Thoughts on pot

Quantum of solace se yaad aaya... that’s what are we missing in our lives... at least let me speak for myself... I heard all the bond movie names are picked from such cheesy words from Ian Fleming’s novels...

The constant turmoil that we live into.. I mean... every dig we take on internet starts with Google... it is a new world’s web address bar... for a while think about a scenario where you are living in a room and everything you want involves a hunting ... long ago we used live in simpler times... where a book finished used to linger in our minds for days... quoting that used to be way of enjoying it... calling bro from other room and reading him passages were the fun part... something is getting lost today..maybe there are distances.,...maybe people we care about part... and there comes a need for talking with many at a time ... we are constantly hard pressed for time....
I go blank in front of blank screen and get careful and politically correct and filter my own thoughts... but true me do meet me sometime.... thoughts come rushing in...
It peaks when I am on my morning 8km run and climaxes when I am taking hot showers on my back...(my lord, ye baat note ki jaye..ye insaan aaj kal sexual metaphors bahot use karne laga hain)
But I feel the blog should not give away ..but should talk about the things that culminate out of your intense brooding over a thing, thought, issue... it should surface with more clarity than clutter.

Things I like to share I get it in that ephemeral moments when my mind is completely light and feathery .. watching over the steps one after the other and thinking nothing else... i fact these days...we hardly do anything for a prolonged period of time... something is always there to disrupt u .. a buzzing cell...talap for tea/coffee... somebody at the door... unwanted mail alert... ... we tend to get something close to this thing..that higher state of mind..on pot(I don’t have that experience as yet but my friends from arts school tell me) or on the pot... (assuming some invest good amount of time for the ROI sitting there) ... some find such lighter moments... moments of clarity in their sleep ...at 4 am... my Prof Bapat.. use to say.. sleep after a good wrestling with a tricky design problem and let the mind synthesis it ... and in the morning..it will be all clear and crystalline for u... they call it “let me sleep over it”..

For me this part of sleep comes not at 4 am but pretty late in the morning... and that supposedly design breakthrough moment actually turns out to be sleep breaking moment ,,,..

I see I write in a muddled up manner, try to be relentless. It reminds me what Sean Connery says to his prodigy in ‘Finding Forrester’ ... Don’t stop ... Keep writing...Don’t stop even for a moment.. it is a key to good writing.... but ... when unlike the seasoned writers it should be good to be able to write one full page of your state of mind... I admire those who can do this..may be through a diary .. sometime they are the one who use it to motivate themselves... for people like me.... by constantly pushing myself .. as to show me what u are capable of.. this results into a constant watchfulness I would say till the level beyond which it is difficult to call healthy.... blog is on such poking to myself... I don’t believe in mass media but I blog...I believe the key to good conversations is knowing how the listener is responding... and growing into that conversation in such a way that you both discover something more valuable and connect... sometime I feel there can be a nice tool one can develop that creates a collage of my conversations with many into a coherent publishable feed... so i tell my friend.. about this movie... and then about how was stuck in traffic... it would be nice to extract that conversation into something others like to overhear and add... no....not a chat room.... we don’t want more chaos to what we already get exposed to... we don’t want to land up in the privacy law suits also. ..

Welcome to sajjanpur .. Return of Relevance

Shaym Benegal is a sweetheart from the time I, sorry, we (started watching TV was a group activity then), used to watch 'Bharat ek khoj' with kurta clad Nehru ...and later shyam banagal took me to new heights of adoration after his "mammo"...happened to see this film on one serendipetous afternoon on TV... and realised the lasting effect of a good cinema on ones mind and opinion and so on ....

