Jaane Tu...ya jaane na & Love Story 2050: Movie Reviews

Yes, I cannot tell a lie - I saw both these movies back to back. Yes, voluntarily. No, you may not ask why. Anyways, on with the reviews.

JT...YJN is an insufferable bore of a movie. The story is cliched beyond belief and thanda like kulfi. You can see the end coming just by reading the tag-line of the movie, which in effect makes this movie an exercise in patience. Not that there isn't enough absurdity in this flick. For example, you meet Peachy and Pumpkin, the so-called world's coolest parents who want to get their daughter married off as soon as she finishes college. Then there's Aditi's brother who's a straight lift from Six Feet Under. Then there are all the ugly friends, the bad gujju caricatures, the absurdity that is the Ranjhaur ke Rathod, Arbaaz and his brother....the list just goes on. And it is so badly shot, so poorly plotted and so badly directed that Love Story 2050 comes as a breath of fresh air.

I have to admit - I loved this movie. The cinematography was top class, the special effects were mind blowing and it was full of lovely little ideas that kept one entertained through the film. Was there a story? Nope. However, it seems a little unfair to single out this one film for not having a story. Did Jodhaa Akbar have a story? Did Eklavya? Did JT...YJN? Then why is this suddenly a problem with LT2050? Did I mention that the special effects were mind blowing? They were better than any of the Star Wars. The lighting and textures were of jaw-dropping beauty. I was mightily impressed. Do go watch this even if it is just to see a landmark in Indian special effects.Not that this film doesn't have its share of problems but I found them very easy to forgive.

The show we went for was attended by 60 odd Prime Focus special effects people, in effect the heart and soul of this film and we cheered lustily with them at each explosion and each gorgeously raytraced vista of Mumbai. Nikhat Kazmi does these people a huge disservice when she calls them "picture postcards" and I hope this goes a little way towards setting the record straight.

The Wonder That Is Emacs

This post is for all you people in Linuxland who stare enviously (and furtively) at Mac users with their TextMate. I know you've seen all the screencasts with some geek with a MacBook and TextMate doing their nifty snippet things and going clickety clack on their white keyboards. Well, I know I have and I said, yeah emacs is cool and all but why can't I have some TextMate coolness? Then I remembered, what the fuck? this is emacs we're talking about. A quick search reveals that emacs has had html-helper-mode (i.e. snippets) from 19-fucking-95 when html was a baby. Even cooler? It was written by Marc Andreesen. A whole load of history to go with your editing too. Here are some good blogs to setup your emacs properly with python code-completion, etc. Python Programming in Emacs Emacs as a powerful Python IDE Don't forget the screencast. That one is from 2006. Does TextMate do subversion? No, I mean properly....

Aamir - Movie Review

As you may have noticed, Aamir is getting a lot of buzz in the press. For example, Taran Adarsh writes

Films like Aamir are more for the discerning audience, for the thinking viewer. It's a film that attacks your mind, rather than your heart. It's a film that pricks your conscience.

Not one of the reviewers will tell you about all the pitfalls of this movie - its meaninglessness and the utterly retrograde politics it represents. About the politics first - the whole movie is pure Muslim bashing. It's entire objective is to get you to see Muslims as dirty, filthy, uneducated, meat-eating paedophiles and druggies. Portraying Aamir as the "educated, moderate" Muslim only makes the contrast that much starker. It is true that Muslims are poor and uneducated. But so are Hindus. But oh, just you try making a film like this about the Hindus. The moral police will be out in force talking about hurt sentiments and what not. Yet, if Muslims protest it will all be oh, look at them, they're so touchy.

