ScreenAct

Future Computing: Microsoft, Google & Apple

2012-04-15T23:40:00.000-04:00

An oversimplified primer: Personal computing has taken off at a hockey-stick rate in the last few years although the idea of a 'computer at home' for pleasure or work really came into being some 25 years ago. The cost of all the components that make up a computer has come down, and that certainly helped the consumer. But there's been a huge leap in the way users interact with a device. Had the visual interface remained a monitor that can only display green characters on a black background, no graphics whatsoever, your customers will be restricted to just geeks and nerds. It doesn't matter if you have a genie for a processor running your commands at the speed of light, the common man & woman wouldn't care. So it's the progressive ease of use when it comes to input, output & navigation and the sheer aesthetics of the visuals that made computers more accessible to the likes of journalists and accountants.

Now, on to the point: We've moved on from pure text keyboards to mouse controls to touch screens and now onto voice recognition. Here's Microsoft's vision of a future home/office, released last year:

Sleek electronic sheets that can recognize voice and register touch from devices the size of business cards to wall-mount screens. This vision is not set in the near future of 2 or 3 years but in about 10 years, roughly. The problem with such a long range vision is that you have no idea what's going to happen between now and the desired disruption. 15 years ago search wasn't a multi-billion dollar industry. 10 years ago social media wasn't a multi-billion dollar industry. 5 years ago computer makers were touting netbooks as the next big thing. 10 years from now people are going to have homes and they'll work, probably in a place called office. Everything else is up in the air. The greatest social/technical/personal/workplace breakthrough of 2022 would be the result of the state of things in 2020, not a product that was cooked in labs for a long time.

Bill Gates invested a lot in voice/image recognition in the 90s. Gates had a vision where if you ran out of milk, a scanner in the fridge would beep to tell you that you're out of milk. And if you ordered via the microphone attached to the fridge, it would send an 'online' request to your supermarket to save a carton for your next purchase. To me, Microsoft is a company that just imagines a world where people will use products just how the designer intended them. But the real world with its much more intricate, complicated setup offers great challenges once you start using them. If you discount the inestimable human component, the product hits the dirt. Remember Gates demoing their Surface in 2007? That was iPad but 8 times its size and a miniscule of it's versatility. But the real problem is they've been developing it since then and they have a demoed a newer version of it last year. When the real world is lining up for the tablets as their next gadget entry, Surface seems to have no personal and very minimal commercial prospects.

Google, on the other hand is a better lab for cooking future technology. They crazily invest in a bunch of non-core fields and have shut down most of them. But when you sit on billions in cash reserve, the wise thing to do is burn, I mean experiment with crazy ideas and see which gains traction. They're working on self-driving cars. Now, this isn't a concept video but they have a real car with limited success. The car runs, collects massive amounts of real world difficulties and tries to better its algorithm. (Now, if all the cars in the road are self-driving then there's no problem and that's Google's long shot)

Their recent project is Google Glasses.

Remember MIT professor Patti Maes' TED talk on wearable technology? Yes, Google has a prototype and are testing with real people to gather practical difficulties. It's basically an eye-glass with a smart camera that communicates wirelessly with your Android smartphone in your pocket. If you're looking at the sky it gives you a weather forecast and if you're looking for a place to eat it brings up a map of nearby restaurants - projected on the eyepiece - which you're wearing. Of course, you might have to tap a button to enable the projection on the glass so that it doesn't obstruct your normal field of vision when you want to work/drive/etc. More than anything, think about the amount of information Google will be amassing about the user, which is what they're after eventually. If this project takes off in a big way, advertisers would leave Facebook and flock to Google because of the quality, depth and range of information about a user they'd have access to. Well, the self-driving car may never hit the market and the Google Glass may fail spectacularly. But I believe such experiments keep the company young and their engineers competitive.

But Apple in the past decade has been living the dream. They're not too futuristic like Microsoft and not too off-the-wall like Google (for a tech company). They imagine a product, design it wonderfully [1], and bend the associated markets because of their sales power. When you sell millions of iPods, the record labels better change their business model. When you sell millions of iPhones and create an app ecosystem, all the other smartphone manufacturers and service providers have no choice but to follow. We now have the 3rd generation iPad, meaning the competitors have known the segment since 2010 but they don't have a decent offering to even be placed next to the leader. I personally feel that the first generation iPad is better than the best non-iPad today (Galaxy Tab), which puts the most recent iPad at least 3 years ahead of the competition. In electronic years, if an established company like Sony or Samsung or Motorola can't deliver a worthy competing piece in 3 years, that's jaw-dropping shameless

Tim Cook, Apple's CEO recently insinuated that they have innovative products queued up for later this year. That sets my heart aflutter. I think the single most reason they're very successful is that after disrupting the status quo with their 'shiny new toy' (as Apple's critics deride them), they persevere and deliver great subsequent versions. When was the last time a flagship Samsung success consistently built on it? Apple's policy has been to not bring a half-baked product into the marketplace. They take a problem, forget all existing solutions and design from the ground up to deliver something amazing. Since they do both hardware and software the pleasure of holding and browsing a phone arising from the tight integration is hard to beat for someone like Microsoft or Google who outsource their hardware. Apple has very few product categories and still clinched the title of the world's biggest company. Either you have to sell a product that everyone in the world needs (like oil, which is the second biggest company) or you deliver something that everyone in the world wants. Now, that's just love.

* This blog post has been mostly a general-purpose blog without going too deep into anything. I'm a technical person by profession and in this post I kept my ideas free of jargon. But in the future I'm considering discounting generic readability for some depth.

[1] Design is not just how it looks. Steve Jobs famously said: design is how it works.

