Small is beautiful...Green is elegant

11th hour is part 2 of inconvenient truth.. Al Gore’s impressive documentary which makes you feel ashamed for being lifelong consumer of fossil fuel and raises hazar questions on the life style we got getting accustomed to without even having the pangs of irreversible destruction we are causing.
We all know Leonardo de Carpio, the man who has a public image of being sensible and earnest about things he does. And after Al gore he is the right choice of voice that binds these plethora of freewheeling interviews. Tthese sound bites are just long enough and crisp enough to communicate what a one whole book worth has to say.
I mean 2008 is heating up with the so many sane minded people coming out and making their voices heard. Obama appointing Steven Chu as a energy advisor, makes one hope for some path-breaking changes in world in which we live today. We have seen millions of people getting affected by food shortages like never before , unprecedented floods and storms and draughts.... all the result of haphazard use of fossil fuel, trapping of too much of green house gases in biosphere, leading to rise in average temperature causing arctic ice to melt. Its caouse and effect even 4th standard kid can understand took us wiping clean of half the O3 umbrella and 3/4th of rain forests to learn. Right now we are witnessing a tipping point and if we don’t stand up to that, we will not live to see the future. It’s basically you are not saving the environment , it will continue to live but then human won’t be there to see the aftermath 'cause it won’t be a livable anymore. There are so many catchy lines in this: Introspecting US academicians quoting Churchill, “Americans often do the right thing, but only when they exhaust all the other possibilities”. (make sure you turn the subtitles on even if you are watching it English. Made me remind of, not long ago, we have George Clooney’s Batman, in which a middle aged environmentalist woman was portrayed as a villain and laughing stock of the whole party. Seriously, we have come a long way from there.
Central theme of this documentary is nicely punctured with 3-second video-clips of natural events and somber voice over that adds to amazing effect. Hearing about what we notice and but chose to ignore sometimes makes us be conscious of the gravity of those things
‘Go green’, but how? Kindly package it for me, for the masses.. what can we do at my level.... may be run a blog/website where people suggest tricks / hacks / strategies to reduce ones carbon footprint. Unlike Americans we are not big fan of SIGs special interest groups possibly because we already have so many cults and sects and are a divided society. Of the top of my head, we should make a PIL in consumer court to start putting carbon values (how much green house gas this product led to into the environment in its making) on the products and we stick to buying those which are the least...market forces are the strongest, there is no denying once it comes into effect. All you need is right push in right direction and it will self-evolve. So far the oil lobby driven the geo-politics and the wars and the tensions in the second- half of the 20th century, but Obama promises some change in the time to come. As an Indian we should be ready to gear up ourselves with the values of frugality and 'small is beautiful’ and ’green is elegant’ attitude. Gosh, it worth a Tantra T-shirt slogan. 
Otherwise our politicians will sell us off as a dumping ground of the greedy and set-in-their-ways so called immature developed countries.

Lurkers... any thougths... what can be done to drag the hand s of clock backv inot the time frmo the 11th hour...

Assassination of Jesse James

A beautiful movie in which characters come alive and a legend is re-enacted and revisited. Based on a novel in which characters speak slang of American English of the turn of 18th century…I watched it without having gone to tomatometer or imdb, ‘cause I was sure Ridley and tony Scott coproduction should hardly disappoint. It s a story about a legendary robber, a persona build to such a minute details and his disposition described so well, it is easy to guess it is written and directed by same guy who has finesse in narration, nowhere there a hurried or mushy mashy portrayal, or underdeveloped shots, each scene each shot is polished to an extent that one would feel the level of a slowly finished oil painting by some laid back artist. Recreating the times and the mood of that era has become a mere technicality now-a-days for most productions, but it should not escape a mention. Oh and the background score, It lingers long after the movie is over, there is no denying how much intensity it adds to the whole scene. Remember the screeching siren sound so well used in the sequences ‘to peak’ in Dark knight whenever there is ‘spat’ between the opposites …joker and batman,… I look forward to some gems from rehmanin the flicks like Gajhini…coming back to Jesse.. Brad Pitt coproduced it, he looks like choosing big frame portraits ..earlier achilles In troy and now jesse james… then we have almost 20, bob ford, a guy highly impressed of jesse’s persona to an extent he imitates every gesture, watches every move, moves around slyly in most of the frames, portrays a meek who faces the conflict , a deep desire and need to be applauded and be somebody …and a suppressed loathing for his own demigod he is slated for some trophies for his performance.. and some of the angst and private confessions of Jesse are so well said, “ I go on journeys out of my body, I wonder about that man that’s gone so wrong, I’ve been becoming problem to myself”… There are no significant female characters and it’s to be watched for the performances in some of the well scripted shots. It’s a long one (2:40) by any standards for an English movie, but it is canvas well used and rich with subtleties. Don’t watch if you are in a mood for a quick snack. It is a multicourse French gourmet cuisine to be savored till dawn.