Anyone with even the first glimmer of Marxist ideology will see the situation of the unwashed masses as a deliberate result of the policies of the establishment. It is class warfare and religion is just a tool of oppression. Looking for the reasons for terrorism in shady underworld dons is like looking for the reasons for cholera in a puddle of watery shit. It is purely symptomatic of repression, poverty and exploitation. Had the film carried such a radical message, it would then have been possible for the absurd plot to recede to the background as a purely narrative device to bring the bourgeois protagonist in touch with the proletariat, for the terrorist to then make the point that the real enemy is neither Hindu nor Muslim but lies in the corruption of the State and the greed of the elites. There was a point in the film where it almost went that way. I thought the director had set up a nice dialectic with the whole "aadmi apni kismat khud likhta hai" setup, but oh the waste...now, that would have been a film. As it is, Aaamir has a meaningless plot full of holes and an absurd ending and it has absolutely no sympathy for human beings that are victims of the great political games. It almost seems like someone else (cough...Anurag...cough..cough...Kashyap..) directed the film from about halfway through the first half (enough with the running behind the taxi already!!)

Is Nikhat Kazmi a Muslim? Can even she not see this film for what it is? What's that paper she writes for again? And boy oh boy did she go out on a limb for RGV with this one...some excerpts for your reading pleasure

But like his father, he has the welfare of Maharashtra at his heart and is hell bent on giving his state the multi-national power project which the NRI business executive (Aishwarya Bachchan) would like to set up in India

His camera follows the angles it excels in, plastering the screen with extreme close-ups of his protagonists. Of course, it does help when the faces in full view are extremely emotive and reflect the myriad emotions of anger, pain, passion and revenge with a mere muscle flick.

It is too boring to review the whole movie. Pathetic depiction of the goons that pass for politicians around here. Can you imagine a film about a power project (we all know which one Ramu) without a single rupee note exchanging hands? The asslicking machine is already at warp5 captain....I cannae hold her no more....

Update: A discerning viewer pointed out the very insiduous assumption at work in the film i.e. that an educated Muslim will immediately seek to distance himself from the terrorists, which is to say that their anger is not justified. Is it not possible that an educated person will look back and say that yes, after decades of marginalisation, of persecution and of being terrorised their anger is indeed justified. That is not a possibility that is admitted. Like in a one-sided argument, the film never delves into the marginalisation and terrorisation of Muslims in India, even if only to reject this as a justification. The film seems to say that only lack of education is the reason behind their squalor and the terrorism in India, and in the same breath says that the onus to educate oneself lies with the individual, as though systems of control and subjugation of whoever, Muslims, dalits, etc. just do not exist, that there will never be the equality of opportunity without some semblance of equality in circumstances.

Mike Miller - possibly the tastiest guitar player ever!!

In 1993, Chick Corea put together the second version of his Elektric Band and recorded what has turned out to be one of my favourite jazz-fusion discs of all time - the seminal Paint The World (those who have been following this blog might remember this post). The lineup replaced uber-shredmeister Frank Gambale with the little known Mike Miller, a studio musician from the Los Angeles scene. I can still remember my jaw hitting the floor when Mike's music came pouring out of my speakers for the first time.

The first thing that strikes you about Mike is his tone - it is sharp and biting, and Mike really digs into your ears with his bluesy, ballsy playing throughout the album. The second thing you notice about him is his total control and very strong melodic sense. Of all the solos on the album, his are the most singable. Mike is the polar opposite of his predecessor in the band - he doesn't go in for very fast playing, choosing instead to let his phenomenal phrasing and evolved musical sense create their own mood. Mike's gutsy playing can be heard throughout the album as he solos or comps with some bizarre chords in that crunchy tone of his. In Tone Poem, he rips an absolutely phenomenal nylon-string solo, just for fun I guess. Some of his other standout solos are on CTA and The Ritual, while the sparring with Chick on the initial bars of Ished leave you in no doubt that this is a guitar player who has learnt the theory, mastered it and then chucked it out the window as he goes with his highly evolved musical gut. I won't waste any more time here, but what I will do instead is to leave you with a few samples of the masterful artist doing his thing.

Ritual solo.mp3 Space_solo.mp3 Tone Poem solo.mp3

Mike has a solo album out called Save The Moon. While the music on this album is a lot more laid back than Paint the World (Chick can get very complicated at times), it is still a whole album's worth of immersion in some wonderful guitar playing and you should totally buy it off emusic (or wherever) if you can.

The petrol subsidy must go.

