Appoose's World

The cohesion of visuals, music and poetry in Malayalam movie songs during the late 80s and early 90s was just plain brilliant, wasn't it? Pity our directors lost the ability somewhere.

( A compilation of a few youtube videos of Malayalam songs from the 80s )

Twittering as appughar. Resisted the temptation for a while. But decided to give in.

For Malayalee Readers :-)

I have moved my serious blogging to wordpress ( so point your rss feeds to http://appughar.wordpress.com ).  Having said that, I will be keeping my lj-account, mostly for commenting and also to put up the occasional external links (or youtube videos) I would like to share. In short, the bloggie posts will go to wordpress and linkie post will remain in lj.

Interesting!

Yipee!

www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/obama-to-become-next-president.html

I have been refreshing my browser tabs vigourosuly for the past couple of hours. Now, I can do something more productive.

A manifestation of extreme procrastination (and the indication that I should graduate soon as I have perfected the art and is time to move ahead for greater glory)! Anyway, the short preemptive  answer to the question "Being an Indian citizen living in India, why I am even bothered of US Election" is "I am a PhD who is supposedly writing my thesis".

Anyways, the endorsement appears at http://appughar.wordpress.com/2008/11/03/an-endorsment-for-barack-obama/

I have started to run a parallel blog at http://appughar.wordpress.com/.

The wordpress blog is meant for posting self-indulgent, incomplete and often semi-coherent ideas. However, the entries in lj will be written with the intent and belief that there is a reader base (however sparse it may be) and will be treated as a space to connect with other fellow bloggers.

ps: I am planning to migrate out of livejournal in the recent future (mainly due to the ugly ad box it is putting up). However, I am in a state of high inertia, hence deferring the actual migration for at-least couple of months.

"Preserve our {culture|faith|values}"

Every time this quintessential conservative and right-winged argument gets hurled into public arena, a pang of fear+concern wave rips over me. The surprising fact is that I do not have a major disagreement with a community expressing such a sentiment. In-fact, in a good number of 'specific' cases I can empathise with such a statement. `Apprehension to change things that are traditionally and historically found to be working reasonably well, providing an order, structure and support system' is a valid and an essential one. However, the problem with the typical main-stream right wing arguments are their unwillingness to specify what they need to preserve.

Whether it be the RSS/VHP's attempt to 'conserve' the Bharatiya Sanskriti (Indian Culture) or be it Islamic terrorist's attempt to wage Jihad to 'conserve' Islam or be it Raj Thackery and co trying to 'conserve' the Marathi pride or be it American right-wingers attempt to 'conserve' the American and family value; what is clearly lacking is the specification of what they are trying to 'conserve' (and why).
Let me take Sangh Parivar as a case study. The question that I want to raise is what do you mean by Indian Culture and Tradition ? (and the second question is why do you want to preserve it; however this question is irrelevant if the first is not answered). There are off-shot questions like `What constitute the act of conservation ? ', `Why should a majority remain a majority and minority a minority ?'. However, I am not going into such sub-questions.

I came to IIT around 5 years ago. Almost all of the 23 years of my pre-IIT life I lived at Kerala. So suddenly, I was thrown into a cultural and traditional landscape totally unknown to me. The belief systems, traditions, festivals that are celebrated, food habits, language dialects all were alien to me. Now isn't it natural that when someone calls for the preservation of the culture of India, I find it extremely ambiguous and confusing! Is it the culture of Kerala (if it may be defined) or is it it culture that I see around at Mumbai (if it may be defined) or some other place, say Delhi our national capital that I need to preserve!!! In fact, personally I found that I connected with a western (Australian) culture more easily than I could connected to the Mumbaya culture. In my metric (dare I generalise to upper-middle class internet age south-indian) cultural distance between South Indian culture to North Indian culture. super-seeds the cultural distance between South Indian culture to Western culture (dare I generalise again!).

But to make my argument more concrete, let's start by asking ourselves, what do you mean by the term `culture' ? Wikipedia gave me two related definition

1. "Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate") generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activities significance and importance. Cultures can be "understood as systems of symbols and meanings that even their creators contest, that lack fixed boundaries, that are constantly in flux, and that interact and compete with one another''
2. "Culture can be defined as all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation. Culture has been called "the way of life for an entire society." As such, it includes codes of manners, dress, language, religion, rituals, norms of behavior such as law and morality, and systems of belief as well as the art."

