Happy birthday Appa and God bless you! You are the kindest person I’ve known in my life.
Jan 312005
Hundred Years of Relativity
Etc.
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Jan 302005
“… in 1905, a young patent clerk named Albert Einstein found the way forward. In five remarkable papers, he showed that atoms are real (it was still controversial at the time), presented his special theory of relativity, and put quantum theory on its feet. It was a different achievement from Newton’s year, but Einstein’s annus mirabilis was no less remarkable” Read more at the Economist …
And what does relativity mean to us? Rowan Hooper explains.
If you think you can explain relativity better than Hooper (and do it with pictures) then you should check out the Pirelli Relativity Challenge.
Jan 302005
Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. Winner of the Man-Booker prize for 2002.
Life of Pi is a book that can be difficult to pigeonhole: it could be a modern day fable, a fantasy with shades of magic realism or just a simple tale of great adventure. But one thing it surely is : a great read.
The protagonist of the book is a young man named after a French swimming pool — Piscine (pissin’) Molitor Patel, son of a zookeeper in Pondicherry. In the first 16 years of his life, Piscine manages to shorten his name to Pi, starts practicing Hinduism and Christianity and Islam, and picks up a few nuggets of animal psychology from his father (including “You can never befriend a tiger”) — all of which stand him in good stead as his family packs their bags (and a few animals) and leaves for Canada.
Enroute to Canada, a shipwreck leaves Pi stranded on a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, an injured zebra and an adult Bengal tiger called Richard Parker for company. Soon, all the other animals either eat each other or manage to get eaten by Richard Parker, leaving only Pi and him remaining. The rest of the book is a fascinating account of how the two manage to survive over 200 days in the Pacific, with a flimsy tarpaulin used to demarcate their territories on the lifeboat.
We know Pi is going to survive the ordeal, but it is a tribute to Martel’s narrative that he manages to keep the readers curiosity piqued almost constantly. Every thing that happens on the ocean rain, no rain, day, night all bring a different kind of adventure with them : a new set of dangers for Pi, and new ways in which he must overcome them.
When he finally reaches the coast of Mexico with Richard Parker, after traversing through an Utopian island — probably Martel’s nod to magic realism — Parker runs away to leave Pi to do the explaining to a bunch of incredulous Japanese assessors. And then Martel throws us a curveball — a retelling of the tale that will leave you stunned (and perhaps a little perplexed). So what is the truth?
The conversations of the author with the present day Pi (that are peppered throughout the book), and the initial encounter with an old man who points Martel to the story add a lot to the aura of believability that the book creates. The only thing that detracts from the book is the occasional preachy tone that it adopts. And the Hindu-Christian-Muslim parts at the start were downright corny. And… no, I shouldn’t be nitpicking. This is a wonderful book — one of the very best I read last year.
Fool’s paradise
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Jan 302005
A pleasant surprise for me over the last few weeks browsing blogs has been the number of Tamil Blogs on the internet. But, much to my dismay almost all of the Tamil bloggers seem to have been struck by a singluar obession — the urge to communicate in “pure” Tamil. Here’s an example : the winner of this year’s “Best Indic Indiblog [Tamil]”.
There are quite a few English words that have become part of colloquial Tamil today. Words like bus, car, computer, coffee, tea, brush, toothpaste, soap are de facto Tamil for the man on the street. The sensible thing to do would be to expand the language to include these words, right? Nah. Not for the purists, the people that would rather travel by a “Perundhu” and drink “Kuzhambi”. Dont get it? Don’t worry, not many people in Tamil Nadu do either. Go to Madras and ask someone on the street if she uses a “Kanini” (scholarese for a computer) and she’ll either laugh you off the street and/or move as far away from you as possible.
So while the rest of the world (Tamil speakers included) browses the web on laptops and clicks on links, the clique of purists would rather use a “MadiKanini” (Gawd!) and use “Chuttis” to traverse the Valai. And by doing so, they hope to influence everyone to follow suit and start talking like them. Go figure. Try as they might, my milkman is always going to say he was “late” because his “cycle” had to undergo “repair.”
Every language changes over time. Change usually starts with the spoken word, and starts reflecting itself in the literature of the time. Look at old English — it is almost unrecognizable from what we speak today. Does that make it a lesser langauge? The gulf between written and spoken words is wide and growing in Tamil : not a healthy trend. A language remains vibrant and young by absorbing words and adapting to change — the more insular it is, the sooner it loses its vigor.
Of course there are exceptions : Dubukku has a delightful little blog written in a conversational tone.
Jan 292005
Dilip D’Souza is as red as they come. But hey, even bleeding heart liberals can write well.
And BridalBeer’s blog is personal, quirky and well-written. In other words, a good blog.
