Bang for the Buck

   Movies  14 Responses »
Jun 302005
 

The crowd hath spake on Shankar’s Anniyan : big hit in Tamil, big hit in Tel­ugu. Hindi Movies with Long Names, Chan­dra­mukhi, Anniyan … makes one thin­keth that movies might be your Achilles heel, Mr. Surowiecki. In case you are won­der­ing, I can­not fig­ure out for the life of me why I have this incur­able urge to write in fake old English.

Set­ting that aside for a moment, let me talk about a cer­tain scene in the movie. But first, to set things up, here is the premise: Mul­ti­ple per­son­al­i­ties come out of the docile hero, and do mul­ti­ple things. Since I hate spoil­ers, I will just say that the mul­ti­ple things he does may or may not include cre­at­ing arti­fi­cial stam­pedes with buf­faloes, fry­ing peo­ple alive, eat­ing live mon­keys, talk­ing in a hoarse whis­per and cop­u­lat­ing with snakes. And yes, I must add that it was all done in a grandiose man­ner, so if there were buf­faloes they were pretty big.

One of the per­son­al­i­ties that emerges out of the weak kneed lead char­ac­ter is a wannabe cool dude, decked up with all the accou­trements that go into mak­ing some­one a wannabe cool dude. These include, but are not restricted to the following:

    1. Col­ored Hair.
    2. Trans­par­ent cloth­ing.
    3. Gaudy Sun Glasses.
    4. Ter­ri­ble Fake Accent.
    5. This Name: Ramp Walk Remo

The girl that refused to fall for the docile hero, falls for the wannabe. Nat­u­rally. For how can you not fall when wooed with roses? Ram­p­walk sends roses to the girl. (Sorry if the sen­tence con­struc­tion sounds funny, but that’s his name. Also notice how I took the lib­erty of assum­ing Ram­p­walk is his first name, unless Ram­p­Walk is actu­ally two words, in which case he should be called Ramp W Remo…). So where was I?

Yeah, Ram­p­walk send­ing roses to the girl. Rose bushes, if you care for detail. An obscene num­ber of them in pots. Along with an audio tape. (a Com­pact Disc maybe? The direc­tor dis­dains cheap stuff) As the girl stares at the roses, look­ing suit­ably sur­prised, fake accent plays out of the tape and asks girl to smile. She obliges, and behold: ama­teur­ish spe­cial effects make all the roses bend down in uni­son. Fake accent explains to a bewil­dered audi­ence: The roses were ashamed. Duh. Some­thing a good edi­tor would have chopped, and flushed down a toi­let. (If you ever do that, make sure you have some Drano handy).

Why is this scene spe­cial, you ask? Because I hap­pened to see an inter­view of Shankar, and he talks about this scene in par­tic­u­lar: Appar­ently, the first time they brought the roses in for the shoot, the roses sucked for what­ever rea­son. And so, Shankar chose to wait four months for the roses to bloom. Four months the pro­ducer spent mak­ing inflated inter­est pay­ments. Per­fec­tion­ism, à la James Cameron.. Or cal­lous dis­re­gard for the real­i­ties of a reel­ing industry.

You think Shankar knows what the title of my post means?

 Posted by Karthik at 10:18 am

Typecast Me Not

    Lit  Comments Off
Jun 292005
 

A two-day trip — cor­rec­tion, a two day busi­ness trip — work­ing all day, return­ing exhausted to hotel rooms, call­ing wife, crash­ing. Yet inflated esti­mates of read­ing speed are made and books are packed — two, three, four of them. Rolled eyes are ignored. On return, three are returned back to the to-read shelf, and rolled eyes are ignored once again.

The Tele­graph cat­e­go­rizes the way peo­ple pack books, and they missed me, just like they missed Jessa Crispin (at book­slut).

I got to con­fess though, I’m a teensy bit proud that they didn’t pigeon­hole me. Before you go around call­ing me des­per­ate, remem­ber this: teensy means really small.

 Posted by Karthik at 1:08 pm  Tagged with:

’tis the season for tags

 Etc.  3 Responses »
Jun 262005
 

Navin tags, and sin­cere geek that I am, I do.