On Selective Consumption

2012-04-04T00:33:00.000-04:00

I don't understand people who stand in front of a cinema multiplex browsing the posters to decide which one they should watch. I dig deep before seeing a cinema or reading a book. There have been cases where I've read about a trailer before seeing it. I exaggerate, but only buy a little bit. On an average I spend close to an hour browsing titles on Netflix, checking their IMDb ratings, their freshness on Rottentomatoes, scanning reviews of the titles that pique my interest by whoever is the critic that I most respect at that time. Same goes for a book, only even more demanding as the number of hours I'll eventually be investing is manifold that of a cinema.

My earliest memory of placing the critic/pundit on the pedestal: I was 17 and with the meager pocket money I had saved I bought a copy of Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight Children'. Pretentiousness and college years go hand-in-hand. So what's the metric of my superior taste? Of course, you read award winning books. Because 'Midnight's Children' had not only won the Booker prize, but also the 'Booker of Bookers' the best work among the first 25 years of winners, it would obviously make a grand statement about my aesthetics. By the way, I should mention that it's the first book I've paid for, though it's a bootleg sold on the pavement. I come home and couldn't read more than 3 pages. My vocabulary was severely ill-equipped to handle a few sentences at a stretch. Sometimes sentences ran into a paragraph and I had to read back from the beginning just to gather the vaguest idea of what the heck the author's talking about. Five years later I read the book over the course of a month and to this day, it remains one of the best works of fiction I've read. [1]

My initial predilection towards the critics'* verdict was nothing more than hypocrisy. I didn't understand art films, but still saw what the critics recommended, tried to mold my line of thinking to fit into the critic's view. This is vanity. Just repeated reading of good criticism alone isn't enough to truly appreciate the value. The skill to appreciate is mostly an acquisition, not something innate, at least for me. And at the beginning of this acquisition, suddenly the critics' words didn't sound hollow. It wasn't gibberish anymore and I saw what they meant. For the past ten years, I've spent a significant amount of time reading criticism - mostly of books and films but also of any genre from the somewhat relatable theater to the more obscure architecture. Good critics not just cull but educate and enrich the experience. I read Ian McEwan's 'Amsterdam' 10 years ago. And I re-read it last week. Of course, with time and maturity, the consumer sees and feels new things in those same words and images. But if I hadn't consciously honed this skill called appreciation in these intervening years, I'm pretty sure my second reading would have been less penetrating.

The other direct consequence of selective consumption is the extremely low tolerance for crap. Ten years ago, if I had to choose between 'American Pie' and 'La Strada', my decision making process would be: "La Strada is an important piece of work and needs utmost focus. But I'm in the mood for something light now. I'll go for American Pie now and save the serious work for another time". Today, I still push important works by important artistes to a later date, but an 'American Pie' equivalent wouldn't appeal as instant gratification. If I can't read a Coetzee or watch a Bergman, fine. But instead I don't read John Grisham or watch Michael Bay just to 'pass the time'.

An exception to the progressive nature of my 'selective consumption' was products and artistes that I grew up liking. Rajini and Kamal, two huge film stars where I come from, dominated my formative years. Even after I was able to objectively place them in the ladder of entertainment value somewhere near the bottom, where they rightly belong, my nostalgia laced with a skewed logic ("they're doing this for the regional audience") put me into an escapist mode and allowed me to enjoy them, if you want to call it that. I can now safely say that, for the past few years, I'm not enamored by either Kamal or Rajini [2]. This nostalgia flavored exception doesn't extend to books. I read Sidney Sheldon in my teen years. (For you Americans - he's the James Patterson of India [3]). About 6 years back I tried reading him again. I was squirming all the time that I twisted my limbs and had to stop reading due to physical pain.

All things considered, my extensive devotion to research a film or a book before consuming it has worked quite well for me. And usually, the depth is greater before trying an unknown artiste. When critics compare and contrast a book with something else, they add another entity in my mind-shelf, introduce another creator and expand my horizon. I read a whole lot about Julian Barnes before trying his most recent book, which just blew me away. But once this metaphorical ice is broken and the creator gains my trust, it gets less intense henceforth. Now that he's into inner circle I don't scrutinize his past works that much. Even if the second work I try isn't much to my liking he still gets the benefit of the doubt. I don't mind submitting myself to the next Pixar venture without bothering a great deal because they've worked hard to earn my trust over so many years.

* I have used 'critic' and 'pundit' interchangeably. This is a blurry line: critics writing for newspapers have to oblige by certain rules, like the number of words. But when you pull aside a respectable critic and ask him/her about something, usually, he/she has the ability the to go on a lengthy exposition, a fine dissection, which is generally considered a pundit's terrain.

[1] The average lifespan of a book for me is 6 months. After that time, the plot and sub-plot and characters start fading away rapidly. What remains with me is how I felt when I finished the book. In that sense, 'Midnight's Children' shook me, literally. It was a tour de force. A trip to a strange land and back. Not many authors or books can do it. I'd like to read it again and write about it. But these days, with a child at home and hectic work schedule, big books put me off.

[2] I wanted to clarify that I still like some of Kamal's comedy films. His serious works.... wait... let me throw up.

[3] It is strange that Sidney Sheldon, an American, is such a pop-culture icon for Indian teenagers but not many in America know him. He was the answer to one of the clues in Jeopardy (a quiz show) and the contestants didn't know him.

Drive

2011-10-23T14:13:00.003-04:00

The unsmiling no-name no-nonsense protagonist who talks 3 words per minute, keeps going about his business until fate intervenes and a makes mighty mess his way. Then there are sudden bursts of extreme violence, which leave him mostly unruffled, that add depth, maybe charisma too, to his personality. We've seen Clint Eastwood don some of these in the 60s. Drive, starring Ryan Gosling directed by Nicolas Refn is a mature 21st century reimagining of that genre. While this is undoubtedly more mature and satisfying than the buttered popcorn action flicks that pop out of Hollywood studios, there's nothing for deep introspection here.

