Just saw " Rocket Singh " .....

I must say it was one of the better movies o come out of the YRF factory ( Yash Raj ). This is not to say that it is a great movie...my views on YRF movies are that they should not have been made. The only reason their films were hits were because there was no one during the 90s who raised the bar and these people dont bother about such things. To give you an example...just the other day caught the last 10-15 minutes of 'Mujhse Dosti Karoge". This is probably a 2002-3 movie and the climax of the movie was the proverbial unintentional sindoor falling from the temple alter onto the heroines head in a clean red line !!! I am glad that now there are good movies which make people realize how bad the yrf movies generally are.

Back to rocket singh.....cant help of a better analogy...that a dog chasing a car. The movie was like that....good to watch until th dog caught up with the car...it then has no clue of what to do with the car. Same thing here. For the most part it was interesting enouh for us to watch it and then the dog caught it..and the movie did not know how to end...and they have made a hash out of it. That said..it is still a decent move with some cheesy lines...' risk to spiderman ko bhi lena padta hai...hum to salesman hai'.

overall a 6/10....have fun watching the dog chase !!

My Experiments with Bollywood Lullabies
(No kids were harmed in the making of this article or the experiments themselves!!)

This is inspired by something I do to get my son to sleep every night. A typical night begins with me taking my son from the arms of his dear mother amidst screams which if could be translated would probably a barrage of choiciest abuses. I still take him and turn off the lights and start singing softly some of the few bollywood ( yes..you heard it right...bollywood ) numbers for which I know the lyrics partially. And it is in such circumstances that I made some observations.

One does not have to be a purist or a connoisseur of music to be able to judge what is melodious soulful music and what is not.  Melody, by the way, is defined as ' A pleasing succession or arrangement of sounds '.  That is what every song is. So what makes it soulful. What is soulful ?


Lets take a very obvious example. Try singing a Govinda/David dhawan number to get your kid to sleep.

                            What is mobile number ? What is your style number ?

Now try singing a good old OP Nayyar number

                            Aaiye Mehraban...Baithiye jaanejann shokh se leejiyegi Ishq ki Imtihaan

Frankly you don't need to even know the lyrics...just hum the tune and the difference will be very obvious. Of course in this example it is rather stark. Let us try something which is a little less different and closer in terms of composition timelines...let us take the year 1999

                   Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (Ismail Darbar )-   Chaand Chipa Badal Mein...Sharmaake Meri   Jaana...Seene Se....

                   BaadShah ( Anu Malik ) - Baadshah O Baadshah...Baadshah O Baadshah

Lets us take the same year

                   Mast ( Sanjay Chautha ) - Aasman kehta hai rab se...tune chaand do kyon banaayee

                   Biwi No 1 ( Anu Malik ) - Any song

 If you have not listened to the song from mast, please do...it has very beautiful lyrics in simple hindi. No urdu. No complex metaphors..just simple ones. But just beautiful.

Let us take two songs from the same movie - Tere Mere Sapne ( 1999 - Viju Shah )

                  Tere Mere Sapne ( Title Song )

                  Kuch Mere Dil Ne kaha , Kuch Tere Dil ne Kaha

The second one beats the first one hollow in terms of soul. My point here is not that there should not exist different genre/styles of songs, or that melodious soulful music is only those which are considered 'soft numbers'......but the fact that there is a very simple manner in which you can differentiate the melodious ones from the rest. It is not the only way...but it is a great way and will work for folks with no music sense whatsoever.

To look at it from a hindu philosophical perspective....we are all supposed to be souls in a body and the souls themselves are closer to god. Babies are therefore much closer to god in they they have just acquired bodies and that probably is why this experiment seems to work...since if a baby finds peace in a certain kind of music...it is because it is touching the soul. To quote Fritjof Capra - ' The language is very limiting '. I really cannot explain it in detail..but if you have the opportunity to sing a lullaby to a small kid, try this experiment and you will know what I mean. Here are some more songs to compare and try to sing to your child.

                        Kaminey - Than Tan Dan

                        Kaminey - Title Song

                        Kaminey - Raat ke dhai Baje

You have to doff your hat off to Vishal Bharadwaj for his range and versatality. That said...do the lullaby experiment and you will almost be able to caliberate the songs in terms of its soulfullness. Please keep in mind though that this experiment works better when the kid is not totally dead tired and will sleep to anything. It is for those in between periods when he/she will refuse to sleep on their own and needs a catalyst. What was started as a catalyst by me landed up as my experiments with bollywood lullabies.

On a side note I am actually observing a pattern in terms of us as adults having the opportunity to use children to actually help us in making complex adult decisions. More on those experiments once I have some successful conclusions to draw from them.

