The Blue Umbrella

Nothing implicit, this is about the recent movie by the same name as the title of this post. If there is another (apart from chak de india) of the recent movies that is a must watch, it has to be vishal bhardwaj's The Blue Umbrella. The movie is set in a picturesque small village in himachal pradesh with the backdrop so breathtakingly beautiful that it leaves one wanting to be in the place. The theme is simple and revolves around a japanese umbrella, which is an object of desire for the whole village and as the story progresses, it leaves you smiling on occasions more than you may notice. Not convinced yet? What if, I tell you its none other than the inimitable and phenomenal Pankaj Kapoor in the lead (remember the old budhai of the Neem Ka Ped?) ? well...that could be good enough a reason to go for the flick but I could bet, there are more...go n watch!!

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Leisure

The other day I came across this beautiful poem by W. H. Davies and no later than I've finished reading it, I felt a pang of suffocation in my workplace. So, I got up and walked out of the place to somewhere devoid of that paper sheet reading "Pending Tasks", where there are things that are more than mere human contrivances...where there are trees and the bed of green grass instead of columns of concrete and the marble floor...where the wind that kisses you is the same that kissed the leaves, the birds and the squirrel.

Fortunately, in this part of hyderabad one could find a few remnants of natural beauty -- a pond, old rocks on dwarf(and almost barren) hills and some open spaces dotted with trees (all of which is being voraciously gnawed up by the upcoming software firm buildings). So, I set out to visit the nearby pond whose one side is cluttered with waste building material and the opposite side has a narrow pathway alongside the shore with a few tamarind(imli), neem & Acacia(babul) trees. Its been three months since I last sat beneath the tamarind tree on the opposite shore. The words were still ringing in my head -

                 "WHAT is this life if, full of care,
                  We have no time to stand and stare?"

But my steps today were unhurried, I looked at the office building and it looked back...different. Then I was thinking of my childhood...that village with its green farms...narrow pathways between two corn fields...those strolls with friends, each one putting forth his 'theory of everything' about things we saw around us...the barefooted runs chasing the peacocks since they can't fly much...and involuntarily, I was singin these lines from pink floyd's High Hopes:

                   The grass was greener
                   The light was brighter
                   The taste was sweeter
                   The nights of wonder
                   With friends surrounded
                   The dawn mist glowing
                   The water flowing
                   The endless river

Now I was beneath the tamarind tree at the pond shore, awed by the beauty and serenity of the place. Every now and then a small fish breaches the water surface as if to smell the air, on the nearby tree branch is perched a kind of Egret waiting for the opportunity, a water snake swam at a distance, I scared a few crabs as I went close to them - weird creatures, i thought to myself...they walk sideways; cool wind blowing and slowly I was being lost in the beauty of nature's creations that go unnoticed in our busy everyday life. Everything around looked to be ecstatic and I was feeling elevated too. Suddenly, it didn't seem to matter anymore if I fail to show any significant work for the day in the daily status report(the only other time it happens is when a few pints of beer think and talk for you :D). Seeing those merry creatures I thought, we may have learned to build cosy houses for ourselves but we certainly have forgotten how to celebrate life. Now I could appreciate better than ever as to why Thoreau chose to go into the woods. And since then I slow down to smell the air...to appreciate the beauty...to stand and stare!!

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What, if not madness?

Rajni(kant) mania has struck again. His latest flick Sivaji - the Boss which was released sometime in mid-june is rocking the theaters across the world, thanks to his mad fan following. On the first look i read only half the movie title and thought it has something to do with the legendary shivaji (dumb me!!) and its only after reading the last part that i realized: the demigod is back in his new avtar. Despite his films being devoid of much meaning and having a counterpart only in fantasy movies or cartoon films, they are able to create (fools) paradise for his fans everytime. That's what happened with the release of his latest movie, the fans went mad...checkout these images. I'm forced to ask "what is this, if not madness?". I've nothing against rajni but a 'seasoned' actor like him doing such foolish roles and then the crowd going mad after it, really calls for some brickbats. Seeing his movies, any sane man could easily say, rajni would make a great comedian in a movie for the sensible.

They say, entertainers are necessary in every society, but then their entertainment must be seen in the right perspective...should people go mad behind a comedian, calling him god, killing innocent animals just to please gods (who are still supposed to grace the temples) to make his otherwise horribly pathetic movies successful? See the action in his films and you would wonder if all newtonian physics has been turned on its head while you were still sleeping. See for yourself. Three hundred years back pope exclaimed:

"Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in night;
God said, 'Let Newton be!' -- And all was light."

