Era of Keywords

A walk with colleagues after lunch is a mine of crazy topics..we were talking painting..a pro in that field made a passing reference at a technique called ..'Wet-on-wet', I made a mental note...to look it up. And it opened up treasure of fixes for all the little dilemmas I had in past while dabbling acrylic paints in awkward way.
We live in the era of keywords... an inquisitive mind can embark on insightful journey with few right words up his sleeve. Gone are the days of hand-holding and sharing the hard earned wisdom of worlds. Kids today, all they have to know is type in that bland empty text-bar and reach a particular bit of information in no time.
I get a feeling in sometime there would be some nerdy high-school competitions to find a piece of information using Google and then boasting their way to glory by how they picked those specific bunch of keywords to slice n dice and reach the finish line. No wonder MS is flirting with Yahoo for their share of search market.

Call for ideas... everyday traffic problems

One of my colleague from work was very excited and happy...thing is he worked on a proposal, a solution for traffic congestion at the cross roads.. ..everyone gets pissed but he went little further and tried solving it....got an article published in daily and one fine day got a response from traffic commissioner...such public-govt administrative partnership is although something most logical..but happening just recently ...and is very encouraging,...

My friend was pretty sympathetic with the conditions at this traffic control room.. "they work 12 hrs a day..continuously answering a beeping radio...following up an orderly on certain case ..dictating certain purchase requisition to a clerk who is getting words handpicked from the whole cluttered mingled conversations"... in fact .....As in good ol'days, from changing the lane if policeman is seen coming to partnering them on such solutions, we have come a long way, at list in patches.

Other thing I noticed that we are starting to voice our concerns using Web as a Social Platform ..there is a trust and hope developing that my voice will get heard and not as a chance incidence like a message in the bottle floating on a web cloud. Today Orkut community provides, although in some make-shift way, a social tool for special interest groups like 'Save Pune traffic' groups to virtually come together.

Madam Q

They say about British people that all they like to do is watch football and reality shows and stand in a que whenever where-ever possible....
With we Indians the story is different .... as with everything else...I saw a nice yellow strip at one of the airport boarding line ... "Please wait for your turn" .. it looked so alien and culturally misfit to find it there... we like to huddle around, a ticket or whatever is the object of desire should be a priced earning at the end of intense struggle. that use to keep us alive ...those little victories..but used to leave us tired and annoyed and conveniently oblivious towards the bigger questions of life and spared us with pseudo-intellectual vanity that people in rich countries often find in their lives.
In one of the bank cash counter, people don't pay heed to such lines, so the rifle holding multitasking security has to stand there and make sure they do.
Some time I feel, isnt so counter-intuitive that the countries and cultures which are scarcely populated have habits of queing up while with us, the more the crowd the more chaotic it tend to get. Sense of organization and order is also a cultural conditioning... it is very unnatural to us..or not conditioned as yet ... some of the inherent behavioral and cultural difference between western and eastern civilizations are at the root of divergent development and growth trajectories we took.....this fact is emphasized beautifully in Jerad Diamond's book...Guns Germs and steel.

That aside...coming back to yellow strip. New 'feel good' factor in urban India brought with it so many such alien ..not quite grounds up.. artifacts and constructs... which seems to be quick marker of being developed but it is a big time misfit with the minds that has seen it both....the past and the fast changing transient present...a hazy snapshot that is whizzing past...

There are some things new technology brings with it... which is inevitable...but some are nothing to do with technology..they just follow the suit...At time like to call it non-contextual design copied inappropriately.

Resurrected...

My site is up again... go visit www.amitrathod.com
want to add a mini-feed of this blog to the site. I got to do little Googling for some code snippet.
Other thing I am planning to add is thumbnail view of portfolio, nobody cares or likes to read long passages, pics can result into much wider browsing of pages than could possibly facilitated by a menu.
Also felt like adding my latest bookmarks . These days ones' personal browsing history run into millions but it is at the same time becoming a thumb-print of who you are.

Time hi to nahi hain...