Some more songs which I successfully use with my son

                       Chanda re ...Chanda Re  (Sapnay - Rehman )
                       E chand Teri chaandni Ki Kasam ( Tera Jadoo Chal Gaya  - Anu Malik)
                      Aao huzoor aao Sitaaron Mein Le chaloon ( Kismat - O P Nayyar )
                      Aa Dekhe Zara ( Lounge Version - Yes..there are subtle differences in this version which change the  feel of the song ..may not be suitable for beginners :)

Try it. It is a phenomenal feeling to perform this experiment successfully. It means you are assured of a good night's sleep :)

Growth through mediocrity

One of my braindroppings that came by in a conversation with a friend. Figured it was unique enough in my view to pen it down. Let me start this the ENTJ way ( those who have done the myers briggs test would know what I am talking about )...so let me start from the top.

TCS, WIPRO, INFOSYS - These names are often taken as organizations which are taking india to the world. Guess what - they are all based on mediocrity...in fact large volumes of mediocrity. Let me explain. The revenue model of these organizations are based on the volumes of billable resources - you know that your career is going nowhere the day your manager refers to you as a resource...and you know you are becoming a manger when you start referring to your team as a pool of resources !!! Anyways....The moment you talk of volumes in any context..you are talking about commoditization. The moment you talk about commoditization, you are talking about the smack center of the bell curve. And if you have a large enough center, it just means you have a large number of 'average grade' products...or resources in the context of the above firms. Given the extremely large number of people ( i am trying to be a different manager - i still refer to everyone as people and not resources ) these firms employ, it is safe to assume you have a large number of them who are essentially the average lot. Dont let anyone give you any crap about the fact that everyone is above average...that just means there is a new average...there is no such thing as a large above average crowd. As very delightfully said in movie ' The Incredibles ' - 'If everyone is special, it just means no one is'. So that is what we have with TCS, WIPRO etc...a large number of folks with average skills who contribute in making their respective firms multi billion dollar organizations.

Let us dig a little deeper into the nature of work these firms do. This is how I would think a Business Dev Manager and a Client conversation would be

BDM - Whats up ?

Client - not much. Just hangin in there.

BDM - Why ? what happened ? work pressure ?

Client - Yup. Late night support, was up all nite. And to top that, I had to document all the shit. To add to that, most of the stuff I do is so repetitive in nature that I could do it blindfolded....and guess what...sometimes I do it that way so that things get challenging in that I do not know where the keyboard is.

BDM - You got to to be kidding me.

Client - the worst part of it....I could not attend this friends bachelor party .

BDM - Dont you worry. We can take all that work off your back which will then leave you to focus on the real work that you need to do ( have fun with strippers !! )..... and we will do it for much cheaper rates too.

2 months down the line

BDM : Folks ...we have got a lot of challenging work being thrown at us by our new client and we need to make sure we do a phenomenal job at it.

ODC employee : What is the nature of work ?

BDM : The firm is a fortune 70000 company.

ODC employee : What is the nature of work ?

BDM : Infact they made it to the top 1000 best firms to work in alaska !!

ODC employee : What is the nature of work ?

BDM : They are rated the fastest growing company north of iceland given their geographical positioning on the planet

ODC employee : What is the nature of work ?

BDM : And best of all there is a good likelihood that many of you will get to go onsite !!!

ODC employee : When can we start ?

So my friends that is what the bulk of the work that is done out of these firms. And you do not need super smart folks to do this kind of work. An average joe like me can come out looking golden by doing this. And all the top IT service firms depend on this as their bread and butter and more. They excel in grabbing such mediocre quality work opportunities and get it done at a lower price with a reasonably high margin. So in essence their objective is to do volumes and volumes of mediocre work which will help then grow and generate more revenue. So they strive for growth through mediocrity. Hope I made my point.

After a really long gap...or should i say a writer's gap instead of a block..here i am writing. just got back after watching the 10.45pm showing of ' The dark Knight ' and trust me ...if you are a superhero fan...you got to see it...if you are a psychology major..you got to see this...if you are an acting student...you got to see this...if you are an art film buff...you got to see it....if you are an action movie fan...you got to see this....if you are a romantic person...go take your other half...and got to see it...hell..if you want to truely enjoy popcorn...you got to see it. Thats how exhillarated I felt coming out of the theatre. Christopher Nolan who made his name a part of my memory after his brilliant 'memento' has just pushed himself way up to the top of my best directors list...i daresay...even above steven speilberg.