I say: "Nature and Nature's laws lay petrified;
           Let rajni be and all is defied."

Hail rajni!!

Nature's Beauty

Stumbled upon this beautiful pic of a dead leaf from some tree while searching for a good image for my desktop background. At first look, it looks like some Brontosaurus or some ufo. what say?

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Wormholes

Wormholes...smells of worms, right? I assure you they can very much be for humans as well. In fact, they are perhaps the only hope for the salvation of human race in distant future. If some disaster is to strike a place, rats are the first to sense it(except the one that the cat brings with itself) and would desert the place before the whole thing goes into mess. Now what if i say our home(our universe) is going to see a catastrophe...an eventual death(believe me, i'm not a paranoid)...cosmologists say it could have two forms- big freeze or the big crunch...what shall we do when the eventuality approaches...well, follow rat wisdom- desert the place...flee the universe...go to another universe(i know you are thinking: what crap is this?...how come there are more that one universe?). Few years back, existence of multiple universes was nothing more than science fiction but now nobody denies it. Infact Michio Kaku's book Parallel Worlds is all about convincing us of the existence of multiple universes and predicting our future.

So other worlds do exist and our world is dying...how to escape it? That's where wormholes come in- they are 'shortcuts' to other worlds, through which we can pass into other worlds in negligible times...sounds like science fiction?...i call it hope.

To talk about wormholes we first have to talk about...what else?..the most exotic(and infamous) members of the universe- the Black Holes(i know you are already crying out: "oh no..not again..I know black holes are dead giant stars and not even light can escape them and if something gets close enough to a black hole, its sucked in and crushed to death, hawking already told me all that"). I would tell you something else: that there are black holes that are not static but they spin- rotating black holes and if you happen to fall into them, there is a possibility that you are not crushed to death.

Wormholes are like shortcut tunnels that may enable us to reach otherwise distant regions of space very quickly.Some of these tunnels connect parallel worlds too and that's what gives us hope. There are theories suggesting that the tunnel or the wormhole, if it exists, will have to be very unstable.

I'm interested in the positive side of it. Imagine the excitement of seeing a new world altogether. Assume there is a evacuation drill(this one is for earth) and there is a flight from sriharikota every 30 minutes to another world and people are queued up(this is india dude!). Imagine santa singh arriving with his family and truckload of family stuff(you can't blame him) and calls out to the commander: "oye ye duji duniya ki flight kinne baje hai? uthe punjab to hoga na?"

Keep the hope!

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Book Lending

In my previous post I talked about malcolm gladwell's book Blink. Actually, I didn't purchase it. How I got hold of it is another interesting story. Interested? Got time to kill? read on...

A couple of months ago I bought a cheap(read pirated) copy of malcolm gladwell's other(and more famous) book, The Tipping Point from...where else...the ubiquitous street book market, only in this case it happens to be the famous(at least for locals) sunday book market at koti, hyderabad. I started reading the book pretty religiously. Unfortunately, when I was just over half the pages through, got engaged otherwise - specifically with duties pertaining to earning daily bread. I think(pardon me for a little digression here), if leisure reading(and contemplation) would have served as the means of bread and milk for human kind, half of us would've been philosophers(don't ask about the rest half - they'd be women and as you know they'd still need to go shopping and do what not...i don't know really...and may be leave those homely philosophers to themselves) and the world would've been a very peaceful place. Now that was not to be. So, while my book was collecting dust...its saviour came in the guise of my friend. He got hold of book and read it and you know that's not enough - you need to tell people that you too have read a good book or two(pardon me raghu, if you are reading this..and if you feel like kicking me..you'll get the chance on my next B'Day ;)). So, he recommended the book to his friends and what was more offered to arrange the book for one of them...and exercising the rights of friendship(mine and his) got me to lend the book to some creature I've not yet known to read books. And then i knew one thing for sure(given whatever little experience i've with book lending business) that there are few(if any) chances of my book collecting the dust of my room again...

That's how book lending goes. The book keeps changing hands and the chain rarely closes on to the original owner..so did happen to my book - until last news, its lying with some guy in US...quite a fortunate book..its going places its owner is yet to go. But fortunately there was something that did give me hope...my aforementioned friend was to pay some 600 rupees to the guy who borrowed the book from me...and showing signs of prudence, he gave me those 600 rupees asking me to pay the guy if he happens to return my book...that was a nice triangle. And as you may have guessed, with this arrangement I'm almost sure to get the book back or the money(which is enough to buy a original copy) in lieu of it. For me, the former(getting book back) seemed far more probable because we all know what kind of paper we value more, not certainly the one found in books. So came the guy one day to reclaim his money...and may be to return my book as well...but to my surprise what he got for me was not The Tipping Point(the book i lent him) but another of the books by the same author - Blink. The reason cited was that he forgot which book he borrowed from me...I guess authors are more famous than books..now that was funny(and slighlty frustrating) to me. Nevertheless, i took the book he has to offer me and returned his money...i had no choice - you can fight for your money but you are not supposed to fight for your book..that's how it goes.