Consider this scene: the Driver (the protagonist is unnamed) is taking his neighbor Irene (in a wonderfully understated performance by Carey Mulligan) out on a date. Before they leave we hear the phone ringing. And in the car she says "That's my husband's lawyer. He says my husband will be out next week". A long silence ensues. The husband is in the prison. There's something blooming between the driver and the neighbor. The husband's return is obviously going to complicate things. I hate to use the word 'art' here, but usually in cinemas that allow for long pauses between conversations, like... er, arthouse productions, the director is giving the audience enough time to grasp and absorb what had just happened on the screen - a death or a divorce or an infidelity. Here, it doesn't even take two seconds after Irene's uttering - the audience know beforehand that the husband will be out of prison and the status quo will be disturbed. Why the long pause? This cinema has probably half the number of words compared with any other movie of similar running length. And I admit that the silence is soothing, mostly because it's better than filler dialogues. But it's important to distinguish between this soothing silence and a meditative silence where what transpires on the scene is deep.

The laconic and cold driver makes money as a get-away driver for the robbers who either don't have their own transportation facility or lack the skill to evade L.A.P.D on L.A roads. His rule is to just wait for 5 minutes outside the event, pickup the party and drop them off at a safe place. So when he realizes his pseudo-girlfriend's husband is in trouble to pay off his prison debts, a matter of few thousands, he steps in to help - the husband will steal and the driver will drive. There's no ulterior motive: not to send him to prison again; the help seems genuine. Makes one wonder what would have happened if the heist had gone right and their neighbors lived happily ever after. After all, the driver is, in more than one sense of the word, a hero. But shit hits the fan spectacularly. The husband is killed and the driver is on the run. We learn that it's no job for a small-time crook. A lot of money is involved and the mafia is behind it. Needless to say, some heads ~~roll~~ are pulped.

This film has got style - Ryan Gosling's minimalism, not just words, but expressions, Carey Mulligan's vulnerability as a single mother, the terrific score helping the noirish photography, non-commercial violence, enjoyable silence and more. But at the core, even though Refn has invested enough time in developing his primary characters, I really didn't care if they got together in the end. Now, I don't want a climax where the hero/heroine race through the airport and one of the people in the background say something romantic. But, even by the standards of neo-noir I had the least bit interested in the driver starting a new life with Irene. The objective here seems to be excellent filmmaking, not making an excellent film.

Thorrible

2011-05-15T14:06:00.004-04:00

It's hard to get the take-me-not-serious tone. Just not taking the writing & production values seriously doesn't provide the tone. Most of the dialogues are horrible. Sample this supposedly funny line:

Our dear friend is banished to Earth! Loki sits on the throne of Asgard as our King! And all you have done is eat two boars, six pheasants a side of beef and drink two barrels of ale! Shame on you!

Shame indeed. This happens when Thor is getting to know the Earth people and their way of life: after gulping down a cup of coffee in a diner he smashes the cup asking for more. When he's politely reprimanded by the girlfriend that Earth people order in a more gentle way, he nods in an understanding manner. Wow! I've seen superhero movies where the guy comes to our planet and does funny things not knowing how stuff works. But this writing is scraping the bottom of the barrel. This is stuff rejected in a screen-writing convention in Peoria.

When Thor, the god of thunder is stripped of his superpowers and pushed down to Earth, he faces a giant robot sent to kill him. It slaps him and he falls down unconscious. His girlfriend swoops him and cries not knowing if he's still alive. And at this moment, allow me to remark on the range of expressions she exhibits - played by Oscar winning Natalie Portman, she doesn't invest a quarter of the emotional sincerity expected of an actor for such a scene. She plays it like a high school drama and director knows that the audience know it's a tongue-in-cheek outing and doesn't bother to re-shoot the scene. This laxity, a sense "y'all here to chill" awareness on the part of creators works on a good script. But the script is fractured, childish, immature. Ironman nailed it in letting the viewer take a break in a charmingly intelligent way. With 'Thor', the break is a bit long, about 110 minutes.

The Black Swan

2011-02-19T00:20:00.002-05:00

Warning: Spoilers.

Aronofsky likes to study characters cracking under pressure. In 'Black Swan' it's the beautiful, timid, perfect, frigid, fragile ballerina Nina Sayers played with exquisite control by Natalie Portman. Her personality makes her a great fit for playing the white swan in Tchaikovsky's 'Swan Lake', but to play the black swan, she needs to loosen up, get a bit out of the rigid boundaries she has set herself to excel as a performer. Lily, a laid back dancer who naturally embodies black swan in her gracious but beguiling movements threatens Nina, who's constantly worried about being replaced. As a crushing load of expectations begin to fracture her mind, the audience see things through her eyes, to be precise, her mind. (Which is why this is a mind-fuck movie for adults, and the neatly wrapped up 'Inception' is not.)

I don't know if the sex scenes from the movie are on high rotation on Youtube yet. There's nothing explicit - neither a view of a nipple nor a crotch. But the dreamy layer lends an eroticism that's more powerful than nudity. Are Nina's sexual explorations a symbol of her getting closer towards the black swan inside her? I tried to replay the scenes in my head after the movie was over: The ballet producer, played charmingly by Vincent Cassel, indirectly asks her to explore her sexuality so that she departs away her from 'little princess' image befitting the white swan. First Nina tries masturbation in her bedroom; before she can climax, she sees her mother asleep in a chair near her in her room and she stops her act. Then she tries in the bathtub; but this time its not her mother but her mental blockades scare her out of her mood. The director informs us that Nina's ready not only to accommodate, but to be taken over by her complementary twin, Lily, who exudes unshackled sexual energy expected of the seductress black swan, when she's able to fantasize and climax with Lily.

