Thoughts. Stories. Ideas. Poor narration!

A few days ago I walked into a movie hall to watch a Christopher Nolan movie. My past experiences with The Prestige and Memento ensured that I was fully certain about not “grasping” the movie at all at first go. So, it was more like a walk in the park – just the freshness of the dew clad green grass replaced by the spit stained red carpet of Movietime. A bit of me rued the fact that there were no subtitles. Subtitles have become an essential part of my movie-watching experience. Without them, I feel a bit lost. When I can’t bother to pay attention to detail, I just read the subtitles to get a gist what’s going on, just like flipping through the pages of a really bad-ass book in order to complete it. At the Mahaquizzer three years ago, Q87 went like,

Complete John Updike?s famous poetic lament: ?I think that I shall never view  A French film without _______?.

I vividly remember answering the question with “subtitles” as the answer. The person who evaluated my sheet had a huge bout of laughter when he read that. The answer was in fact Gerard Depardieu.

So, it was a huge surprise when the initial few exchanges were in Japanese with English subtitles to boot. I quipped that the entire movie be this way, in exchange for which I received desultory glances. The movie caught pace as expected and Nolan tried to weave the entire universe into a ball of yarn. The plot was convoluted, garbled with non-linear narration and then the spinning totem right at the end, dwindling and waiting to fall at the blink of your eyelid. A friend had warned that there might be people wanting to stand up and applaud the movie once it got over, but thankfully nothing of that sort happened.As expected, once out of the hall, there was buzz about whether the totem fell or not. Patrons jumped back and forth with consummate ease. There is no merit in trying to take sides as Nolan’s movies are best left not deconstructed. I tried it once with the Usual Suspects – though not a Nolan movie. Eons of writers do it to earn their bread and butter. Here is a piece on Inception and yet another one on Memento.

The world around us wants answers. Answers to questions as part of our annual exams, answers to the malaise of global warming, answers to problems of better housing and sanitation in third world nations, answers to combat issues of terrorism and fanaticism. Companies hire individuals who have answers to their niggling problems, pay them handsomely and pamper them to no end. In this day and age, where the need of the hour and simplify constructs and help disseminate knowledge as far and wide as possible, it is a bit surprising to see junta willing to swear by a concept which poses nothing but questions and makes no attempt to demystify.

To come to think of it, it’s a lot like marketing. The marketing jargon forces to believe that the product is much more sophisticated than it actually is. Slim milk as a friend puts it, is nothing but a legalized way to mix water in milk. Then there are products with “organic” farming. A lot of uneasy prefixed and suffixes are tagged onto products making them Tata Photon+ or Musli Power Xtra or Bharat Petroleum Speed. By adding these syllables or jargon, the marketer is nothing but creating a Nolan-like construct as it is easy to “sell” complexity than simplicity.

When marketers make things complicated or fabricate a “Unique Selling Proposition”, they are looked down upon with a degree of scorn and contempt. When done under the pretext of something more acceptable like a movie, plaudits are not too far. As Raj Kapoor remarked once, “Fellini’s nude woman is considered Art but when I show a woman’s beauty on screen, then it is called exploitation.” It’s a war that marketers and consultants will never win. They shouldn’t try to. Just that it would be better if somehow both parties tried providing answers. Simplifying things. Sealing this post with a KISS – Keep it simple, silly!

Loved the movie. Very detailed. Immense amount of research must have gone into it. Should get nominated to Oscars and all. But I couldn’t bring myself to heap praises over it. And no, if you haven’t watched it yet, you  have not done any irreparable damage to your karma cycle. Come to think of it, inception of the idea in the viewer’s mind that inception of an idea during a dream in real lives is a possibility could be Nolan’s actual motive behind the title “Inception”. Now, that is what you call thought within a thought, motive within a motive

Even though I did not have the privilege of attending the after match IPL parties, the last two weeks were very hectic and sapped a lot of energy out of me. Not being a party animal, I had to scrap to complete my submissions on time week before last. Over the last seven days, I slept intermittently, studying out of fear more than anything else for the practicals and orals. The best part about studying in fear is that there is no external form of distraction so to speak of. The only distraction comes from within – if your train of thought takes makes you dwell on things you would normally not give much heed to.

While studying for my first viva, I came across two approaches of building a data warehouse. The bottom up approach where you create individual data marts (small warehouses) and then integrate these individual modules to make the actual warehouse. And the top down approach which entails one to build the whole thing in entirety and then divide it into components. One minor difference that the book mentioned was that the bottom up method had a higher proof of concept while the top down method had very little proof of concept. It hence suggested that one take the bottom up appraoch as the proof of concept would be there for all to see. Innocuous as it may sound, this point of difference became my plaything (muse for the artistically inclined) over the next couple of weeks.

