Doomsday part II

Continuing on the end of the world prophecies, we are having weird erratic weather pattern all over the world. Yesterday France took a hit. There is a forecast that t winter State College might encounter both record high and record low temperatures!
And then there is a hypothesis of aggression of Vermiform Appendix.

Obama's presidency's first term ends in end of 2012. Is that another indication?

Catching up again ...

I needed some boost to thaw the frozen blogging part of my brain. Gaurav has this hypothesis: in winter people blog less because it is winter.

Then yesterday I received this magazine with the advertisement that reminded me another ad jingle from India; and I felt it is time, just write something.
First I was surprised to seen Devnagari in a magazine like this in US. But if you think deeply, it not unexpected. Growing population of Indian and Chinese technologist is not a new fact. No wonder use of Devnagari or Han characters will become more and more common. In fact someone was telling me the other day, that Indian English is going to dominate American or British English in twenty years! Let linguists research on those issues. The fact is Indian English is very common now, so is Hindi. First time I went to New Jersey, the first full sentence I heard when my friend parked the car, was a Hindi sentence.
But more surprising to me is the tone of the advertisement. Is this an indication of slow cultural invasion ...

'Kya aap close-up karte hain ...?'

Now, the news that made my day ...

Finally one more item from my wish list is going to be crossed out. 'Hair' is returning on Broadway from Mar 31, 2009.
Let the sunshine in ...

A Merry Minuet for the New Year ...

They're rioting in Africa
They're starving in Spain,
There's hurricanes in Florida
And Texas needs rain.
The Whole world is festering iwht unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles
Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don't like Anybody very much.

But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud
For man's been endowed with a mushroom-shaped cloud
And we know for certain that some lovely day
Someone will set the spark off-
And we will all be blown away

They're rioting in Africa
There's strife in Iran
What nature doesn't do to us
Will be done by our fellow Man.

Merry Minuet, the (1958)
Song: Sheldon Harnick
Artist: The Kingston Trio

A fifty years old song to celebrate the end of 2008 and onset of 2009!
And here is the trailer of the movie to watch in the New Year.

Welcome 2009!

Coming back to life

It takes time to get used to the fact that I have landed in India. Reality seeps in slowly. I was getting cues at various levels, right from the beginning of the flight, which got slightly delayed because of some un-put-downable passengers; then the messy arrival lounge - after one month of Mumbai massacre, Mumbai international airport still looks so casual! It is now under renovation. Dimly illuminated, shabby arrival lounge is sure not going to make any positive impression on anyone and this is one of the main, if not the the busiest, port of entries to India! Cues continued - experiencing the driver's respect for traffic signals on my short journey through Mumbai traffic between international and domestic airports; semi-dark, dirty, water-logged rest room of Kolkata airport, and then everyone talking in Bengali ... I sure am back in India. The moment I joined the airport leaving traffic in Kolkata, I realized why New York City seemed so familiar after coming from the tranquil State College. Cars honking at each other, jumping signals, pedestrians crossing the roads like the acrobat maneuvering on the trapeze, hawkers shouting at the sidewalk ... life in a metropolitan city is basically same everywhere, be it New York or Kolkata. I was a bit scared to cross the road even at the zebra crossing as cars continued to rush in even on red light! Distance between two cars were hardly two meters - drivers have a very strong sense of proportion, visual measurement skill and sense of size of the car they are driving, otherwise it is impossible to drive in roads here.

But with all its apparent haphazardness, chaos or disorder, there lies an amazing current of vitality and vigor. Life in a city like Kolkata needs an enormous amount of life-force. Life in cities like State College seems so clockwork, so boring now. Being in Kolkata forces me to be alive, awake!

