The Adventures of Tintin

When a director makes a movie, one of the most important things to keep in mind is the target audience. Sometimes, a director has to make a children's film that faces severe scrutiny from adults. Very rarely does such a film match the expectations of this adult audience since typically their expectation is based on a childhood love of  comic books (or normal books). Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is a notable exception in this respect. Not only does the movie do an excellent job of keeping the viewers on the edge of their seats throughout the 107 minutes of its running time, but it also pays due  attention to the smallest of details that were so important in  Hergé's original comics.

The movie starts with a Catch Me If You Can-style animated silhouette opening credit sequence that uses the same font as in the Tintin comic book titles. This sequence itself is full of references to other Tintin stories. Then when the opening shot was an animated Hergé painting a street portrait of Tintin, I had a feeling that the movie was going to be respectful to the original creation. I wasn't wrong.

The movie combines story elements from three comic books: The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure. Tintin meets Captain Haddock in this movie. The Thompsons and Nestor are in the movie as well. Important comic book characters Omar Ben Salaad and Bianca Castafiore make brief appearances too. We see references to The Cigars of the Pharaoh, The Broken Ear and King Ottokar's Sceptre, among others. As for Professor Calculus, he does not appear in this movie. He will probably be introduced in the sequel.

In a motion capture movie it hardly makes any sense to talk about the cast since anybody can be made to look like any character, but the cast here looks good. The Captain Haddock of the film is more the Haddock of The Crab with the Golden Claws and less the Haddock of the latter stories which I think is understandable. The camera work is amazing, although it is all done with a virtual camera. The detail in the graphics is breathtaking. The music is good, though I have heard much better from John Williams.

And then there is Snowy. No review of this movie can be complete without a special mention of the CGI Snowy. As in the comics, in every scene Snowy is doing something or the other on the side even when the main characters are engaged in something else, and the time the artists have spent in drawing the actions and reactions of this realistic little dog is really praiseworthy. In one particular scene Snowy comes face-to-face with a sitting camel, and the silent little interaction between the two animals keeps coming back to the mind.

Some of my friends expressed displeasure at the amount of Batman-like action packed into the movie but I disagree. The Tintin fans know all about the story, and yet, these very fans want to remain entertained throughout. These fans, like me, have grown up reading Tintin comic books and now, as adults, want to be entertained by a movie that retains the simplicity of the comic books and combines it with the superb film making techniques we normally associate with Spielberg. Almost two decades ago he gave us Jurassic Park, and to this day I cannot find a single flaw in the computer generated dinosaurs. The quality of the animation in Tintin is so good that a few times during the movie I felt some character's movement looked unnatural, only to remember that it was not a live action movie.

I had been waiting for a long time to see this film. Tintin released in India on 11.11.11 when I was in the US. It released in the US on December 21st - the day I left for India. Back in Kolkata, only one theatre is still showing the movie in one show. I had to travel for two and a half hours to get there and could buy the ticket for the 11:45am show only at 11:45am. I ended up seeing the movie from the front row. But for the two hours the movie was running, I forgot all about everything outside the Tintin universe. In the end, every second of it was worth the wait and the trouble.

Checklist

Here's a checklist that I have been checking off over the last month.

• Buy gifts for family. Done.
• Buy gifts for others. Done.
• Buy chocolates. Done.
• Buy cosmetics. Done.
• Pack suitcase. Done.
• Order stuff online. Done.
• Order cards and calendars. Done.
• Weigh suitcase. Done. No problem, it's jut 42lbs.
• Cancel monthly rail pass for January. Done.
• Get I-20 signed. Done.
• Arrange for year-ending party for the CS dept. club. Done.
• Edit and print a newsletter for the CS dept. club. Done.
• Tell advisor that I'm going for vacation. Done.
• Set final exam paper. To do.
• Damn! I left the chocolates in the fridge while weighing. Re-pack suitcase. Done.
• Re-weigh suitcase. Done. It's 47lbs now.
• Print tickets. To do.
• Finish food in the fridge. Nearly done.
• Get back to gym. Done.
• Reduce weight before going to India. No chance!
• Go pick up the stuff ordered online from the post office because the postman came when I was away. Done.
• Forgot to buy something... last minute shopping. Done.
• Go to take pictures of Christmas decorations in NYC. Done.
• Repack and reweigh. Done. Suitcase now weighs 55 lbs.
• Distribute cards and calendars by hand. Nearly done.
• Mail cards for USPS delivery. To do.
• Talk to phone company to reduce billing for a month when I am away. To do.
• Report submissions to advisor (2). To do.
• Do laundry. To do.
• Unpack and repack suitcase by reducing some stuff. To do.
• Re-weigh suitcase. Have to get it under 50 lbs. To do.

That should explain why I am not writing these days. As you can see, most of that stuff is done. Hope to be back to blogging soon!

The Occupiers of Wall Street

They want a good story

These days a much talked about protest is going on in the streets of New York City, and the protesters like to call their movement "Occupy Wall Street." Their demands are not very clear, but by what I understood, it seems they are really angry about 1% of the people (the rich) controlling all the money. So they are shouting slogans and asking the corporations to stop being so evil. Here are some pictures to show what I saw there on my two visits to downtown Manhattan last week. Click on the pictures to enlarge them.

They want jobs. And music. And free lunch.

The protesters had occupied a park near World Trade Center and they were completely surrounded by tourists, the police and the media. There were large TV cameras on tripods everywhere, with pretty reporters arranging their dresses and combing their hair before sending in their live updates. The streets next to the park were filled with news channel vans with their satellite dishes hoisted high over the street level on telescopic poles to ensure interruption-free transmission through the downtown skyscrapers. The police was not letting pedestrians hang around for long. I was curtly told to either move on or enter the park as I paused to take photos. However, I could manage a few photos while walking to and fro around the park.