We will take the second argument, since the first definition innately writes QED for the non-conservative argument.
Similarly, what do you mean by the term `tradition'

• "On a basic theoretical level, tradition(s) can be seen as information or composed of information. For that which is brought into the present from the past, in a particular societal context, is information. This is even more fundamental than particular acts or practices even if repeated over a long sequence of time."

Now, the starking feature of both these definition is both these qualities, culture as well as traditional are multi-dimensional in nature. So let's break down by dimensions. Can we (or the right-wingers) defined what qualities are measured in each dimensions ? Let's for the time being assume we can. The next question is can we sort out these dimensions according to a relevance score based on amount of preservation that we need to do. Again, let's assume we can do so. What are the optimal value (positions) that we should set as bench-mark ? Note, here I am not questioning the rationale of converging to a particular value (which opens up another huge lot of moral arguments), I am merely asking to specify what is that we need to converge.

The hate-mongers does neither of these three. The lack of specification is an effective tool, in-fact it is when the extremes of two social forces meet, anarchism packaged as conservatism; nothing can be more potent that that! It is dis-heartening to recollect that how in past couple of decades our nation has ripped apart; by poisonous and under-(nil)-specified {political|religious|geographical}-bogus arguments.
ps: I wish a wikipedian order can transcend to our public political and debate space where I can express my [[citation needed]] tag freely and liberally.

This is not a movie about 'Batman', this is a movie about 'Joker'. One of the best negative character portrayals in a film.

Dark Knight is probably one of the best, if not the best super-hero (no, super-villain) film to come out from Hollywood. One of the hard (if not an impossible) thing to do for a set of comic book created characters which were developed and produced (for public consumption) almost continuously for more than half a century is to retain their original mannerism, essence and intentions.

"Either die as a hero or live long enough to be the villain?",Similarly the comic characters gets rendered as mere cliches as the life time of the comic increase. What Christopher Nolan has achieved is to do a sensible rewind of all the unwanted and rather useless or nonsensical entities accumulated by transient trends and lack of attention (by readers and creators) and expand on the original blue-print. In my opinion this is a harder thing to do than to flesh out a new set of characters. For example, it is easier for me to imagine to be re-designing and arranging an apartment from scratch, rather than throwing of all the useless junk which you had accumulated over past years and working towards a coherent, functional and aesthetically pleasing look.



This movie might be one of the most sensible high budget Hollywood production I have seen in the recent past. And hey! It offers plenty of thrills and cool action sequences. However, as I said earlier, the highlight of the movie is none other than the Heath Ledger's portrayal of the "Joker" !

A very poignant tale with an extremely sensitive narrative.

1. Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Au_revoir,_les_enfants


2. Imdb entry: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092593/

I got up with a childhood-like and sweetly pleasant dream today. I will tell you about the dream in second. Before that, let me built up the context.

It is humid (80% above), hot (33 deg C above) and unpleasant out here in "Bombay" (I risk the wrath of Raj Thackerey and his goons for using the defunct name of the city). However one of the things which make the heat and sweat bearable are the queen among all the fruits, "Mangoes". The "alphonsoes or aapoos (to which I share the same phonetic nickname), badamis, kesars , Banganapallis" have flooded the market, however carrying a high price tag courtesy inflation and crop failure (manifestation of climate change?).

Now going back to my dream. The dream was that I was in a mango orchard. Akin to visuals from Charlie and the Chocolate factory, mangoes are showering all around me. In-fact, it was almost deja vu to a candy ad which was very popular around 10 to 15 years ago, however with the candies replaced with mangoes. Unfortunately, the elephant which used to shower candies didn't appear in my dream. Anyway, I got up, ran to my fridge to pick one nice big and juicy Badami and devoured it before resuming my sleep.

It is interesting as well as nostalgic to recollect about the huge number of discussion and incidents related to mangoes. Most prominent of them being the cricket matches we used to play in our backyard. Our cricket pitch was umbrellaed by a mighty mango tree. Every time a shot managed to fell a mango or two, we completely forgot about the match. The batsman, bowler, fielders and the occasional spectators ran at their top speed to make the claim for the mango.

Unfortunately the branches of the mango tree extended up to top of our roof, which was made up of brick tiles and used to break if a mango fell on it from a considerable height. So every time an impromptu summer rain fell, all of us in the household had to run with plastic buckets and covers to protect our belongings in the house, moreover had to maintain constant vigil till the next day when my father used to get someone to replace the broken tiles.

However none of us minded the discomfort. Maybe it is because of the untold common understanding that the taste when you bite into a mango, especially when the rich juice flows into my mouth is totally magical. It is pure poetry.

