiracy to commit fraud in 'ninety-nine. No convictions but that is all I know for right now. When the court opens I can get more if you want."
I wanted to know more, especially about how arrests for fraud and assault with a deadly weapon could result in no convictions, but if Cisco pulled records on the case, then he'd have to show ID and that would leave a trail.

may which force be with you?

2011-08-23T20:08:00.000-04:00

Both Rediff and Hindustan Times have something to say about Force, the remake of Kaakha Kaakha. Unfortunately, both disagree on what seems to make this production special enough to merit a news item.

Rediff says: What will make this film stand apart from his other films is that Amin claims he has not used cables in Force at all, a vital element in action sequences.

HT says: Film's action director Allan Amin told the tabloid: "John is a physical guy so the action was all high octane. We did use cables for certain sequences[...]

It gets even better when both disagree on the weight of this motorcycle that John Abraham chose to lift himself without wires instead of eliciting the services of a stunt double. Rediff insists that the weight of the bike was 200 kilograms, while HT is confident that it was only 150 kilograms (it's still heavy enough to merit a "wow," but "really heavy bike" does not sound attractive enough in a news article). Perhaps a special feature on the DVD of the film will include a section dedicated to trivia to console us all.

Spoonerism alert: The Rediff article begins with a reference to a film called Rang De Sabanti (you know they are actually talking about this).