Who is it helping the most? Large consumers of petrol. i.e. Ford Endeavour owners blasting the AC with a special power point for the computer. Or, people like my boss who drive a converted Merc van with a DVD player and a drinks cooler. These are not the people who need subsidies. These are the people that must be discouraged. A quick back of the envelope calculation reveals that petrol retails in India for $(3.78541178 * 54 /43) = $4.75 and change. This is second cheapest only after the great United States (outside of the major oil producing nations). It is a ridiculous number in a country where 99.3% of people DO NOT own cars. You might say that even motorcycles run on petrol to which I will say that the difference between 4-6 kpl in city traffic for a car and 60-70 kpl for a bike constitute two very different things in a family's budget. Or, one might sell three litres at the current price and everything above at exorbitant rates. A minor inconvenience for a biker - a major drag for car owners.

Indian oil companies are "weeks away from bankruptcy" (http://sify.com/finance/fullstory.php?id=14678154). Their failure will send cascading failures through the oil delivery system meaning that cooking gas, kerosene, diesel - the stuff that actually runs the country - might just become unavailable. This is hardly a price worth paying for the wellbeing of the chosen few.

More expensive petrol might actually allow the feedback mechanisms from peak oil to filter through to people's behaviour. Maybe if they drive less and we have less congestion on the roads, then we can possible even have decent standards of living in our cities. Perhaps revert some of that tarmac into basketball courts.

You can bet your ass that it is the country's car manufacturers who are "lobbying" for the maintenance of the status quo as regards petrol. They might as well not bother. As the rupee devalues against the dollar (a shocking occurence in its own right - possibly engineered by the textile and ITES companies), the price of petrol will put paid to their fancy advertising schemes and so on. Tata Nano might just become the "not-so-poor-man's-car" in the near future.

Look for more excitement on the energy front as the twin horsemen of inflation and supply constriction come riding out of the West.

Peak Oil Hits the Mainstream

$135 a barrel. Headline news worldwide. World poised for the outbreak of fuel riots. All of America on the abyss. Is it really happening? It would be to boring to get into an introductory discussion about peak oil but the uninitiated can follow the discussion at http://theoildrum.com

Peak oil is an inevitability. Whether we are living through it at this very moment or not might even today be open to debate (or is it? http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4018) but that the rate of flow of oil will drop below the constantly expanding demand for it seems to be a mathematical certainty. We have all heard the story of the ant and the grasshopper but can you believe that it seems to have had zero impact on all these responsible adults that are running the world? Here in India the increase in oil consumption is palpable. Landing in Mumbai the other day I saw for the first time a sky full of planes, circling. Airport buses with LCD televisions. Cavernous terminals with the air conditioning blasting, the doors open to 33 degree heat. All this wasn't here even just a few years ago and this is one of the poorest countries on the planet. How many more dinosaur bones can we burn before they finally give out? Are we building 13 tonne stone heads with the last of the wood?

To be quite honest, I find the cornucopian argument quite unfathomable. "Something will save us", they say, "It always has." Which would have been equivalent to driving while looking in the rear-view mirror except for the minor examples of the Easter Island and Aztec civilisations (and this from people who have even read Jared Diamond's Collapse). The history of the world is rife with examples of civilisations where "something" did not indeed arrive at the last minute and save everyone. To all the people still thinking about building spaceships to Mars I say this - pull your head out of your fucking arse and take a look around you.

Even if the high price of oil is indeed caused not by peak oil but by world's the collapsing financial systems, I posit that one of the reasons for this is purposeful demand destruction be people well aware of peak oil who want to preserve the precious stuff for the warplanes and the tanks. Hello prisonplanet.org !!

As the Coen brothers said - you can't stop what's coming. The mathematics of inflation and peak oil are very clear. The descent is inexorable. Then it accelerates. What can one do? Gather together. Play some music. Smoke a joint. Forgive your enemies. And your friends. And yourself. Re-evaluate. Re-connect.

We have enough aeroplanes. What we need is a new myth. A new heroism. A new culture.

Food riots and Energy as Money

It was jusgt a few days ago that I told someone - sometime before 2009 is over we will see extreme poverty being brought about by nothing more than a collapse of the world's monetary systems. Seems like it is coming to pass already.