Let me give a U-turn to this post, mainly due to the mention about poetry. The thoughts about mangoes are mostly sweet and pleasant. However the same cannot be told about the poetry called "Mampazham" (means Mangoes in Malayalam) by Vailoppaly. Normally it was very difficult for me to associate any other emotional feeling other than irritation towards a poem or prose if it figured in my text book. The very few, if not the only exception was Mampazham. It is a tragically painful, but extremely beautiful poems. For malayli readers a recitation of the poem is available at http://www.nishaunni.com/vailoppilli.html. If any one finds a unicode/pdf of the poem in the internet please alert me.


For non-malayli readers of my blog I am giving below a crude gist of the poem. Please do not treat this as translation, and its humble aim is merely to bring out the central premise of the story. It is candidly stated that the gist does not preserve the literary qualities of the original. However, the theme of the poem itself is so touching, I feel it is worth an attempt to tell it in English.

( The Gist of the Poem )

I had bought a Sony Ericsson W580i 3-4 months back. I wanted to buy a non-nokia phone. And sony ericssion's feature set to cost ratio was impressive. In fact, they do in general perform well than the nokia's now a days.

But, I had a terrible experience with this model. I had bought this phone around 3 months back. Now the charger + usb interface seems to have failed. The diagonsed reason being liquid seepage in the connector joints. I am a person who treats my electronics equiment with respect. I used my earlier mobile phone for 5 years and is still in working condition. The only reason I can think about is some sweat beads getting into the connector track from my palm. If that may be the case this is a case of faulty design. Please note that the connector is oddly place in the side of this phone where the palm of your hand is in maximal contact with the joints rather than the customary bottom position. However since this is a liquid seepage problem, sony ericcson has devoided my warrnty claims. I wanted to eleivate the issue and sent them an email. I got a clarification email from their side. I promptly sent them the necessary information. Afterwards, it is a black-hole situation, and there has been no replies inspite of me pinging them multiple number of times. Calling the customer care did not help; save the trouble of explaining my condition and stand on issue to five different customer agent , all of them gave me the same reply, please send an email, you will get a reply within 48hrs. "It is 48 working hours, not actual hours", that is how the fifth customer care office replied when I informed him it is well past 48 hrs of I sending the email.

I am planning to give a consumer court case.

I am including the communication so far with the customer care. The only changes I have made is masking out sensitive information like IMEI and my mobile number

( communication with support )

Pure Cinema!

This is not an easy movie to watch. The pace is slow and the story-line grim. However the impact it creates, is massive.

There is a dinner table conversation scene in the movie; which is nothing short of a spectacle. Spectacle, due to the stark simplicity of the frame and motions. One of my favourite punch-line is by Hemingway "Don't confuse action with motion". The corollary to this will be "Don't confuse lack of motion to inaction". Camera is centered around the main protagonist; frame is so tight that some of characters often clip it; something that will not fetch points in a photography class. The conversation stream is mostly off-topic; but makes contact to the emotional condition of the protagonist at distinct and discreet positions; each of which adds to the tension periodically and systematically. Mind you, the main protagonist never participates in the conversation; and is the passive listener (so are we!).

The scenes in the movies are all brutally honest; direct and uneasy to watch. They are cold, cynical, descriptive - not analytical, let one draw one's own conclusions, and more importantly throw many questions at you. It is a clear and objective copy of the period and place it is set at. It doesn't have to be hypocritically pleasant, because the depicted period wasn't; it doesn't have to accuse, nor to justify: it must be cruel and to the point, and to reveal. And so it does.

This post might look almost obligatory for any movie-going/following malayaliees, in-fact it is! I am especially proud of the quality of malayalam movies during 80's and mid 90's. But towards end of the millennium something happened. The quality of movies started becoming bad. Last decade it moved from bad to worse. However, the irrationality of the situation, (even purely from a commercially perspective) is logic defying and beyond comprehension to me.

I just finished watching "Katha Parayumbol". I really liked the movie. There is no unwanted flamboyance in the movie. It is a simple, but an effectively told tale, in a non-complicated and charming manner. It has all the reminiscence and charm of the movies in the 80's. Well scripted characters, witty dialogue and freshness in story. In short, the movie works. I heard that it was a big success back in Kerala.