If you read this, and would like to take a (loong) sur­vey about your blog, feel free to click here:

Take the MIT Weblog Survey

 Posted by Karthik at 12:10 am

Intelligence In Numbers

    Lit  4 Responses »
Jun 222005
 

Wisdom of CrowdsThat crowds are dumb is a given — an immutable truth that’s not worth argu­ing about. Meet­ings are to be sneered at, group-think deserves con­tempt, com­mit­tee and pro­cras­ti­na­tion are syn­onyms. As Niet­zsche puts it, “Mad­ness is the excep­tion in indi­vi­u­dals but the rule in groups.” And Thoreau: “The mass never comes up to the stan­dard of its best mem­ber, but on the con­trary degrades itself to a level with the low­est.” (etcetera: We are good at googling).

The smartest (ok, ok, fun­ni­est) philoso­pher of them all, “Dave Barry sums up our col­lec­tive feel­ings in one (slightly long) line, “If you had to iden­tify, in one word, the rea­son why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full poten­tial, that word would be meet­ings. When on quotes, here’s another one: “Any­one taken as an indi­vid­ual is tol­er­a­bly sen­si­ble and rea­son­able – as a mem­ber of a crowd, he at once becomes a block­head.” — Friedrich Schiller, through Amit Varma.


New Yorker colum­nist James Surowiecki wanted to prove Barry wrong, and wrote a whole book about the value of meet­ings. Ok, half a book maybe. Seri­ously though, Surowiecki’s eru­dite, well-researched, and inter­est­ing book provoca­tively takes on a widely held notion — that indi­vid­u­als are bet­ter deci­sion mak­ers than groups — and proves how wrong it is. Not con­clu­sively, but there’s enough empir­i­cal evi­dence in the book to force a rethink. The book was an instant best­seller and won a lot of acclaim — but most impor­tantly it is an enjoy­able read.

So, why are groups good? A long time back, somewere in Eng­land, a philoso­pher decided to run an exper­i­ment involv­ing a few hun­dred men and a dead ox. The philosoper strongly believed that most peo­ple were dorks, and that crowds of dorks were dorkier and this exper­i­ment was going to be con­clu­sive proof of his belief. The dead ox was placed in a shandy , and peo­ple were asked to guess the weight of the ox. At the end of the day, the esti­mates were col­lected and aver­aged. The expected out­come was that the mean guess would be far off, thus prov­ing that crowds were stupid.

Unfor­tu­nately for the philosoper though, the mean of all the guesses was almost exactly equal to the weight of the ox, and much bet­ter than most indi­vid­ual guesses. In addi­ton to thor­ougly con­fus­ing the philoso­pher, the exper­i­ment had a point to it: It was an early indi­ca­tor of the idea that forms the basis of Surowiecki’s book: A col­lec­tive deci­sion made by a group of peo­ple, each of whom thinks inde­pen­dently, will almost always be bet­ter than the best indi­vid­ual deci­sion. This is not the same as con­sen­sus, which is the dumb­ing down of indi­vid­ual opin­ion to sat­isfy the group. You can­not find a bet­ter exam­ple of the Wis­dom of Crowds than the Inter­net: Google, Linux, Fire­fox and Wikipedia are exam­ples of decen­tral­ized mech­a­nisms that have deliv­ered out­stand­ing results. The Blo­gos­phere, in con­junc­tion with Google’s Pager­ank is quite pos­si­bly the best exam­ple of a per­fect democ­racy: the more peo­ple that like a blog, the more links it gets, increas­ing its rel­a­tive impor­tance and readership.

Draw­ing on exam­ples from every­day life — stock mar­ket bub­bles and traf­fic jams; the Colom­bia crash and over­crowded bars — Surowiecki paints a com­pelling pic­ture of smart groups, and pro­vides sug­ges­tions for pos­si­ble ways to har­ness the poten­tial. One of the meth­ods dis­cussed is a “deci­sion mar­ket” like the Iowa Elec­tronic Mar­ket — a stock mar­ket like sys­tem where you bet on a cer­tain per­son win­ning an elec­tion. The accu­racy of the IEM’s pre­dic­tions are bet­ter than even polls — which is sur­pris­ing con­sid­er­ing the small num­ber of peo­ple that par­tic­i­pate in it. Fas­ci­nat­ing. By the way, what do you think was the most reli­able life­line on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Get a cou­ple of peo­ple in a room. Give one of them $10, and ask him to share it with the other guy. If the other guy accepts his offer, they both get to keep the money, oth­er­wise no money for either of them. Most of the time, the offer was $5 appar­ently, while peo­ple rejected low­ball offers (any­thing less than $2), even though it was free money. Surowiecki attrib­utes this to an innate sense of what con­sti­tutes fair that we all have — and uses it to explain why we vote in elec­tions and why we tip at restau­rants in dis­tant towns that we know we are not going to go back.