She wants to lose weight

He wants free speech

A large percentage of the protesters seemed like hippies and the rest were young people, probably students. "So they are protesting against the rich, eh?" I thought, "So far so good." As a poor grad student myself, I felt I should be sympathetic to their cause, whatever that was. Some of them held up placards. Others danced or played music. Some were eating pizza sitting beside signs saying something about hunger strike. The bronze man with the open briefcase who sits on a bench in that park had been adorned with a woolen monkey-cap and an American flag, probably to show that he was supporting the protesters. From a grotesquely tattooed man with weird costumes and wild piercings, to a young man sitting in a tiny cage with a jug of water, everybody screamed for attention. Not everyone had the same demands, but everyone wanted to be heard. I wondered if I should join them and ask for an increase in my TA ship. Nobody would notice what I was asking for anyway.

Source

And then I saw some poor men who were unlike any poor men that I had ever seen. One of them who was sporting a carefully-nurtured hippie look had these barefoot shoes on which, as I later found out, cost about $100 a pair. Right next to him was a man who was holding up a slogan written on an Apple iPad. He would change the slogan from time to time.

iPads and Barefoot Shoes - probably there's a reason why they are poor?

A man protesting for the poor.

A man protesting against the rich corporations.

A man using an Apple iPad as a placard.

Whatever these men were, they were not poor. They had no idea what poverty was. To me, these guys looked like just a bunch of losers jealous of the successful people. They would abuse Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, while spreading their hate messages via Facebook and Twitter and iPhones.

He later went to McDonalds for lunch.

The model

Then I saw an old man wearing a barrel with "Poorman's Nation" written on it. He was standing on the sidewalk and two men were busy taping a large sheet of white paper on the wall behind the him. Once that was done, one of them took out a couple of large DSLR cameras from inside his parked van and started taking photos of the barrel-man. The sheet of paper was for a nice backdrop, and at the cost of sounding cynical, I would say the backdrop was needed so that it could be easily replaced with a suitable scene later while editing. The old man grinned in front of the camera, only to be sobered by a gruff "Don't smile!" order from the photographers. The old man was incorrigible though, and he flexed his biceps and smiled at me whenever I pointed my camera at him.

After a few clicks, the photographer took some papers (probably a model release form) to the old man and had him sign them. Then he was made to parade up and down the sidewalk while two photographers had a field day following him around, getting as many shots as they wanted. "So the poor guy sold out to the media house while protesting against corporations," I thought. I had not understood the whole story at that time.

The photoshoot

 Five minutes later, in a quiet spot around the corner, the old man had discarded his barrel and was getting dressed in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. So was this whole thing an act? An elaborate costumed photo shoot arranged by some newspaper? I decided to do a little research on it and I found that old man is "Poorman" Jim Trenton, who has a radio channel and a Wikipedia page to himself and is a well-known resident of Los Angeles. Reading through his Wikipedia entry revealed him to be the classic sore loser, who despite getting innumerable opportunities, failed to make it big, and now wants to get cheap publicity by blaming the successful people for everything wrong with the world. And that quite summed up the attitude of all the protesters at Occupy Wall Street. "The Rich have a lot of money. We don't. We want some part of it." If they had a nobler demand, or a better message, I didn't get it. I just saw a band of hippies and unsuccessful people expressing their bitterness on being unsuccessful by abusing the rich and successful.

Not that I was trying really hard. I had to get back to my work where I have to at least pretend to work 20 hours a week to earn my measly salary. Protest? That's a luxury reserved for people who can afford to own iPads and $100 shoes without having to work for them.

A protester in a monkey cap. How else do you define a Bengali?

Thirty

Wishful thinking and trying to ignore my birthday were of no use. My ageing problem reached such alarming proportions yesterday that I turned thirty overnight. The good thing is, I got to eat good food, received gifts, and was wished by Kuntala on her blog and by over a hundred friends on Facebook. As Garfield points out here, it is easy to decide whether I like birthdays or not.

A more detailed post on the occasion of my birthday appears in a Bengali blog post on my other blog.

The Shoulders of Giants

Two men died in the past ten days.

The first was a college dropout who stole the idea of a GUI from Xerox to create his own GUI-based OS which, till date, hasn't found popularity. He then got fired from his own company due to his obnoxious and headstrong decision making. A decade later he was called back to this company and revolutionized the technology industry with the iPod and the iPhone.

He was Steve Jobs. The ex-CEO of Apple Computers.

Within hours of his death, the Internet was alive with the news. From Apple fanboys who claimed they felt like losing a family member, to Google and Microsoft who set aside rivalry and paid tribute on their respective web pages, everyone had just one thing to say: the world had lost a visionary.

And as with all topics discussed on Facebook these days, be it Anna Hazare or ZNMD, either you speak with the majority or you are an insensitive and evil idiot. So everyone agreed that Steve Jobs was a great innovator who changed the life of mankind for the better. Everyone seemed to forget that the thing that the man was really good at was selling stuff. He built a business empire out of selling things that were, to a large extent, inferior to competing products and costlier at the same time. Yet, his products sold more and he managed to gather quite a fan following.

He was not a nice man. He never shared a penny of his earnings with the poor like Bill Gates did, he liked to have complete control over all the devices that Apple sold, and he hated criticism. I never liked his business policies. However, I admired his ability to see a market where none existed before, and the ability to tell people what they needed even before they knew they needed it. Even then, I did not appreciate the hype following his death. And that hype seems even more inappropriate and embarrassing now in view of how the second death was reported.

A friend's status update on Facebook on the 12th of October told me about the death of Dennis Ritchie. I searched for a news report on Google and did not find a single proper English news site reporting it. The few (less than five) search results that did show up were forum discussions. Wikipedia, however, seemed to confirm that Dennis Ritchie had died on... the 8th of October 2011^[1].

He died four days earlier, and not a single media mention! Who was this guy anyway?

