'Change' your car music!

MP3 CD changers are available in India, but they cost about 12-16k, be it SONY or Kenwood. And the Pioneer HDD player costs a bomb ($1500), which is the cost of some used cars here :-)

So what is your option? What about Kenwood KHD-C710? This component connects to the normal CD changer input of your headunit and plays like one. Only, it has a 10GB cartridge that is removable, which plugs on to your computer through a desktop cradle (USB port)! And the street price is about $200!! (9k). It works with only Kenwood head units, but you can get any Kenwood cassette player (like a 389) for 3k and that's it - start rocking!

Being Humble

Gautam Gambhir, playing only in his second test was notout on 85 when play ended yesterday. When asked about the approaching milestone of a 100, he told the media that he will dedicate it to his nani - grand mother.

I thought, isn't he talking too soon? He is playing only his third inning. His first two were completely forgettable. Talking big boosts your confidence, but I thought this was being over confident. (Learned from roommate Sehwag, perhaps?) I didnt pray to God to teach him a lesson, but he got one alright - he got out at 96. Hope it teaches him to be humble.

Be humble, guys - Think high. But talk low, so that the fall is tolerable.

'Fly low, so that the fall is tolerable' is a quote from Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Amazing writer; Awful ending

I think I am pretty bad when writing about writers (call it an inferiority complex: Can I write about one, who has published a book?) and I end up making a hash of it. I read Hari Kunzru's Transmission a few weeks ago, and was amazed by his flow of words and ideas. Some of the lines from the book were striking -- "If you find someone walking on the roads in America, they are either of the three: jogging, foreigner or mentally ill"

But I was let down by the ending. Yes, it built up well and went the way one thought it would, but even with my above mentioned inferiority complex, I have to say that the ending was sort of patched up. An ending like that works great for short stories, I guess. Like those in the works of Roald Dahl or M Night or Phil Dick.

PS: Shashtibrata was 29 when he wrote 'My God Died Young', and I was 24 when I read it. And I was shocked to find that he wrote it that young. Brata didn't write anything meaningful after that (just like I predicted about Arundati Roy), underlining the axiom "You can write one book. Your own story". Kunzru is only 35, but more importantly it is his second book. That's nice to know.

I am 33, I cant even write beyond this box :-(

Dreamworks (1-0) Disney

Are fish so interesting to make movies about them? That too two in a row? Guess so. After the Nemo last year, it is a Shark's Tale now. Though Disney works more (and better) on the emotion levels, I hadn't completely liked Finding Nemo. But it is a different tale here (by DreamWorks, and they score over Disney here)

Shark's Tale is a rocking winner!! The picturization of characters, and matching of the voices are out of the world (well, it _is_ not this world, is it?) Will Smith is incredible, the Shark - the don - that De Nero voiced almost looked like him! So was Angelina Jolie or Rene, so real. The film is not completely without issues: it wasn't really a shark's tale and that lack of focus shows in the ending, as well as the sub plots. But,

If you like Animations, go watch it. If you loved the Shreks, you will love this too! If you liked Nemo, you will adore this one. If you didn't like Nemo, you still will love this one.

The Theory of 90% Storytelling

Currently reading Roald Dahl's short stories, I see a lot of similarity in his and M Night's style of storytelling. Both of them directly jump into the main plot without spending much time on the introduction, and so are their climaxes (they just trail off so fast!)

I am tempted to call this The 90% Storytelling. It is an interesting thought (or theory, or rule - Sinoj's Theory of 90% StoryTelling). Basically, one need to leave out 5% of intro and 5% of climax. Leave them to the readers/viewers. Come to think of it, it is a better way of involving the audience than what Syd Field proclaims!

PS: David Lynch has mastered the art of 60% Storytelling (LOL), so I have no intention of calling my silly thought a break through idea or some such thing, FYI.

Learn the rules well enough...

Syd Field ('The Guru of all screenwriters' - CNN) says in his books that one need to build the plot, plan sub plots, look at transitions between two plots amongst tips on how to involve the audience in the visual storytelling called cinema. Most of the movies that we see fall into this structure, including Bollywood :-)

The funny take on such teachers in Nicolas Cage's Adaptation notwithstanding, I have really gained a lot by reading his books. For I believe in - Learning the rules well enough so that you can break them well enough.

I have been watching M Night Shyamalan's movies lately and I feel that his storytelling is quite different. He builds up the plot well, and abruptly turn to the sub plots; His climax is almost like a flash. But is he forcing himself to be unpredictable, to be different?

Point(er) Blank

Programers say that there are two types of people in the programming world: those who know pointers, and those who just dont get it.

The Y generation had come up with something similar saying, there are people who have done it, and others who havent. I think for any community, there is one single point that divides it to half - if you have it, you are on this side, else the other. I found a minor one about Algebra yesterday, hence the post.

