Baboon Logic

My frantic and tedious journey ended about two weeks back, but I had been either too tired or too busy with coding and gaming to take up blogging.

I got really pissed off in the mathematics camp I was attending (I would have written about that, but the place was ten kilometres away from civilisation in every direction and a computer with a decent internet connection was hard to find). I sent an SOS to Anshul, who said that I could finally come over and start my internship. I made a last minute booking and got on the first train available (it wasn’t actually available, but I got on it anyway, praying for a conformation).

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Sau Crore (1991) is directed by Dev Anand, and I don’t think any fan of Bollywood will need a longer introduction to the movie. I wouldn’t really have watched the movie, except that Naseeruddin Shah was in the lead, and Sunil Gavaskar was to make a special appearance along with his team.

Obviously I didn’t expect much from the movie, but it managed to surprise me. In spite of being devoid of any artistic merits, it offended my aesthetics. The movie can be seen as a forerunner to a whole generation of comedy bums that Bollywood is producing now.

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Much goes in the name of science in this country, and if I were to believe what I read, the rest of the world is not much different.

My personal favourite is Ravan and his Pushpak Viman (a flying machine that he used to kidnap women). Whenever priests, old men and the wise old men of the community described to me the greatness of the ancient Indian civilisation, all of them came to this inevitable conclusion - the western science is now trying to rediscover / reinvent / imitate what had been done in India 5000 years back (the number of years varies from person to person).

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The Unix Millennium Bug started getting noticed (in 2006), exactly a billion seconds before its sceduled execution, after there were some mysterious crashes which were finally traced to the definition of time_t in unix-like operating systems (and more generally, in the ubiquitous C (the programming language)). From a thread in PIClist, I also found this webpage which claims to have been written in 2003 (in case the opening paragraph looks familiar to you, yes, the whole page is a mostly plagarised version of the programming challenge in the introduction to the excellent book Expert C Programming by Peter Van Der Linden, a book I would recommend to anyone).

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For a very long time I had made no effort to understand Shakespeare, owing principally to my belief that he was overrated. Then I saw Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet (even though I couldn’t stand Leonardo those days), which used the original text of the play without modifications (except for omissions and rearrangements).

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– spoilers ahead –

Some Philosophy
Murder, in all its glorious mystery, can not be the story (mark the word - story, not subject) of a movie any more. The focus must lie elsewhere, in the lives of the characters, their interactions, their crisis, their interpretation of the world around them, so that when a clue is quietly slipped into a scene, the viewers’ll either miss it, or interpret it differently (reminds me of Ram Gopal Verma’s Kaun), like we all have done in the best of Agatha Christie novels. This is how Bhool Bhulaiyaa fails. It has no story. Its characters have no life (except Akshay Kumar, may be). That is also why in the end, when the mystery is over, one fails to sympathise with the emotional difficulties of the characters.

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Unfortunately, we in India don’t have free speech. We have a nice illusion of it but reasonable free speech in India doesn’t exist. Poorly implemented unclear laws and a thriving and ever increasing number of self-appointed culture polices don’t help the situation much.

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There are no two ways about it, Moin Khan is a man with little insight, pathetic foresight, non-existent intelligence and atrocious double standards.

I have always meant to write about him, ever after he commented on Sachin in the most cowardly manner. I did comment on that article in passing in one of my earlier posts (the last para), but Moin’s continued double standards merited a more elaborate treatment.

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