Sex is not the only symbolism in the film, though it was the only one that was quite complex and worked on a mature level. The next frequently used symbolism was the reflecting image. Almost every other shot has a mirror or a reflecting surface. Either the mirror image is doing something the actual person isn't doing (though I have to admit that the director doesn't opt for any cheesy boo shots) or the reflecting surface is a weak black reflection telling us what lies beneath. I thought the director went overboard in pounding the meaning through images. Then there's the expanding goosebump and the disappearing bloody patch, representing the struggle between the white and the black swan; this was the most cheesiest trick in the screenplay.

I particularly liked the interplay between Nina and her mother Erica (played wonderfully by Barbara Hershey). That there be no doorlocks in the house is obviously the mother's decision. In one of the earlier scenes, the ballet director asks Nina if she's a virgin and she responds no. But Portman plays this scene so wonderfully and Aronofsky directs this scene so wonderfully, we don't know if this timid girl is lying. The mother's decision to absolutely avoid all physical boundaries between her and her daughter partly arises from Erica's failure to shine as a ballerina herself because of her accidental pregnancy with Nina. A significant chunk of Nina's 'good girl, no sex' policy seems to be ingrained in her brain by her mother as a cautionary tale.

The director pulls off an expected, but satisfying climax by playing a trick on the protagonist's mind. Was it a cheap trick? It would be, if you're to flip through the pages of the screenplay. But the intensity of the camera, with it's grainy film closing up on Portman's face combined with an eerie background score adds complexity to her character, the narration, the movie as a whole. But I still don't like the very last scene, where the filmmakers leave it up to the audience to write their own ending. Aronofsky did that with Mickey Rourke's character in the 'Wrestler' and he does the same thing here with Nina's fate in limbo. It's not that I'm not capable of convincing myself if someone lives or dies when the closing shot is a bloodied body. It makes me feel cheated when the director strongly guides a viewer all along giving no room to wiggle and in the end shoves him into a wide expanse of possibilities.

When the Best Is Bad

2010-10-04T21:44:00.012-04:00

The Tamil blogosphere, 'critics' and 'pundits' are abuzz with Shankar/Rajini combo taking Tamil cinema to the next level. Wait a second, let me retract that: taking Indian cinema to the next level. And where has Indian cinema been all these days if 'Endhiran' represents the next level?

The movie is one big ad for a Rajini toy for all fanatics who puke on their Facebook wall that Rajini can make an onion cry and his gmail id is gmail@rajini.com. Too bad producers haven't thought of merchandising. By the time hundreds of Rajinis are stacked together to take the shape of a snake to gobble up cartoon police (near the end of the movie), I wished the snake to leap out of the screen and eat up most of the audience. They were all cheering. I don't know exactly what they were happy about - the very idea of a multiplied Rajini which was mind bogglingly stupidly executed or the 'special effects' which are notable because of their sub-par effects. Sensible people who hail this as a milestone must carefully choose their words - that this maybe a milestone for an Indian movie, in terms of special effects. But otherwise, the plot is badly conceived. The dialogues are bad. The special effects are pre-Jurassic Park era. The action (as in thespian, not blowing things up) and direction are plainly incompetent. I'm not a Rajini fan. But for a sensible fan, I'd recommend he get his fix from Annamalai.

The movie opens with the scientist Vaseegaran, played by Rajini (I know, it's hard to say with a straight face that Rajini plays a scientist) working on a humanoid robot. And by working, I mean he's literally working on it. He's screwing the stuff together, with the help of an assistant scientist and a deputy scientist played respectively by, wait for this, Santhanam and Karunas. These two wouldn't know the 'neural schema' (ooohh, a big word for a Tamil cinema) of the humanoid, and they primarily help with polishing and changing the dress. It just gets interminably boring from these first 2 minutes: Aishwarya Rai, the woman who's just dying to marry the scientist man and settle down, is pissed off that he hasn't returned her calls or replied to her emails as he's busy working. And after Vasee emerges from the lab, he goes on charm offensive and wins her over. Seriously, can it get any more clichéd? Bastards. I can't dwell on the storyline anymore; my IQ is dropping every minute I think of the story.

One of the guys said "machi, padam pattasu machi". Most of our (Indian/Tamil) movies and TV shows have been courting people who have a deep hatred for anything that is either intelligent or tastefully done. Shankar and Rajini have sound judgment. They know very well what makes their target audience go 'pattasu' and they get paid to flesh out their ideas which wouldn't pressure the acumen of a stupid 15 year old boy. (But there's a scene where Rajini converses with a bunch of mosquitoes. Anyone over 5 and has an attention span of 2 minutes would have heard their brain cells killing themselves).

One of the atrocities committed by the blogosphere is to classify this as a science fiction. It has to be, right? Because they use words like neural schema and humanoid and robotics. They obviously haven't turned a leaf of either Clarke or Asimov or seen '2001' or 'Solaris' or even something very commercial like 'Minority Report'. There's just not very little science in the movie, there's anti-science here. Artistic liberty on top of some basic science would have been appreciated. Every concept is either dumbed down or simplified or misinterpreted. The android is taught emotions and it falls in love. It's been done at least 18 times before with a decent scientific rigor. But what we witness in 'Endhiran' is a crime against humanity and humanoid-ity.

Hollywood is a medley. Titanic and Avatar, two mega-blockbusters feature maudlin plots with some horrible writing. But when they do special effects, they do it better than anybody else. The 'Men In Black' franchise is stupid, but it knows it's stupid and doesn't treat the audience like they're stupid. The Batman series by Nolan has a solid story and inventive action scenes. The independent film circuit here is super good. Darren Aronofsky has done 4 movies in the last 10 years and just look at how magnificently different the themes he's dealing with are. Alejandro Inarritu has done 4 movies in 10 years and though they have the same undercurrent, I don't think there's any other filmmaker who can do a better job of interconnecting multiple stories with this level of emotional impact. And there's Paul Thomas Anderson. Need I introduce Coen brothers or Robert Rodriguez or Quentin Tarantino? My favorite writers Aaron Sorkin and Charlie Kaufman excel in their own styles.