The book has been accused of not being rig­or­ous enough (as in pro­vid­ing sta­tis­tics for why crowds are smarter), and some­times you get the feel­ing that the author is hand wav­ing his way to a pre-determined con­clu­sion using anec­dotes, but you know what, if you judge a book by the amount of plea­sure you get from read­ing it, then this is a good book. I’ve not enjoyed non-fiction more (if you don’t count Starry Nights, that is). Plus I now know all about the virtues of a decen­tral­ized, diverse cor­po­rate power struc­ture and ways to run pro­duc­tive meetings.

Excerpts can be found here and here.

 Posted by Karthik at 8:10 pm  Tagged with:

Identification Parade

    Life,    Lit  3 Responses »
Jun 212005
 

A group of sailors — tal­ented mav­er­icks — set out to sea on a war­ship. Amer­i­cans, World War I if my mem­ory serves me right. They get near the Bermuda tri­an­gle and mys­te­ri­ous things start to hap­pen. An eerie light comes out of nowhere — and the ship sinks. One can­not be too sure though — the captain’s log for the day is cryp­tic. But wait; there was a sur­vivor, a young man who can shed lit­tle light on what really hap­pened. Sev­eral years (forty? fifty?) later, the ship unsinks all by itself. A pass­ing ves­sel notices the bat­tered old ship on the sur­face of the ocean, and lets the Navy know. The Navy tows the ship back, and it sits idly in a ship­yard — until some­one has a bright idea. He wants to find out what hap­pened to the ship, and what bet­ter way than to recre­ate the voyage.

The Navy is con­vinced to give up the ship, and a crew is recruited. And sur­prise! The crew includes the sole sur­vivor. The ship gets a make over, and they set sail on the same route. Near Bermuda, same thing hap­pens — an eerie light, some weird noise, a long drawn out cli­max at the end of which the ship sinks. Again. But this crew was smarter — they had a lifeboat, and all of them sur­vive. Except one, that is. The sole sur­vivor of the first ship­wreck dies. The moral being, the ship unsunk itself to get the guy that man­aged to elude it the first time around.

A creepy tale that scared a young me. An uneasy, per­va­sive fear for a few weeks after. Close win­dows at night, sleep next to daddy. An anony­mous tale I want to read now and prove that old fears have been con­quered.
.….….….….….…..

Suresh Anna was Lak­shmi teacher’s son. She worked in the same school as my mom, and like my mom, got the suf­fix “teacher” appended to her name when­ever some­one wanted to refer to her. Our fam­i­lies knew each other quite well. Suresh Anna had a “busi­ness mind” (my mom claimed in pri­vate that his marks were not so good) and so after fin­ish­ing school, he did a quick course that taught him clin­i­cal lab­o­ra­tory tech­nol­ogy, and set up a lab in our neigh­bor­hood. His dad was friends with the local doc­tor, and once in a while the good doc­tor would direct some blood and urine the lab’s way and every­one was happy. Except Suresh Anna’s busi­ness mind, that is.

Not con­tent with a clin­i­cal lab, he wanted to expand. And given the extra room he had in front of the rented house that was his lab, he decided a lend­ing library would be a per­fect fit. Not an extra room per se, the patients waited there to have their blood drawn, but what sick fool would mind a few healthy peo­ple brows­ing a few shelves with a few books? Plus, it was really none of their business.

Blood together with Blood Line, sem­i­nal works inter­spersed with semen sam­ples. Yeah. Pen­guin Flyer’s was born thus — apos­tro­phe and all, and “Blood, Urine, Spu­tum tested here” gave way to “Pen­guin Flyer’s Lend­ing Library — Tamil, Eng­lish and Mag­a­zines.” The busi­ness mind did not care that tech­ni­cally speak­ing, Mag­a­zines was not a language.