Fly away home

Everyone has already boarded the flight. Luggages are also loaded. Everything is just on scheduled time. Still the flight is far from starting. It is a Newark - Mumbai flight on Christmas eve. I had an window seat. five minutes past the scheduled departure time, I looked through the window at the distant status display. It read,

Time : + 00:05:43
APU ON? : CTC OOPS WHY

Definitely it meant something else, but to me it made sense in a different way. The ground crew was unable to figure out why the flight hasn't even started its APUs even after closing all the doors and locking the luggages. So they put up a WHY on the status display!
Inside the flight people are walking down the isle, chatting to friends, who have got seats far away because of insensitive check-in procedure! Most of them are trying to settle a negotiation with their co-passengers to develop a new optimized seating arrangement for family and friends. The captain, fade up at losing their on-time statistics, finally started announcing,

Please settle down on your current seats. Once we settle on our course, you can move around and exchange seats as per you convenience!

How could ground crew ever imagine why the flight is getting delayed!

The flight was full of passengers returning to their home on Christmas vacation. So they had plenty of gifts in their luggages bordering on the upper limit of the baggage allowances. It was a hard time to fit all luggages in the overhead compartments. It was another optimization problem. How can you cram maximum number of your bags in overhead compartments close to your seat. Now consider each such compartment has three seats below them and each passenger on these seats has two bags of maximum allowable size. Each compartment supposedly, but not necessarily, can fit two of the maximum sized bags. But since the maximum size is defined by total dimension, some of the bags are too wide and some of them are too high to fit in with other bags in the compartment. If you have hard time in imagining, close you eyes and imagine a group of blind-folded people trying to fit in an assortment on square and round rubber pegs in few round holes. So it was a nice time pass watching the passengers and crew pulling down their carry-on luggages from overhead bin and trying to fit them in again in a different orientation!

Anyway, after all the seating and luggage optimization the flight took off half an hour after the scheduled time. And suddenly it occurred to me, tonight is Christmas eve. They might have some surprise gift for the passengers. Unlimited free glasses of Champagne with meals? Half of the ticket price refunded back? Or at least all the air-host and hostesses moving around with Santa hat ...
Well, yes, there was a surprise gift. 51 bonus miles instead of 3 for each on flight shopping ... urgh!

Yo!

I haven't been to their site and was suddenly feeling little urge for Christmas shopping, so I typed in criterion.com in the address bar ... and wow! Their site is totally revamped, and ... what is this ... the Auteurs ...?
Wow! Now criterion screens movies online ... and some of them are free to watch via the Auteurs.
This Christmas will be fun!

Why ... ?

... it hurts, it saddens ...
Malayesh was getting married next month, was ...
He was a nice guy, like many others.

Why?

Snow white State College

“A clear, frosty night. Unusual brilliance and perfection of everything visible. Earth, sky, moon, and stars, all seem cemented, riveted together by the frost. Shadows of trees lie across the paths, so sharp that they seem carved in relief. You keep thinking you see dark figures endlessly cross the road at various places. Big stars hang in the woods between branches like blue lanterns. Small ones are strewn all over the sky like daisies in a summer field.
“We go on discussing Pushkin. The other night we talked about the early poems he wrote as a schoolboy...”

Was it coincidence that I felt like finishing the rest of 'Dr. Zivago' tonight and stumbled on this?

Well, not Pushkin, I was thinking of Elliot while walking my way back amidst the vast snow-white field. The yellow street lights, half covered foot steps on snow, deserted roads ... all felt like a déjà vu from childhood. Weird!

Backlog

Its been almost a month, I couldn't find enough time to put together a train of coherent thought to post. I kept on making bookmarks for interesting piece of information, I thought worthy of writing about. But couldn't write...
So let me clear the backlogs by just posting the links here:
India loses four children every minute ...
Greedy Chinese companies tainting the babyfood ...
If there were not McCain, there would not have been Blackberry ...
Daily routine for a grad student ...
Studying is a stressful and frustrating work ...

Done!

End of the world ...

God was pissed off and so he brought forth a catastrophic flood to eliminate mankind and start over.
Equally pissed off was Brahma, and then he did the same thing.
So was every God in every culture

Archeologists and historians say, not everything is myth. Deluge had swept the world and changed the course of history and evolution.

