Santa is interviewing for a job as a driver. At the end, the rich lady tells him,
“You are hired. The starting salary will be Rs.3ooo.”
Santa is excited.
“Thank you. What would the driving salary be?”
Aug 212005
Aug 212005
Ponniyin Selvan is filmmaker Radhamohan’s second movie, coming on the heels of his successful debut venture Azhagiye Theeye. The movie stars Ravi Krishna — the no can emote son of the biggest producer in Tamil, with Gopika, PrakashRaj and Revathy playing supporting roles.
Radhamohan has an affinity for feel-good tales about young men from middle class backgrounds — Azhagiya Theeye was an oddball romance between an aspiring actor and a girl who wants to shake off her arranged marriage. It was simple and honest, funny and touching — the kind of substance over style movie that Bollywood will never make. The movie wasn’t flawless: it emphasised words over visuals, an unfortunate throwback to the Balachander days and the old fashioned direction did nothing to dispel the stage drama feel that parts of the movie had. But, a neat script and some good performances glossed over the shortcomings, and the movie was eminently watchable.
Ponniyin Selvan though, has no such luck. Whatever chances the movie had of success, are ruined by insipid performances.
It’s the story of a disfigured young man living with his widowed mom. He has learnt to live with his disfigurement and the accompanying disadvantages, and seems fairly content with life until someone suggests to him that maybe he should try fixing his face surgically. Turns out that the surgery costs a fortune. End happiness, begin obsession. He works hard to make money, forgetting the simple joys of life in the process. It’s not a bad premise at all, and with better performances and less mush, the movie could have worked.
Ravi Krishna sports the same blank expression throughout the movie, and his monotonal, droning dialogue delivery makes him unbearable. Prakash Raj tries his darndest to act enough for everyone else in the movie, while Revathy, surprisingly, delivers a controlled, effective performance as Ravi Krishna’s mom. Gopika is competent as the goodie –goodie girl that doesn’t care much for looks, and there is another girl that doesn’t care much for the way the hero looks.
The other big drawback is an overdose of pithy one liners in the dialogues. The occasional smart repartee livens up things, but to have every exchange between every character end in some type of witticism is disconcerting. (Also the fact that some of the lines are quite inane.. “It’s ok to live in a complex, but don’t let a complex live in you”). Radhamohan doesn’t seem to get the “cinema is a visual medium” thing still — there are a few people in the movie that seem to exist to just sit on benches and exchange “There was a Sardar once.. ” type of jokes.
Throughout the movie, the struggle between the director that prefers realism and the director that is obliged to make a star out of his producer’s son is evident. There are pointless dances (Ravikrishna can add leaden footed just below wooden faced on his resume), and given the lack of suitable situations for the hero to beat up a few people, there is a ridiculous dream stunt sequence. Surely, that’s a first.
And so, one more filmmaker with potential promises to deceive.
Aug 202005
I met a mathematician a few weeks ago, and he spoke to me for a long time about the metaphysical nature of complex numbers, about how they are mysterious objects that
are but fronts for all the profound secrets they hide within them. If all these secrets were to be unlocked, you could (among other things) cure the world of all ills.
He looked like the average mathematician type to me, and using the Beautiful Mind as my second data point, I did some regression analysis to arrive at the following conclusions:
Mathematicians are eccentric. Most of them seem to exhibit varying degrees of weirdness, and all of them are delusional.
I try to research my posts thoroughly, so I painstakingly scoured the internets, and it seems to me that the world at large agrees with my conclusions. I also conducted an informal survey and all three respondents agreed with me wholeheartedly. One of them was an engineer, and he told me that mathematicians were the only people he could call geeks, and still sleep well at night.
Now, the mathematicians seem to have gotten wind of their unpopularity, which they are blaming on a vast liberal arts conspiracy. In an startling exhibition of ignorance of the theory of cause and effect, they are convinced that jokes such as this one
“How do you define an extrovert mathematician? Someone who looks at your shoes when he’s talking to you.”
have caused their unpopularity.
They have concluded that the only way to burnish their image is to sup with the devil, so they are organizing joint conferences with writers to mollify the artsy types, and convince them that physicists are worse.
