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.