suicides and blasts

Reading Hindu after Times of India is like resuming a serious news channel after a commercial break. I have never seen such an irresponsible agenda driven so called national daily as TOI. Yesterday in Hindu I read a shocking piece of statistic: The number of deaths by suicides among farmers is mammoth 1,82,000 since ‘97… last four years Maharashtra, supposedly developed and progressive among the states, has been breaching 4000 figure in farmers deaths…. that is in spite the so called India shining and air of progress, recent influx of FDIs, creation of wealth and opportunity by IT and services sector. Deaths toll by Naxalites in the ‘interiors’ of tribal India in central regions is far more and especially more brutal and leading far more ‘loss of trust’ in government which virtually does not exist in those areas.

But what is taking center stage in media is killing done by mercenaries sent by our neighbor and that to me is as good as giving wrong signal to unhappy elements in India. It is like, you want your issue to be taken seriously, go and shake up urban India and hit where it hurts. Politicians in India have got habituated to delaying tactics knowing public memories are very short term and under the name of patience they can and have been avoiding definitive actions.

The whole episode makes me think common principles of prioritizing issues are being forgotten by so many those who are responsible for our society’s mental well being. And we don’t seem to be doing anything substantial on any front either. … let that be national security, intel, inclusion of marginal social sections, …looks like we are busy addressing the symptoms too much that we completely lack a long term solution to any of these problems. Watched “Charlie Wilson’s war”, Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts in a very realistic political drama, around the tumultuous times before the US was coerced to intervene in Afghanistan invasion of USSR by a single person’s will and efforts then in 80s. 28 years later we are paying the price of trusting this most insecure neighbor and trying to keep peace process going in spite of repeated back stabbings. This movie is must watch as it shows how the wars are fought and how their financial backbones are spread thin across the globe. ...When we are in our retirements there will be movies made on How indian parliament attck was plotted or How bunch of brain washed mercenaries were sent on suicide mission to Mumbai..By then lets hope both countries mature enough and look back as mistakes of the past.

Why do we like designer stuff... or do we?

I have been pushed to see something bizzare by the subject line of the fwdee...






interesting isnt it..!!
Don't tell me that its hard to quickly say what's the time. I know its not that usable. but thats not the point. Its a design with personality and may or may not get thumbs up for being usable. Now here lies the tricky part which involves how a designer steers through such moments of decision where he has to drop fancy attribues of her designs and make peoples lives easier but mundane and less interesting. Thats the reason Mac designs have a definite personality. I heard they don't bother too much when they go ahead with their usability studies. There is One maxim that a camel is a horse designed by committee; I would extend it further, using a a overly normalised product by bunch of designers is worse; resulting interaction must feel like romancing with a family and not a person.

Alas, there are moments when the inner designer get immensly satisfied...

the other day in a similar mindless browsing spree landed at IDSA awards... here is one winner from IDEO : Heimspiel (german for "home play" ) .. so many amazing subtle design changes ..Ideas such as bringing a light element to a door edge that allows the light to spill into the room as the door rotates around the hinge, a radiator control knob that begins to illuminate in response to the radiator's warmth, door knob allowed to 'sink-in' if it has "do not enter" sign ..like a disbaled button... feels like a smooth fusion of Product Design and interaction design...


going through it made me conscious ...like a suddenly-vision-corrected-person-coinmg-out-of a-spects-shop.

the whole thing reiterates what a real design effort can turn into rather than a I-wrok-for-bread-n-butter work one gets accustomed to and start getting habituated to.

Some works are really outstanding.. check out ... IDSA awards

The Robbie Williams Show (Something Beautiful)

I just love this song ... I like robbie williams music...its so much in your face... I started listening to his mucis in my design school.. in fact that is when I started listening to eng pop music... lyrics is good,

Digsby : all in one

tired of maintaining hazzar networking sites,....we all have our reasons "hey, 'cause I have been using it from start, ...this, I started since I liked the interface,.. this one...oh..I just have coupla friends there, this id is just to provide whenever asked in typical web form for registering " .... We had meebo earlier for consolidation, here is one more Umbrella client which will take care of your messengers, mail clients, networking sites in one place... digsby... worth a try.... i liked the homepage as I could find one character of Family guy in their avatars... you never what thing you will like in an app.