If you want evidence of the problem that confronts them, look no further than today’s newspapers. Millions of people now enjoy Sudoku puzzles. Forget the pseudo-Japanese baloney: sudoku grids are a version of the Latin Square created by the great Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in the late 18th century. Yet these legions of amateur problem-solvers tackle puzzles accompanied by the absurd assertion that “no maths is involved”. In parts of popular culture, mathematics has become not so much the love that dare not speak its name as the love that doesn’t even know its name.
While there were some things that didn’t go according to plan,
[…] real mathematicians have mixed feelings about mass-market yarns that present their domain as the stamping-ground of eccentrics, or even lunatics. But, for the most part, they applaud the endeavour to dramatise the human struggle of mathematical reasoning. Only one (absent) literary figure really fell foul of the Mykonos mob: the American writer David Foster Wallace, who in Everything and More wrote not a novel but a purported history of the mathematics of infinity. The computer-science guru Martin Davis counted “86 really egregious errors” in Wallace’s book. “Are we so hard up for approval from the humanities that we have to accept this?” he thundered.
overall I think the conference was a success — there will be a comic book in 2007 about the development of 20th century maths. If nothing, that’ll win over the engineers.
Through the Independent Online Edition.
PS: The title of this post is unique. It is the first time Mathematicians and Cool have appeared in the same sentence.
Aug 182005
I thought Manoj’s round up of Independence Day TV programs in Chennai was neat, until I read the post again and realized he seemed to be dissing Namitha.
I am apalled. Look at her gorgeous, beautiful, pretty, um… face and tell me how someone could be mean enough to make fun of her.
Aug 172005
William Grimes reviews Philip Dray’s Stealing God’s Thunder — yet another book on Benjamin Franklin — for the New York Times. After Walter Isaacson’s thorough(ly enjoyable) Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, another Franklin biography sounds redundant, but this “compact and stylishly written” book seems to get away with it by narrowly focusing on one aspect of Franklin: the scientist.
Americans tend to regard Franklin’s scientific accomplishments as an interesting sideline. In his own time, however, Franklin was lionized abroad as the man who solved the age-old mystery of lightning, one of nature’s most fearsome power displays. It was a great victory for the Enlightenment when Franklin, the backwoods philosopher, snatched the thunderbolts of Zeus and robbed them of their destructive power.
And not surprisingly,
The clergy turned a disapproving eye on Franklin’s great invention, the lightning rod. Who was he to disturb the instruments of divine wrath? Even Jean-Antoine Nollet, one of France’s foremost lightning researchers, warned that it was “as impious to ward off Heaven’s lightnings as for a child to ward off the chastening rod of its father.“
Franklin was amused. “Surely the Thunder of Heaven is no more supernatural than the Rain, Hail or Sunshine of Heaven, against the Inconvenience of which we guard by Roofs & Shades without Scruple,” he wrote to a friend.
I’m sure the clergy didn’t like this either,
As a child he suggested to his father that if all the meat being salted for the winter meals were blessed at once, it would not be necessary to say grace at each meal, resulting in “a vast saving of time.”
The Franklin Institute’s cool Benjamin Franklin page has a list of his inventions among other things.
Aug 162005
Chris Anderson, editor of the Wired wrote an article called The Long Tail last year, where he argued that the future of entertainment lies not in megahits, but in the steady trickle of money from “niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.”
The article was received well — so well in fact that Anderson is now turning it into a book, following the lead of James Surowiecki whose book born out of a New Yorker article — Wisdom of the Crowds — was an instant bestseller.
Anderson maintains a blog on The Long Tail, a “public diary on the way to a book.” A blog is a great way to gather information for a book like this — a look at some of the comments on the Long Tail is enough to convince one of this.
And if the book is not a bestseller, I’m sure Anderson won’t be too worried. After all, he invented The Long Tail.
Aug 152005
The Observer profiles Julian Barnes, the odds-on favorite to win the Booker this year.