Dennis Ritchie built the C language. And he was the co-developer of the UNIX operating system. Those two things together make up nearly everything that we see around us in the computing world today, and definitely all of the Internet. As this article discusses, the two operating systems that Steve Jobs built his business empire over - the MacOS X and the iOS - were both derived from UNIX. Bill Gates built his business empire over Microsoft Windows which was written in C originally, and today all of the Internet runs on programs that were either written in C or written in languages derived from C. And while Gates and Jobs went on to become the richest men on the planet selling their respective operating systems, Ritchie's operating system formed the basis of the open source software movement.

Sir Isaac Newton once said, "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Dennis Ritchie was the giant on whose shoulders Steve Jobs stood. He was the giant on whose shoulders we are standing even now. Five days after his death. With hardly any media mention. The world doesn't even know who he was.

Steve Jobs got mentioned in millions of tweets. Fine! He earned them. But please, people, spare a little thought for the man who was behind it all.

Rest in peace Dr. Ritchie. You were the man who made me fall in love with programming.

[1] It now seems he died on the 12th of October 2011. But the fact that Wikipedia reported the wrong date initially only enforces my point.

The Jersey Devil (Bengali Post)

I wrote this Bengali blog post on a strange creature supposedly found in the plains of New Jersey. A request to my Bengali readers: if you like my writing and want to read more of it, please follow my other blog independently. I may not be making an announcement like this here every time I write a blog post there. As of now, I am just testing how blogging in Bengali goes. Hopefully, updates will be more frequent in the near future.

Slice of Life?

That's how you enjoy life

Recently I happened to watch the movie "Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara." The movie had been so spectacularly praised by almost everyone around me that I was expecting a pretty much life-changing experience when I sat down to watch it. And what did I feel afterwards? Not only was the movie not great, it was not even ordinary. Cliched and predictable to the last degree, the movie dragged on and at one point I was just wanting it to get over so that I could move on to better things in life. The ordeal lasted a full two-and-a-half hours.

Later, when I confronted a friend who had highly praised it, he said the dialogues were nice and the jokes were hilarious. The actors looked good. What more could anybody ask for?

"A plot? A story, you know, with a beginning and an end. That would have made it really watchable. I don't think you can watch jokes and dialogues for over two hours," I said. "Dude, this is a slice of life movie! That's the way they are supposed to be - no need to have a well-defined storyline. You need to acquire a taste for them." He sounded smug.

Which brings us to the point of this post. Three points actually. Firstly, I know there has been a sudden increase in the number of "different" movies recently with smaller multiplexes and all that, but is just being "different" enough for a movie to be called good? There is no dearth of good looking people willing to act, and if you have money you can go and shoot in scenic locations. But don't you need a story and some semblance of reality to make a good movie? Or are the Hrithik-Farhan-Abhay-Katrina fanboys numerous enough to make any movie containing these stars a success? One of my friends said she loved ZNMD because of the lovely underwater scenes (which account for less than 10 minutes of the movie). "But you can see that even on Discovery Channel," I told her. Her answer was that Discovery Channel could not be seen on a big screen. Then is it enough to show some Discovery Channel-like visuals to make a movie good? Which leads us onto my second point.

My second point is a little controversial. Who decides whether a movie is good? Of course, everyone should have the freedom to like or dislike a movie, and I have no right to say nobody should like ZNMD just because I didn't. But I do have a problem with people saying that the message of the movie was something that I didn't "get." I mean, come on! What is the point of making a movie where your message will be lost in bad film-making and will have to be explained? For me, the message of the movie is what I got from it, and not what somebody else explained to me. To paraphrase Bengali columnist Chandril, directors these days aim to make a movie that will make every viewer feel, "I understood that, but I doubt if the general public will." That's what these so-called offbeat movies are all about- making every viewer feel superior to the others- and this leads to the problem that I am trying to focus on here. The media, the celebrities, the fanboys on Facebook and Twitter, everyone gets together and indulges in something that can only be compared to the story of the emperor's new clothes. If you don't like the film, you are unworthy.

A railway platform in Mumbai

I noticed the same phenomenon recently with the Hindi movie "Delhi Belly" and the Bengali movie "Autograph." I haven't seen the first one and saw the second one but didn't like it. Autograph is a lame attempt at recreating scenes from a Ray classic using a big star. Throw in some good music and things cannot go wrong. However, my point here is not about the quality of the movie itself, but the assertion that some people make that you HAVE to like the movie or you didn't get it. Don't these people realize that they actually do more harm to the movie by raising the expectation? The English movie Slumdog Millionaire is a case that comes to the mind. Is it an enjoyable movie? Yes it is. Does it have a hidden message about triumph of love blah blah blah? Nothing that is not there in the most routine of Bollywood flicks. Is it a realistic depiction of life in India? Nonsense! It is a complete "don't apply your brains" movie as I said before.

Singham: How real people fight

And this is my final point about these "different" movies (and ZNMD in particular). Depiction of reality. Do you know anyone who buys a handbag worth €12,000 for a friend's wife? Have you ever met someone who went skydiving and deep sea diving on the same trip without any prior experience of either? Have you ever heard of a person who could maneuver in free fall and hold hands with other skydivers in mid-air on their maiden jump? Let alone the maneuvers, do you really think anybody would be allowed to jump alone on their first skydive? Do you find it believable that a girl talks with her fiance on phone from India in the morning, and then reaches Spain that very evening to check on him without any prior planning? I wonder if Sonia Gandhi could do it that fast! And the ending sequence that has no relation to the rest of the movie? It's so bad that it's good! Of course, suspension of disbelief is there in every movie, but then why call it a slice of life? Call it fantasy, like Harry Potter or Lord of The Rings. Why is a Dabangg or a Singham or a Robot worse than a ZNMD? Just because they have unrealistic action sequences? What about unrealistic storylines, unbelievable characters and plot holes the size of swimming pools?