Last weekend, picked Sajjanpur over much hyped 'Kidnap' and (plz...dont judge me!) 'Drona'..and needless to say I throughally enjoyed it... at prasadz it was like a private screening...in out metros such movies can survive with such medium and small size theatres only... It was less of a movie more of a folk-lore told in a similar fashion. This story touches so many interconnected aspects of our not-so-urban areas and unlike Swades, it gives a full justice to it without being unmindfully preachy about it. Some characters stand out and some shots still bring the smile on my face and make me realise how can the director bring humor in so subtel way.... One such instance was "Baithiyeee Mamaji..!!" ... there was nothing funn about it but it was all adding up. The shot when Ila Arun comes and steals the show is , I think, the high point of the movie. If possible catch this movie with a Bihari on your side, as some words are better understood at that very moment and there are a lot of the words from rural dialect. Omkara tried this and here again we are trying to go back to where the real stories are.

Light Bulb Moment

mind in thoughts, eyes in blank stare,
a step after another, matching lines of the floor

frantic run on a mill, still going nowhere,
light bulb moment eludes, nothing seems clear

Farhan Rocks

Was it because platinum tickets in PVR screen or a good company or my upbeat mood, I don't know...But i liked ''Rock on'.. and Farhan as a rockstar. It came effortlessly to him, a prodigal son of poet and screen-writer who is already on a career high with his few flicks, nobody else would have been a better choice in this role... and Farhan did it so well...I mean his stage presence overpowers any what so ever flaws in his rest of the screen presence or his heavy hoarse voice, a perpetually frozen countenance.
I believe rock is not about good voice ... its guys' idea of mass communication...
Its loud and its direct...
I am no big rock fan ..but i have listened to my share of rock and
I don't have crazy looking hairdo or grunge graphics outfits or silver jewelry... but the way these 4 jam... I loved it..
this new actress who did 'saakshi' was good in her role, she is out from now on for good sensible roles, few that our film industry produces... and Koel was equally bad... but they were always the side dishes..
No where these rockers feel any obligation to the English rock, they are as Indian as it can get... may be a little urbane ... in the ideas they convey... in the words they choose. Like a real Punk rock, this shows the reaction against the producer- driven music compopsition ... with their skirmishes with label company honchos...

Among the movies on the similar theme, I have seen 'Almost Famous'.. it was good...Kate made it good...while the soundtracks are all from the already popular songs, the theme and the story is around a band's dynamics... same is with very well made movie 'Dreamgirls' ..its about a band's journey and all the emotional ups and down they go through like a spicy reality show squeezed into a two hour movie. One of the best movie on such theme, I stumbled upon is "Once", which is also an Oscar nominee for 08, a simple story of a guy and girl and the music they happen to compose together...both are non-worldly and socially awkward and in typical situations of their own in their lives...but its the music that gives them the new breathe of life and hope.

Like any Hindi movie, ROCK ON has got many unconvincing twists and glitches in the script, like the time Farhan calls it quits...I mean one got to have something big to happen for leaving your passion all of a sudden. But all and all, its a good movie... As I always say, watch this flick with bunch of dudes in forgiving mood and not with sceptics.. !!

The Other Khayyam

Been to twist n tales... our own neighborhood bookstore and enjoyed an hour there..
came across a classic ...life n work of Omar Khayyam...his work"rubaiyat" (four liners)..first I thought is this the music director of the classic 'Umrao Jaan' ... but no .. this happened to be a century older... a poet who pushed the boundaries of mysticism, existentialism, nihilism...

These few lines got stuck as I flipped through..

"Since neither truth nor certitude is at hand
Why waste your life in doubt for a fairyland
O Let us grab the goblet of wine
for, drunk or sober, in ignorance we stand"

The guy was not just a poet but happened to be a versatile human being ..a scientist,mathematician, astronomer...deeply inclined towards the doctrines of Sufism but never confined himselves into a single doctrine... ..the book have higher linguistic analytical stuff on his style or writng..
things like "Ontological indeterminism"... that mean Khayyam used to use the words even outside the periphery of the commonly understood meaning and context.. "daayra" ... one of my favorite Urdu word..

would have been a good a buy..wanted to give in to the impulse...thought unless I read his poetry myself and let it sink, no point in reading the second hand interpretations... So saved it for the days with luxury of time and deeper pockets!!

O Soulmate !

