Iconoclastic ...me?!

I am truly fascinated by the people who lived thousands of years ago who studied, observed and recorded their countless observations about our environment, plants, humans and their harmonious existence. Not only were the observations recorded, but they were studied thoroughly by future generations, added to and amended. As time passed, future generations understood and assimilated vast amounts of information quickly and using this information they concisely wrote down guidelines for a better living. These included guidelines on physical health, spiritual or mental health, occupation, civil works and social living (morals and ethics). These people in their minds had a clear vision of how their guidelines if implemented properly had the potential of creating the most harmonious existence of humankind. . The guidelines were supposed to help humans achieve harmony with nature, other humans and self.

In the Hindu way of life, these guidelines are called the "Vedas" which means knowledge or wisdom imparted through the speech of god. Over the years across centuries man then translated and manipulated these practical texts to give it a sacred and religious colour to it. While doing this, considerable alterations were done to the original text. These alterations not only diluted the guidelines but also paved way to create fundamental schism in the original teachings. The hand-me-down approach is possibly one of the reasons why changes to these texts happened in the first place.

During this time there was no idol worship or at least there is no known record. The classification of labour was introduced during this time and was done based on capabilities. The obviously stronger people got into more physical jobs like civil works, farming and security. People with known talents in many arts like clothing, sculpturing were given a free rein to develop these further. People with higher cerebral capacities were given the task of research and town-ship planning. Some people were isolated from society due to their exposure to communicable diseases, exhibition of disorderly social behaviour and other malicious reasons. Along with these people another group of people were isolated with them to help them. While this classification started of well, vested interests, ulterior motives to gain more power which mark the basic human trait started tilting the equilibrium of this system. The cerebral people wanted to gain more for less. They started making schemes so that people start to trust them more than others. The people with physical power tried to take control of other weaker people instead of protecting them. The isolated people were further distanced. The increasing rift between these classes became so fundamental that across centuries people forgot why the classes were created in the first place but instead a malicious misinterpretation of classes was to remain thousands of years to this day to plague the Hindus in all aspects of their lives. It seems logical to say that these classes were never created to act as a classification to define one's standard of living but as a practical guideline for work.

It is indeed sad to see today's Hindu society fighting amongst themselves over these classes when the whole idea behind them was harmony, With the introduction of god and idol worship, people have morphed themselves to be the followers rather than leaders. While the concept of god does seem to give the people the power to stay mentally stable it is in fact detrimental to their mental power as they push the responsibility of their stability onto someone else. While determining the happiness quotient, Indians rank high for just this particular reason as they make god responsible for everything that's happening to them which makes them feel secure and in turn happy. While this pattern of misinterpretations of original teachings over centuries is not just valid for Hindus but more or less applies to all religions. The people who created these religions were great men but lesser men after them got more power and following than they deserved and chose to mutate the teachings of these great men into scriptures of illogical doctrine.

Fortunately looking at history there has been no dearth of great men and time and again, great men have rose to the opportunity and tried to create an equilibrium and a harmony for humankind. Currently we are in a hiatus in that harmony but things will change soon for the better. The only thing unknown here is how soon.

A detour from the mainstream hindi cinema? Maybe. Maybe not.

Yesterday I was cursing as to why did I have the privilege of watching Nagesh Kukunoor's latest flick 8x10 tasveer. The movie starts normally with Akshay showcasing his acrobatic antics as fast as Salman khan can remove his shirt but then in this movie AK also gets the opportunity to do some actual acting and he fares well. So bottom line is AK can act if he wants to and if the director wants him to but what can AK do if the director doesn't want to direct. I think thats what happens in the last 20 minutes of the film. It feels like some amateur who while trying to complete Beethoven's unfinished symphony totally totals it. It almost feels like Kukunoor for some sadistic reason decided to take one of the best suspenses in Hindi cinema and push it down the very cliff from which Akshay takes his fantastic leap at the start of the movie.

I think Nagesh Kukunoor went blank and he could never really figure out what to write for the climax. In my opinion he should have appointed Anurag Kashyap for the task . That would have been a cracker of a movie. Agreed that AKashyap is a highly self-indulgent film-maker but what 8x10 tasveer needed was a whacky/shocking/revelating climax and he seemed to fit the director's bill perfectly. Overall the 8x10 tasveer has a very good international feel to it. The scenery selection is excellent and the NRI characters look just right. As a counter-argument, Kukunoor did well to take the film into familiar Indian cinema grounds rather than taking a very abstract detour. So to sum up the movie is a decent effort that raises the technical bar of hindi movie making but lacks a good script and ends up in a banal climax.

If you haven't seen either DevD or "No Smoking" you should. They set foot into a totally new territory never before ventured by any Hindi movie director and kudos to Kashyap for making such movies. Of course, it takes a twisted mind to make one and yet another one to understand such movies but then Kashyap knows there are too many of these twisted minds around. For people who saw "No Smoking" and didn't get it please read Stephen King's Quitters Inc short story and if you still don't get, forget it you are the one of the few unlucky ones with an untwisted mind

Something to boggle the mind...