Apparently, be it Gods or be it Nature, flooding is the easiest way of getting rid of a rotten civilization. Just like washing a bowl of rotten curry. No wonder "righteous" men, sorry, persons in every decade had been foreseeing Doomsday deluges to wash away all the sins of mankind in the then near future. And the people around the world has already began preparations for latest Doomsday!
Now lets think what's happening around the world now. Catastrophic flood in India, UK and US (well, not flood in US but a series of hurricanes and flood in Haiti). So disaster has struck all part of the world at the same time. Don't you get the feeling that the Doomsday is nearing? Not yet?
OK, so let me tell you one more thing. Some "guys" are trying to simulate the creation of world. They are trying to play God. So why God won't be pissed off again?
The days of our lives are over ...

There are never a dearth of skeptics. I came across this piece of old news while reading an article on CERN's ground-breaking experiment, the largest physics experiment of the century, may be the most important, too. The lawsuit is probably a very good example of what and how an idle brain works!

An interesting comic strip from user friendly on April 01 is below.



The interesting discussion here reminded me of the old Kingston Trio song "Merry Minuet".

Google again

Just couple of months ago when that privacy law suit against Google was underway, the official Google blog had this post, explaining why Google prefers to be lean and why it doesn't hesitate to drop their name from their front page to accommodate the privacy link without increasing the word count. So much for lean and thin. Now they have nine extra words there to promote Chrome, which was "open source and free" browser with Google having virtual royalty-free full access on every damn thing built on it!

No harm done!

Cause and effect ...

“since Britney [Spears] started wearing clothes, [and now that] Paris is out of town and not bothering anybody any more, thank God, and evidently Lindsay Lohan has gone gay, we don't seem to have much of an issue”.
- William Bratton, the LA chief of police, refuting the necessity of the recent law to curb paparazzi activities.

You can't do anything about it. Its all business. And how you market yourself. Being a celebrity is a form of selling yourself to the public. For some of the "celebrities" this sale is the main force that keeps them afloat in the celebrity zone; for a small faction of other celebrities, this market dynamics is beyond their control (say, Lady Diana) and for the rest somehow there is not enough motivations for paparazzi! As a British photographer said,

"Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson — you never see paparazzi pictures of these people. Guess why: because they're not stumbling out of a nightclub at 2am without their boxer shorts on."

The heat of the market is so high that sacrifices are not rare. Sometimes mishap like Lady Diana's accidents do happen partly due to this. Probably majority of the problem can be avoided by treating it from root as Bratton has indicated. But that doesn't remove the necessity of paparazzi curbing law. There should be limit to mob's invasion to someone's private life however tempting it may be. This is hard because gossips and scandals are the most delicious dishes for public.

Bratton's argument momentarily reminded me the chauvinistic argument given in favor of eve-teasers in India - the scantily dressed ladies provoke the hormone-raging youth in this very restrictive social structure so much that sometimes they cannot control themselves.

How fur can you go to prove your perversion?

India blasts ...

I was talking to Kalyan the other day and the news of bombing at Bangalore and Ahmedabad came up. He commented that given the security and intelligence scenario in India, number of terrorist attacks are unbelievably less. Well, he was true in some sense. Security measures are never adequate in India. Our security agencies have so many problems to attend - so many politicians to cover, so many terrorist groups to look out for, so many Maoists to take care of, and so on. And believe me, everyone of them, politician, terrorists, Maoists - everyone has a "motive" to "blast" a city! There can be plenty of motives for someone to kill a person; money, jealousy, love, power, authority, or insanity. But what can be motives of bombing randomly in a city? Well, sometime to create a riot, or to prove how powerful they are, or to send a message to the bourgeois Government about the oppression of unprivileged. And we have too many messages to send to appropriate authorities. Apparently the best way to get attention is by killing innocent bystanders.
The sad thing is that just after the massacre, the city goes back to normal state in a jiffy; within a day or two, entire nation except the suffered family forgets something bad happened. We don't really care about anything till it happens to us. And we even play with this sentiment. Last night someone sent a hoax mail to some TV channels stating Kolkata is going to be blown away at several places. By the way, even if we think our security agencies incapable, they did save Surat by diffusing a number of bombs.
Its all so confusing and saddening ... I forgot what I wanted to write ...