Don't have it on my wrist
got it strapped on my mind
a scarce resource they always say
hard pressed paupers of every kind

Reflections

Stick-out my forked tongue, I need a constant affirmation
I thieve on flattery, limelight and all that adulation
Am I getting more responsive, and so less immune
lose my yesterday on every passing reflection

Part time soul

4 am poet and a part time soul
much ado about a perfect hyperbole
feather-weight champion can't stand this wind
each realizing potential dwarfing me within

Sweet Phony

Hands and limbs, tied to the strings
Bright blue screen behind, freedom to dream
Get wide awake, let the body sleep on
well, the clever Ad gets it all spot-on

Beijing Bicycle

Kumar's initiative is bearing fruits...in the series of his hand picked foren language movies screened every Friday, this Chinese one is the third.
If you are here for spoilers then you will definitively get some.
With this movie first thing peeps into an in-n-out Indian minds, "yaar chinko ne acchi khaasi progress kar daali hian... look at the big road... n all that humdrum"
But that apart... once the story start sinking in, the cultural differences subside and we start associating with the dreams and forces of typical adolescence which knows no ethnicity.
Story revolves around two needy boys claiming the bicycle. The art of storytelling espoused in this movie lies in hiding some facts that generally drives anybody's sense of fair judgment. Through this IMO director want to make a comment on every single crime, every single story that we come across leaves it incomplete and that is not because could not be made complete, but it cannot be.
Some amazing frames and still camera work makes it a serious movie making and engrossing to watch.

Ephemeral never fail me

a living without a grand scheme,...
Appy, watermelon and latte with cream

episodes of ...sun moon and twilight,
the feisty, the fragile and the delight

but the ephemeral never fail me,
and square one is the end of each journey

Paradox of choice by Barry Schwartz

Some time I wonder books of this kind are a nice amalgam of research papers we hardly bother to read in first place, although author brings us the insights from these references in a framework of this book ..which try to develop a theme around the current overabundance of choice in every walks of life.... and which is not empowering us the freedom of choice but wearing us down,...

there some nice references to concepts like price anchoring - some pricing tactics followed to create an artificial feel of choice and good bargain, psychological ledger of our buying and spending habits, framing etc,
...

an easy read like a stroll in a park,,,, with many insights on its way...
happen to come across this book as a part of quarterly book review we often do in our small design group at work... it definitely a must for those deal in consumers domain or design websites for commodity selling.

'Atonement'- More than Keira in it

Why is that classic stuff is made out of tragic stories ..which makes it all the more beautiful and at the same time fragile... Keira Knightley's 'Atonement' is one such story...that even after the cinematic experience some kinda longing leaves you restless and wasted .. ... Some shots are detailed with more than one perspective which adds to the intensity of the plot. A sense of regret fills in the entire life of Briony tallis, a kid now grown up and plauged by the haunting of the past blunder. She brings the characters of her play "Two figures at the fountain' alive to some kind of redemption on her part.
The Victorian era is so well detailed in not just costumes and sets, but even in the gestures of the characters and compositions of the frame. One near the pool is especially exquisite.
It reminds me similar powerful performances delivered and that bygone era rebuild in "Sense and sensibility" ; Emma Thompson with her suppressed anguish, boyish charm of Hugh Grant, Kate Winslate with her yet another bubbly effervescence. Although 'Sense..' is backed by Jane Austin's water-tight classic, I would give 'atonement' heads up for its end-treatment wherein the inner narrative of the author comes out.

transliteration ...now in blogger..

Earlier I used to type in Devnagari using Baraha client...now blogger supports a transliteration as well...

let me try

अरे ये तो बहोत ही आसान हैं... खाली एक ही प्रॉब्लम है...जब तक मैं किसी भी शब्द को ख़त्म न कर दूँ तब तक हिन्दी मे preview नही आता... that keep me guessing without giving me an ongoing feedback.... anybody from the blogger listening... i think i have to whine loud enough... or this is not a right place.. :)

Jean-Pierre Jeunet - The craftsman

With every passing movie... I am getting BIG fan of Jean-Pierre Jeunet. He is hooked on to Audrey Tautou, the fabulous actress in and as 'Emelie', the Jean pierre movie that most people know about. she never lets him down with her tender performances.
Yesterday watched mesmerizingly beautiful 'Un long dimanche de fiançailles' (French) - "A Very Long Engagement" is a touching tale of a girl's idiosyncratic belief that one day she would break the mystery of her fiance disappearance from war front who was sentenced for court marshal along with other five. she has these crazy habits of relating things around him to find the answers to her depeest questions and more often she gets it as some kind of validations of her beilief.
Her journey and story is a cinematic treat to get involved in and Jean-Pierre weaves yet another classic with his characteristic thumb-print seen all over.
His style render every frame with rich compositions and vividness of the French landscape. At times subtitles are a distractions and viewer is torn between this ugly trade-off and we pity ourselves for not having learnt French, the language with its peculiar phoneme and free flowing movements like tai-chi.

Coupla days back watched "Delicatessen", also by Jean Pierre, a romantic love story on the backdrop of weired world only a most creative mind can visualize. It has its moments that still bring smile on my face. A must watch, at least for the scene wherein the joker comes in for a cupa tea at her loved ones invitation.