एहसास-ए-तुफ़ां किनारे से नहीं आता
इश्क-दा-जझ्बा दबी कशिशों में नहीं आता
सदियों कि खलिश और पल मे छुटकारा
रंगीन दिल को आसां रास्ता नही भाता

TOI and our thought trains

The other day I was talking to my brother who is aspiring to get into a Business school. The topic of discussion was GD sessions that are conducted during the Management Entrances. One of the topics given to bunch of 10 candidates is "Morality is a creation of weak to control and deter strong" and initial thoughts that are heard would boggle anybody with sane mind.

One guy gave an example of how Dhirubhai and how he (not even saying) allegedly build an empire using corruption while others took shots at the similar examples. Now it is absurd in so many ways ...first you quote an heresay, second it is not even close to point under discussion. It seems guys in their eagerness to 'talk' loosing a ability of active listening. Other thing evident is inability to talk in terms of concepts and abstractions or making statements which shows chain of reasoning and logical/rational bent of mind. Most talk like a typical Times Of India article, shallow in its way to drive home a point...look what you did to our best brains...!

Any takers of these mashups....

Being in an IT company is like leading two lives. Your alter ego works in the office which is time-matched to precision with western developed world while as you step out of office the reality hits you in the face. Some time it leads to frustration while sometimes I look at it as an opportunity and responsibility on us to at least bring into our daily lives some essence of digital world. These days my Google reader is flooded with feeds on topics like free APIs, most powerhouses exposing key APIs for the developer community to use and create mashups. I cannot help but put these pieces together in my mind. Some mashup ideas I am thinking can greatly make a difference...

1. We have lot of builders want to advertise their new projects, and people take long time to visualize the exact location of the new site of the apartment. A google map API can be used. We got to decide where this data is coming from. It can be a small news-mailer sent to key builders that will fetch the location information of the upcoming projects, or more appropriate would be government registry which is more authentic but the toughest to access place unless you have more forthcoming municipal corp. We can also ask them to upload images of the scheme which then pins it places using panoramia. Same thing can work wonder for the rentals. We are yet to build businesses around it.

2. With sites like 'burrp' getting loaded with members-and-consequently-with-visitors. Burrp is basically an imitation of "Yelp : an collaborative restaurant review site in a nutshell" an web20 venture started by Paypal founders once they sold off the cash cow to eBay. Now with lot of info on burrp we can utilize a standard toll-free number well popularized to get a query SMS from any location and throw back information of hotels in-and-around that area to that cellphone in return. Since we got this mobile revolution like never before in India; this can be a hot-cake idea for an API if not a tailored feature for burrp.

3. We are close to an age wherein Phone cameras geo-tag all the images it takes. Now with some additional voice tag while the photo is being looked at or being taken becomes a powerful metadata. This will improve the relevance for the image search from its current effectiveness.

4. More from the geo-tags: Assume you have access to the locations of the people through their cell phones; may be you are sitting in the control room of a cellular service provider. Once you know this area/pin code/lat-lang constitute an area under IMAX a movie theater. At 6:00 pm you have a bunch coming out of some XYZ movie. Now you can send SMS and do quick market survey as soon as those folks walks out of the theater. I know this flirts with privacy issues but such geo-context can lead to some interesting 'push' information flows.

My 2 cents on Gtalk-Gmail

Lately got into habit of critically comparing products I use. Case in point is gtalk and yahoo chat clients.
G-talk I felt also lagging in terms of some of the features like "show me recent conversations". Its a high time folks at Google should come up with something as base functionality is now already assumed and well digested. Now we want next course on our plate!
We share so many urls / links among the close group of people. Why not Gmail provide a way to access all those in one place. It can be a list of links shared with columns like who send it, when, etc... Same can be done by finding out phone no.s, and attachments. We are moving towards an era wherein Gmail is our Online Any Time accessible place for storing document and communication.

I have seen lot of people using it to work on doc partly at work and later imparting finishing touches at home using Google doc.s. Now unless you convert consciously each attached doc into a Google document it wont let you collaboratively edit it. It should be done by default for every document that comes as an attachment.

And above all...when are we going to have the tabbed interface for mails...

Why do I love Stewie?

Every one has a reason to love Stewie ...I have many. and it reflects....
1. Just the way it happened with overly popular friends sitcom, after some time one start identifying with certain characters.
2. When in reverie one doodles stewie without any construction lines!!
3. In the middle of conversation, your mind drifts to wonder what would stewie would have said to Brain at this point....

then my friend is time to safely say that you are seen one too many of 'Family Guy' episodes for a day.

Recent Watch : The Hoax

Man.....Mr. Gere can act and how...!

May be this is first time I saw him with those 70s brown hairdo ...and he also bears a fake nose. There is this shot in the initial few minutes when he is waiting in the lobby of the publisher and he is all shaken by the cold response ..he is getting jolts of reality but he dont want to let go...he acts through grunts, sound of heavy breathing,.. he trembles and boasts just to catch hold of the receding dream.....

Story, an adaptation of a novel and some hand-picked events of the life of certain writer Bob Clifford, who claims to be writing an Autobiography of legendary Howard Hughes and tries and almost gets away with the con given the imbecility of aging and idiosyncratic Hughes.

But this movies owes a lot to Scorsese's' "Aviator". It sets the tone for the charismatic character of Howard Hughes....or may be this is a case for the non-US audience like us who didnot already know about Mr. Hughes that much before Aviotor.