On a clear night if you start looking at the sky and think about the countless stars, the endless sky, the infinite number of galaxies the mind starts to boggle. After a while you give up as there is only so much the mind can comprehend before it starts reeling. My mind does the same when I think about technology advances and that mind you is happening right here on earth. The speed with which technology is advancing and the world is shrinking is truly mind-boggling. Some of the new gadgets like Apple's iPhone are not just eye-candy but the next step in how humans are going to interact with the information available to them at any given time.

Not only is innovation in top gear but the assimilation of different innovations to generate a synergistic and coherent uber-innovation is also happening at a faster pace. The iPhone uses many of these innovations like e.g utilizing the street view from google maps to pin-point your location and orientation using simple web interface and not GPS. Of course, you will need to personally co-operate with the searching process in at least identifying whether the building that you are standing in front of is actually the one showed in the street view map.

Some years back I had seen an invention for a auto-focusing camera that uses retro reflected eye focus measurements. What that essentially means is when a user looks at something say e.g. part of a scenery, the view finder optical system detects the eye direction and focuses on the object your eye is actually focused on. Now combine this with the latest and the greatest OCR (Optical Character Recognition) algorithm and you can actually compute/translate/ what you are seeing onto the screen. Let say you are looking at a signboard, the camera will auto-focus on the sign board and the OCR will read the characters out of it. Third invention is the micro-camera that can almost fits in the corner of a spectacle frame. There was also an invention which projects an image on the glass of the spectacle and so it feels like you are watching a giant TV but in reality the TV is a 4x4 mm square on your glass of your eyeglass frame. With rapid advances in wireless and information exchange, you can quickly process what you are looking at. So the total assimilated invention will be something like this.

Say you are walking down a street and decide to grab a bite. You basically (and always) want the best food at the best deal for your money without wasting your time. Your choice of cuisine for that day is lets say Chinese food and you look at the banner of the first Chinese restaurant you come across. The moment you look at the banner the camera in your eyeglass frame will auto-focus on the letters and the OCR will kick into action and capture those letters. The letters are then sent over the ubiquitous wi-fi/mobile/3g etc to an online search engine. The search engine searches the text and realizes its a search for a restaurant and gives back a table of data. The table of data shows relevant details like alternative (/better) restaurants in that area, current menu, today's special, cheapest item on the menu, how long the hotel is open etc. These results can be custom prepared for you if you have a profile uploaded on the search engine. The results are then either neatly tabularized or mind-scaped (brain-graphed) to suit each person's preference and ability to understand information in a preferred format. This is then projected on the micro-tv on the eyeglasses' frame. All this should complete in one fraction of a second so the moment you look at the restaurant you know if you want to go in there or not. The information available is endless. A tiny camera scanner combo can probably scan your retina for secure transactions that needs authentication and say access your bank or credit card account to see if you can afford the chosen place or not.

While all this may seem fantastical its really not anymore. All the individual components are already ready. Its just a matter of time before somebody realizes their collective potential and creates a uber-device.

Whats in a name!

I have a habit of asking the meaning of someone's name if I find it interesting/obscure/amusing. While I keep wondering what is the best response I can give if somebody asks me the meaning of my name. If you google for Siddharth one of the hits shows some interesting statistics. "The name Siddharth, is the 37945th most popular baby name at mybabyname.com placing it in the top 53% of names by popularity.". I think that's some achievement. In school we had at a maximum 3 Siddharths in my class or my grade. In my college, there was only I AFAIK. Thats not a lot of Siddharths compared to Amits or Rahuls but nevertheless it has become one of the most common-place name.

The earliest known usage of the name is by the great Gautama Buddha. Many fail to realize that he was Siddharth"a" before he became the great buddha. Ironically Siddharth means he who has achieved his wishes or he who knows the meaning of life. If that was true Buddha would have stayed put within his palace walls knowing that he has achieved all but he didn't. Instead he went out in the search of the very answers his name claimed he already knew and boy, did he achieve greatness.

A million things to write about but.....

The question that almost kills is what does a newbie blogger blog about. He wants the blog to start on the right subject and the right note to attract the right kind of readers. I would rather write something that I hope to attract any readers at all to begin with. This is turning out to be more of a meta-blog. I really thought I would write about movies but nothing came out recently that deserves a truly special mention.

Too many people have ranted about how Danny Boyle's Slumdog millionaire took the growing, gleaming, superpowered , financially stabilizing, technologically advancing face of India and splattered all over it the dehumanizing, impoverished and fetid details from the mumbai slums and worse, packaged it into a typical commercial hindi cinema well one third hindi and brought in international accolades.

Another movie in recent times that made me raise an eyebrow of interest was Zack Snyder's Watchmen. The trailers were very slick, Although I was more curious to understand what prompted Zack Snyder to take on probably THE most difficult comic book adaptation ever. He probably failed to realize that he was digging a bigger hole for himself than the one into which Leonidas kicks the Persian messenger. In all fairness, Snyder faithfully captured the three dimensional painted panels of the comic book but completely failed to capture all the other dimensions that Moore had so deftly interwoven in the comic series. For me as a true Watchmen fan it was a bit of a disappointment but that was expected and I wasn't surprised.