The last man on earth, to watch Inception...

I know it is pretty late to blog on Inception, but after watching the movie about one week late, after hearing praises from all my friends, after feeling that I am the last member of the "movie watchers fraternity" to watch the movie, I feel that it is something to note. Thus this post....

Inception is what I would like to call a concept movie, here the makers had a novel concept which they developed into a story and eventually into a movie... There are lot of such kinds of movies where the whole idea can be summarized into a sentence of concept. And most of such movies falls into some trouble, major being the lack of funding. Just imagine you going to a producer and asking him to fund the next movie that you are making, with the concept of the metaphysical transformation of a transvestite in a reverse chronological order... and you end up kicked out of the office with a restriction order preventing you to enter the premises within couple of kilometers.But much to the credit of its producers, Inception does not fall into this problem.. other wise it would have ended up as another indie movie unnoticed by all but a small group of nerds ready to burn the midnight oil....

Other things that can cause problems to such movies are ill handling of subject matter (Kabhie khushi kabhi gham, where a simple concept of joint family is stretched into hours causing unbearable overacting and acute emotional trauma to those watching), more emphasis given to the concept and thereby left with a very weak script (Identity, which despite being a good concept makes you feel that why the hell should I watch the mental conflicts of a super nut), making the concept watered down by adding lot of commercial elements (Avatar, where despite all the peacefulness and philosophy the aliens in the end turns trigger happy assassins much worse than the humans)... But Inception, thanks to the talented Director Christopher Nolan and great bunch of actors led by Leonardo di Caprio, never falls into any of the pitfalls making it a complete entertainer for the brain... Great concept, great script, wonderful execution and superb use of technology... 

I don't want to go into the story details, so I will just mention here that it is a movie dealing with someone entering into the dreams of others and incepting it with ideas... This is probably the most original movie after Matrix series, but here things are more serious and there is no childishness of The Matrix..

But I have one complaint about Indian critics who reviewed the movie... Of course they were all praising it, even those who never got the head and tail of it. But years back there was a movie by Anurag Kashyap called No Smoking, which was also kind of a concept movie, which these same critics trashed. (one person even told outright that No Smoking is a bad movie because he could not understand it. What kind of review was that? How can someone blame the movie maker for his ignorance?) I feel this is double standard. If Nolan makes a brainy movie, praise it, and when Kashyap makes a brainy movie, trash it without atleast trying to figure out what it is... 

Caught in the web: Attack of Micro blogs

The final installment in Caught in the web trilogy.

Continued from Caught in the web: Rise of Social networking

So by the end of 2008 I had just joined Facebook,where I was alone, started a blog in Blogger, the one that you are reading now, and was using orkut as the main link to connect with the virtual world... In orkut usage, I had by the time totally stopped using communities, where previously I used to socialize a lot and where I got a few good contacts too. Another couple of sites that I didn't mention before which I had joined, but never used much were job sites. I had account in Naukri, Monster and Times jobs. Never came to any use. And also a profile in Bharatmatrimony.com thanks to my sister, in which I did not had any hand!

Blogging was the most challenging endeavor... You need to find a subject which is the most toughest process, develop it into atleast some 100 words, tell it in such a way that people will connect with it and ultimately typing it without much spelling and grammatical errors... phew... But the satisfaction when you get a comment on blog is just awesome. Even if it is just a review on a book, when a comment comes that someone I never knew will read this book after reading my review is a sign of some personal achievement. Initially for around a year, very few people used to visit. These days it is picking up. I have joined some sites were you can promote the blog and interact with fellow bloggers, like Blogger, Indiblogger.in, blogadda, networked blogs, entrecard, were you can get to meet and read some fabulous people around the world who want to announce their voices to the world...

