Monthly Archive for February, 2009

Here’s my two cents, or rupees, or whatever on the whole topic.

To summarize my opinion it’s this: It’s a good movie. It’s enjoyable to watch despite the cliches, and the direction and cinematography is fantastic. That being said this movie will change a lot of people’s opinions about Indians.

I feel this is important because people will start taking Indians a little more seriously around the world, treating them as people with regular lives, hopes and dreams, rather than the stereotyped cow-worshipping polytheistic dork working at a call center or a kwik-e-mart.

It’s likely many people will be compelled to treat India as more than just another emerging market and invest in providing higher-end services and products.

Here’s what I thought about the movie when I watched it:

• Despite my relatively poor command over Hindi, I was charmed at the originality and authenticity of the dialogues. I’d be really interested to see what a native english speaker would have to say about the subtitles everywhere.
• While it seemed a little odd to see everyone speaking in English (wait, that seemed very odd), the director does a good job of giving us more important things to worry about.
• Indians everywhere would feel proud about this movie. A lot of people criticize this pride (especially at the oscars), primarily because except for the actors and the set helpers, everyone who made the movie were Westerners. But that’s the thing about Indians – they like seeing themselves in movies, news, media, and would especially yelp at the thought of being featured in a movie abroad. Heck! I’m sure that many people yelped when the TV show Heroes had a small ten minute section in Chennai.
• While I’m no expert on movies (I watch one a month or something, and even then they’re butt blisteringly boring), there were better ones, atleast in the oscar nominations (or so I’ve heard), but this film is so absolutely different that it makes up for not being intellectually stimulating like “Syriana” or something like that.
• The film does what it’s supposed to do. It plays with emotions. Despite clearly guessing the ending, I was genuinely pleased to see what happens at the end and was at the edge of my seat most of the time.
• Lastly, this film will make a difference. Not in a way that the US will open up free trade routes with India or that Sindhu’s friend will get his EEE PC at 4% lower cost, but that it will subtly change the way most westerners look at eastern countries in general.

If you haven’t watched the movie, do check it out. I daresay you’ll be able to find nothing solid to bitch about.

I read an article in the New York Times regarding the Sri Ram Sena – a new group that takes moral policing to a whole new level. Turns out they go to a popular watering hole in a college town, which is obviously quite crowded and decide to pull out and beat up the young women customers. While nobody was seriously hurt, this sparked the new debate that’s been raging on.

On one side, you’ve got the fundamentalists, who believe that as tradition dictates, women must not interact more than required with the opposite gender, let alone go get a drink with them. While most conservative families and parents maintained leashes on their sons and daughters, this is the first time has a large number of people made it a point to physically enforce their opinion on others.

These people really piss me off.

The funny thing is that the other side doesn’t scratch my itch either. Young people from all around the country are motivated to do things, not just head to the nearest pub to supposedly “relax” while various testimonies and studies indicate that it’s more stressful, irritating and lowers your self worth. A lot of these people are driven by MTV, the movie industry and peer pressure to do the things they do and convince themselves they’re having fun while they’re probably miserable.

A lot of people will claim me wrong on this, but with a little introspection, one sees it’s the company that matters in these cases, rather than the setting. Everyone needs a standard issue spine and cojones to realize this. I am all for freedom of speech and to do what you want to do, but freedom is a very vaguely defined, expensive, and oft-thrown around term which in my opinion is as stupid as the moral police’s concept themselves.

If you ask me, I blame the parents. Most people would want them to control their offspring and discipline them by constriction. My parents seldom introduced any major constraints in any field, which I feel taught me to make my own decisions, and thus my own mistakes – which helped in their own way. I really feel that the parental paradigm is better as that of a teacher, rather than a puppet master.

The thing that arouses my curiosity is the root of the problem. What exactly ticked the Sri Ram Sena off so significantly that they decided to take this step. I noticed the NYTimes article had a section:

Since then, they have promised to campaign against Valentine’s Day, which they criticized as a foreign conspiracy to dilute Indian culture, and they said they did not disapprove of men drinking at bars.

So let me get this straight. Bars dilute Indian culture. Bollywood, commercialism, 24/7 coverage of terror attacks, utter greed of the masses, and every other thing doesn’t? Most people, safely 19 out of 20 won’t know what Indian culture is all about, and these are Indians we are talking about. For most people culture is Bharatnatyam, Vedas and saints sitting in the mountains, like you saw on those cheap mythological TV shows when you were a kid. Trust me, most people won’t come up with anything more. Screw you!

Also, from the article:

“In India, no matter how modern you are, you’re still in this schizophrenic nonmodern thing,” she said, straining to be heard as the D.J. blasted Pearl Jam.

So let me get this straight. You consume alcohol, a substance that has been consumed for 5000 years. You listen to pearl jam, (Probably “Jeremy”, you haven’t heard any other pearl jam), which has been around for atleast twenty years. You know nothing about what’s happening in the world, let alone about politics, technology, or art. And you’re supposedly modern. In that case, I know rickshaw wallas more modern than you.