Barnes’s longlisted novel is Arthur & George. It is a story about Sherlock Holmes’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but it does not, like the myriad of other books and plays with this starting point, draw on Doyle’s texts or on the deductive techniques of his great detective. ‘I deliberately didn’t want to write a book that bounces off his work,’ Barnes has said.
The George in the title is George Edalji, a Birmingham solicitor and the son of a country vicar from Bombay who was a converted Parsee. In the normal course of life, the two men would never have met, but in 1903, Edalji was convicted of maiming horses in his father’s parish of Great Wyrley in Staffordshire. The ‘Great Wyrley Outrages’, as they were known, became a cause célèbre when Doyle took up the cudgels in order to correct what he regarded as legal injustice and racism. Doyle became to Edalji what Emile Zola was to Dreyfus. Barnes’s telling of the near-forgotten tale focuses on our appreciation of guilt, a guilt that the Victorian novelist also feels over his fading love for his dying wife, Louise, and his growing, unconsummated passion for his wife-to-be, Jean Leckie.
Barnes threw himself into research on the Edalji case and confronts his version of Doyle with the same documentary material that he uncovered in trying to piece together the truth. He chose to write the novel, he has said, partly because the case has almost vanished from British history. ‘It makes not a ripple anywhere. It’s gone. I wrote about it because I couldn’t read about it.’
Given Barnes’s reticent nature (he decries the “Oprahfication of emotions”), it’s not surprising that he is the least well known of the favorites this year. The profile discusses a little bit of controversy surrounding Barnes, and if you know your Rushdie, you’ll react the same way I did: “Why is this controversial again?”
Barnes lives in north London with his wife, literary agent Pat Kavanagh, and it is this close association with the cannibalistic publishing scene that has drawn Barnes into controversy or, at least, into the gossip columns.
When Amis junior decided to leave his agent Kavanagh after 23 years so that he could throw in his lot with American agent Andrew Wylie, known as ‘the Jackal’, his old friend Barnes severed all links, sending a letter in January 1995 which contained a phrase that Amis has described as ‘a well-known colloquialism. The words consist of seven letters. Three of them are fs’.
I sure hope his books are spicier than the controversies he finds himself in.
PS : Talking of Sherlock Homes and Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Yorker carried a fascinating article a while back by David Grann, where he talks about the death of “the world’s leading Sherlock Holmes expert” under mysterious circumstances. The article isn’t online, but there are interviews where the author discusses the story here and here.
Aug 152005
Q: How do you make global warming go away?
A: Easy. Start calling it Climate Change instead.
[…]at the Brookings Institution, its environmental boss detects a whiff of terminological politics. “Polling data suggest that much of the public considers the term climate change less threatening than global warming,” says David Sandalow. “As a result, politicians eager to downplay risks tend to use the term climate change.
Aug 152005
Richard Lederer writes in the NY Times Magazine,
As a word-bethumped language guy, I adhere firmly to the blooper snooper’s code, taking only what I find and contriving nothing. How could I possibly concoct this vivid headline: ”Grandmother of Eight Makes Hole in One”? How could I improve on this receptionist’s voice-mail advice: ”Please leave a message. The doctors are out of the office or else on the phone and me, too”? Nor could I manufacture the sign in an Acapulco restaurant: ”The manager has personally passed all the water served here.” And could I come close to matching this student’s sentence: ”In 1957, Eugene O’Neill won a Pullet Surprise”? Or this one: ”Ancient Egyptian women wore a calasiris, a loose-fitting garment which started just below the breasts which hung to the floor”? Forget it.
”Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.” The statement is hysterically unhistorical, and we have no trouble believing that a student actually wrote it. How blunderful that one young scholar’s innocent confusion of ”circumnavigate” and ”circumcise” and accidental pun on ”clipper” can beget such nautical naughtiness. This creation is one of the greatest bloopers ever blooped.
Read the full article here.
Aug 132005
Rediff has a slide show of the “swanky” new terminal at Mumbai’s domestic airport, and adds that this is just a taste of things to come.
First Chennai and now this, so perhaps we’ll drop off the bottom of this list soon. As soon as we get rid of the mosquitoes, that is.
Link to list of worst airports through Sepia Mutiny.