Used books were bought, mom’s old books — home bound ver­sions of seri­al­ized Tamil works — were brought, mag­a­zines were sub­scribed to, and the Pen­guin was fly­ing. Fly­ing, but not very high. Cheap books were needed. Busi­ness mind started think­ing hard, and it came up with an answer that had been right in front of its nose all along. Ask mom to ask teacher friends for books. For­get cheap books, these were free books. So my teacher mom got asked, and the ques­tion bounced off her and landed on me, with a rec­om­men­da­tion attached — “Paavam, he is try­ing to make a liv­ing, why don’t you give him some of your brother’s books, they are sit­ting on the attic gath­er­ing dust.” My response about dust being a supe­rior alter­na­tive to germs was ignored, and sev­eral con­ver­sa­tions were held out (but not too far out) of earshot about some­one climb­ing the attic the fol­low­ing week­end and bring­ing down the books.

Come Sun­day, Suresh came by the house, and I learnt that I was the des­ig­nated climber. I got on the attic using a makeshift lad­der con­structed from two stacked din­ing chairs held in place by my dad and started gath­er­ing the books from boxes, and throw­ing them down (“gen­tly, gen­tly”) one by one. Trea­sure Island and Huck­le­berry Finn, The Guns of Navarone, The Day of the Jackal, The Bourne Iden­tity, Sec­ond Lady, Pirates, pira­nhas — maybe about fifty books in all, dou­bling Pen­guin Flyer’s stocks in under 30 min­utes. Col­lected book by book by my brother, now slog­ging away at a bank in Ooty.

One more box left — with all of three books. In tat­ters, miss­ing front cov­ers, start­ing with a fer­vent plea about not buy­ing books with­out front cov­ers and depriv­ing authors of their right­ful dues. I climb down just in time to hear Suresh telling my mom that he didn’t want the three books in tat­ters. Gift horses, mouths — ring a bell? Turn­ing towards me, sens­ing hos­til­ity, he gen­er­ously offers free book rentals if I were to go to his place. Yeah, and rent my own books back right? I try to hint to him that he was being loaned the books. But he didn’t get it. Or didn’t want to. So he left, cart­ing away my books, leav­ing the tat­tered three behind.

Three torn, ter­mite eaten books — naked, vul­ner­a­ble and anony­mous. I read a few pages from the first one, and imme­di­ately rec­og­nize it — Tightrope men, Desmond Bagley’s taut thriller, now a lit­tle thin­ner, and not very anony­mous. The other two remained name­less though — no vain author’s name on top of every page to res­cue them from obscurity.

One bored day some­time in the future, I started read­ing one of them. Thick, small print, long hours. About Los Ange­les — the growth of the city traced through a two fam­i­lies that set­tle there. A feud between two broth­ers, a ten­der, del­i­cate young girl called Amelia, and the home they stayed in, Paloverde. Lots of romance, adul­tery, some sex, a nascent Los Ange­les serv­ing as a his­tor­i­cal back­drop, daugh­ters falling in love with sons of ene­mies, bitter-sweet end­ing, a pot­boiler. Fun. Curios­ity piqued, who wrote it. Finally unpiqued by Ama­zon — Jacque­line Briskin, and the book was Paloverde (duh!).

The third book remains anony­mous. No names in mem­ory, no key­words to jog Google. So I blog the plot. And cross my fingers.

 Posted by Karthik at 1:08 pm  Tagged with:

Crummy Writing

 Etc.  1 Response »
Jun 192005
 

A recent edi­tion of India Today, India’s most widely cir­cu­lated news mag­a­zine has a sur­vey of Indian col­leges — a sur­vey that the Edi­tor in Chief claims is “the barom­e­ter of aca­d­e­mic excel­lence” in India. So, how does the barom­e­ter start its “pres­ti­gious” rank­ing of the top 10 busi­ness schools in India?

If you don’t read MBA as MBA but as Mas­ter of Busi­ness Admin­is­tra­tion, it sounds more lofty than CEO, chief exec­u­tive offi­cer, notwith­stand­ing the fact that the two belong to dif­fer­ent ends of cor­po­rate hierarchy.

‘cuse me?