GWB's recent comments regarding the alarming rise in food prices has sparked off quite a controversy in the papers here in India, as well as I suppose in China. Of course, Jairam Ramesh was right in retorting that this is just another example of his ignorance, which indeed it is. Had there been massive crop failures or some other event, it would even have made sense but in the absence of all these issues, simple rising of demand for meat, etc from India cannot explain a 200% increase in wheat prices and 100% increase in rice prices in such a short time. The massive diversion of cropland away from food to biofuels does play some part in the tragedy that is unfolding. Those of you who have faith in the free market and its ability to fix our looming energy crisis might pay attention to this, a good example of the so called free market completely fucking things up for everybody. Wheat prices Rice prices

What can, and does explain the alarming rise in prices is US Dollar inflation and rigidities in the real world that cannot keep pace with the changing value of money. Oil prices US Dollar

Now, some trader on Wall Street bidding on rice contracts, priced in USD, has changed the world for all the rice buyers whose national governments and central banks have a particular policy towards the US dollar. Regime's change painfully. Those who have built their lives on a particular regime will fight tooth and nail to preserve it, but like every other fiat currency, the fiat currencies of today and especially the most powerful US Dollar (or should we call it by its real name - the Federal Reserve Dollar) are beginning their inexorable decline to zero value and are causing untold misery along the way. It seems there is a limited amount of money you can push into the economy through subprime loans and HELOC extractions before people start wondering what it is that those dollars actually do.

So now we have a situation where the collapse of the worlds monetary systems is once again causing poverty where none existed. Even hallowed institutions like the World Bank are saying that all of Capitalism painstaking efforts at pulling millions out of poverty have suffered a huge setback with millions being pushed back into poverty because they were just too far away from the action - the action being the rapid and continuous devaluation of the world's reserve currency. Fools.

Sooner or later one must ask the question - what is money? I think we can answer this by describing the functions that money performs i.e a medium of exchange and a store of value. However, let us take a closer look at these functions and see whether our hallowed dollars and rupees do actually perform this function. Is the dollar a medium of exchange? Undoubtedly. You can buy bread, eggs, apartments for dollars. You accept dollars as payment because you are sure that somewhere down the road, someone else will accept dollars to provide you the things you need. A dollar, and all money, represents a claim on assets, on real things. From whence does this claim arise? Simply put - from propoganda and from the corecive power of the State. Can you think of another reason why you continue to accept dollars and rupees in exchange from your labour when the value of your assets changes so rapidly from day to day?

Is money a store of value? Let me ask you - is a lakh of rupees a lot of money? Can you remember a time when it was? How long ago was it? Your savings - what will they be worth when you retire? Is this fair? Here's another question to test your familiarity with that thing we call reality - is gold a currency because it is valuable, or is gold valuable because it is a currency? Leave your answers in the comments.

Most of you who read this will scoff. Don't worry - that is normal. For someone to suggest that Weimar hyperinflation could arise again is for someone to suggest that our leaders have learnt nothing from history. That would be true only if you give them the benefit of the doubt, which I refuse to. Our leaders have no interest in our wellbeing. War is for external enemies. Economics if for the internal ones. Much more bang for one's buck, especially considering that the bucks are all fake anyways.

There is one thing though, that can serve as the ultimate currency, which has all the benefits of a currency but none of the drawbacks. For example, this unit of currency would be unforgeable, uninflatable, totally fungible, would preserve it's value (it might even get more valuable with time), would be environmentally friendly, would take power away from the great banking cartels, would be freely exchangeable and tradeable and would be great for backing not only local but also national and international transactions. Ladies and gentle, may I present - the humble KiloWatt.

If there is a dynamic entrepreneur out there with the ability to reliable deliver kilowatts, I suggest you float a currency.

I am sure there are any number of objections to this proposal, and like I like to say - if there is a truth, let it out in the comments. While I do believe that my many hours and weeks and years involved with banking have meant that I have spent a lot of time thinking about these things, I still maintain that truth is truth and that it will emerge only from discussion and not from me saying any xyz thing on my blog. Have at it in the comments and let us see whether we can find a better alternative to our volatile and unfair systems of trade today.