So please guys, give me a break. All I want is to draw my own conclusions after watching a movie and not listen to your interpretation of it. If you think I am dumb, so be it, but I will call a spade a spade. And I will not call a movie like ZNMD good.

Me, Myself and Irene

The summer holidays are about to end, and apparently this year's summer holidays are not among those holidays that prefer to end silently, fading into the last sunset of the last Sunday. No Sir! These holidays are about to end with a bang. Two bangs actually. An earthquake and a hurricane. And in the middle of New York City too!

It has been raining regularly for the last couple of weeks, and I have been enjoying it because I miss the Indian monsoon here. In fact, as I have noted here before, these thunderstorms are my favourite weather phenomenon here in the US because even with the double-paned windows of my climate-controlled room closed, thunder and lightning can make me sit up and take notice like nothing else can. I even went out in a thunderstorm one evening and took a picture of the Manhattan skyline. But even I was not prepared for a hurricane in the middle of New York City.

First there was the earthquake. I had just stuffed myself with free food from the international student orientation at the school and had settled down for an afternoon siesta in my lab chair when I felt dizzy. Before I could understand anything it was over, but then Facebook came alive with "Earthquake?" status updates. Later I learnt that people had run out of tall office buildings in Manhattan when the Richter Scale 5.9 earthquake hit.

But scary as it may sound, the earthquake was no match for what was in store for the weekend. Hurricane Irene is hitting New York City and the New Jersey coastline right now as I type this. For the first time in history, a partial evacuation of New York City has been ordered and the city that never sleeps may turn off its power. All airports of the city are closed. Public transit has been shut down in New York City and New Jersey, and parts of Maryland, Washington DC, Pennsylvania and Connecticut are affected as well. In fact the whole of north-eastern USA from South Carolina to Maine are under threat from Irene.

After repeated warnings from various sources regarding emergency-preparedness, I went to the supermarket to buy some ready-to-eat canned food this morning. The supermarket was crowded beyond what I had ever seen, and everybody was buying those canned foods. The most shocking sight was the bottled water isle - it was empty.

So here I am, sitting at home surrounded by candles and canned food, waiting for Irene to arrive. The situation can only be described as "Haate hurricane," a Bengali phrase which is so impossible to translate that I wrote a complete Bengali blog post on it. Now I better publish this before the storm hits and the internet goes away, although I have a real strong gut feeling that nothing worth mentioning will happen. Firstly, because the weather office is seldom right, and secondly, from what I have seen in these last three years, the Americans overreact to everything!

The Future of Books

All three Borders bookstores in New York City went out of business recently. For me the Borders store on Broadway and Wall Street was not just a shop to buy books, it was one of my favourite hang out places as well. Whenever I felt low or bored and had a few hours to spare, I just went to the city and submerged myself among the rows and rows of colourful books until I lost track of time. I would always look forward to the next Borders visit. The other two stores were much smaller, but I visited them too from time to time. I won’t be able to do that anymore.

From a very early age, books have been my best companions. My grandfather owned nothing short of a library. I grew up with ceiling-high bookshelves in our rooms. The books my grandfather owned were very old, but then my father started buying new and shiny hard bound books for me right from my first birthday. So I have been the owner of books like The Inventions That Changed the World and The Family Encyclopaedia of the Animal Kingdom even before I could read. The animal kingdom book was my all-time favourite and my father showed me the pictures and told me all about them when I was very small. As I grew up, books poured in as gifts from my parents, my grandfather and my maternal uncle. All that I am today – researcher, photographer, blogger – I am because of those books. How can I even begin to explain what effect books like The World’s Best Photographs (seen in the photo), Encyclopaedia of the World, Physics Can be Fun, the Tell Me Why series and The Giant All Color Dictionary had on me? Yes, call me crazy if you will, but I actually spent hours reading that dictionary (and The Charlie Brown Dictionary too) like a novel, just because it had such nice pictures.

Add to that the numerous books on birds, animals, history, geography, science and arts whose names I don’t even remember, tons of Bengali and English poetry and prose, and magazines like Anandamela, Shuktara, Readers’ Digest and National Geographic, and you will get an idea of how I grew up. No computers, no iPhones, no video games, no Internet, hardly any TV or movies – just books all around me. Was it good? It was more enjoyable than the Internet could ever aspire to be.

The closing down of Borders seems surprising to me because I have seen smaller bookstores with far less business go on for decades in Kolkata. Maybe it has something to do with the business model here that makes large companies turn turtle in an instant. Maybe it is because of online bookstores that sell the books cheaper that it is no longer profitable to run physical bookstores. I, as a matter of principle, never browsed a book at Borders and later bought it online at Amazon – it seemed unethical to me. Surely everyone wouldn’t think that way. But coming to think of it, there is nothing surprising about bookstores going out of business. I could have predicted it long ago.

My father’s company gave him a desktop computer at home in 1996. It was one of the earliest multimedia machines and there was a free CD with it. It was Microsoft Encarta 1994 – one of the first multimedia encyclopedias. It was like magic – while reading about any country you could listen to its national anthem, you could listen to Pt. Ravi Shankar play the sitar, you could hear the voice of Gandhi, Einstein and Neil Armstrong, you could hear the calls of animals and birds and spoken language samples, and you could see photos of any place you wanted – from the Nile flowing by a Sudanese village to a sunset in San Francisco. Want to know how a volcano is formed? Want to know how a lizard catches its prey? No problem! Encarta had animations and videos to explain everything. You could browse the content in a variety of ways, and click on links in one article to move to another.

And that was just one CD. Compare that to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and you will see why bookstores are going out of business.