I'm not saying these guys are the best. Hollywood produces its share of trash every week. But there's something for everyone in every mood. I don't see that in our movies. Maniratnam, one of our best shots, directed 'Ravanan'. A movie that just goes nowhere, conveys nothing. And I have to say that I like 'My Dinner with Andre'. Just see 'Ravanan' for its dialogues. Kamal Hasan's 'Unnai Pol Oruvan' discounts the complexities of religion and politics and offers a 'thriller'. Well, Shankar and Rajini don't pretend to offer popcorn bites for the mind. But these guys combined are our front-runners and they all suck.

Slate, an American online magazine I visit daily, carried an article on Rajini and introduced him thus:

If a tiger had sex with a tornado and then their tiger-nado baby got married to an earthquake, their offspring would be Rajinikanth.

Seriously? Is there a universal rule that if you like Rajini you'll have to write nonsense?

Isabelle Huppert

2010-05-16T22:33:00.002-04:00

Once in a while you see a movie which features a stellar performance that you don't know what hit you. Isabelle Huppert's role in The Piano Teacher stabs you in the heart and twists the knife a bit. It's a wonderfully calibrated performance about the deleterious effects of sexual repression. The movie is supremely engaging and disturbing at the same time. I will write about the movie, which will entail a frank and detailed sexual exploration, in a later post.

Pricing a Book

2010-05-13T22:20:00.003-04:00

This book by Praveen Swami - India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad: The Covert War in Kashmir, 1947-2004 (Asian Security Studies) - boasting one of the most boring titles I've come across, costs $160. On the top of my head I can think of a few parameters that determine the price range of a non-fiction book. The perceived value of the content is obviously on top. Research scientists and anthropologists spend decades gaining knowledge which they summarize succinctly in an understandable manner. (A topic like Guns, Germs and Steel pops to me). We pay for their years of experience and analytical skills. Another determinant is the genre - an exploration of counter-terrorism, though important, doesn't sell as much a biography of Oprah Winfrey (pandering to the masses). And then the popularity of the author - Obama's earnings from his books last year was $8M.

But no common-sense approach would okay a publisher setting the price at $160 for a 272 page book. (I know there are businesses that pay a lot for slim reports. But this doesn't fall into that category. I bring in the number of pages because that's an indication of the extensiveness & depth of the treatment. A 57-year history can only be put in a nutshell in less than 300 pages; to dive deep and dissect would consume considerable volumes). Unless there are any state/jihadi secrets, which there obviously can't be, it doesn't make sense to price it out of reach of a common man interested in understanding the history. It's hard to put a price tag on any book and the value a good book delivers can never be measured in dollars. And this book might very well open eyes to many; it might very well contain many seminal ideas. But such an expensive price tag in most cases will work against the propagation of the author's knowledge; it may turn out as the prime means to ensure a reduced readership.

2010-05-10T23:48:00.005-04:00

David Brooks writes a column that I wanted to write about Elena Kagan, Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court. Here are the final lines:

What we have is a person whose career has dovetailed with the incentives presented by the confirmation system, a system that punishes creativity and rewards caginess. Arguments are already being made for and against her nomination, but most of this is speculation because she has been too careful to let her actual positions leak out.

There’s about to be a backlash against the Ivy League lock on the court. I have to confess my first impression of Kagan is a lot like my first impression of many Organization Kids. She seems to be smart, impressive and honest — and in her willingness to suppress so much of her mind for the sake of her career, kind of disturbing.

It makes theoretical sense to have someone in the judge's seat who can impartially listen to and make a fair judgement. But nobody is impartial. The school they they went to, the friends they had, the community they grew up, the crime rate around them (or the lack thereof), born to educated parents, educated in a Ivy League institute, marital life (or the lack of it), being a woman... A judge may claim to be impartial in their hearings but still all the arguments have to pass through their collective background filter and by virtue of growing up they would have lost their neutrality.

We'll know quite soon where Kagan stands; after all, she's replacing the liberal lion of the court and Obama wouldn't possibly nominate someone who's going to tilt the court towards right. But as the pragmatist conservative columnist David suggests, it is intellectually dishonest to not express your position on various issues that concern the society and play it safe all along for the sake of professional growth. It is ironical that she had criticized the senate confirmation process for not being insightful enough, while all along she has been preparing herself for such a process.

There's an episode from the melodramatic 'The West Wing' where the president initially leans towards a very centrist judge for openings (two) in the Supreme Court. But then he listens to an extremely liberal and an extremely conservative fight each other inside the Oval and he decides to go with them. I'm glad that Sonia Sotomayor called herself a wise Latina.

Sitting Duck or Bait?

2010-05-05T22:47:00.004-04:00

Faisal Shahzad bought a used SUV from someone nearby in a face-to-face transaction, did not scrape the VIN off the engine, loaded it with Home Depot grade explosives and left it near Times Square without properly setting off what could have been a ball of fire. The level of clumsiness he has exhibited will put any 15 year old Forsyth-reader to shame. And he's just back from Pakistan after a 5-month visit after alleged contacts with fundamentalists there. When the border police boarded the flight (he was trying to escape to Dubai, and possibly back to Pakistan) he said "I've been expecting you. Are you NYPD or FBI?"

Was he desperately trying to be apprehended? Is he throwing the intelligence resources a dummy trail behind his back? Was it a ploy to see how responsive NY's counter terrorism cell is in responding to such emergencies? Investigators say that he's talking freely; terrorists either blow themselves up or play hard to get. Is he a loony easy catch or is there anything more to this case?