And, hard as it may sound, the write-up man­ages to bet­ter(!) the incred­i­bly bad start. It’s con­structed almost entirely from inane cliches (“India Inc”, “there are MBAs and there are MBAs”), more inane cliches (“customer-driven”, “an insti­tute is only as good as its users think it to be” ) and ill-formed cliches (“feel-great-sentiments”?). The author has a lot of trou­ble with arti­cles, so he takes the safe route and just throws a few around to make sure — (“In the times as good as these, why bother with a rank­ing of B-schools?”).

Here’s another gem:

B-school aspi­rants have been look­ing beyond Indian shores for many years now, of late, not just to the US but also to schools in Europe, Canada and Australia.

If that’s the leader from the most cir­cu­lated issue of the most cir­cu­lated news mag­a­zine in India, then no won­der the Finance Min­is­ter thinks for­eign papers will hurt Indian news­pa­pers. . I hope they let at least the for­eign mag­a­zines in soon. All of them, that is, except this one. Hmm.. maybe that one too, the author knew his arti­cles, and I’ll for­give the word play on Suren­der and sur­ren­der as a one time thing.

 Posted by Karthik at 1:27 am

Bull

    Life  6 Responses »
Jun 182005
 

Flash­back to a few weeks. We check into a hotel on our arrival in Malaysia, and col­lect our keys. We turn the key cards around, and it says in block let­ters, NO DURIAN. A red cir­cle with a line drawn across it to empha­sise the point. The genius in me assumes that Durian prob­a­bly meant smok­ing. Then, we rent a car, turn the rental agree­ment around, and … yeah, same thing.

A few days later (we are still in flash­back mode, remem­ber?) a friend at work tells us, “Let’s go try some Durian today.” And around him, quite a few peo­ple snicker.

“Durian?”

“Yeah, it is the king of fruits.”

So he dri­ves the whole group over to a thatched tent like struc­ture, four peo­ple to a car, three cars, just before din­ner on a Fri­day. Through the drive, I keep think­ing about why a fruit would be banned from a hotel room.

As we enter the tent, a strong smell hits us — my eyes scan the place for a giant pile of rot­ten fruits sprin­kled with Calvin Klein Obses­sion, and sea­soned with var­i­ous other olfac­tory irri­tants. But all they see are some jack­fruit like thin­gies, shaped like giant pineapples.

The friend points to a cou­ple of them thin­gies, and the guys at the store (for the thatched tent was a fruit store) nod, smile, take a knife, rip it open and let out the strongest, poten­test, bad­dest odor I will ever get close to in this life. Oh, how I wish I could inflicit it on you!

Hold­ing my breath, I boldly get close to the thing and peer closely at it. Inside were a few yel­low pods, shaped like a tri­an­gle, with a tex­ture like an avo­cado, but­tery. I get away for a minute, take a deep breath and get close to the group again, which is by now in the grip of frenzy.

I watch in dis­be­lief as they all grab the hideous pods, and actu­ally put them into their mouth. I looked closely, because I was pretty famil­iar with the exper­i­ment where a pro­fes­sor put his index fin­ger into a bad sub­stance, and fooled his stu­dents by lick­ing his mid­dle fin­ger. In this case though, the pods I smelled were the pods that were being eaten.

And then the inevitable fol­lowed — “Eat some,” some­one offered. Lavanya and I took a slimy, slip­pery (and yes, smelly but I’ve stressed that enough) pod in our hands, and I watched as she boldly nib­bled at the cor­ner of hers. She fol­lowed it up with a most remark­able con­tor­tion of her facial mus­cles, and then aware of the glances of the fren­zied mob beside her, she recov­ered quickly enough to state that it was, er, not too bad. My turn to nib­ble, and I took a small bite. The smell imme­di­ately located the back­door to my nose and took it. I chor­tled, politely smiled at the guys, and threw the rest of it away. The group by now was in splits, lead­ing me to rec­og­nize an impor­tant truth: they enjoyed our dis­com­fort as much as they enjoyed the fruit.

So if I am ever stranded in the mid­dle of the Pacific, à la Piscine, and if the only store in the mid­dle of the ocean sells Durian, I will prob­a­bly pass. Unless the alter­na­tive is tor­pedo soup.

A cou­ple of peo­ple here told me that being a veg­e­tar­ian pre­vented me from enjoy­ing the plea­sures of tor­pedo soup. And they waited expec­tantly for me to take the bait and ask what that was. I did.

