iPost

A lot of important things happened over the last few weeks none of which was worth blogging about. So we are back to the standard dilemma: should I write about something that does not interest me, or should I write about something that does not interest you?

The decision was easy. I chose the latter option.

So here's my first blog post written with my iPhone. Before you start asking me why I bought an iPhone if I don't like Steve Jobs and Apple, let me tell you that I did not buy it. I jailbroke an old iPhone that my cousin gave to me.

My verdict is that it is a cute little toy too small and slow for any serious work. It is bad as a phone since its charge hardly lasts a full day. That is, however, not as big a problem for me as it sounds since I don't browse the net on the go.

On the plus side, it has some nice apps for stargazing, a plethora of games and various other stuff that very conveniently distract me from my stressful work and help me spend my already precious time in more innovative ways. Now without spending a dime I can indulge in tremendously useful and interesting activities like playing musical instruments, count every step I walk and mark every spot I visit on the map. Oh yes, I can tell people where I am on Facebook too!

Wait, did I say that was a plus? Sorry, the real plus is that I can type out a blog post while my laptop is busy with my experiments. The iPhone spell checker and autocorrect, although irritating when I am typing a text message in Bengali were a great help while typing this post.

Speaking of Bengali, I have an app for typing in Bengali too.

এইরকম ভাবে |

So enjoy your weekend while I enjoy mine. I must end here because I think I am getting late for my taanpura practice.

A hundred years later

On April 15, 1912 the biggest man-made moving object on earth moved to the bottom of the Atlantic.

Exactly a hundred years later, I went to watch the movie Titanic today in a 3D theatre. However, this short post is not a review. There's no point reviewing a movie that came out fifteen years ago and has been seen multiple times by most people of our generation.

I know what a lot of critics say: Titanic is like the Twilight of disaster movies. It is a melodramatic, mushy, Bollywood-style over-the-top and unrealistic romantic film which did not deserve many of the eleven Academy Awards that it received. I would probably agree. I'll also confess that I like the movie. The movie brought back a lot of memories of my childhood - of school and early college days when I would listen to "My heart will go on" in endless loop.

When Titanic came out in 1997, I was in school and did not get a chance to watch it in theatres. English movies did not run for multiple weeks in Allahabad and the theatres in Allahabad were not too technologically advanced at the time anyway. I watched it much later on TV. I watched it several times since then. The last time was probably a decade ago. For me, Jurassic Park and Titanic were two movies that really redefined what technology could do in a movie. We have had all kinds of special effects since then - be it in the department of large animals wreaking havoc or in the portrayal of colossal loss of life and property - but we have never had anything that can beat the experience of watching Jurassic Park or Titanic for the first time.

My experience was incomplete. I completed it today by watching the RMS Titanic go down on big screen, in 3D, with surround sound. Who cares if it is a mushy love story? I enjoyed every moment of it!

Sleuths on Screen

Uttamkumar as Byomkesh in Chiriyakhana

Cinema, and by this I mean both the big screen as well as the small, has virtually replaced the book as a medium of storytelling. Movies are being made from all genres of fiction and virtually nothing seems out of reach for them. Movies like Jurassic Park and Lord of the Rings have demonstrated what technology can achieve, while numerous great directors have demonstrated time and again what can be achieved without technology. In view of all this, it seems a pity that few directors, if any, understand how detective stories work.

By detective stories I mean detective stories, not thrillers. I do not mean Robert Langdon, Jason Bourne or James Bond. I mean the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. And our own Byomkesh and Feluda. Is it too hard to understand? A director may have made great films and yet, he often messes up a on a detective story. Why? I think the answer to that question is straightforward. One simply has to understand why those of us who love detective stories do so.

What is so special about Sherlock Holmes or Feluda? What makes Hercule Poirot unique? Is it the story? A novel plot is only novel the first time. Then why do we go back and read those books again and again, even when we know who the murderer is?

Elementary, my dear Watson. We love our detectives. We know them inside out and love their every fault, their drug addictions, their lethargy, their arrogance, their obsession with cleanliness and symmetry. We are not bothered about who the criminal is. We want to predict how our detective will react in a given situation and then see if our predictions come true.

We want to learn up their dialogs, mon ami, we want to laugh at their mannerisms. We are not simply interested in seeing a crime being solved. We want to see the man (or woman) we know solving the crime. This is what the directors fail to see. 

The name's Bakshi. Byomkesh Bakshi. 

Sandip Ray, for instance, does not understand that we don't want to see Feluda punch somebody to a pulp. We would rather have a Feluda who gets occasionally intimidated by knife throwers or beaten up by thugs. We know his time will come and we patiently wait for that moment. Feluda in a fistfight? Come on, that's like asking Rahul Dravid to prove his worth by wrestling. Not that wrestling is bad - its simply not his game. It took the junior Ray three amazingly bad films and one moderately bad one to finally realize that. His father, of course, didn't do much better when handling Byomkesh. Uttamkumar may have been the biggest superstar of his time, but he was no Byomkesh. Byomkesh never had a pet snake. Couldn't a man like Satyajit Ray see that it mattered? Of course, it is quite another matter that the poster of the upcoming Byomkesh movie by Anjan Dutta (right) hints that Ray's Chiriyakhana may not have been the worst Byomkesh movie ever.  And yet, it has nothing to do with budget. Most Indian fans will agree - and not just Bengalis - that Basu Chatterjee's small screen Byomkesh has never been bettered. How did that happen with a small budget?