Regional Affinities

2010-05-04T23:54:00.004-04:00

As I grew up and opened up to a variety of experiences I gradually lost my affiliations that made what was me during my formative years. I'm not a fan of Maniratnam, I don't love India, I don't think bisibelebath is the best dish ever conceived and arguably there are better writers than Rushdie. But during the IPL, I found myself supporting the Chennai cricket team, my city, though it's not my city anymore. And now the world cup has commenced and I'm back to my indifference, not caring much for India. And to think that I rooted for a team that not only had non-Chennai players but also non-Indian players and don't feel bothered by a team comprising all Indian players is... not unsettling, just a tad puzzling.

2010-05-03T22:51:00.003-04:00

Writing is like hitting the gym (what a flimsy metaphor to begin with). The more you do it, the better you get at it (and the nonsense continues). And if you begin to take breaks and are happy to be sitting home watching sitcoms, you get cozy with your laziness (a light-bulb moment!). I'm going through one of those phases - neither hitting the gym, nor writing amidst not doing many other things and am strangely happy with my lack of initiatives. And since any act, when not practiced or projected, loses its sharpness, I'm struggling a bit to put my thoughts in writing coherently, not to mention the ability to prioritize on which topic to write about. Like getting on a bicycle after 15 years, I'm hopping on it again...

In Other News

2010-04-28T23:15:00.001-04:00

.. blogging will resume this weekend. Thanks for checking.

What's Illegal in India?

2010-04-16T09:35:00.002-04:00

Human sacrifice, BBC says (emphasis mine):

The head and the body were found at the local temple to the goddess Kali near Chotomakdampur village in the western district of Birbhum.
Police say they have detained a tribal villager for questioning.
Human sacrifice is illegal in India. But a few cases do occur in remote and underdeveloped regions.

The shock value of such a news piece has slowly subsided since every once in a while I bump across the same headline. But what is BBC saying about the state of Indian polity to the rest of the world by including that line? The fact that we still have to deal with dangerous fools is another matter.

2010-03-23T20:54:00.005-04:00

The Supreme Court threw its weight behind live-in relationships on Tuesday, observing that for a man and a woman in love, to live together is part of the right to life, and not a “criminal offence”.

The Supreme Court of India decriminalized homosexuality last year. Now they've approved pre-marital sex between a man and a woman. What next? Pre-marital sex between gays. Whatever happened to our moral fabric?

Update: A friend asked what was up with me. Of course, satire doesn't come to me naturally. I thought the label 'Oddballs' would give it away.

2010-03-22T21:16:00.004-04:00

I had CNN on for almost 3 hours yesterday to see the final minutes of the health care reform bill pass the House. It will now go to the Senate and soon the White House where it eventually becomes a law. If I find the inclination & time I'll write about this historic bill [1]. But now I want to point out something else - the remarkable narrowness of politicians.

For the sake of the uninitiated, U.S is a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. In a country like Switzerland which practices direct democracy, decisions are made by the assembly of citizens. Most policies (be it at the level of a town or country) are in the hands of the public - the recent vote to ban minarets being one of them. Whereas in the U.S (and most other democracies) the general public elects officials who are entrusted to make decisions concerning their welfare - from their county to the country. Essentially, the elected officials are believed to possess a sharp long-term understanding of what's good and what's not for their societies.

Watching the debate yesterday was quite appalling because the representatives of the House were just echoing the popular opinion of their constituencies. Every Republican and 34 conservative Democrats voted against the bill. (It passed 219-212). As a representative, not of the lower House of the U.S Congress, but of the U.S democracy, their job is to evaluate the bill and vote based on the what they think is right. But what happened was everyone bowing down to the political pressure of pleasing their constituents and pitching for re-election. All Republicans acknowledge how screwed up the health care system is, but they're just not happy with the bill tabled (although it has close to 200 suggestions from their party members). They want reform, but not in this format which is going to result in record deficit.

Obama joked a few weeks back when talking to members of the Congress: "When Americans say they're concerned about jobs, they mean their jobs, not ours". Only that he wasn't joking.

[1] Here's my very brief take: I support this bill in spite of being a fiscal conservative. The bill is watered down and doesn't actually reform. And though the budget office estimates that over a 10 year period the government will save $140 billion with its Medicare cuts, I highly doubt that. Taxes inevitably are going to go up and people are going to dislike that. Once people get used to a welfare scheme it becomes politically impossible to revoke (like reservations in India). And the right-wing would be quite right in fighting government expansion only if it weren't for health care system. But I believe any great nation should have a great health care system, where one doesn't go bankrupt in the process of taking care of one's family or is dropped coverage when one develops an expensive illness. It is a moral issue not a money issue. Good health coverage should be ahead of good education and good military for a developed nation.

Whoa!

2010-03-22T20:55:00.002-04:00

From Andrew Sullivan, on a retired U.S General's testimony before Congress:

SHEEHAN: The case in point that I’m referring to was when the Dutch were required to defend Sbrenecia against the Serbs, the battalion was understrength, poorly led. And the Serbs came into town, handcuffed the soldiers to the telephone polls, marched the Muslims off and executed them. That was the largest massacre in Europe since World War II.

LEVIN: And did the Dutch leaders tell you it was because there were gay soldiers there?

SHEEHAN: It was a combination –

LEVIN: Did they tell you that?

SHEEHAN: Yes.

2010-03-19T15:59:00.001-04:00

Tony Judt writes:

My generation was obsessed with the distinction between theory and practice—I knew a man in California whose doctoral dissertation was devoted to “Theory and Practice in theory and in practice.”

