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.

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.