Proof of concept is pretty much self-explanatory. To put it in simple terms, if what you ideate, think or follow translates into visible, tangible results then you got a high proof of concept. To explain with an example, a salaried job has very high proof of concept (we’ll call it PoC here on) as there is amount credited to your account at the end of each month. On the other hand, if you are an entrepreneur, there is minimal PoC. It is difficult to explain to people what you are doing, why you are doing it and what is coming of it.

When faced with a difficult choice to make, often we tend to choose the one which has the higer PoC. A lot of decisions we take are influenced by the PoC value attached to it.Is a higher PoC necessarily a bad thing ? It depends on what you are looking for.

Lets start with the engineering examination scene. I envy those lucky bastards who study in autonomous colleges. Because autonomy brings with it tremendous PoC. Examination results are declared almost instantly and the timespan for realization of your efforts gets reduced drastically. Very high PoC. On the contrary, we have very low PoC at the Univ of Mumbai. Examination results are not declared for two months after the exams leaving a lot of students shrouded in worry. A classmate of mine was nearly in tears when she messed up her practical exam in one subject. Because of this low PoC, she would not know if she’d clear the same for the next three months. She admitted that she would worry herself to death over this and would not be able to concentrate on her written exams. At such times you really do need a very high PoC.

Gambling and intra-day trading also have a high PoC. Within a span of minutes, you realize your money. And that is what attracts a lot of people to the equity markets and casinos. Because it’s human to take the path having a higher PoC.

Boy-girl romances provide an amazing insight into the PoC story. We have come to a stage where a simple “I love you. I will always be there for you unless ofcourse I don’t fall for some prettier female while coming to meet you” does not suffice. Abstract nouns have a very low PoC. Kindness, niceness, empathy, trust are often relegated as they fail to pull their weight  on the PoC scale (*very thrilled with the pun*). Something on the lines of “You are Vishwanathan Anand. You are not controversial enough to be India’s leading sportsman”. You need to shower praise in public, throw hugs, pecks on the cheeks, click lewd pictures – perhaps distribute them, make out – in rickshaws, movie theatres and behind closed doors to prove your concept of love. Everthing that is done thereafter is to ensure a higher proof of concept. It reminds me of  a Monica Bellucci movie I watched a few years ago – Combien tu m’aimes which when roughly translated means – Show me how much you love me.

Gautam Chaturvedi once very passionately mentioned that the only thing he really loved to do was to frame a quiz. And that his parents could never understand in the true sense why he quizzed, why he loved quizzing more than his Power Generators and Transformers. He then went on to explain that every six months – marksheets quantified his progress in his academics whereas quizzing had really low PoC. I’m pretty sure he’d use a quizzing funda to ace some interview in a couple of years and then it will all be worth it.

All good things have a really low PoC. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, suggests that in order to be good at something, you need to devote 10,000 hours of your life to it. Geez, perfection does have a very low PoC doesn’t it ? Imagine waiting 10,000 hours for perfection to happen. And it might not happen at the end of it for all you know. Say you decide that you want to be more humble or more sensible or more compassionate from now on. Would you give in after three months ? Because there is no metric to measure if you have “grown” over the period. There is no tangible yardstick. Very low PoC. All the really invaluable qualities in life have a really low PoC. The whole idea is not to get intimidated and soldier along. Because when you take up a task with a very low PoC and when it reaches fruition, you’ll be the most content person on the face of this planet.

Happiness happened today. Insanity happened today. It’s not very often that I am so content and at peace with myself at twelve in the night. Usually, at this deathly hour, I’d be wallowing in self pity or bothering myself over petty assignments or fallacies of people around me, but today I am super happy. I’d just recap the whole day one moment per line. That’s that!

Morning Chai

Upma

Bath

Second Chai

Half completed acerbic blog post

Photocopy shop

Temple

iDiva

Balaji Wafers, Bingo Mad Angles, Parle Smart Chips

Mint

Vicks Action 500

Priya Ramani – LSD editorial

Gautam Chaturvedi stories

Pratap Kaul stories

Chinmay Kamat stories

IRock

Taj President

Rishkul Kulkarni

Girish Das & Kshemu Desai

Sugar cubes

Quizzing startups

Giri Pickbrain Balsubramanium

Mahatma Gandhi-Rajiv Gandhi Sea Link

Tea

Strawberry Muffins

Cookies

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Wild Card Round 1

Singapore Airlines

Hyundai

Buzzer Tests

Mike Tests

+12 Characters created for Commonwealth Games 2010

Project Guttenberg. Decent guess. Didn’t work out.

Ricardo Semler. Bad miss.

Pierre Omidyar. Ebay. Shit. Shit. Shit.

iCon Wiley Publications. Bad miss.

