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.