“It is made from a bull,” one of them said. And the other chimed in, gra­tu­itously, “From the part of the bull that looks like a torpedo.”

“You actu­ally eat that?”

“Yeah.”

“Ballsy!”

 Posted by Karthik at 2:14 am

Jithan

   Movies  6 Responses »
Jun 122005
 

We watched Jithan (a Tamil movie, for the unini­ti­ated) over the week­end. It’s a remake of Gayab (a Hindi movie, God you are really unini­ti­ated aren’t you?), and if you trace the inspi­ra­tion tree you’ll end up at H.G. Wells. Kinda like Revenge of the Invis­i­ble Nerd.

So any­ways, the movie had music by Srikanth Deva, son of the leg­endary music com­poser Deva (snicker); and I was inspired to write a detailed, ana­lyt­i­cal review of the sound­track. So, here goes.

Excre­ment.

More reviews of the sound­track from around the web.

 Posted by Karthik at 3:49 am

No Comebacks

   Movies  5 Responses »
Jun 112005
 

Pre­lude: Young man enters movies fresh out of film school, makes a few movies that span the entire emo­tional spec­trum between mushy and corny. Most of them turn out to be big hits, women cry, all the big stars vie to act under his baton, he gets called a top direc­tor, etc. Sud­denly, his luck runs out. Or mush went out of fash­ion. A few movies flop, he has a fall out with the music direc­tor who helped his movies immensely, and he dis­ap­pears from movies, mak­ing only occa­sional appear­ances as a pass­able lyricist.

Now the young man is no longer so young, and he wants to make a comeback.

“How do you make a come­back?”, he asks his muse. Per­haps ’twas a friend he asked, but that’s besides the point. Not that there’s a point to all of this, but thats even more besides the point.

“Easy. Make a youth movie na!”

“Youth movie?”

“Haven’t you seen those? Easy to make… Get a young hero. Get a young hero­ine. No, wait, get two, just to make sure. Give them very lit­tle by way of clothes. Let them all prance around a lit­tle bit. Get a dark look­ing dude, and make him shout out his dia­logues loudly. Call him the come­dian, it seems to work well.”

“Thats it?… what about a vil­lain? Where do I set the movie? What’s the premise?”

“Dude, you are so not in sync. Premise? Ha-Ha-Ha. ”

“No premise? I don’t get it.”

“Ok, have one if you must. Set it wher­ever you want to. Vil­lage, city, what­ever. Get a vil­lian if you must. But remem­ber this: Not much clothes on the girls! You hear that? ”

“…”

“I can’t stress this enough, like for instance, even if the girls have to cry, make sure the cam­era pans to their cleav­age. Or maybe their waists. Ok?”

“How would peo­ple know she is cry­ing if the cam­era is on her cleavage?”

“Duu­u­ude, don’t keep inter­rupt­ing me. Show her eyes for a sec­ond, and pan down, ok. Maybe let her heave her bosom a lit­tle bit when she cries, peo­ple seem to like that. You have to improvise.”

“I think I get the idea. Let me work on it.”

Lakshmi Rai, wearing her crying costume, but not really crying

Once young film­maker works on it alright. He gets the half brother of a pop­u­lar hero to star in the movie. (Impro­vi­sa­tion, you see!) And fills the movie with innu­en­dos about how this guy looks like that one. Even fits in a scene (or seven) with the come­dian get­ting him and his half-brother mixed up, and shout­ing out his confusion.

The other heroine, kinda overdressedHe gets the rec­om­mended two hero­ines. Even goes for “for­eign song shoot­ing.” Like going to Malaysia and set­ting a song inside a car deal­er­ship, who could’ve thought of it. He fills the movie with inno­va­tions, like hav­ing an ant go inside the heroine’s blouse and the guy tak­ing it out, hav­ing the guy do CPR on the girl after sav­ing her from drown­ing inside a shal­low river. Over­all, he feels pretty good about himself.

Just to make sure though, he goes to an astrologer and asks him to make sure his stars are in the right order.

“Hmm…”

“Is there a problem?”

“Yeah, your name has issues. R. V. Udhayaku­mar? It’s like an open invi­ta­tion to all the bad vibes that are out there”

“Oh!”

“Don’t worry, … an extra A at the start of your name will fix it.”

“Aud­hayaku­mar? That sounds a lit­tle funny.”