Books are a bulky, inconvenient and environmentally hazardous way of gaining knowledge or entertainment. Why, the Sony Reader that I bought for my sister can fit in a coat pocket, and yet can hold hundreds of books. You can move between books, save multiple bookmarks, look up meanings of words and annotate. Moreover, e-books are either free or much cheaper than their real-world counterparts which must be made by cutting down trees. No wonder paper books are becoming less popular with each passing day. When National Geographic Magazine gives me one year of subscription for $15, I know it means that the 125 year old magazine may not exist much longer in its familiar form.

Of course, the advent of e-book readers is not the only reason for books dying away. Our attention spans have been so severely shortened by the Internet and satellite TV that spending a few hours with the same reading material seems a waste of time. Why, I would be able to browse through a dozen blogs and hundreds of tweets in that time! Our brains no longer want to process a lot of information in the form of written words – everything must come with some audio/visual stimulus or we feel cheated. Everything that books gave us – knowledge, entertainment, pleasure – the Internet and TV give us better.

Everything, except for the limitless imagination that comes with slowly taking in the description of a place or an event word by word, line by line. That, and the smell of fresh printing ink or accumulated dust as you turn each page. Clicking on a “Next” button, even if on a touch screen, is just a poor substitute.

That is why the closing of Borders makes me sad. In spite of all the logic in favour of e-book readers, I love holding the real books in my hand, savouring every word, every picture as I turn each page. That is why, going against all logic, I ordered another year of National Geographic Magazine today. Borders was one place where I could browse through real books. Now I will have to look for other stores, like Barnes & Noble.

Until that closes down too. Eventually it will. I am sure of it.

Its Magic!

Some feelings never change.

I have always loved magic shows. I can still remember the time when I saw a magician perform live on stage. I was in the second standard and the show was in my school. As I sat open-mouthed on the ground in front of the stage, the magician poured endless quantities of water from a jug, changed the colour of feather dusters, made things disappear and reappear at will and performed numerous, but as I now realize, fairly easy tricks. I and all my friends had our theories about how each of these tricks were done, but we couldn't be sure, of course. As we grew older over the years, the magician's bag of tricks remained equally awe-inducing for us and we waited every year for the annual magic show.

Then I saw P.C. Sorcar Jr. perform on stage during my engineering college days. He had come to perform at Chinsurah Rabindra Sadan and I had gone to see it with my grandmother. I was a grown-up now and had come a long way from that wonder-struck boy sitting cross-legged in front of the stage in the school auditorium. I myself knew a few magic tricks now, or at least the secret behind them. But when the show started, P.C. Sorcar Jr. sent me back into that school auditorium of twelve years ago. In the thirty odd tricks that he performed on stage, he not only twisted my sense of reality as he wished, he also seemed to know how exactly we, the spectators thought each trick was performed. After performing some of the tricks, he would reperform it in a manner that would nullify our hypotheses. He escaped locked boxes, solved integrals while blindfolded and as a finale to the evening, let himself to be sawed in two.

That was some eight years ago. I hadn't seen another magician's performance live in all these years until last Wednesday morning at the Circus Circus Hotel in Las Vegas. I have, however, watched a lot of those "Masked Magician" episodes on TV and Youtube where a lot of complex magic tricks are explained, reducing them from magic to a clever combination of science and acting. However, at this performance at the hotel, a man and a woman changed their costumes on stage repeatedly at the blink of an eye, and I did not know the secret behind this one. There were people crowding all around the stage this time, as close as ten feet away, but that did not deter them from performing the trick with the bare minimum of cover, and in one case, with arms and legs tightly bound. The performance was somewhat like this video, but better and more complex. I couldn't even start to imagine how they did it, because at least the woman was wearing fairly short and revealing dresses throughout and one dress could not have been hidden underneath another. I only know they made me feel as thoroughly muggle-like as P.C. Sorcar Jr. did all those years ago.

If I Google for "magical dress changing" I am sure I will get half a million websites trying to teach me exactly how that trick is performed. However, I am not going to do it. I have realized that there are certain things in this world that I am better off not knowing, and the secret behind magic tricks are some of them.

Google may be like magic in some respects, but it can never make me feel what not knowing the secret of a magic trick can.

The Botched Ending

[Warning: Spoilers ahead. Do not read this review if you haven't read the last book in the Harry Potter Series and don't already know the ending.]

The Devil, they say, is in the details. And it is in the details that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 fails as a faithful adaptation of the book. But since it has its own share of enjoyable moments, let me first gloss over the bigger picture.

The Gringotts episode was amazing. Right from the acting of Helena Bonham Carter to the depiction of the light-starved and tortured blind dragon breaking free over London, it was flawlessly executed. So was, to some extent, the battle of Hogwarts, phase one. I mean, they did not show Fred Weasley die, but they showed his body later, so that was enough for me. Voldemort didn't meet Snape in the Shrieking Shack but in some Hogwarts boathouse (Hogwarts had a boathouse?) but that would be forgivable considering that they showed the teachers, the Order members and the students defending Hogwarts in a very nice manner. I only wish they had shown some of the ghosts.

The Chamber of Secrets, the Room of Requirement, the episode of Kings' Cross station - everything was perfect. Then there was the Prince's tale. Alan Rickman proves once again why he has been given the opportunity to portray the greatest character in the series. The short and beautiful memory sequence which jumped back and forth in time between Snape's childhood, youth and recent events brought tears to my eyes. Yes, Alan rickman is Severus Snape, and nobody could have done it better.

Now the botched up details. First, the minor ones.

This movie never bothers to explain how Harry knew Hufflepuff's cup was the horcrux in the vault, and just how Tom Riddle had found the lost diadem of Ravenclaw. It does concoct some lazy excuses for patching up these plot holes, but we miss the beautiful detailed analysis of Voldemort as a person that Rowling so beautifully wrote in the last two books. Also, at the very end (19 years later), why oh why couldn't they have aged the actors properly? Only Bonny Wright looks convincing as the older Ginny. The rest of the cast... c'mon guys! This is Hollywood, for heaven's sake! Just adding a paunch to a 20 year old does not make him a 40 year old!