O soulmate, of denied existence
let me find my soul first
the glass shoe I'll then take around
from city palace to that remote hut

As I look for you all around
Its more a search of lost self
somewhere within and without
a mute perfection waiting to prevail

Handful of salt thrown either way
safe shores, see'em all receding away
the pain and the pleasure of love labor
realm unseen unknown, into we both sway

I start feeling consistent again...

I see people around me who have some or the other way some itch for physics. ..every designer some point of his life wanted to make his career in physics... although theoretical physics is tucked away nicely in the mysteries of advanced mathematics... it always eludes one when he sets out make career choices that are at that time of life look pragmatic and worldly. But the quest for philosophical foundation is always on...in some form...some call it spiritual or some knowledge, some search for completeness...

I grew up in a school where a day used to start with recitation of 16th adhyay of Bhagvadgita.. for reasons beyond my understanding even today.. they say it explains so many things, mostly behaviral dos and donts but I still pick my choices on my own on every cross-roads and those codes of conduct fails to come to my mind. Later in the day we were taught physics which tries to define the world view of space, time, object, matter, cause and effect.. separate isolated belief systems were under constructions ... I am sure folks from school wanted us to learn Upanishads but with no broader framework as to why it is good to know these ancient scriptures... so the answers are now getting clearer. Its when Fritjof Kapra runs you through the simplistic understandings of philosophical basis and limits reached by western way of critical inquiry into things, lets call it quantum physics deep downward and relativistic model upward. In his book "Tao of physics" he draws parallels from Hinduisms and other eastern mysticisms and I feel my both ends somewhere meeting. I start feeling consistent again.

Music that connects

Music is integral part of our lives, and when me and my friend hang out inevitably topics shifts to things he liked and things I liked listening to in these days, ...its like a co-discovery.... he was telling me, incidences around some songs - Once the legendary S D Burman was composing a song and R D of course had his itch to introduce a fleet of instruments at every sam-n-taal. Now S D allowed him to do so and when the song finally came out; RD was aghast as none of it was there in the final cut. SD took care at the time of sound mixing!!
Our thought train such kept crossing lines, finally Pink Floyd and their insistence of perfection. ..in one of the song they wanted a pig's squelching sound, they brought a pig right in the recording studio.
Ek vo din tha aur ek ye din hain...
Now we live in the world of fakes of the likes of pritam who plagiarizes each one of his song from World music and in a way render social service to the ignorant people pf India. Some of the originals are from Korean movies even some from TV serials ..and are worth listening to as you would like them even without understanding the lyrics.

Permission Interfaces for better dialogs

We loose our innocence every passing day..we call it learning the ways of the world...
so is designer goes through this maturity curve, he learns the ways of the world; undones all the notions when he was fresh out of design school. We used to have these rosy ideas about appropriate design... we still do but in more pragmatic frame of mind.
I was under the the deep influence of design bible "design for the real world"by victor papanek. I used to look at the marketing efforts and their right hand mercenaries for all the dirty work - the advertisers, in utter disdain. I still think its a bad use of creativity.
As papanek opens his book with a line - "advertising is world's phoniest profession which tries to influence people to buy things they don't need with the money they don't have and to impress the people who don''t care."
And now here I am reading this book "Permission Marketing". It teaches you how to bait a stranger to be a friend, and then a customer.. of course I am not out there to sell anything. My whole focus is this books emphasis to use of the web for 1:1 with masses as against traditional interruption marketing techniques of the conventional mass media.
But it is good to learn from things you feel unethical and immoral, right? so When sachin says he wont endorse cigarettes one feels good about him..
neways...in this book Seth Godin succinctly take you on to changing nature of marketing efforts with time and media...what amazon did to web and how its changing the ways businesses are done.No, its not going to be another dotcom dud. Web is mature now if it is not already said enough. Core values and mores of the permission marketing is so very relevant to UXD since its finally the UIs that get influenced by this pitch and approach. And finally out there on web and its clutter and overload of information - you are in a selling business..may be not a commercial product or but of course an idea or a sequence to do things.. wherein step by step permission interfaces are more desirable than in your face interruptions.

Little Miss Sunshine : Time to look back...