“Hmm.. ok, A.R.V Udhayaku­mar then. And hey, make sure you use a smaller font for the extra A.”

Leaves him feel­ing even bet­ter. And he names the movie “Karka Kasadara,” — chaste Tamil — sure to please the anti-English lobby in Tamil Nadu.

Movie gets released, and movie sucks. So movie bombs. Shaken, stirred and angry, he looks for his muse, want­ing to do bad things to it. But then, the muse had deserted him a long time ago.

A few weeks later, a cou­ple of doo­fuses walk past a run­down movie the­ater that’s screen­ing the movie. “Loong time since we saw a Tamil movie in a the­ater,” one of them opines. The other agrees and sug­gests that they go in. A few days later, one of the doo­fuses writes a clever review of the movie for his blog. It was not a total waste of time, you see.

 Posted by Karthik at 10:57 am

Me Meme

    Life,    Lit  6 Responses »
Jun 102005
 

How many books do I own?

A few hun­dred prob­a­bly. Over the last few years, I’ve been get­ting rid of my paper­backs and replac­ing them with hard­cov­ers, a habit that has con­vinced my dad, mom and wife that I am slightly off my rocker. (“Why would you buy the same books again and again?” my dad asked me when he vis­ited us, as my mom vig­or­ously nod­ded.) My prized pos­ses­sions include first edi­tions of the World Accord­ing to Garp, and a cou­ple of books from the Earth’s Chil­dren series. And a signed first edi­tion of Quick­Sil­ver, thanks to Manoj.

Last books bought

From Ama­zon: Seize the Day, a nice bound copy of Humboldt’s gift, Lolita, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

The Man who Knew Infin­ity was an impulse buy — we drove all the way to Miami to buy it — after a Sepia Mutiny com­ment that rec­om­mended it. Babyji too — I saw it at Barnes and Noble as a store employee rec­om­men­da­tion. That and an excerpt that had Anamika pro­claim­ing some­thing about col­laps­ing wave func­tions. No, the cover art had almost noth­ing to do with it.

And one called The Wis­dom of Crowds, by New Yorker colum­nist James Surowiecki. That was the _last_ book bought. I am not a big reader of non-fiction, but the premise was intrigu­ing (Why the Many are Smarter than the Few), and the first cou­ple of chap­ters were inter­est­ing. Per­haps my next post…

Last books read

Babyji, The Man Who Knew Infin­ity, The Wis­dom Of Crowds. A lit­tle bit of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Nor­rell. And Seize the Day.

Five Books that mean a lot to me

The World Accord­ing to Garp. quirky, witty and weird. For the unex­pected plea­sure it provided.

Crypto­nom­i­con — Neal Stephenson’s best work. Snow Crash and Dia­mond Age were cool, but this one is über cool. I can’t think of a book that was more fun than this. Stephenson’s irrev­er­ent prose, a com­plex plot, and large doses of irrel­e­vant detail that is nev­er­the­less inter­est­ing make for an amaz­ing read. I still chuckle when I think of the scene where Daniel Water­house goes to Lon­don, and every­one calls him Woe-To-Hice. (Say it out loud) He spends the bet­ter part of an impor­tant meet­ing try­ing to fig­ure out why they hate this dude called Hice so much.

A Con­fed­er­acy of Dunces. Not many books make you laugh so hard, and leave you a lit­tle sad at the end. Sad­der still when you know that the author com­mit­ted sui­cide because the book got rejected for publication.

Gravity’s Rain­bow Dense, Fre­netic, intri­cately plot­ted, filled with arcane ref­er­ences and insider jokes. Also hap­pens to be a clas­sic. I must’ve spent a month read­ing the book, and it was worth every minute.

Humboldt’s Gift. Bellow’s best book. ’nuff said.

Don Quixote. I approached it with a lit­tle bit of trep­i­da­tion, but it was thor­ougly enjoy­able. Clas­sics can be fun reads too.

Now the hard part, tag a few more peo­ple.… I got in late, so I have to try really hard.

Manoj. Updated.

Man­ish

Prashant

DoZ

More as I keep think­ing of names.

Thanks again to Navin and Sybil.

 Posted by Karthik at 7:16 am  Tagged with:
 Older Entries
© 2012 etcetera Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha

Switch to our mobile site