The only temporary stoppage in blogging was caused by a new inventive site that allowed to blog spontaneously, in small sentences of 140 characters... Yes, Twitter... I joined twitter around middle of 2009, and got hooked soon, although initially I was alone there too. I liked twitter because unleashing yourself was too much easy there.. no need of thinking and planning your words, just put out what is in your mind and forget it... yes that was the problem, tweets are like those droplets of mist in the daybreak, no life..... How many of you cares for those tweets you made a year back or even a week back? All those tiny part of your mind, let alone, orphaned in the twitterverse... it was a painful thought for me.. these days I have reduced microblogging... may be just to promote my macro blog... or to reply some friend's tweet, or to catch up with some friends... 

So after the realization I came back to macro blogging with a bang..... And as I knew when I made my Facebook account way back in 2008 Jan, by 2009 end it was surpassing Orkut.. Lot of my friends came to Facebook and lot of time and energy and money were spent in virtual farming and killing people, thanks to addicting Zynga games Farmville and Mafia Wars, for some time... Then life became normal again...These days Facebook even serves the purpose of twitter, but with lesser restrictions and more flexibility, like "like" and a facility to comment... my only regret is that there is no Unlike option there. It would have been great. 

The last social networking site that I joined is shelfari.com, a quiet cool place were you can discuss on my favorite subject, with lots and lots of equally fanatics... BOOKS. Now this is the place to be if you are a book lover... a great, understanding, supportive community.

There are few more sites that has to be atleast honorarily mentioned here... how can they be avoided when these sites occupy 80% of internet? hm... porn sites. I would just mention hereby that like any young guy I too had my share of adventures with them, but as the time passes, was able to come out of it unscathed. 

Last decade internet had been a major changing factor, in the life of many people around the world, changing it for good or bad... Like any inventions this too has its downside. I believe three terms will explain atleast most of it: Spam, Scam and Stalking. Spam can be avoided or neglected although it irritates like any thing. As for scam, I genuinely feel that if some one was cheated in scams, they probably deserve it. Finally about stalking, in my case there was only one incident where one person, with a female fake profile tried to abuse me in Orkut. Months later he tried to contact me with his real profile. I could find out this was same guy by the same wordings he used in the scraps that he send me. Now if some one I know hates me and wants to stalk me it is the problem of his mind, not mine, he has to deal with it. Hope he gets the will to do that...

This story never ends... more sites and new adventures are being loaded day in day out... waiting with anticipation and praying those novel things not turn up like Chatroulette.com were perverts all over the world are on the vigil 24X7 for the unsuspecting visitor, to scare the hell out off with naked genitals.

There ends my trilogy of Caught in the web. Hope I did not crash land it the way they did it with The Matrix trilogy, some how trying to end the sucker...

Caught in the web: Rise of Social networking

Continued from Caught in the web: Part 1

So till 2005 my time with internet was spent only by checking emails, forwarding funny pictures and other stuff to friends and then in late 2004 some downloads... mostly songs, old hindi tracks, ghazals, and ebooks from esnips and of course a few comic strips. I was crazy about comic strips like Hagar the Horrible and Garefield, who shared an uncanny resemblance with a good buddy... 

Then I was introduced to social networking sites by a friend, the first one being a very non popular site whose name I forgot... me.com or something like that. It was a very short lived amusement and I was feeling kind of bored with it... Life went on with more downloading and more forwarded mails, which I never used to open and just forwarded like that to all friends. 

Google was the emerging giant then, which revolutionized searching the web and giving a new word to the netizen's vocabulary "Googling"... so when they started a new email service Gmail, which was kind of unlimited service, a new trend then, all of the friends switched to it...again I kept my loyalty to Rediff. Then another new concept Orkut came into existence. Initially I was apprehensive of it, may be due to the disinterest caused by my association with that I-Forgot-the-name social networking site. My friends recommended it a lot but I kept my resistance, later I bend only when they made an orkut account for me... they set the profile for me and even helping in searching some old high school and higher secondary school friends whose existence I had forgotten by then. Thus started orkutting that was valuable in getting in touch with scores of old contacts, otherwise whose memories would have slowly moved into oblivion. Those days emails took a backseat and only those mails were checked which were personal and important. Orkutting and downloading songs and books were the internetting pastime. Later if we were able to organize a get together of high school friends and made it a reasonable success, it was all courtesy Orkut.