-3 Strawberries

+6 Ginger

-3 Tata Elxsi

+6 Ashok Leyland

20th Century Fox. Bad miss.

BMW. Bad miss.

Last question. Nothing to lose.

+12 ITC

35000/-

Tata Crucible bag

FastTrack eyewear

MoserBaer DVD player

Slight Pangs of disappointment – should have won this. Shit. Shit. Shit.

Theobroma

Choco chip brownie *2

Bade Miyan

Baida Roti, Chicken Reshmi Kabab, Chicken Tandoori Kabab

Bagdadi

Butter Chicken * 2, Naan *2, Chicken Biryani, Caramel Custard

Gateway of India

How Roman numerals work ? A quick tutorial by Abhijeet Badrike.

Ice Cream

Haji Ali – Grape Juice

A few moments of disappointment

Sleep in the car

Final goodbyes

Bath

Phonecalls

Mirth

Blogpost

More mirth

And hopefully some sound sleep!

Edit:
Time for some indulgence. I clicked a couple of snaps, thankfully with no animate objects with their tongues sticking out. Below is the heist (Ed: will put it up in a day). Clicked in all its glory. The ‘dream’ was to make the stage at Crucible. Doing well is just the icing on the cake! Yes, National Final would have been nice. But it’s totally cool. You can’t have your cake, get it home delivered and then eat it too, all the time. I would not mind retiring now. Spending the rest of my time telling stories to my grandchildren

The Barclays Premier League evokes very passionate reactions from many youngsters of this agrarian country. The excitement provided by the footballers, their ill-perfected skill and their phony girlfriends reaches orgasmic levels at times. This devotion towards the game – especially towards some silly League in England – which is broadcasted at prime time on one of the better channels on Indian television is fast becoming a concern to the intellectual integrity of this nation.

On the day when the Prime-minister’s daughter was feted for her contribution towards science and its development in this country by none other than the Infosys Science foundation – the pioneers of slumdog outsourcing, many ill-advised youth were deeply engrossed in dissecting the bones out of Manchester United’s loss to Leeds united.

The photograph above has some illustrious personalities from(L-R)-

NR Narayan Murthy (Mr.Infosys), Amartya Sen (Nobel Laureate), Hamid Ansari (Vice-President of India), Upinder Singh (Award Recipient), Kris Gopalkrishnan (Cool Dude Infy CEO), Mohandas Pai (Infy HR Head). The most notable fact about all these great minds is that none of them have ever bothered discussing football in their lives – let alone incidents in some obscure league in England.

The complete apathy towards one of the “nearly” great fairytales of all time combined with the lack of willingness to bother about other league not shown on television at primetime is a huge matter for concern to Infosys and to the nation. The biggest outsourcing company is losing some of the best brains of the country not to football but to the Barclays Premier League.

Education is considered of prime importance in our country. Engineering doubly so. The employees of the Premier League are not exactly education enthusiasts. None of the characters who make a living out of the eyeballs that are glued to the television in India and China bother to go to Universities. Neither do they know Fourier Transforms, Binary Phase Shift Keying Techniques or Effects of Deforestation. Quite contrary, the Barclays Premier League is always on the look out for exploiting the educated and “unsettled” Indian viewer. A quote by Manchester City CEO Garry Cook brings out my point more clearly -

“China and India are gagging for football content to watch and we’re going to tell them that City is their content. We need a superstar to get through that door. Richard Dunne doesn’t roll off the tongue in Beijing. Ronaldinho brings access to major sponsors and financial reward.”

Only the noble outsourcing companies, can save this country from this growing malaise. Infosys need to market themselves better and make themselves more appealing to the masses. In order to rival the entertainment bouquet provided by football and BPL in particular, Infosys should start primetime shows educating the masses about Software Development Life Cycles, Acceptance Tests, Beta Tests, Clean Coding Convention and Practices. With a few desi items showing ample cleavage to keep the insatiable engineer interested, the programming would be a grand success.

If the situation worsens, Infosys will no longer find able engineers to perform data entry jobs for big clients like General Motors and British Airways. This situation has to be nipped in the bud. A mass awareness campaign should be initiated making the youth of this country aware that – India is primarily an agrarian nation. That they have an opportunity to sit in a cubicle and attend calls from US clients. It is a privilege that most youngsters who dont have a broadband connection to read this post dream about. To discuss about follies and shortcomings of uneducated, impassionate European and African chimps who earn more in one week than the Prime Minister of our country earns in one year is not sustainable in the long run and will have disastrous effects on Infosys and Indian economy on the whole. The faster this problem is sorted the better. Else Infosys will never ever earn the cult status that Intel or IBM enjoys. And it’s all due to Barclays Premier League.