While in college, it used to be slightly different as we had a relatively small but beautiful world of our own - the college and the hostel(oh...even the slightest mention of these words causes a sweet heart-pain) and the lent book can be precisely located(provided the book doesn't suddenly starts obeying heisenberg uncertainty principle). There too, once a popular book is lent, it keeps going places(read rooms)...until someday the original owner enters his room and stares at his bookshelf, while he is still staring, trying to figureout what is amiss...the shelf cries out: "you pathetic bastard...don't you even remember you lent that book to some wretch?...now go and get it back". Thus this poor chap decides to reclaim the priceless copy of his otherwise forgotten book. But the task is not easy because by now the book has changed many hands. He starts from the guy he lent the book only to find that he inturn gave it to another guy who passed on to another....he goes from room to room but finds only pointers(praying the next pointer doesn't turn out to be a dangling one), getting more and more furious at every redirection and when he finally finds the book lying with some guy, he's so furious that he blurts out: "my friend, i don't care whether you've finished reading the book...i want it back right now"...bang!!...and thus he get's it back and resolves not to lend his books again.

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Blink

Undoutably, The Tipping Point is the magnum opus for Malcolm Gladwell so far, but his next book: Blink is no less good. The book gives excellent insight into the power of 'snap-judgement' or the first thoughts that come to our mind when we see a new thing or confront a problem. He talks about a giant supercomputer running in the back of our minds and calls it the 'adaptive unconscious'. Its a giant decision making apparatus that is capable of making very quick judgements based on very little information. Generally, we are wont to rely on the long & tedious process of deliberate thinking when confronted with a problem. What malcolm shows us in blink is that our snap judgement(or the instinctive answers that come in the first few seconds) could be as good as the long intent deliberation, we just need to pay heed to it when it happens.

A pretty interesting incident occurred to me while i was reading blink - i too had a blink moment. When i was barely 20 or so pages through, a question(from nowhere) popped up in my mind: how many pages the book has? and before i could make a logical guess(as i would usually do by feeling the width of read and unread pages between my fingers and comparing them to guess the ratio between the two...that would give a fairly good idea), a number appeared in the back of my mind: 300(no it has nothing to do with the recent hollywood blockbuster 300 which i thoroughly enjoyed and envied those 300 spartans). I tried to dismiss(as we do with first thoughts all the time) it as weird first thought with no logical basis, but then i said no...wait...lets put theory to test - lets test the power of the unconcious. So, i turnred to last page and it turns out that the book has 288 pages(not counting the covers), just over 4% error. Blink!! you couldn't have asked for more accurate an answer from the first thought. That's the power of snap judgement. To some the above incident may seem vague but i guess it drives the point home well.

Lastly, Malcolm Gladwell is a great narrator of incidents and awesome in elucidating facts. His books make a very rawarding read.

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Quotes

• Civilization will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest. [more: 1 2]
• To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.
• And on the eighth day God said, "Okay, Murphy, you're in charge!"
• Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.
• May those who love us love us, and those who do not love us, may God turn their hearts, and if He cannot turn their hearts may He turn their ankles, that we may know them by their limping.
• The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them.
• Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
• Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.
• There are two different kinds of people in this world: those who finish what they start, and"
• If you can't sleep, try lying on the end of the bed. Then you might drop off.
• Love makes the world go round? Not at all. Whiskey makes it go round twice as fast.
• Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
• Classic- a book which people praise and don't read.
• The best way to keep one's word is not to give it.
• If a woman insists on being called Ms, ask her if it stands for miserable.
• Men are simple things. They can survive a whole weekend with only three things: beer, boxer shorts and batteries for the remote control..
• The trouble with children is that they're not returnable.
• It's always darkest before the dawn. So if you're going to steal your neighbor's newspaper, that's the time to do it.
• The old age: First you forget names, then you forget faces. Next you forget to pull your zipper up and finally, you forget to pull it down.

The content for this post is not static and the author will keep updating it as he finds more interesting stuff. The readers are invited to add to it.