Rain rain go away ...

It was drizzling thoughout the day just like back in India ...

Photo-stat

If you are somewhere in between into serious amateur photography, you probably heard about the community of photographers at photo.net. They recently had a survey on their members their members. There is nothing exceptional about the statistics. Considering the fact that this is a community of mainly serious-amateur to pro photographers, the results are kind of expected.
Ladies are in general more confident in posing in front of the lens than going behind it. That commemorates with the fact that male human beings are more sensitive to visual pleasures. And probably at the begining of second half of life most of us become little lost and then try to hold on to old hobbies. That may explain the high number of middle-aged photographers. (I don't think they have to spent half of their lifetime to get into the stage of serious amateur). The fact that Canon is the front-runner in camera brand is not surprising as they were the early birds in dishing out cost-effective semi-pro DSLRs. As expected, Nikon is also at the same level. But surprisingly Pentax has a staggeringly low share, even if they are supposedly at the same level, if not better, in the film camera sector (which is still almost half of the entire photo sector). Interestingly even in the community of serious amateurs the point-and-shoot digital cameras are edging out the film SLRs. Indeed immediate feedback and virtually no recurring cost are two of the major factors that turn one into a serious amateur from a casual photographer.

Photo.net Survey Reults

Photo.net members are: 87% Male 13% Female

-By age:
17 or under: 1%
18-24: 5%
25-34: 18%
35-44: 23%
45-54: 32%
55-64: 15%
65 or over: 6%

-20% are professional photographers in some fashion, 66% are serious amateurs, and 14% say they are "just getting started in photography."

-Cameras used:
Digital SLR camera: 84%
35 mm film camera: 44%
Point-and-shoot digital camera: 41%
Camera phone: 1%
Medium format camera: 19%
Large format camera: 5%
Rangefinder: 12%
Other: 4%

-Brands used:
Canon: 50%
Fuji: 7%
Kodak: 4%
Leica: 6%
Nikon: 42%
Olympus: 12%
Panasonic: 4%
Pentax: 12%
Sony: 9%
Other: 31%

-Lenses and memory cards were the most common items purchased in the previous 12 months and were also the most likely to be purchased in the following 12 months.

-Many different computer applications were used for digital adjustment of images, but Photoshop and Photoshop Elements was the most common by a significant margin.

Courtesy - Photo.net

Having said all these, I love my Vivitar because it has a Pentax K mount and K mount is amazingly backword compatible making it easy to find damn cheap used good manual lenses on ebay!

Wandering off

This movie can spin off a movie like "The Guy Who Kills His Fathers"! Its like a FPS video game with a fake story line. Assuming people want to see things they fantasize about in movies and considering that this is a hit, why people love killing others? So much of violence, mindless violence. Video game-ish. I wonder why did I ever go to watch this 'Fruit of the Loom' (credits Benny) movie. I wish I hadn't 'Wanted' it. Violence reminds me, they say Japan had a very high rate of youth violence. Its decreasing now. But still there are urban camouflages being sold in Japan (by the way, read the comments here, funny and thought provoking). And that piece of news is picked by NYT in such a manner that it seems a regular trend in Japan. This is not just a stray case of filthy reporting. Take look here. I used to think that only our Bengali regional newspaper spins story of a mountain out of a mole as they used to write things like how last night's kabab affected Ganguly's play today! But making a story seems to be a universal reporting trend. Well why not? After all with so many companies in news business and so much of competition, news makers are really in demand. And for no reason that reminds me an old chinses verse ...

Most men, bringing up sons, wish for them intellect;
But I by my intellect have had a life-time of fauilure.
I would only desire that my child should be simple and dull,
That with no ill-fortune and no troubles he may attain to highest office.