Recent Watch : Ghost World

One thing you will like about this movie is the way a medium of cinema is used to make a free comments on many issues that are bothering the director and he wants to share...
of American lifestyle, of perception of art and expression, about mass media and its result into mass consumption, of the vices of capitalism, of culture of shallow pursuits.

Story or plot revolves around the teenage-adolescence void and their yet to 'harden' and 'develop' social skills. But it is just a prop. The undercurrent is very strong and it is voiced when our "dork" record collector says.."Give them a big mac and a pair of Nike and they are happy"....

For Scarlett fans.. it is one of her subdued performance or a mere presence to show flip side of 'those who comply'.

Recent watch : Death at a Funeral

This one is one hilarious and slapstick comedy...builds up through the movie and reaches the crescendo towards the end... like a Woodhouse classic full of close family members and relatives, aunts and uncles, with their eccentricities..all shows up and there begins one rib tickling series of events.

Too beautiful to lie (Korean)

Wanna watch a Karan Johar and David Dhawan flick in Korean tint with its mastered brew of romance comedy? Kim Ha-Neul replaces Govinda and How!!! This is kinda stuff that proves that a good passable film can be made with tried and tested formulas and patterns. But it does not stop it from being a bit less entertaining!!

Canadian : Sweet Hereafter

In the back drop of serene Canadian village, a story, hypnotically told, of a tragedy and its aftermath. Two parallel stories run through the movie - one of the ambulance chaser who him selves have troubles back home...and of a surviver of the accident, a more sensitive one of the bunch.
She gets to live her favorite bedtime story of pied piper.

There is this opening scene of car wash that sets the mood for the things to come.
Sense of community among distressed is paramount and it gets its rightful place in the scheme of things.

The film's tag line "There is no such thing as a simple truth" lives it up to show how.

Bic Runga : Sway

A friend fwded me this beautiful song by Bic Runga...hope she is not One-hit-wonder...hk out the lyrics too, and the tune is so good it reverberates all day long ... enjoy

Invasion : Extremely Pathological, Stay Away

Hollywood has this culture where the studio biggies forms a committee and decides how and on what next movie gonna be. And a typical result of such cumulative nonsense is "Invasion". And why Mr. Prolific Daniel Graig is accepting such pedestrian roles is also a mystery. He is a tuity-fruity doctor fighting against alien invasion with a mother and practicing Psychiatrist who is Nicole Kidman. Donot waste your time and money on this...

Khamoshi(1969) : Watch it for Waheeda and Gulzar's poetry

Have been listening some of the best songs (since the time I could remember listening to music) like "Tum pukar lo" and "Woh shaam"..and realized that they all happens to be from "Khamoshi (1969)". Credits of the movie were crowded with awe-inspiring biggies. There I found some of the best artists behind its making. Waheeda Rehaan's charming presence and Hemant Kumar's melody makes each of its song a haunting number. "Sirf ehsaas hain ye" is also a gem of poetry by Gulzar less likely to found in mainstream Hindi movies. But one sure feels the pace of things matching to late sixties and one cannot deny that fact that it was one of the forward looking cinema for its times. Watching Waheeda makes me dig down for her best flicks. No doubt she gave some of the classics like 'kaagaz ke phool' and 'Pyaasa'.

time to get happily surprised

I was down with viral.. feeling shitty that evening ...after a long boring day in bed...and in half sleep I double-clicked this flick...n got happily surprised that I watched it till the end without break...This is a psycho roller coaster ride is at its best if one lets the power of "Make-believe" take over.

India's own Majid Majidi

Blue Umbrella - A simple Ruskin bond story told in the equally simple way. Vishal Bhardwaj comes up with yet another movie for kids, staged on the serene backdrops for his native Kumaun. Why I kept thinking of Majidi is because of the subject matter although Iranian uses a perfectly still camera for longer shots a little too much that gives more seriousness to the whole narration. Once a friend who is pro told me about this bit. Although more play with camera gives a little fluidity if the story lacks it.
Don't miss it if you admire Vishal's work.

Sona - Abhi Nahi Aana

very good song...just chked..it is from 2006...how did i miss?.. Sona mahaptra's one more video is there...aa ja...which has got a nice music video.

Understanding USA

Along the line of my previous post...this one is also about the info-graphics and its tremendous power to drive home a point based on complex data.

Ted dot com and gapminder

Ted's site is an apt platform for the biggies in the world arena; those who bring about a change in the perception of world issues. Some of the presentations and talks will remind you about the movie-documentary 'The Inconvenient Truth'. The way each argument is put up and made so compelling, is a testimony to its clarity of thought and transparency in presentation ..which is so much missing in a mass media we are fed with these days.

Having read Tufte's Classics and always thought about missing examples in todays context, this one presentation took me a long way in terms of my understanding of "Quotients of Development" and power of appropriate info-viz tool that help us drive home the correct inferences out of statistical data which are normally looked upon sceptically and often discarded as yet another useless contrived gimmick of numbers.

Free translation of Nida Fazli's poetry

hardly did I change,
am still the same
met so many,
but strangers we remain

surrender myself
to words and color
doesn't we all have
the golden despair

quest is one thing,
so is the reaching
a lot is between
the eye and the dream

.... some lines are free translation of Nida Fazli's poetry... rest by yours truly

Liars Paradox

Everyday ends dawning the meanest truth of our lives
Like a Liar's paradox, either which way it but defies

The observer and the observed, elude the order
I regain the senses and embark the journey of forever