Hee hee ha ha ho ho hi hi!!

Knock Knock!
Who's there?

Knock KNOCK!!
Who's THERE?!

KNOCK KNOCK!!!
WHO THE *!$**# IS IT!!??

Silence.

Silence who?

Shut up and you will know!


I know better than tormenting my audience with such humour but I like to take things to a crescendo and then end with a low note. That my friends was a classic example. Now why would I want to do such a thing? That is because there is no climax for the joke teller when he has to tell a conventional joke. He knows the only outcome is that people are going to laugh but when he tells a joke (if you can call it that) like the one above he gets to see a variety of expressions. Starting with curiosity, restlessness (on the last KNOCK), surprise, disbelief, disappointment and anger. I love these expressions more than just seeing a blissful mirth on the recipient's face. Of course there are other jokers that like to see much more than simple expressions. They like to see confusion, trauma, anguish, pain and sheer terror. The one of the most well known of such sadistic Jokers is the The Joker from the Batman comics.

I was watching the Dark Knight the other day. Ledger's performance is mesmerizing. He creates such an embodiment of evil that its going to be very difficult for anyone else to recreate the manic chaos he creates in the movie. Its interesting to note that he was given "Batman and the Killing Joke" graphic novel as the reference. If you read that, you will realize the movie personification of the Joker has fewer dimensions to his character and has no emotional department in his upper floor above the neck compared to the Graphic novel. Essentially the Joker is what he is because of "one very bad day". That's why he says the Batman and he are very similar as the batman is also a result of one very bad day i.e day when his parents are murdered.

Incidentally the idea of keeping the Joker a very evil character devoid of any emotions whatsoever was director Nolan's idea. He wanted the emotional burden of the movie to be carried by Harvey Dent (Eckhart). So in actuality the movie is focused on the origin of Harvey Two Face and the emotional turmoil his mind goes through rather than that of the Joker. He is the main guy who swings from an extremely moralistic righteous path to the path of chaos and crime. And Why? Because he has one very bad day. He loses his sweetheart Rachel Dawes and his face literally in that one day. That said however the whole movie is about how the Joker is trying to prove a point. The point being how one very bad day can drive an average or even a more than average stoic man to insanity. How the binding of rules is nothing but a pathetic attempt to cling to rationality. He is trying to convince Batman more than anyone else and uses Harvey as his guinea pig. In the Killing Joke he tries to do the same to Commissioner Gordon in a much more brutal fashion but ultimately fails.

While Batman Begins showcased the origins of Batman extraordinally well the Dark Knight showed him to be a more or less regular superhero. I love Batman because he is the most complicated superhero. To start with he isn't a superhuman at all. He is a just a mortal who is walking the thin line between normalcy and insanity and juggling challenges of his orthogonal superhero life at the same time. He is a billionaire extraordinaire by day and a masked vigilante by night who beats the criminals to pulp with his bare hands. He is a chaos within himself but he tries to channelize the chaos towards goodness by having principles and ethics. He has left in him a small spark of sanity that acts like a light at the end of the tunnel. The light is guiding him in his life but the reality is that he is never destined to reach the end of the tunnel. So he is stuck in perpetual chaos but uses the light at the end of the tunnel as a goal, a taget for him to reach and to keep himself sane. There have been numerous situation where the Joker and others have driven Batman insane but he has managed to crawl back to sanity. He has seen both the worlds but yet he is frustrated by the fact that he doesn't fully understand the Joker. He actually has no clue about what the Joker is thinking and he doesn't realise that there is no point knowing what the Joker is thinking because the Joker's behaviour is chaotic beyond comprehension. Alfred in his infinite wisdom tries to make Batman understand that its impossible to get inside the Joker's psyche without going mad. The Batman series has some of the best character development for a comics. Every character has his or her own distinctive private and intellectual space. Bruce Wayne and Batman are two completely different characters even though they are the same person. The comics have been very particular in keeping it that way but the movies (not only Nolan's) have made that distinction a little fuzzy.

While I really think is that Health Ledger was a good choice for that role and has done ample justice to it but there could have been others who could have added much more shades to the Joker. Jim Carrey and Adrian Brody could have been great too. Adrian Brody is unbelievably talented and his persona very closely resembles the Joker in the comics as a bit more vulnerable earlier and I am sure he would have played the insane part as well as Ledger. Jim Carrey on the other hand is a natural as a lunatic and if used well has the potential to deliver surprisingly powerhouse performances. For all said and done, history has been written and I am waiting with baited breath for the next Batman cinematic installation due in 2012.

Man. A social and sociable animal.

Man is a social animal. He lives to communicate more than he communicates to live. The former and overwhelming category tends to call the people in the latter category reticent. People in first category also quite casually put the reticent into a more extreme group of the Taciturn. However Silence is a powerful communicative tool if used correctly. Most western cultures react differently to silence. People from such cultures tend to become uncomfortable when they see a silent man in their midst. They are unable to understand whether the person is angry, unhappy or whether he is brewing a malicious plan. The main reason for such confusion is that usually in Western Cultures when people are happy they will try and communicate their happiness readily and naturally to the person next to them and at the same time they also share their unhappiness. Thats why a silent man is sure to make people confused.