If you’re smart you’ll realize, it’s not about morals or modernity, it’s about doing what people of your mindset are doing, and somehow believing that you are doing the right thing. Whether it be hosing down straight vodka, or hosing down straight women; it’s all about doing what everyone around you thinks is right.

In January, me and the band played at an event, and we wanted to do it good, so we practiced nearly every day for a few days, and practiced quite hard indeed. Once the gig was done, we said to each other we’d meet up and hang out because we’ll build great chemistry and also because it’s great fun. Last week, we decided to get together with our instruments on friday and play – without any pressure or any specific goal in mind, just play for the pure fun of playing.

Needless to say, we didn’t play. Small, low priority problems that we would’ve easily brushed aside a few days back suddenly became more important. The friday runthrough got pushed to saturday and it didn’t happen on saturday either. Needless to say, it’s pretty hard to do something without any specific motivation, requirement or a goal in mind.

I’ve been writing to this weblog for well over two years now, and it’s been great. Though off late, I keep getting great and crazy things I decide to write about but then put it off for later because I have something else to do. It’s started to become something that’s requiring a great deal of effort, though the time required for writing an article is minimal. I don’t need to worry about hanging on to visitors, ad revenue or anything of that sort, and I don’t even track how many visitors I get, so writing seems to be less of an important priority as time is going by.

This is where I need your help. I don’t want to stop writing, because it has it’s advantages, but I don’t know what to write about. The things I can write about are either surprisingly boring or dry and might not appeal to most of the people who read it. At the same time I want to use this blog to get in touch with people from across the country and the world, like every other college going democrat.

So here’s my request for you:

Leave a comment with a relatively plausible topic to write on, and I’ll write about it. My writing skills will improve and you’ll have something in life to look forward to . You don’t need to leave your real name (and you can fill in a fake email address), if you’re worried that the government is tracking you. Spammy topic suggestions will be deleted.

Fire away!

A week later, the speed has gone down, but my paranoia hasn’t. But I’ve been able to use Windows XP for a week without any significant glitches or zombie attacks. I know what you’re thinking now, you’re thinking “You elitist prick, every douche in the world runs XP and gets away with it, why do you make a big deal about it?”. Firstly, go away! we don’t like your kind here, and secondly, I was worried because I had to throw away all my settings (or rather, backing them up) and leave something which I was very comfortable with for some work which I absolutely need windows for.

After a week, I started recollecting how things work, and it isn’t quite bad actually. For an operating system that is six years old from 2003, XP is incredibly stable and powerful. Compare that to some older Linux distros and you’ll see how much they’ve improved and how much they’ll continue to improve over time.

Overall, I don’t see that significant a difference, the speed and usablity is the same. There are some differences, certainly, like drive letters and the inability to execute text files, but at the end of the day, you just need to do work.

Here’s what I feel at the end of the week:

• It’s fine as long as you’re careful, but it’s fragile. It seems that one wrong executable can ruin everything.
• There are incredible 3rd-party tools. I forgot how incredible winamp was, along with great applications like OneNote, clipboard managers, alarm clocks, filesharing clients, etc, etc.
• There’s nothing significant that cannot be done using another operating system. Just that it might be easier or more convenient here.
• Visual studio is great. I got a student license for free, and am pretty interested in the new visual studio 2010 IDE. They even have a swanky podcast called “10-4” which talks about the upcoming features.
• The MSDN library is incredible and the extent to which everything is documented is just mind boggling.
• Firefox and internet usage seems to be a little snappier with smoother rendering and scrolling of pages. It even seems to task my system less.
• The file browser leaves a lot to be desired, also lack of a console is difficult sometimes
• I’m planning to look into virualization and to see if it might be a good idea to use a virtualized linux distro for specific work.
• Hardware works great. I can plug in my guitar processor to the USB port and it’s recognized as a new ASIO sound card, allowing me to record or filter the sound further in realtime, which is really sweet.
• The fonts are probably the most noticed change for me. Linux, specifically gnome, wastes a lot of screen space with a lot of padding around large text objects in menus and buttons. The menus are smaller allowing for more screen space for the application which really matters.

Some things which I miss from my previous linux installation include:

• Keyboard shortcuts for almost all applications that are commonly used along with sensible keystrokes.
• Seperating system files from user level files.
• The quick-fix development solutions like python+gtk, etc.

This just proves to me my earlier theory that it doesen’t matter what you use to do work, but it’s the work that matters. I’ve seen people spend more time tweaking their .vimrc than actually using vim to do any work with it. Linux users should really get over themselves, because it’s not really that big a deal in retrospect. In fact, I found it more challenging to keep a stable and up-to-date windows machine and keep it free from malware than I did a stable and working linux machine.