2010-03-18T22:54:00.005-04:00

Here's a sentence from 'Fashionable Nonsense' on epistemic relativism:

But the numerous discussions we have had during which the theory-ladenness of observation, the underdetermination of theory by evidence or the alleged incommensurability of paradigms have been put forward in order to support relativist positions leave us rather skeptical.

This quote appears in the 50th page - a point where the authors can safely assume that the reader is well in tune with the context and subject matter of the book. I was, in fact. Even then I had to read the sentence twice to understand what the authors are trying to convey. I've read books by professors written for mainstream audience and I've found most of them strikingly clear in getting the message across. Richard Feynman once said that however a difficult a concept may be, if you understand it thoroughly you should be able to explain it to a 17-year old satisfactorily. The authors of this book (Sokal & Bricmont) are professors and from what I've read of the book I can say that they know their stuff. But frequent sentences like this where the reader is expected to perform vocabulary gymnastics can be tiresome.

I understand that authors sometimes are so deeply immersed in writing journal articles for elite societies and keep talking among themselves when evolving ideas for a book which might result in chapters that are jargon loaded like this. But it should have been the responsibility of the publisher to make the authors' ideas more accessible (without diminishing or simplifying) - if at all their target audience are general public. I'm going to try to continue reading, but if I find myself rereading frequently I'll have to shelve it for there are many more in my wish list.

2010-03-18T16:15:00.003-04:00

I've seen many discussion board comments like this: "Do you have the required expertise to talk about the Narmada dam issue?", "I've worked in the election commission for 15 years, what rights do you have to question me on election fraud in rural India?", "I have a masters degree in journalism, don't teach me how to report riots"... I understand this style of argument because I've been there myself. This is mostly the result of reaching a point where they realize that they cannot satisfactorily progress (based on logic/facts/etc) a discussion because of their half-baked understanding of the issue or a realization that the other guy has brought valid points to the table that cannot be refuted and instead of conceding the discussion in an honest manner they hide behind their credentials.

Green Zone

2010-03-17T23:08:00.008-04:00

I'm a huge fan of Paul Greengrass' Bourne movies and a very huge fan of his 'United 93'. His camera techniques (jerky movements, small takes, rapid transition between long & close-up shots...) in the Bourne movies created a sense of immediacy and tension which with a good story and a solid actor like Matt Damon generated genuine thrill. 'United 93' is the first (I think) 9/11 movie and by keeping it completely non-political and non-commercial Greengrass delivered a punch to me that's been equaled very rarely in probably the thousand movies I've seen [1]. In Green Zone he has tried to conflate politics and thrill and history. It succeeds moderately as an action movie, but the naive treatment of the political dimension takes away any seriousness a thinking adult may invest here thereby boiling it down to a popcorn story for teenagers discussing politics.

As pointed out by Anthony Lane of New Yorker, even a google search and subsequent clicks made by a warrant officer (Matt Damon) comfortably sitting inside his room is shown to the audience with the cameraman's acrobatics where the monitor is zoomed in and out and focusing on just the words that the director wants the audience to read. This is precisely my fuss when dealing with movies based on real events: just show everything - politically - and let the viewer decide where he should stand instead of the writer/director cherry picking actions, events and decisions to suit their needs. I know Hollywood's political affiliations (Spielberg, Lucas, Cameron, Stone and many other bigwigs are on the left-wing) and I understand it is not their job to inform the general public on political matters in a non-partisan manner, especially when it comes to wars. Does Greengrass, the creator of a masterpiece like 'United 93', realize that presenting a simplistic story ignoring the political complexity [2] results in a shoddy cinema?

[1] Here's a link to my half-ass review of United 93. Talking of raw punches, Irreversible is another movie that hit me very hard.

[2] At the risk of sounding redundant, but to emphasize my point, I'll say it again: The director has great artistic license in the case of fiction. A soldier can even sing a song and dance when bullets whiz past him [3]. But when you base your story on a real and ongoing war, you have a moral responsibility to not dilute the events. This movie is inspired by Rajiv Chandrasekaran's critically acclaimed, politically dense 'Imperial Life in the Emerald City'. By calling the screenplay an inspiration, the screenwriter has disabused himself of that moral responsibility. I understand that there's only so much that can be crammed into 120 minutes, even if you're shooting a documentary, but this movie is shamelessly one-sided.

[3] The semi-fictional semi-docudrama Waltz with Bashir actually features a scene like this - a soldier waltzes in the middle of the road in a war zone in Lebanon. If you get a chance see it just for the brilliant visual style.

Mornings With Infant

2010-03-16T09:37:00.004-04:00

I was in the shower and my wife was all tied up getting our daughter ready for daycare.
"Can you get me a soap?"
"There should be a body wash."
"There are bottles of moisturizers and shampoos. No body wash."
"Okay." *Brief pause* "Use them."

Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness

2010-03-08T21:26:00.007-05:00

A few years back I read a book called Millionaire Next Door which when distilled had 7 or 8 bullet points which go like spend less than you earn, make a budget and stick to it, choose a profession you like, don't show off your wealth, etc. At the end of it, I thought, wow, this must not be hard. Then I realized that my parents and relatives and many of my friends' parents all have practiced most of the attributes mentioned in the book for most of their lives but they're nowhere near half as rich as the one's in the book. It wasn't hard to deduce - the authors of the book just looked at what the rich guys were doing; they weren't social scientists investigating the financial health of all of the cross-section of the society that had those millionaire attributes. While you could be persevering, smart, living well below your means and materialistically modest there are still pretty good chances that you could end up not becoming a millionaire. And I thought at that time what if a book dwelt on this aspect - where the author exposited in great detail that you could be doing all the right things successful people do and still remain not successful[1] enough all your life - the book would bomb at the marketplace. Who'd want to read a dejecting theory? Apparently, many. Taleb's Fooled by Randomness does exactly that and much more.