The thing about superhero movies is that there is always this sense of disconnect from reality which always made one come back home and have dreams of being able to fly, or bash the bad guy, or be all powerful. Those were always going to be the kind of dreams you would most likely have. This move totally changes that paradigm. Rest assured when i was driving back home, the last thing i was thinking of was being batman. There are so many plots and subplots...so many layers to the dialogues....and the characters seem so close to reality that you tend to forget the 'fiction' premise of the characters.

The joker....enough has been said about Ledger's performance.....everything said is true....but the character that has been etched out and enacted gives you the goosebumps not because he does crazy and evil things...but because..somewhere you start to believe that there is no reason that such a person might not be sitting right amidst us and that creeps you out a lot more than anything else. What he says and does ...does not seem as something coming out of cinema...rather something coming out of life into cinema.

Batman...Bale.....you forget that in reality it would be ludicrous sight to see someone dressed as a bat and jumping off of rooftops...because when you are looking at the batman...you are not paying attention to the suit...but you are thinking about the character behind the suit. The suit could be regular cheap ass walmart made in china suit and it would not matter. Absolutely brilliant stuff.

And how two face becomes what he is....again..absolutely brilliant stuff. Its a superhero movie..so at the end....good has to triumph over evil...which does happen...then why do we not come out happy....why is there turmoil in thought ? You got to watch the movie. Suffice to say I would loooove to watch it a second time...but most likely I will not be able to do so...you see we are expecting our second kid and the due date is anytime now....so be it a girl or a boy...please make note..it was because of you...i did not watch the movie a second time. My daughter's room is currently based on a superman theme....the second one....guess which one is it going to be !!!

Just a little dabble with some original shero shayari....

Zindagi jeene ka naam hai
Maut ki tum socha karo kum
Dhoondne se to mil jaata hai khuda
To Dhoondo khushiyan...bhool jaaoge tum saare gum

Khuda ka shukr hai
ke ho nahi tum koi pari ya kisi jannat ki hoor
Kyonki agar hoti...to na rehti tum mere paas
basti kahin aasman mein...mujse door...bohot door

This weekend - Jaani Dushman!!

Boy....I can belive I am saying this...but i actually watch this bollywood piece of s*&^ a second time!!!. Jaani Dushman - Ek Anokhi Kahani.

Trust me folks...all those who come to thie website intentionally or otherwise. Please make it a point to rent this movie. It is absolutely hilarious...not intentionally though. A brief description of the plot will give you an idea how it is.

2 snakes - One 'icchadhari' and one non-icchadhari are in love. That line alone should be enough. But let me go on. The two thin and slimey reptiles are being played by the 'Heavier than thou' Manisha Koirala and a guy who is being re-launched for the third time...Armaan Kholi with fake green lens.

Now these two snakes obviously choose to take a human form...which begets the question...why would a snake that can take a human form want to be a snake in the first place ??? Why cant it just be human. But that is the way it is..and for song and dance purposes at least, they take the human form since dancing without any hands or legs are...well...not exactly interesting...and how the hell will you know which is the male and which is the female snake!! So we have Manisha Koirala with enough curves to be the michelin tyre man and armaan kohli dancing on a supposedly realistic CGI generated colorado!!. Now this colorado....had to be generated by a color blind cgi guy....cos the colors were anything but realistic. Neon mountains !! Let me not get into the details...the summary is interesting enough!!

Towards the end of the song.....it turns out that they are dancing on a strange colored hillock under which there is an Amish Puri doing tapasya. Owing to the weight of manisha, the hillock literally crumbles and these two human shaped snakes disrupt the tapasya. Amrish Puri livid with anger states that that evening, he was finally going to meet god. (Yea...I can imagine god sitting with his PDA and setting up an outlook appoointment "Got to meet Amrish Pur in the evening" unless ofcourse he breaks his tapasya before that!!) Now because, amrish got disturbed by the heavy dancing, he cannot keep his appointment with god and so he curses manisha koirala to die and also to spend some time at Weightwatchers before that. Armaan Kohli decides that he would rather bang his head on a rock than see manisha going to weightwatchers and lose her curves...sorry....die. So he bangs his head on the rock till Amrish gets bored and says..ok...go live in a tree till the 21st century when manisha will come and bump into you and then you can come out and continue your heavy dancing. So manisha dies!!