Confession: I havent got the pointer thing yet. (I havent looked inside any code for ages anyways) but I just go blank when I see a *

Microsoft is now searching

They are big, and done it before (remember Netscape?), but I am not too convinced. In their attempt to beat Google and Yahoo, the big fat liar is getting into searching. Check their beta search at:

http://beta.search.msn.com

I think they got scared by the desktop search tool by Google which is just amazing! It may have small security issues, but hell, what a great search! Digging up old mails used to be a _real_ pain earlier, but a breeze now. If you havent seen it working, go now and download it.

Coming back to MSN Search, I did a small test. I tried the same keywords on Yahoo, Google and MSN. MSN returned much less results than Y/G. Especially in the case of image search. Are they better results? I dont think so. It was, may be one-third?. May be they are still indexing the web. Let's see.

Greece, it is!

Was catching up with Jacob after a long time, he was talking about his travels and in particular, Greece. He was there when Greece won the Euro!!

It seems in Greece, people work only for 6 months an year. And they are very friendly (Sounds very much like Goa!) With the climate very mild throughout the year, it should be a great place to visit. And I love mediterranean architecture - the azzure/blanca villas! If you switch your camera on, it should make a great frame by default.

I dont know when I can do it, but I have decided. If there is a planned vacation in the horizon, Greece, it is!

Dirty Game

Any management guru will tell you that there is a difference between winning and winning. Australia seems to be doing the former. And the mere fact that they cannot take defeat, shows how "good" this team is. The team may be proud, it has all reasons to be so, but they are plain dirty. They play to win, only to win; just to win. And they will do anything for it. That is not winning, is it?

This series, they tried to change some of these bad images. Like they started "walking". Mark of true sportsman spirit? Then why did they appeal for Sehwag's dismissal? They didnt hear that nick? Come on, the guy in the last row in the stands would have heard it, at least seen it. McGrath is lying, so is Gilchrist.

I remember this one interview that Ponting gave a few months ago. Lara had just broken Hayden's world record of 380. And what does Ponting have to say about it? That Lara is selfish. And he went on bad mouthing about Lara. He had not a single word in apreciation about the innings. That showed his character, and this exactly is Australia's character.

They just play it dirty. I liked what Harbhajan meant while talking to the press about Ponting's dirty pitch play in media, "Shut up!"

"Great Homes"

I googled precisely that - "great homes" in images. I was looking for something less disturbing than the Indian scorecard (Well, they went on to win, but that was later).

I was looking for interesting houses. It is my exercise on visualization: I look at unknown things and try to visualize what is inside/beneath, here in this case, the plan and interiors. Works great for houses, and it is fun. Sometimes I look at a house on the screen and walk into it. People call it different things. FBI might call it profiling, an engineer might call it analysing, a doctor might call it something else, but it sure is fun.

But the post is not about 'that'. It is about the results. Of the 900 odd results, on random sampling, atleast 60-70% were pictures of dogs or cats. And 100% of such reults are homes in America. I dont know what to conclude about it, but I thought it was interseting enough for a post.

What happened to Farhan?

After a path breaking movie like Dil Chahta Hai, Farhan Akthar chose to direct papa Javed's story of an aimless young man coming of age through his stinct with the army. It is a battered and recycled hindi movie concept, but since Farhan was doing it there was lot of hype around it. And they were so confident that they didnt even promote it like a normal movie.

His direction is quite average, he or the script doesn't even attempt to develop any character but Hritik's. But for a rock climbing scene, the army sequences are paper thin and outright silly. Most of the actors were wasted. The transformation is clueless, there is no focus, forget the glaring errors. Some scenes by part are good, but as a movie certainly a waste of time.

Even in DCH, the rift betweens characters was a light one, which would have been unacceptable in normal Bollywood terms. But the narration flow countered it well. In a pukka hindi movie like Lakshya, it doesn't work. I think he should stick to (realistic) lifestyle movies... dil chahta hai.

Movie Moulds

Come to think of it, even a more experimenting Hollywood has this fixture of hero winning the final battle. It seldom ends on an 'even' note.

The one movie that I really wished to end so - Michael Mann's Heat - ended with a never before handshake between the two, but still not bold enough to 'break even' when it easily could have (De Nero is killed in the shoot out). In fact, the script really stretches the imagination to get to a 'normal' ending.

Mann's latest movie Collateral is also built on similar lines, this time there was no super cop though, making it a little lighter than Heat.

The only (I think) movie that broke this 'Hollywood Studio Plot' pattern was Swordfish. Travolta makes that (in)famous statement at the beginning of the movie about why people make movies in which the villain invariably dies. He plays a villain similar to the one he did in Broken Arrow, and wins the game in the end. But the lack of super cop/hero (though it had Halle Berry and Hugh Jackman) and with the production classified too slick even for MTV standards, the movie was no where close to a classic in the Heat lines, and went sort of unnoticed.

But broke the proto-type anyways. Better than watching the same saga over and over again.