The Washing of the Infant - Su Shih
Trans. by Robert Kotewall and Norman L. Smith

Have you ever stopped and wandered?

The Fisher King in me

Half of the year passed by.
I planned to do so many things ... Nothing has been achieved yet, nothing has been seeded. A sense of getting old and incapable of creating anything new grows day by day. The days pass by doing mundane works. All quiet on all fronts. No new light, no new shine, no new hope.
Is it summer that makes me sad? Its summer with occasional surprising rain, reminds me

"Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour." ...

Am I like the Fisher King in his Waste Land - impotent yet hopeful of contributing and proudly protecting futile legends?

... and Broadway

This trip to NYC was not about sightseeing, but just to catch up with friends. And Broadway. Or to be more precise, RENT. This was my opportunity to experience the phenomenon before it closes on September this year. So we booked a Sunday afternoon show at Nederlander Theatre.
And Broadway is literally a just a broad way connecting two ends of the New York City. The theatrical district is just a small part of it. The good thing about all American cities is the well laid out plans and streetways. You just need to know the nearest intersection of roads. And in places like NYC where all the streets are numbered in a systematic way (Streets running East-West with increasing number towards North and Avenues run North-South with increasing number towards East), its hard to get lost. Still we managed to make walk in large circles just to reach to the next block! And the subway map is really complicated. So many routes... I wonder if A.J. Deutsch were to write the famous sci-fi now, he would've written it about NYC MTA not about Boston MTA! Coming back to Broadway, we just had a short walk down 7th Ave from 34th St to 44th St to reach the junction of Broadway and 44th St at the famous Times Square (which, eventually, is a triangular junction) and again traced back along the Broadway just to find the we were actually hardly a hundred feet away from our destination from where we started! You know actually we were not paying attention to the street and avenue numbers as we had plenty of time to kill. We were just drifting with the crowd which being mainly tourists had obvious destination of Times Square.
And then the Nederlander Theatre. A shabby, old building in a narrow lane. Who thought that a theatre with more than 1200 seats will be there. Its hardly distinguishable from other buildings. On the other side of lane there is another old almost-derelict building with old stairwell hanging outside. That is the Amsterdam Theatre playing "Mary Poppins". The entrance to the Nederlander Theatre was 'guarded' by parked cars on the road and a big tourist bus covered the entire facade of the building (which was nothing but a series of posters of Rent on an old wall with wide doors!
Inside the theatre, things are as they should for a play whose premise is shady areas of mid-nineties New York! And with a lot of deliberation I had bou,ght four tickets of orchestra seating in fourth row with the idea that its gotta be a big hall to accommodate 1200+ people. And soon we realize, its apparently not that big and from our place we can touch the stage if we try hard! But the real problem was that we were little too close to the loudspeakers; nonetheless that didn't prevent us from enjoying the show. And that was a thrilling experience, but that story is somewhere else.
And back to Broadway again. That place - the place cordoned by Broadway, 7th Ave and 40th to 46th St is simply ... what should I say ... awesome, at least to me! Which way I turn my head I see a theater hall playing something. And not only something, they are playing plays like 'Rent', 'Boeing Boeing', 'Grease', 'Gypsy', 'South Pacific', 'Sunday in the Park with George' and what not! Its like a treasure trove! Theater is something I cherish and Musicals are something I love. I know some theatricians might not get that excited about Broadway because its not really a playground of experimental theater. Broadway is the capital of mainstream theater and hence the main interface with the crowd and the theatrician. I respect this community for having such a conglomerate of theaters here and making them a social outing place. Its like making theater more and more common-man-friendly. But there is a concern, too. Now-a-days just like any other popular media, Broadway is losing its originality. It is getting overshadowed by Hollywood. If you just go by the current shows at Broadway, how many of them are new and original? Not much. Mostly are wither revival (Boeing-Boeing, Sunday in Park..., South Pacific, Grease, Gypsy, etc.), or continuing old play (Mama Mia!, Phantom of the Opera, Rent, Lion King, etc.) or adapted froma hit movie (Lion King, Little Mermaid, Young Frankenstine, Xanadu, Hairspray, etc.) Earlier the trend was opposite, there were Broadway productions first then there were movies based upon that. Think about shows like 'Hair', 'Sound of Music', 'Fiddler on the Roof', 'West Side Story', 'Oklahoma!', 'Miracle Worker' and lots more. Now its opposite. There are movies like 'Legally Blonde', 'Hairspray', 'Cry-baby' which are the sources of new theater of Broadway. This is saddening. Theater used to be so much live, so much fresh, so much original...