Taleb is a Wall Street trader and a professor in risk engineering in addition to many other things. He's well read and the range of references he makes here almost make me wonder if he were simply showing off his diverse education. The crux of the argument he makes in this book is that blind luck or chance occurrence is discounted by most, especially the successful people. His area of expertise is in the markets and he extensively draws analogies from the life in Wall Street to pound the idea home. He talks about the human nature to fit everything into a seemingly logical order and hence we fall into a narrative fallacy of explaining rare events (he calls them black swans) after they've occurred. Taleb effectively informs us that random (or rare, if you will) events will always be part of the human cycle and our historians and journalists should stop glamorizing them by fitting them into a logical flow and establishing a fake order retrospectively.

Once you accept that not everything follows a pattern, at least when it comes to the world of finance, then the expertise of a successful trader is called into question. That's what the author does - he claims to not know the how or where or what or when of markets - and in openly expressing his ignorance he also claims his superiority over many other traders who think they've somehow struck a golden forumla whereas in reality they're just deluded. Taleb even writes about a trading company that had Nobel prize economists[2] but crashed spectacularly in spite of their knowledge of the markets. Funnily, it looks like these economists referenced Taleb's papers on black swans after they went bust to absolve themselves - another attempt by these people to explain their losses and successes.

I'm terribly uninformed of what goes on a trading floor and I'm willing to take most of Taleb's theories at face value. But he extends most of his theories to life and I'm not too comfortable with his condescending tone here. Of course the rich and famous and successful guys did some right things at the right time - they either sat next to a venture capitalist in a long flight or were experts in a social phenomenon whose time has arrived because of technological breakthroughs or were married into a business/political family that had connections.... This interpretation of doing the right thing at the right time is something only time can confirm. It is appropriate to acknowledge the role of luck in making big. But Taleb gave me the impression that hard & smart work doesn't get you anywhere without luck and I don't warm up to that idea. In fact, he uses the example of dentistry as a stable profession through most of the book, and explains the low stress associated with a steady growth as opposed to a fund manager who is invariably stressed every minute of the day and has a high risk of crashing down. But he doesn't seem to imply dentistry as a successful profession by itself.

At some point I wanted to drop the book because it was getting redundant. He was just providing different use cases to illustrate his central theme; but at least he kept issuing nuggets from diverse fields such as philosophy, poetry, history & mathematics which kept me going. (With all that, I read only 13 out of 14 chapters). If you have a pragmatic view of life this book is not going to enlighten you - you already know that chance does things that smartness alone can never do. But that degree of unpredictability in our markets, as painted by the author, unsettled me a bit. In spite of its redundancy it's not a bad book. It was like having a cup of tea with your well educated, well traveled uncle - he repeats some jokes, but he tells them interestingly. So you sit and listen without fussing.

[1] Success in this context is mainly by money. The author cites a scenario where constant exposure to the ups and downs of market arrows takes a high toll on health and then goes on philosophical introspections on what good is money without good health.

[2] There's no such thing as Nobel prize in economics. The award is presented by the Swedish Central Bank and doesn't come from the Nobel fund. Taleb repeatedly points this out. He somehow can't get himself to place economists who predict and create patterns along with scientists.

PS: I'll take a 10 day break before I start my next book - Alan Sokal's Fashionable Nonsense.

Oscars 2010

2010-03-08T00:06:00.008-05:00

My morbid curiosity for watching the Oscars live (and unedited) has come to an end. It's really a test of human endurance to watch people go through their laundry list of thank yous. Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin should be spanked for hosting one of the most boring most-watched prom nights. I was glad that 'Avatar' didn't win anything big* and 'Hurt Locker' did win the top categories. At the risk of generalization and simplification I'll say this - it's interesting that James Cameron did the most womanly of the movies I've seen in a long time (and a crappy one at that) and made a ton of money while Kathryn Bigelow made the manliest of movies I've seen in a long time (a very good one) and has until now remained relatively obscure. In a world where cinema audiences are increasing men (especially teenagers), I've got to give it to James for breaking successive records with maudlin movies featuring horrible dialogues.

I liked Sandra Bullock's speech and I'm happy for Jeff Bridges.

* Avatar won for cinematography and now I'm really confused. In a movie like 'Hurt Locker' the viewer is made to recognize the vastness and emptiness of an Iraqi desert, a bustling market, the sweats on the face of a soldier. There's a whole lot of special effects in Avatar and the cinematographer still guides the view through his lenses - but it all seems a bit fake to recognize such a movie with the highest Hollywood honor. When most of a movie is shot inside a room with a monochrome background and movements aided though software and sensors, it somehow seems unworthy of Oscars to me. But then who said that Oscars should always go to the worthy.

2010-03-01T22:38:00.001-05:00

Two articles on the future of U.S solvency:

Eternal optimist Fareed Zakaria is being politically naive:

So, [deficit] problem looks unavoidable, but also insoluble. Remember, though, that America has a $14 trillion economy that was, until recently, growing quite fast. We can find ways to address even this challenge. Here are three simple proposals that would defuse the debt bomb, with money to spare... Each of these policies could be phased in so that the timing is right. They could be pared back, especially if other savings and reforms are enacted. (Currently, tax breaks and deductions cost the government $1.1 trillion a year.) But just these three fixes would place the United States on a firm fiscal footing, leaving it with ample resources to invest in research, education, infrastructure, alternative energy, and whatever else we want.

Niall Ferguson's ominous words:

Neither interest rates at zero nor fiscal stimulus can achieve a sustainable recovery if people in the United States and abroad collectively decide, overnight, that such measures will ultimately lead to much higher inflation rates or outright default. Bond yields can shoot up if expectations change about future government solvency, intensifying an already bad fiscal crisis by driving up the cost of interest payments on new debt. Just ask Greece. Ask Russia too... Washington, you have been warned.