Cut to the 21st century!! Heavy Manisha Koirala is a college student!!! Can you belive it....a college student!! But i had barely adjust to that reality, when came along the rest of the students.....Akshay Kumar, Sunil Shetty, Aditya Pacholi, Siddhart (of vansh), Shivdasani, Sonu Nigam, rajat Bedi and to make things realistic...Sunny Deol as an Ex-student!!! Rajat and Siddhart have a thing for Ms Heavy and they trick her into reaching a picnic spot named 'nagda fort' ( The pun (jabi) being nag - da - fort ) a whole 1 hour earlier than the rest of the folks. But they make Ms Heavy belive that everyone tricked her. And then they go ahead and enjoy her curves ( rape her ). So the sati savitri that she is, she commits suicide by running into a rather blunt stub of a tree trunk. The only reason, it pierced her was simply because of the momentum generated by her weight!! But before she dies, Armaan Kohli, whom she had earlier met to know her whole 'snake turned human flashback' bumps into her. And she tell him to take revenge on all the guys since they contributed rajat and Siddhart in raping her. Now being a guy, i know a little about guys!! But there is no way 10 guys will assist 2 guys and let just the two guys go and do their task. that is too far fetched even for bollywood. but what the hell....ms Heavy isnt the smartest around. And that my friends is the set up.

The rest of the story is about Armaan Kohli killing each person one by one taking different forms....different personalities. Sometimes he is a motorbike, sometimes a bird, sometime a male seducing females and sometimes a female luring males to their death...and in the process realizing that he is bisexual He is also occassionaly assisted by Ms Heavy ( now a transperent ghost ). Arman Kohli gets aid from a whole lot of cheap versions of hollywood movies like Terminator 2, Matrix, Anaconda to name a few. And at the end, something happens and the only one who survives is sonu nigam...since even the realms beyond death could not bear to see his acting !! And yea..there is Raj Babbar who is a professor of parapsychology ( the only person in the world to get that degree !!) who helps arman kohli become a transperant ghost to join Ms Heavy to continue to do their ghostly dance!! And that my friends is where I am stopping. For hilarious details....rent it from a video store from far far away...chances are no nearby video store will keep this movie!!

And psst...I cant belive, this movie was the reason why I missed a production issue for which I was paged!!! Jaani Dushman - A story about a bisexual icchadhari snake!! It has to be anokhi!!!

A great weekend. A few of our friends had come over and we just talked and talked and talked till we dropped. But as usual, there were some pearls of wisdom that came out of it.

The best was from the usual suspect...Jeetu.

The Male mind is like an onion .......why ?.......Because, it has layers (Thank You Shrek )
The Female mind is also like an onion...why ? ...Because it makes men cry !!! (Thank you Jeetu!! )

There was a Eureka moment for me....

Why is the female mind more complex than the male mind ?
Well....which is easier to explain....emotion or logic ? And which sex is more emotional ? Well...now you know why women are more complex :) Simple...eh ?

This was a statement made by jeetu on allegations that he talks a lot when trying to impress a girl.....
Jeetu ( A Leo - Lion sign) : ' Abe....Sher tab garajta hai jab shikar ke liye nikalta hai'
Me : 'Par kabhi kabhi yeh sher itna garajta hai ke shikar pehle hi bhag jaata hai' ......That would explain JV's single status :)


A new definition that got coined -

S-mode : A mode that every male needs to be afraid of. A state of mind when the female expects commitment from you for the 'm-word' .....marriage !!


Cheers folks !!

God made us to do things that he could not!!!

There…now that must have got your attention. Well…what follows is a result of my discussions about god with a dear friend of ours – Jeetu. It’s more or less a theory of what could be. And what made it an interesting theory to me is the fact that, it is a somewhat radical notion that there are things that we do that god cannot. Think of it….doesn’t it turn the whole perception of god upside down. No. That’s not what we think of God as. The common perception is that God created us and so the logic follows, if he created us, he obviously can do everything that we can do and more.

Now let me talk about the thing that inspired us to come up with such a theory. Funnily enough, while not in any way surprising – it all is inspired by math. And to be more specific…by 2 numbers – even more specific – 1s and 0s. Yup. That’s it. That is what inspired us. That and a little bit of matrix, a little bit of Douglas Adams and a whole lot of boozeJ. Just kidding. Actually it was just the booze. Kidding again. Actually there is no booze involved...it just makes the writing interesting. So coming back to Douglas Adams. In his book ‘The salmon of doubt’, he talks about why there is no god and then goes on to say….why there is a god. No typo there. That is exactly what he does. Read the book if you want to understand that. But this is one of things that he states that the assumption of a creator as the reason for our existence leads us to believe that the creator is a superior being to us and unexplainable. But if you consider evolution as a basis of creation, it is much easier to explain at least our physical presence.