Harry used the elder wand to repair his own broken wand before returning it to Dumbledore's grave in the story. Here he breaks the elder wand and tosses it away. No harm done, you say? Agreed. However, it will make any Potter fan unhappy.

But the worst mistake of the movie was the handling of the wandfight between Harry and Voldemort. In the book, they had fought in a room full of people, circling each other and Harry calling Voldemort by his muggle father's name. In my opinion, Harry's real moment of triumph was not when Voldemort died, but when Harry told him, in front of a room full of people, that Severus Snape was Dumbledore's man all along. And they cut out that part! Harry here killed Voldemort who died alone like a sad old man, never knowing what the flaw in his plan was. Why, I thought the last fight of the book was too dramatic, "almost like a movie." And now when they do make it into a movie, they remove it from the script. What irony!

In short, it could have been a great movie, but David Yates narrowly missed that. If you have not read the books and want to understand the plot from the movies alone, stay away. If you are a Pottermaniac like me then you will be disappointed with the ending to the series.

Very, very disappointed.

Load shedding

With the mercury up at 41 degrees Celsius and "feeling like" 46 (according to weather.com), only one thing was left to make Newark feel exactly like back home, and it happened today.

Load shedding. Power cut. Black out. Whatever you call it.

I was already bathed in sweat this evening when the fan suddenly slowed down, then sped up again, then slowed down and went off with the light. Instantly the room was plunged into darkness. The street light outside the window was off too.

I was at my friend Atreyee's place for dinner. We had candles, but the heat was unbearable, so we decided to take a short walk outside, hoping that the power would be back soon. We found another friend sitting outside her house with her three month old son. We stopped by for chit-chat. Many others in neighbouring houses were out in their gardens too. There was some music coming from the park, so I walked there with Atreyee to investigate.

Some Latin American festival was going on with some loud music blaring from the loudspeakers and a lady singing live on stage. The whole field was transformed into a fairground, and just like fairs back home there were Ferris wheels, carousels, bubble-blowers, balloon sellers and small stalls selling fried foodstuff and drinks all around. We walked around for a few minutes, staring longingly at the food. Unfortunately, none of us had our wallets with us.

We walked back to the friend who was sitting on the stairs with her kid. Her husband had joined her, and so had her mom and another friend. We sat down on their front steps as well and had a good old Bengali style "adda" (useless chit-chat) where we discussed all topics under the sun from sleep patterns of babies to the weather in Iceland. In that sultry, dark evening gathering I felt at home in a way I haven't felt in a long time.

Back home in Hooghly, we spent periods of load shedding lying on the terrace staring at the sky and talking among ourselves. Sometimes we would try to recognize stars - we could still see a lot of stars from Hooghly in those days, and more during power cuts. All breeze seemed to mysteriously stop as soon as the power failed, but the conditions would not be too uncomfortable altogether. In fact, sometimes we enjoyed it so much that nobody would bother to check if the power was back, we simply spent the time lying on the roof talking.

But the country is USA after all, so we could call up PSE&G and ask about our power failure, and soon the lights flickered back on around us. The meeting broke up, and I followed Atreyee to her apartment for dinner. Dinner was a hurried affair and part of it had to be completed in candle light as the power went again.

The power has since been back and stayed on for the last few hours, but the voltage is dipping low now and then and the lights have dimmed more than once, so I decided to type this up and upload it before the feel-good factor faded away. Load shedding may have made me nostalgic for a while, but if I have to sleep in this heat wave without a fan at night, my feelings would be along entirely different lines, and all of it won't be joyful enough to post here.

Creativity and Boredom

While going through Dilbert creator Scott Adams’ blog the other day, I came across an interesting idea: boredom breeds creativity. I had never thought about it this way before, but since I read that article I realized I could explain a lot of what is happening in the world today with this single idea.

Essentially the idea is very simple – the brain generates new ideas when it is bored, and with the modern lifestyle we have reduced the periods of boredom to near zero. We have hundreds of TV channels to choose from, we have the Internet with e-mail and chat and Facebook and Twitter to keep us boredom-free every moment of the day. Even when we are traveling, we have our iPods to listen to music or smartphones to browse the Internet on the go. In short, we are never bored. Consequently, Scott speculates, we see an abundance of creations that are less creative, like reality shows and sequel movies.

In my childhood days, the TV had only one channel, and you had to imagine the colour. The transistor radio in our house didn’t work, and the radio programs in Allahabad weren’t worth listening to anyway. That was when I started on drawing and painting to spend time, and also took on origami. Looking back at more recent periods of my life, I also realize that I started writing this blog when I was bored out of my wits sitting idle in my office, and that was the time I started taking photos as well. And when one of my favourite bloggers, Kuntala, describes herself in her profile as “Bored” she unknowingly divulges the biggest secret of her writing ability.

After typing the previous paragraph, I went to Kuntala’s blog to get the hyperlink. I read the latest post there and by the time I was finished writing a comment, I had lost the chain of thought that I had for my own blog post. This is a very good illustration of what happens when our brains have too much of stimulating stuff. No wonder the frequency of my blogging has gone down since I came to the US and particularly in the last few months when I got a walkman phone. Instead of thinking up blog posts at the gym or during the times I travel, I now simply listen to music. In the last few weeks I could have written blog posts on the July 4th fireworks show, the latest Mumbai bomb blasts or the photography exhibition in Kolkata that showcased five of my photographs but I did not. It’s true that I have been busy with my paintings and some other research-related work, but five years ago this would not have deterred me from writing. Thank God I don’t have a smartphone yet or I would probably stop blogging altogether.

So I have decided to spend some time getting bored from now on. If I want to remain creative and generate new ideas, be it about blog posts or anything else, I must get time to think. This American lifestyle is getting on my nerves. I have to spend some quality time doing nothing or else… I will be unable to do anything worthwhile.