Look at the hair, not the moustache

Supposedly the 1974 classic The Murder on the Orient Express was the best representation of Poirot on screen till then. Really? Ladies and gentlemen, what you see on the left is the best representation of a man who would die before he parted his hair asymmetrically. Do they really take us seriously? Sherlock Holmes is the fictional character who has been depicted on screen the most number of times. I have seen many of those, and never liked them. Firstly, the representation was either too literal and bookish which combined with the old London sets made the movie unrealistic-looking. Secondly, they failed to get the essence of the stories. In the version of The Sign of Four that I saw, Watson's fiancée finally finds her treasure. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, the criminal was found and arrested. When Warner Brothers announced their multi-starrer big-budget Sherlock Holmes movie, I thought they would finally get it. I should have known better. This is what Sherlock Holmes in that ninety million dollar movie turned out to be:

Not shown: bullet-time punches and Jude Law as Watson

The reason why I am ranting about this here is that I recently came across a BBC TV series called Sherlock which is based on Holmes, but puts Doyle's detective in present-day London. He uses a laptop and a smartphone, maintains a website and searches the Internet when needed to solve crimes. Watson is an army doctor back from Afghanistan who blogs about Holmes' cases. Compare this with Sandip Ray's Feluda who, even after having time-traveled from the 1970s to the 2010s, does not own a cellphone or a computer. Ray does not even make an attempt to explain this anomaly, let alone try to modernize the story-lines and incorporate the changed technology realistically.

Strangely, this modern Sherlock is the best Holmes I have seen on screen so far. This is the man I have known and loved since the day my father gave me the Complete Sherlock Holmes in two volumes. He has the same arrogance, the same disregard for rules, same spite for the Scotland Yard and the same thorough knowledge of the world he lives in. The real Sherlock Holmes was a man of science. This one is no different. His instruments have changed, but he is still the master of the best methods. He uses texting instead of running errand-boys now. He uses Google search instead of going to the library. He still beats up dead men at the morgue because he wants to see how corpses bruise. He talks lightning fast, thinks faster, and when he speaks he is usually obnoxious and conceited. In short, Benedict Cumberbatch plays Sherlock Holmes exactly how he would have been if he lived today. Here's a trailer for the first season of this mini-series.

Of course, I have only seen the first season (three episodes) and I don't know yet how this has turned out in the future episodes. I have seen great movies ruined by bad sequels before, and it may well happen here too. However, from what I have seen, this first season is good enough to teach Sandip Ray a lesson about handling Feluda in the 21st century. He could, of course, choose to stick to 1970s like the original stories, but that would only increase his budget. If something must change, why change the character's personality and make him fight thugs? Why not make his deadliest weapon deadlier with the help of smartphones and cameras and laptops and the Internet? A tablet would serve the purpose of his blue notebooks perfectly. He need not even write in Greek - he can simply password protect it. He can still smoke his Charminars, and he can still switch off his phone when he needs to disappear for a few hours. As long as he does not look like a behind-the-times anachronism, anything works for me.

As far as Byomkesh is concerned, I do not need to give suggestions. With Anjan Dutta as the director, the movies are going to be like... piles of ash, as Byomkesh himself would put it. Only, there wouldn't be any treasure to uncover underneath.

On Being a T.A.

Teaching assignments are of four types.

First, there is the grading job where the professor teaches the class and you grade their assignments and exam papers. This is very popular among the first-year  Ph.D. students since they are nervous about facing a class, and also among the final year Ph.D. students since they don't have time to teach a class. The good part about grading is you don't have to maintain a schedule. The bad part is, well, you have to read and evaluate the trash submitted by the students, and that, in my opinion, is no less a punishment than having to teach a class at 8:30 on Monday mornings.

Then there is the teaching assistant who supposedly assists the professor in a class apart from grading the assignments. This assistance can be anything ranging from  reciting part of the material in class to simply sitting and forwarding the slides when the professor says "Next!" I have done that last type of job. Trust me, it is not fun forwarding slides although it seems like very little work. I have  dozed off more than once waiting for the professor to finish a lengthy slide.

The third type is the work that I got as my first assignment in the US. A lab instructor is a TA who is supposed to set programming assignments for the students and then help them solve those problems. In my case this had to be done in a lab where each student was sitting in front of a computer with the screen turned away from me. About 90% of these students had Facebook or Youtube open in those computers and couldn't bother less about my teaching. The remaining 10% complained that I spoke too much and they couldn't focus on solving the problems. The class was Monday mornings at 8:30 and there were students who came to the class, pulled their hoods over their heads and officially went to sleep putting their heads down on their desks. I never liked this job since I had to teach at the same pace as the professor, and the professors don't always leave enough time for the lab instructors to cover the material before proceeding to a new topic. But this was better than both grading and forwarding slides as it gave me some feel of real teaching.

And real teaching is what I have been doing for some time now. True, I don't have a TA to grade the assignments and I don't even decide the syllabus or the book. But at least I can decide the pace and manner of teaching different chapters. I sometimes feel like losing my cool while grading the exams, and the students' feedback at the end of the semester is almost always discouraging, but there is always one student who goes on to draw a house as soon as I teach the class how to draw a rectangle. There is always one student who rises above the prevailing indifference to write me mails with comments (both positive and negative) about my teaching, and visits my office during office hours to learn more.

At the end of the day, only this one student is enough to make teaching worth all the trouble that it is.

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.