Another two sites that came into forefront at that period were  wikipedia and youtube... former was an information revolution and latter, a visual revolution. The success of these sites was phenomenal... Facebook was also making it big, but outside India. In India, it was all orkut for another couple of years, probably till 2008. I decided to make my entry into blogger world in 2006. It was a fascinating thing then. A platform for  showing off all your creativity, a vent for all the crazy things that goes through your mind.... I realised the potential but inspite of making a profile in blogger and starting a blog I never continued it. Later in 2007 I started a few blogs, in which I reviewed movies, books and things like that but that also stopped by 2008. 

I also joined Facebook by 2008 starting, but I was alone then. And bored, none of my friends were around. So I went to Orkut again for two more years. These years, 2008, 09 and 10 saw a large number of social networking sites and communities developing and prospering... but I believe all were short lived...and in 2009 I took to blogging seriously... micro and macro ways...In 2008 another thing I did was chatting. Yes, I was too late getting in it. I opened a Gmail account, which is a spammer's paradise right now filled with disgusting ads of machines to increase size of private body parts, power enhancing drugs, multinational companies announcing me winner of lotteries (Now do any one sensible will believe microsoft or Yahoo will have any interest to invest their hard earned money into lottery business?) and millionaires in Nigeria ready to give me a part of their black money. And I still find it difficult to chat with strangers... I feel kind of cheating them and at the same time feel cheated too.

Coming up next: Micro and macro blogging

Caught in the web- Part 1

This post and the upcoming ones are dedicated to all those poor social networking websites where I never joined in spite of many friends sending invites and also to those ones where I joined and never cared to go back... like ibibo, friendster, shtyle, indyarocks (who cares?)....

It is around 16 years since I have first heard about Internet, and 12 years since I am using it... So in this occasion I will just try to recap my tryst with internet... 

It all started when I first saw an article in Reader's digest way back in 1994, I was a small kid then, about internet and its scope in revolutionizing the world. I thought "Whoa! What an idea sirjee!". Then I was doing a one month beginner's course in Computers and floppy disks and DOS were the in thing... It was the era of COBOL, BASIC, Fortran... After many years in Higher secondary, we got another class on Windows, a very primitive version, I forgot which, may be Windows 1990 BC...

The very first time I logged on was probably 1998/99, in Dharwad when I, with some friends went to a newly opened internet cafe and opened a Hotmail account. It was an accomplishment.. But I didnt knew what next! I remember one friend who opened his email account and was proudly telling us to note it down. He also gave us his password. He didn't knew it is supposed to be a secret. My friends used to open account in every free email sites, like yahoo, usa.net and many more. I stayed loyal with hotmail for another 2 years. Then Rediff became the new rage... It looked cool compared to any other email providers then. I opened an account in rediff that I uses still. Never ever I touched Yahoo or any others that had better options then and I even hated chatting at that time. 

I was never a regular internet user then, may be once in two weeks or one month. There were times when I never browsed for 3 months or so. After studies, internet was really a useful thing because, it was comfortable to send resumes, keeping in touch with friends...And the way I used internet was again revolutionized in 2005.

Coming up next: Social networking and chatting

Blast from past

I don't know by what quirk of fate, I bought two books, Salman Rushdie's Enchantress of Florence and Orhan Pamuk's My name is Red from a book vendor. I was fascinated by Rushdie's Midnight's Children before and that was the precise reason I bought his novel. Orhan Pamuk's novel I selected because the vendor suggested it. "Sab forenwalein yahi book lethe hain". How could I ignore such an expert opinion. I ended up buying two novels that are quite different from each other in style and plot but have quite a few similarities also. Both are stories happening in two different parts of the world at the same period, around 1580 AD. Both are exotic recreation of a splendid era of two powerful nations of the same period... And both are fabulous reads... 