Its not one more in the crowd of character comedies, in fact I wont call it comedy at all. There is some good characters and pretty eccentric in their own standards too.

Our protagonist the kid who wants to participate this pre-teen beauty contest, a self-help teacher and really PITA (pain in...) practitioner at home, an adolescent and restless brother of miss sunshine who is focused to the edge of craziness to become a fighter pilot, a scholar and depressed to clinical levels uncle who just had a break up with his gay partner, mother who is trying to cope all the pressure, and the old school grandpa.

This jamboree creates this tremendous possibilities of friction, tension and drama. I mean once you have a good 'elements' identified what's left is pretty much their 'placements',...as one theater director likes to call his characters as my 'walking-talking props'.

It is of the kind of a film where you go in, have heartiest laughs without realizing that laugh is at you..the audience. In fact it ridicules the conditioning of us by mass media to have the Best in our lives and thereby making ourselves miserable. We 'all' want the best personalities and features illustrated over and over by glossy magazines, education that is intellectually stimulating and work that is rewarding and socially relevant, spouse that is sexually, emotionally stimulating and comforting, kids that listen to you and have some of your unfulfilled ambitions...anything below than this is failure and No NO. This movie has lot to say about how American living has turned into. This finds it place alongside "American Beauty" , "Requiems for a Dream" and "Ghost world". If you liked those, go for this one.

Our Indian urban-scape is slowing gonna be like that, an eventuality of set of distorted ideas that we follow about modernity and being a developed nation. Reminds me of the Eddie Vedder's song" Society" .... society, you're a crazy breed I hope you're not lonely without me ....When you want more than you have you think you need ...

Gorge at George

If you are a foodie, then ultimate pleasure is discovering new joint and planning it for a nice occasion.
Being in Pune and especially in Aundh had been a so far not that adventurous but of late there is some renewed activity and some surprise discoveries. I have been a regular at Idlicious, a breakfast joint to go to with half sleepy eyes and eat till you drop those typical southee dishes and hang around with a steaming cup of filter coffee. Moving on to the midday, if you are a hard core non-veggie, ‘Tareef” is one such place on your list of never-to-miss eateries, especially for Paaya soup and raan (lamb leg piece nicely roasted) and their tenderly cooked mutton biryani. It reminded me of my days at Hyderabad and those late luncheons after a sweaty volleyball games and quarrels thereafter. Talking about mutton “George” is on such restaurant near MG road. Have a good walk on MG road and then take it out all on those crisp mutton chops followed by Pishta Kulfi. If you little more foolhardy in your culinary explorations, radio will take you to new high with kheema pav and seekhs. MG road is a place full of such close to my heart joints. You enter Hotel Diamond with tired legs and you have at your disposal gulps of chilled beer and mooh lagan ke liye Surmai fry. ... List is endless...watch out for more on this ...till then let me go and relish homemade aamras and rice papads.

Starting out in the evening

I have this special place for the American Jewish scholars and writers. They would give you the best piece of literary work, may it be Charlie Kaufman, Spielburg or here in this case Andrew Wagner... this is so far the best screenplay, and it gets its due nomination to some ivy league critic award as well.

The four corners of the plot, these four characters are so well balanced and keep the things tight. A less understood writer in his last years, his daughter on the wrong side of 30s who has her own issues with her relationship with a guy who carried some priorities of his own ahead of anything and last the catalyst of change in this story, the university student completing her thesis about this writer who comes and "shake things up".
There are some good conversation when this student probes in to bring out the writer's take on her understanding of his novels. The film is replete with dinner table quotable and some deep enough to be just quotes..

"..To sit across a table and talk to someone you love is itself a complex engagement...to go to bed with someone and carry the conversation to the realm of body, a realm of insecurity and vulnerability and fear as well as pleasure, is fraught with the sad evidence of how difficult it is to understand a person and to make yourself understood."

When she say.." I find few men of my age interesting. They are like chewing gums, few minutes of flavor followed by a bland repetition..."

Eloisa to Abelard -- Alexander Pope

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;

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