But I have had my experience on Broadway, at last. And that too with Rent!

NYC

So I was there this weekend. The city that never sleeps! After living here in a small university town for almost a year, this was my first real visit to a big city (not just passing through or spending a night), and my first impression was, 'Wow!'
Living in this small university town made me taking disciplined, organized, friendly crowd, clean streets, no-nuisance neighbourhood for granted. And New York reminded me how wrong I was. It reminded me of another big city.
Dirty subway trains, dirty platforms, commuters leaning on door just beside the warning of not to lean on door, and incomprehensible announcements about upcoming station greeted me on my way to NYC. I was getting more and more comfortable, homely. Then I came out of the subway station at 34th Street, and 'Wow!'. So many people rushing about, street is all crowded, yellow taxis, hawkers yelling and selling things on the sideways, smalltime sellers selling used books and cds on the pavement, people shouting and bargaining, beggars asking for pennies, taxis honking, double decker buses, old torn movie poster on shabby walls, stinking dumpsters just beside a restaurant. I never felt so homely! It is just like Kolkata just little bit scaled up!
In fact Kolkata metro is probably little cleaner than NY subway but its much much smaller in volume, too. Kolkata doesn't have so many skyscrapers. Kolkata has tram, NYC doesn't and Kolkata has a distinctive betel spit decoration that sets her apart. There are some more minor differences such as cops don't pose in fron of their car with tourists in front of Victoria Memorial in Kolkata like they do in Times Square, you can hardly find an open manhole in NYC and things like that. Strikingly its the same life force jostles down the streets of NYC like it does in Kolkata. I guess this is the charecteristics of all the big cities.
And I read this inside the subway ...

"There are roughly three New Yorks.
First, there is the New York of the man or woman who was born there - who takes it for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter - the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out at each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.
Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion." - E B White

Isn't it true for Kolkata, too?

Inspiration

Dyuti sent me link to this video.

Umqombothi is an African beer. And Yvone, the singer is one of the most famous African artist. She's often called princess of Africa. African music are very rich in percussions and the rhythm is simply amazingly vibrant. Apparently this song was used in opening sequence of Hotel Rwanda. It seems this is one of the biggest hit songs of Africa.

The funny part will reveal is when you listen to this video:

Its a Bengali band - Chandrabindoo performing a Bengali nonsence-rock.
I have no qualms with someone "copying" someone else's music, It is hard to differentiate between copying and getting inspired! Inspirations are always welcome, if you acknowledge your inspirations very good; if you don't, well, you are insecure and scared of your own capabilities! Anyway, this is not about copying someone's music.
I appreciate Chandrabindoo for their urban, satirical and nonsensical lyrics. But this time the first line of their song phonetically matches first line Umqombothi in an uncanny way! I mean, being a Bengali if I listen to Umqombothi, I'll hear the first lines of the song as "Brahma Janen, Gopon Kammo ti" ... and this is such a weird Bengali line, it can spun a beutiful nonsense poem in the hands of a good lyricist. I wonder if that's how this song worked for Chandrabindoo!

We MaDlamini

Uph'umqombothi (3x)

Verse
I work hard every day
To make my beer
(Umqombothi)
Wake up early every morning
To please my people with African beer
(Umqombothi)
I make sure the fire burns
To make my beer
(Umqombothi)
My special beer Umqombothi
(Umqombothi)
Is African beer

...more