Enchantress of Florence is the story of  the life of a Mughal princess who was lost at the time of Babar and how  her arrival after two generations changes the fate of a city made by wealthiest emperor of Hindustan, Akbar. A handsome foreigner arrives at the darbar of  Akbar, pausing as the messenger of Queen of England, murdering the real messenger on the way. The reason for his arrival is to tell a tale... of the beautiful Mughal  princess and a Turk warrior of Italian origin (It seems Rushdie has an obsession depicting people with a multiple cultural background) spanning a hundred years and three continents. And through the tale, the princess comes alive... As in Midnight's children, Rushdie weaves the story by using fictional and real characters, like Akbar, Amerigo Vespucci, Birbal and Thansen... And another queer depiction is of the fictional queen, Jodhabai, a figment of imagination of Akbar, who lives as a shadow in the palace of Fatehpur Sikri, respected and envied by all, including the other queens (real of course) till the other princess, Qara Koz, comes alive in the Emperor's imagination dethroning Jodha. I wonder how people will react to the theme of an imaginary Jodha after watching Aishwarya Rai as Jodha in the Bollywood extravaganza Jodha Akbar. I think, it will be fine considering the shadowy acting of Mrs Bachchan. The novel starts with the image of a lonely traveller arriving near a lake and imagining it to be filled with golden water, a mirage created by setting sun. But Enchantress of Florence, is no mirage... it is true gold, thanks to the splendid plot setting, larger than life characters, and non linear mode of story telling... 

Next novel, Orhan Pamuk's My name is Red, tells the story of a murder mystery happening around the same time, but in Turkey.  A miniaturist working on illuminating a secret and controversial book commissioned by Sultan is murdered. The murder opens a Pandora's box... Several questions are asked on politics, religion, art and the relation between them, an old love is rekindled, much to the worry of others who don't want it to happen for various reasons, an all out war between traditional and modern thinking is started and the only solution... lies in the identification of murderer and his motive. Thus Black Effendi, who is brought back from exile for completing the book after the murder, starts a journey into the magical world of books and paintings to get some clue about the murderer.... This book is not as extravagant or exotic as former, requiring great attention from the reader. Many pages are dedicated to the style and history of Ottoman illustration and book making, and discussions on religion and art. The narration of each chapter is done by different characters of the novel, including the dead man and the murderer (without revealing the identity of course). Even non human elements like Dog, Satan, Death and coin narrates some part of the story. But if you are dedicated to read through all these hurdles... I assure that you will have a great read... 

Knight and day: Mixed bag

Watched Tom Cruise and Camaron Diaz starrer Knight and day. Hm... I really cannot say it is good or bad.. What is evident is that it is a last ditch attempt to save a sinking ship... the career of the hero Tom Cruise.. It is a mix of fun, action, romance, international espionage, comedy, tomfoolery, some feminism, some male chauvinism, gadgets, chases,  beaches, some secret device that should not fall into bad hands, a spy turned wrong... all this jam packed to two hours without even a poor excuse of a story...

Breathless (a story in Beta version)

It was love at second sight for Ramesh, who was a graduate engineer from a reputed engineering college, where he got admission for the great relief of his parents, who were from a very lower middle class back ground and whose father Rupesh, being a low level clerk, had a small curve on spine caused by the sheer amount of paper work that he had to do, thanks to his vulnerability, which his colleagues took advantage of, dumping their work on his shoulders and his mother Sujatha, who was a secondary passed home maker, a beautiful woman who loved her family above all, and for Fatima, who was also another graduate from a different college, but from a better off household in the same city,whose father, Salaam

A wedding, boat ride and full body massage

Last month I had been to Pollachi for a good friends marriage. G is a great guy, wonderful friend, ex colleague who had been a good support to me when I used to work in FPL. He used to take care of system administration and we used to call him 'the father of ERP' because he was responsible

Midnight's children: A cocktail of history and fantasy

Years back, at the dawn of twentieth century, a young doctor Adam Aziz educated in Germany bruise his giant nose while praying in Kashmir valley and decides to stop believing... causing the occurrence of a hole in the place of his heart... thereby setting off a chain of events that culminated in the chronicling of them after more than sixty years by his grand son Saleem Sinai...