Evolution is nothing but the process of starting off as a single-cell organism (there is the ‘1’ again) and gradually multiplying to form a more complex organism. But evolution again is something, which the few Darwins of the world understand and so is not an easy concept to grasp. But now is the age of the ubiquitous computer. And that helps understand evolution in a way nothing has ever come close to. And it makes it available to the common man.

So how does a computer explain evolution? Forget the Internet browser…and Google. You are not going to get any answers there. Think of how the computer evolved and you will understand human evolution too. Or at least a part of it. Think of a programmer. A programmer essentially breaks down the most complex tasks to multiple (if possible repetitive) simple and basic tasks. A computer works in turn breaks it down even further into the most basic of tasks such as addition, subtraction and it does all this in the least complex language of all ‘1s and 0s’. Now…if you think of this exactly in the opposite manner t o what I described…there...you have evolution. ‘1s and 0s’ form some pattern to form a slightly more complex ‘creature’ (a byte) and then that in turns combines with more such ‘bytes’ and forms an even more complex ‘creature’ so on and so forth. And thus it evolves. And at the highest level we have supercomputers etc. That is nothing but evolution. The only difference being that, we as programmers are guiding the evolution to evolve it into something ‘useful’. And biological evolution – we would like to believe was guided by …….’God’.


Don’t worry…..I haven’t lost focus. I am still on the topic. So now, we are at that point where I was before jumping into the discussion. Now, think of the computer. What we are doing with a computer is nothing short of creating life. Of course we still have a long way to go. But it seems to more a matter of time. What do we use the computers for? Most of the things we get the computer are things that we can do…but what would otherwise take a lot more time to do. And we also use it to do things that we otherwise cannot do. Say…..talking on cell phones, moving in cars, flying to places, incredibly large computations etc. If you consider these carefully, none of these are things that humans cannot do. We can shout at the top of our voice for people at a distance to hear. We can always walk or swim to reach a particular place. We can always whip out a paper and pen to do large computations. But shouting at the top of our voice will not enable us to communicate with some one a few blocks away, forget the other coast. Our legs will give way before we reach San Francisco from New York, if we were to walk it up. Large computations…don’t even think about it. But computers can do it. Artificial intelligence is inevitable if not 100 years from now…then in 200. But it’s surely going to be there. We will have computers doing tasks that, we cannot think of right now. In short we are will into the process of creating ‘life’ which can do things, which we cannot. Aah…..do you see where this is going!!!

Continuing…..what will happen the day, we create a fully functional artificial intelligence which can do everything that we can? We would have created life!! Albeit not in our form…but in a different one, all the same. Wouldn’t that make us ‘GOD’ to the life form which we created? And now if that life form can do, not just everything we can, but a lot more ….then doesn’t that mean we have created something to do things which we otherwise cannot? And as I mentioned, to those creations, we are the equivalent of ‘GOD’. So as far as they are concerned, their ‘GOD’ created them to do things which their ‘GOD’ themselves could not!!! Therein comes the conclusion – if such a thing as explained above is plausible, then it is very much possible that in our world too, our ‘GOD’ created us to do things that he/she could not!!

Here I am sitting down to write, and I am stuck. Just started and I am stuck!!. So I did the next best thing...rationalize and come up with a reason as to why i am stuck. Its known as the writer's block. Yes...that is it. I am experiencing what is know as the writers block. That got me thinking....what is a writers block ? It obviously is something that prevents the writer from ...well...writing. But then, is being a 'writer' a pre-requisite to getting a writer's block ? If so then what happens to a guy who is trying to write for the first time in his life ? Can it be called a writer's block if he is not able to write ? Or is it just that he is not capable of writing ? . If he simply does not have the talent to write and he thinks its a block....isnt he then stuck till eternity in this delusion that its just a block which will go away ? Isnt the 'writers block' creating a different kind of 'block' ? Isn't it 'blocking' the guy from realizing that he is not a writer ? So then, what we have is a bigger 'writers block' of which the more commonly known writers block is a subset. So the two 'writers blocks' complement each other and create a catch-22 situation which is something every new 'writer' should be wary of. If someone falls into the trap, all you have is a person who is stuck trying to do something which he simply cannot and is also not aware that he cannot.

That brings me to an interesting point...there I was all stuck up not knowing what to write due to a 'writers block'....and now i have written quite a bit about 'being stuck'. Does that make me a writer who is eligible to have a writers block..or does that just make me someone who cannot write ? Well the fact is...I did write the above lines...so presumably, I can write. That would mean, there are two kinds of writers...one who can write about what he wants to write and the other who does not know what to write about and still writes. So we have two kinds of writers..and two kinds of 'writers block' which would mean there are 4 possible combinations.....

Oh well...let me not go there. Thats enough to get this blog started!!!