Now if you do simple recap of successful and memorable main-stream movies of the past 8 years, remove the movies of Sreenivasan and co out of it, very few movies will actual remain in the list. What really bothers me is why the heck are the movie makers adamant on modeling malayalam cinema like products from bollywood or Tamil industry ? Isn't it obvious that the sensibility of the people are different. Give people a film with a simple story, but with care taken to character building, it is sure shot recipe to success. Now, to put things in contrast, how many instance do we quote a dialogue or scene from a movie made in 21st century. Very little, I suspect. But I atleast use dialogues from movies made pre-21st century in my day to day conversations quite regularly. Be it about the Paul Barber in USA or the kilometers from Miami Beach to Washington DC or Pawanai- the serial killer or mera nam Ram Singh hai/ho/hui; these are still afresh in our collective imagination.

Cause of the decay has been debated endlessly; blame game carried out long enough than necessary. But my argument is simple; the bulk of the movies which follow a bollywoodish or tamil-ish tempo have either fell flat on their heels or barely scrapped through in the box office. But on the other hand if you take the movies Sreenivasan scripted; his last three outing being Udayanu Tharam , Arabi Kadha and Kadha Paryumbol : all of them has got the attention and imagination of people. To put forward the argument from a different perspective, how many of malayali film adaptation in other languages are consider in par or better (if any) to it's original. The problem most of the viewer have is with the mismatch in sensibility, most often intentionally added by director who is targeting a different audience. Now if people are smart enough to understand that they have to change the treatment while adapting a malayali movie, why are they myopic to the reverse!! The statistics is out there in wide open, exposing itself crisp and clear, and there is bunch of jokers who is illiterate to see it, what a pity!

"Sir, extremely sorry for the inconvenience caused. But sir ........ "
This seems to be most irritating and dreaded phrase in the recent times for me.

Some times I feel guilty at yelling at poor customer care personal. Usually I am quite cool-headed. But, I am sure it would test any ones patience, if you have to reiterate the same mundane details to 4 different customer care staff, two times since the line got cut, one time because the personnel at the other end chose to keep me in hold infinitely during the middle of conversation, that too without any real notification and the final time he exposed me to the fine-print booby traps (sir, it is 48 working hours, not 48 actual hours, gotcha looser). But all the four conversations were served with the vintage punch line prelude.

The sheer inability of our people (be it customer care centre or the passport office clerk [I had gone to renew my passport yesterday]) to conduct a professional conversation petrifies me. Neither of them were interested in listening, let alone understanding my problem and they invariably come to their own sweet conclusion by hearing 20% of my story. Now, all I wanted to ask if when and if they will respond to an email which I had sent them couple of days back. All four personal insisted on me giving a complete story of the case, in-spite of my prior correspondence has matured beyond a formal complaint stage. However, chose to not to give me an option of following up and picking up the thread from where it is.

ps: Anyone who has prior experience filing a consumer court case please ping me. Need some info.

Quick and Painless Ennegram test. Got the link from diffdrummer journal.


My enneagram type is NINE (aka "The Mediator")

"I am at peace"

( Read more... )

You can find your ennegram score from here

Thank you folks for all the wishes. I survived past the deadline and managed to submit the paper. My batteries are recharged after a 14 hour long deep sleep.

Just found out that the deadline for the next conference (I am submitting a previously rejected work here) has been extended by another week. So the new counter is reset to this

Btw in news, Prof. Erik Demaine proves P=NP

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=998

My current deadline timer, at the time of this posting is set to 1 day, 23 hours, 14 minutes and 3 seconds

The live counter appears here

Wish me luck!

I sometimes feel the primary purpose of our life is to tell stories.

We are in a constant process of creating and exploring new stories in our mind. We act it out to others through our life, sometimes we write about them, sometimes we make pictures and at other times we sing songs about it. Whatever our expression means, the crux of our stories are the adjectives that we contribute.

The adjectives; the process through which we can join ideas and prioritise them is much often way more important than the subject, object or the verb. The mastery over these adjectives are the skills which endows us to touch, traverse and understand deeper territories in the fabric of our lives, but more importantly transmogrify us to master story tellers who can tell honest stories about human spirit and her perturbations.

This post is dedicated to Terry Fox.



Diagnosed at the age of 18 with cancer, one of his leg had to be amputated. Three years after he decided to run coast to coast of Canada in order to raise money for cancer research. He ran a full marathon distance everyday with one prosthetic leg. However, after 143 days of constant running he had to stop as the cancer had metastasised to his lungs. Terry Fox for me is a master story teller. The adjectives he chose to use in his story exemplified 'hope' and 'human spirit' like very few ever has and ever could.

Some more details about Terry Fox and his story can be found at http://www.terryfoxrun.org/english/marathon/default.asp?s=1