Like I said earlier, Silence is good in socially tolerable limits and if used with good sense of timing. Social people which is the majority of the populace commonly exhibit qualities like gregariousness, extroversion and vocal friendliness. These are the acceptable qualities with which one gets stamped as Social.

In today's times when communication is considered as a vital path to success it also seems to imply that introvertness is a sure path to failure. Agreed that the world is shrinking. It shrank a lot when telephone was invented but people weren't satisfied. The concept of sharing was still incomplete. Something more was needed. Just voice didn't suffice. With the advent of computers and internet came the bridging of that gap. Vast amounts of information was being exchanged through voice, video and data-files. People who rarely opened their mouths were perceived to be gregarious when they started typing on chat. However with ever increasing channels of communication the human mind quickly gets bored and starts to feel lonely. Something more entertaining fun, educative, provocative etc. was required to keep their minds active. Essentially alive. Enter socio-networking sites. I akin them to interactive TV. Its still wastes a ton of your time but you perceive yourself to be actively involved and keeping your mind alive. I as a avid movie fan can't figure out how that is better than watching movies but experts say it is. Probably because at least some muscles like your fingers are moving other than just your eyelids.

It always strikes me as interesting when in an extremely fast-tracked life people can still afford to spend countless hours updating their facebook pages with minute details of their daily mundane life and commenting on equally mundane activities of other people's lives. When millions do it actively and I don't see the point, I am clearly missing the point. However a deeper question is in an increasingly shrinking world why is everyone becoming more isolated? Why are people becoming more reserved in real life and extremely garrulous online? All these new mechanisms of communication are actually in some way mutating our natural behaviour of real-life face to face communication. Thankfully the online emoticons can never replace the actual emotions and its impact on the participants of a face to face communication. Am I saying this as a fact? Hell no, I am just making a blog out of my personal experiences.

Criticising the critics!

A few nights ago I watched a wonderful marathi movie named Harishchandrachi Factory. Its a Marathi movie by director Prakash Mokashi about the Father of Indian Cinema Dadasaheb Phalke's journey to immortal fame. Its a commentary on a significant period of Phalke's life where he got tremendously inspired by "moving pictures" i.e cinema and decided to make one for the Indian audiences.

The movie shows his passion for learning and his struggle to achieve his goal in a much lighter vein. To many people's surprise this was intentional. Many complained about the Chaplinsque style that Mokashi decided to use to portray many of the scenes but most people failed to get the point. The point was to show Phalke's struggle to success in the same way he would have shown it had he made the movie himself. You see Phalke was a master of silent films and silent films were to remain his only choice even after the talkies had made an entry into Indian Films. The picture's style is in actuality a tribute to Phalke's films and his film making style.

The film is about the making of Phalke's first film. It is not Phalke's biopic. The intensity of Phalke's problems is deliberately toned down to show Phalke's point of view in dealing with the situations like his approaches to raise money by quickly selling off house hold stuff, his grit and determination and his tremendous sense of focus in learning of the film technology in London without any contacts there to help him out. Phalke is shown as an eternal optimist but thats a question of individual interpretation of a character. When I saw the movie, I realized the movie played out the sequences like they would have played out in Phalke's mind, light with a sense of tangy humour.

It goes without saying that Phalke in his financially troubling times suffered and made his family suffer with him but the manner in which he never lost focus, hope, his sense of humour or his love towards his family through the bad times is a lesson to all of us. Many people were irked by the feel of the movie and the very set like atmosphere. Consider the fact that the movie was set in early 1900s and loud almost garish sets were available back then that brought out different colours in shades of grey in the black and white movies.

Overall the movie entertains and is meaningful. Its exactly how Phalke would have intended it to be.

Sun's demise or a revival in the making

With the Sun Microsystems acquisition complete, everyone should expect at least a million blogs about the golden and brilliant days of Sun at its peak and its subsequent retardation. While many inside Sun will lament its demise as an open cultured fun loving ass-kicking technological company, I for one believe the Oracle takeover might be the best thing that has happened to Sun. I am not talking about Oracle saving Sun from death because that goes without saying but the fact that Oracle can give all the Sun technologies a sense of purpose and direction.

Agreed that the two merging companies don't share a lot of culture. Oracle is known for its ruthless demeanor doing one thing it knows how to do best. Making money. Sun over years of extraordinary research and development has developed hordes of bleeding edge technologies but looking a bit deeper one can't help but wonder that all of them look like orphans. This is comparable to developing the coolest operating system with little or no applications running over it. Of course, I am not talking about Solaris here but Sun as a whole. I believe with the acquisition most of the Sun technologies have now got a singular purpose. To make sure Oracle applications work best on them. Oracle in that sense is a very lucky company to get hold of Sun. It now has to its disposal some of the most advanced "tools" it can use to make sure it stays ahead of the applications race.

No matter what anyone says the feeling of satisfaction when one gets after being appreciated for developing a good piece of art is way more than developing a stupendous piece of art that no one will ever appreciate. The fact that the merger will kill Sun's working culture is undeniable but I think if there is a sense of purpose and return on "research and development" investment thats far more important than anything else.

It will finally give people a sense that no one at Sun is wasting their time doing ultra-cool stuff that had the potential of never being used because Sun couldn't find the right user application to sell it with.