I think that’s what Jorge Cham, creator of PHD Comics refers to as “The power of procrastination.”

And yes, among the lack of creativity predictions that Scott Adams made on his blog was an increase in the number of blog posts that discuss other people’s blog posts.

Do I need to say more?

Hobbies

My hobbies are fighting a war for the largest share of my time. And blogging is losing out at the moment.

I always had a lot of hobbies. Collecting stamps took so much of my time during my childhood days that the word “hobby” was almost synonymous with stamp collecting. I would not have thought it possible at the time, but I don’t think I can tell where my stamp albums are now.

Other hobbies came and went. Some, like spirograph, caught on and stayed for a while. Some others, like matchbox-collecting, failed to make an impact. Some remained close to my heart, even if they were not getting the most attention all the time. Origami, coin-collecting and reading would fit this description.

After I joined my first job in 2005, I developed two new hobbies – blogging and photography. Slowly, as I gained expertise in the latter, it grew and threatened to push all my other hobbies out of the schedule. Digital photography demands a lot of time, especially if you own a DSLR and shoot RAW. I did not have time for much else except the occasional blog post. Even reading, once my first love, had to be cut down severely.

And then, last month, my school closed down for summer vacation and I started indulging myself in a very old hobby – painting. All of it isn’t painting actually: technically I use three kinds of media. I have used charcoal to draw people’s portraits and watercolor to paint landscapes and other things before, but the medium that I have fallen in love with recently is oil pastel. And I have been drawing almost one painting a day since then – some of them imitations of other people’s work, and some of them copies of my own photographs. I am also continuing working with watercolor and charcoal. Here are a few of my latest creations. All of them are done using oil pastels on paper.

My hobbies are fighting a war for the largest share of my time, and painting seems to be emerging the winner right now.

Summer Schedule

Last Friday, I was voice-chatting with a friend who is in India. I told her I was cooking. “Didn’t you go to college today?” she asked.

“Well, school is closed these days…” I started, but she interrupted me. “School? Don’t tell me you have gone back to school!”

“Er… actually I have. Here in the USA undergraduate students go to college, but graduate students go to school.” I hastily explained.

“Undergraduates? You mean school students? They go to college? And didn’t you finish your graduation in Kolkata? I thought you were doing post graduation there!”

This was getting messier than I had anticipated.

“No, actually what we call graduation in India is known as under-graduation here. So the engineering I did in India is under-graduation here. The Ph.D. that I am doing is known as post-graduation in India but here it is graduation. The engineering students here come to college to do their…”

Before I had a chance to finish, she had started again.

“Ah now I get it! The engineering students go to college, just like in India. But how come they don’t let you do Ph.D. in the same college?”

“Of course they do. I study in the same college, and in fact I teach those engineering students.” I said proudly.

“But you just said you don’t go to college but go to school!” she sounded exasperated.

“Er… we go to the same college, but we grad students call it school.”

“I see. So after passing college you get an urge to go back to school and since the schools won’t take you back, you start calling your college school?”

I would have liked to say that it was not quite so, but unfortunately I didn’t have a better way to explain it. So I grudgingly agreed.

“So your school is closed for summer vacations? For how long?” She never ran out of questions.

“Mid-May to August. It’s more than three months.” I wanted to make her jealous.

“Then how come you were in lab yesterday?” There was suspicion in her voice.

“Ph.D. students have no holidays, you know.” I tried to sound smug. “We have to go to lab even during the vacations. However, since school is closed on Fridays during summer, I thought of staying home.”

“Doesn’t vacation mean school is closed on all the days of the week?” she asked.

“Ah yes, that is the regular school. However, the university offices and the summer classes, if any, are open only four days a week.”

“I see. You Ph.D. students go to lab only on the days when the university offices are open. Basically you are following the work schedule of government employees. So you have a long weekend every weekend then.”

“Yes, and this one is even longer!” I said happily. “Monday is Memorial Day and practically everyone in the US is going somewhere. I have also decided to take off on Monday even if I stay at home.”

“You seem to be following the holiday schedules of everybody around you, taking holidays within holidays, while lamenting about working more than everybody else. Am I right?”

Again, I would have liked to say she was simplifying things too much, but I couldn’t find a flaw in her explanation.

“Y-es. Quite right.” I conceded. “That’s why I left the real world job and came here to do a Ph.D.”

Toy Story

Kuntala defines a friend as someone from whom she can borrow a blogging inspiration, but for me, a friend is someone whose blog posts feel as if they were written by me. I like a lot of bloggers on the Internet, but there are very few that I identify with. This is the reason why I consider Kuntala a friend. This is also the reason why she is almost useless as an inspiration for me – when she has written on a topic, she has written the exact same things that I would have written if I had chosen to write on that topic, and in a much better way. I hardly ever have anything to add.

So while I can, let me steal a subject and write a post before she gets a chance to spoil it for me. For all I know, she may have written something on toys already that I missed.

What is a toy? As my nephew gets a tablet PC as his eleventh birthday gift, I wonder if that can be called a toy. The boy already shows amazing talent with his Wii console – a thing that, when I was his age, would have been more fairy tale than science fiction. The toys that his younger brother owns make some kind of electronic sound if I happen to step on them lying about the room at night. For me, the state-of-the-art in toy sophistication was a battery operated “remote controlled” fire engine that was actually connected to the remote control via a cable. Anything else that moved, lit up or produced sound was operated either manually or by a wound-up spring.

But even these toys, although they belonged to me, were mostly from my sister’s childhood days. Before that, when I was the only child in the house, things were considerably simpler.