Jan 292005
As I grew up in Coimbatore, I used to take a bus everday from home to school and back. At “terminuses” when buses stopped for a while, the bus would soon be full of people trying to make some money. There were the beggars of various hues, the inji maraba peddlers and then the lottery ticket hawkers: Mostly women and kids who were too proud to beg, screaming “Assam, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu — oru rubaiyku oru latcham” (one rupee can buy you a hundred thousand). They made a 20% commission on every ticket sold, and they would plead, coax and cajole everyone in the bus to buy just one ticket. Hard work, yeah, but most of them did it with dignity.
Over the last couple of years or so, state governements have started banning lotteries. It started off in Tamil Nadu, and seems to have spread to neighbouring Kerala now. Why the ban? Because lottery tickets are gambling, and gambling is a vice. And Indian Governments love to legislate vice. True, gambling is a problem. But it is a personal problem, not one that society should try and legislate. We know a priest that lives next door to my grandmother’s house. Every single day, he spends at least half of what he earns on buying lottery tickets. Once in a while, he would win a few hundred thousand, and promptly buy expensive “jackpot” tickets with his winnings. Now that lotteries are “banned” in Tamil Nadu, you think he has been mysteriously reformed?
Seedy places where you can play “scratch” lottery have mushroomed throughout the state. With legitimate lotteries, the government at least got a piece of the pie. Meanwhile, I wonder what happened to the old woman that peddled tickets in her shaky voice at Gandhipuram. I took pity on her and tried to buy a ticket once, and she told me “Chinna payanukku idhellam vendam thambi” (A young boy like you shouldn’t be buying this stuff).
Locked out
Life
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Jan 282005
There is an interesting article at Wired about the art(!) of lock-picking.
A few weeks ago, we had been to New York. On our return, we reached home at midnight to realize that I’d left my keys behind. Lavanya never carries her keys around on trips such as these (her cute key chain weighs close to a pound), so mom, dad, she and I were stranded outside our house.
A locksmith responded to our call in about an hour. After a little bit of haggling over the price, he started walking towards the door.
“How long do you think it’s gonna take?”, I asked him. “Oh, about two minutes, perhaps less,” he responded nonchalantly. Impressed, the four of us gathered around to watch him at work. He reached into his bag, and pulled out a long, threaded metal contraption that looked suspiciously like a drill bit to me.
“Is that a drill bit?,” I whispered into Lavanya’s ear. She shut me up with a cold glance, and turned back to watch him at work. He peered into the lock for a minute, then turned to me and said, “This is easy!” Then he got out what looked like a $50 cordless drill, but for fear of another cold glance I didn’t comment. Then he began a rapid sequence of movements, which culminated in him drilling a large hole in the middle of the lock. And he had the gall to turn back and smile proudly at us, like he had just won the Dutch Open. The moron had just bored a hole in our lock, and earned a cool $100 in the process.
We slept fitfully that night — you can’t expect to sleep well when all that is stands between you and a potential serial killer were two chairs stacked up against the door. We needn’t have worried though — with locks like this, a chair will possibly offer more protection.
PS : The next day, we asked Geetha and Raja, our friends who had hosted us at New York to check with Enterprise if I had left my keys in the rental car. Raja called me back to say they had our keys. Small consolation. A week later, the keys arrived by mail — they were someone else’s. A fitting dénouement.
Tamil Cinema Today
Movies
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Jan 282005
A Vairamuthu interview to kick off the day. First the good news. Vairamuthu is not writing for Rajinikanth’s Chandramukhi. But he says, every “micro-second” of his life contains poetry. Like so:
“Princess of Istanbul (!)
Heat up the land with your kisses” (from Mazhai)
He talks warmly about Illayaraja, I think. It is kinda hard to figure out what the man is trying to say. And he also says something about talking to Rahman being a “pleasure.” Says their next project is Godfather starring Al Pacino and Asin.
And Rajinikanth? What can I say? Perhaps just a bad wig day.
Meanwhile, Balu Mahendra agonizes over good directors (read : him) not being treated right by Tamil cinema. Poignant story about him talking about salaries with other directors, and realizing belatedly that they were talking in millions, not thousands. I used to like him a lot, but he seems to be stuck in a rut these days.
Speaking of photos
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Jan 282005
Amazon is starting to establish itself as a “technology” company. After pioneering “search inside the book”, they’ve come up with this : the block view thing on its yellow pages is a great new idea. They have pictures of almost every block in select cites, and you can view storefronts, and browse the whole block virtually. Take that for cool!
Talking about photos, Google’s Picasa picture organizer is typical Google: simple, efficient and indispensable.
Jan 272005