When I was a small child, almost every toy that I played with was a rubber doll of some sort – be it a human baby, a bear or a monkey. The most they could do was squeak on being squeezed (a functionality that didn’t last too long) and everything else was left to my imagination. Even the cars and the airplanes that I owned had to be rolled on the ground to make them move. There was a green rotary telephone whose dial had a spring just like a real one – imagine my delight when I would dial a number and the dial would return to its original position on releasing. If, on reading this far, you think we were dumb, then it’s better if I don’t tell you about the functional telephone that I had for some time – it consisted of cups attached to the ends of a long plastic pipe. Other short-lived toys included monkey-shaped balloons, a paper crocodile fitted with a dried mud wheel controlled by a string (description useless unless you have seen one), or a plastic horse which jumped forward by means of an accordion-like pipe in its stomach when air was pumped via a long tube fitted with small bellows. Probably nobody understands what I am talking about anymore, because these were the days before the battery operated “Made in China” toys hijacked the market.

But if you think our toys were boring, think again. The black Leo submachine gun could have been the perfect prop for a kid playing “Navy Seal Team 6” had such a role playing game existed back then, but it was detested by the elders because it made so much noise, and hence had to be used with moderation in order to avoid confiscation. I also had real sophisticated toys – the boy with the cymbals who clapped them when wound up, the white horse and the furry dog that walked when would up, and the little Leo ladybug that also walked with a buzzing sound when wound up. These were kept in our showcase and I only got to play with them once in a while. And I only wanted to play with them once in a while.

Oh yes, I almost forgot the various kinds of building blocks and one jigsaw puzzle that consisted of a dozen cubical blocks which could be arranged to make six different animal pictures.

As I grew older, toys increased in sophistication. My new gun fired bullets and I soon developed an amazing skill in shooting the plastic bottle that came with it. More and more toys had spring-driven mechanisms. When some rich kids got something new called “video game,” I got the poor man’s version of it which was a small transparent box filled with water. By pumping a soft part of the box, small objects like beads or hoops inside the water could be made to jump about. And when my parents went to Europe they brought that fire engine for me. They also brought cars with – would you believe it – opening doors! It never mattered to me these cars had no driving mechanism; I just spent hours and hours with those scale-models of a Jaguar and a Porsche.

My sister had her own share of toys, of course. She had several dolls that closed their eyes when they were made to lie down, but her favourite was her daughter Timi – the white teddy bear from London. But for most part, even her toys were static things like doctor’s instruments and small kitchen utensils that required imagination to play with. And yet she played with her toys way more interactively than a kid does today. Much later, she got her first Barbie.

In spite of the lack of sophistication and battery power in our toys, we never felt we were missing out on something. Now it may be argued that people miss something only when they know it exists, but that’s not the point here. The point that I am trying to make is that the enjoyment derived from a toy depends mainly on the imagination of the child and not on the sophistication of the toy. That is the reason that I could spend more time playing with tiny metal balls in a circular maze than the kids of today can spend with their Gameboys without getting bored.

You may call it a case of the sour grapes, but I think our toys were way better as playthings. They let our imagination run wild. For instance, we were free to imagine what the teddy bear’s voice would be like rather than having to accept some pre-recorded electronic voice. And we also played with lots of odds-and-ends: broken bits from real world objects that could be put to various uses in the toy world. And lastly, I may not have had electronic toys in my childhood, but most of the toys that I had are still in “working” condition. I would like to see my nephew’s Wii console after twenty years. And there's no way his tablet PC can outlast my tablet - the slate chalkboard.

I agree to what Kuntala says: our childhood days may seem poor when we try to count the things that we didn't have back then, but the things that we did have would surely surprise the current generation kids.

Identity

Rabindranath Tagore's 150th birth anniversary is here, and I am here with the English translation of another Tagore poem. This year, when I was selecting a poem to translate, I came across this gem that reminded me of a little girl whom I had met recently. And although she has a name that her parents selected for her, we, the people who know her (including her parents), like to call her by any name that comes to our minds. So here's a tribute to Tagore that is also dedicated to our Little Gherkin.

Identity

~Rabindranath Tagore

There’s a girl that I know,

She rules over our village small

She’s the one who is worshipped

And called little goddess by all.

But let me tell you something

Trust me and hear me out---

That her qualities are godlike

Is what I really doubt.

Early morning, when it’s still dark

Where does her sleep flee?

A row ensues on her bed

By her little shouts of glee.

By her loud chortles

Half the street wakes up,

She runs doing mock fights

Away from mother’s lap.

Arms stretched, she looks at me

I have no choice then,

But to take her out on a stroll

On my shoulder again.

Getting the ride of her choice,

In her great joy she insists

On pummeling me repeatedly with

Her plump and soft fists.

When I hurriedly tell her ---

“Wait a little, stop it please!”

She promptly tries to grab and take

The glasses from my eyes.

With me she quarrels so much

In words un-understood.

What an uproar! Could you ever

Call her manners good?

And yet, it hardly befits me

To engage her in a fight.

Without her, the music stops,

The household feels quiet.

Without her, will flowers

Still greet the morning light?

Without her, will the evening star

Still rise every night?

If the mischief-maker isn’t home

For a moment if we part

It seems impossible to fill

The void in my heart.

Her naughtiness is the southern breeze

It wakes a storm joy-laden

It makes all the flowers sway

In my mind’s flower garden.

The only thing that worries me

Her name, if you ask,

To call her by a single one

That is a difficult task.

Who knows about her real name?

I call her as I please –

Miss Mischief, Little Bandit,

Black-face or Ogress.

The name given by her parents

With her parents let it rest.

Let them find the sweetest name

And lock it in a chest.

One person names a baby

In some ceremony,

For everyone to adopt that name

Is nothing but tyranny.

Each calling as they please is how

Naming should be done

The father may call Chandrakumar,

The uncle Ramsharan.

A Sanskrit name is something that

Our girl can hardly carry,

The only thing it adds worth to is

Cost of the dictionary.

I for one, call her by

Whatever I think of

The one I call knows it’s her,

Let the others laugh.

A hundred different games

That little one plays

Is it right to call her by

A single name always?

(Translation by Sugata Banerji)