sharukh

I have a few friends who abhor Sharukh so much that, whatever the case might be, they are extremely skillful, in finding faults in all of his performances, stressing a few trademark remarks, that his acting is monotonous, he infact is not a real actor, he overacts too much and much much more.
I recently had oppurtunity to watch two movies back to back of Sharukh. One is the recent, Swadesh, about a young indian, working for NASA in USA of A, who for the love of country and his life, decides to leave behind all the comforts in life and truely follows his heart back home, swadesh.
The second movie, an old one, which probably released like a year back, and one that I had watched earlier, Kal Ho Na Ho. Amazing performance by Sharukh, in the movie. After the movie, I had heard many a people sarcastically remarking about the prolonged ending and that how much time sharukhs character in the movie takes to die...that quite a few people were bitting their nails and praying hard enough that he dies and the movie ends.

However seeing the movie for the second time, I actually realised how elegantly Sharukh has portrayed the character of a dying man, with love for life and all that life represents. It was brilliant depiction and i shud say comparable if not better performance of character played in late seventies by Rajesh khanna, in the movie Anand.

Sharukh carried the entire movie solely on his wonderful performance. There are a few suttle cheap dialogs in the movie, which, for the second time if one watches the movie, come to light. For example, in the scene where, Sharukh gives Saif an ear phone to train him to woo preeti zinta. He says, "Ise Kan me dalna", and Saif interprets, "ise Kh... me dalna", and reiterates, what sharukh just asked him to do..
Second in a scene, where Saif comes with his father to preeties, home, to formally ask for preeties hand in marriages, he says, "....painter mere hool ko bhi paint karega" and the small kid erupts into laughter..The flow of the movie does produce its effect and one cant help but laugh.

I actually am able to correlate the character of sharukh in the two movies, with the character of Miles played by Paul Giamatti, in the recent hit, Sideways.
Correlation in sense that, life is not pretty most of time, but outlook is what matters.
How one carries oneself through life is what people remeber in the end and
small goods, even if it is say, allowing the old man in grocery line to checkout first, is very very important. It gives one a sense of self and actually is more satisfying and happiness enducing than many more materialistic joys in life.

Neways, I think I thoroughly enjoyed all the movies, mentioned above and yes I for sure think Sharukh for all his weaknesses , still is one of the best actors hindi movie has produced so far.

Blame the Machine

What do I mean by that, well.. isnt it true that whenever when ever we are into something really important, very technology that enabled us in the first place to do what we are doing and probably is really important at that moment in time, gives up on us. Like, say for example, I am working on an application deadline and suddenly it turns out that the charger of my laptop just gave up on me.
I realise that when, suddenly the laptop starts bliking, prompting me to switch onto AC power asap..

What!!!!wasnt I on AC power all the time.. how did this happen and then I scamper here and there trying to save the work onto some portable media and hope that I have back up machine to continue my work in office...
As it turns out, the day is just bad...Network in the office is down and the way the server is configured, down network implies one cannot even log onto ones own machine....

What does one do in such ocassions.. Can one really be prepared for the unexpected...Have we reached a point in life, that dependence on technology for mere survival has become so important that if things go wrong, one is just stranded midway, gasping Why ME????

Being in sciences, and research, most of ordinary days, are spend reading journal papers...
Gone are the days, when there used to be archieve of journals in the library and one had to climb on those, wooden stairs, to reach the Journal archieve on the top most rack.. The glamour of actually researching to get the research article is lost. With the recent scholar.google.com and the pubmed website, all one has to know what key word in the field one is looking for and with correct mention of the period of publications and any more of minimal information, without even knowing the actual source of material, one can lay hands on any god damn article one pleases. In some sense one can also retrieve classics from yester years, and I say in some sense, simply because, the actual work is probably hanging on some museum wall, surrounded by impenetrable enclave, like 1959 paper by Hodgkin Huxley on ion channels on cell membrane, or Black Scholes paper on Option pricing model or Lorenz work on reduced version of Napier Stroke model, which was first published in some obscure Weather journal, and is now, the most prominent, feature of any fancy work related to chaos or say 1905 series of papers by Einstein on
Brownian motion and photoelectric effect and Special relativity...

Each of papers mentioned above spawned an industry of work in itself.. All I had to do to get these classics was, Google it!!!

Some how, the charm of hard work and the satisfaction of being able to lay hand on something priceless is lost, may be many people will argue against it and to be true, convinience is what man strives for and now that I have it, I want the old days back...

Neways, I was prompted to write here today was as I began, life sometime just sucks!!!
In such times, the only saving grace is a nice book in hand and soft pillow under head.

Outrageous

I am prompted to write here, simply because I heard this audio file, related harresment of Indians, working in call centers, by some radio jock on his show.
Audio File

It is very well known now, how outsourcing jobs to indian companies have enraged quite a many americans and we are in some ways accostomed to the rallies protesting such outsourcing. However, never in my 3 and 1/2 years of stay in the states have I ever experienced any kind of racist behaviour or any sort of discrimination against Indians and in general any brown population. This is a country which cherishes meritocracy and if ur good u will find a way to succeed here, no matter what background u have and no matter where u come from in the world. I have grown to love america simply for this reason. However, it was a shock for me when I heard the above audio.
Its been in the press now for sometime, the harresment of indian callcenter workers by callers here, but this is just too much.

I am happy to know that there was wide spread protest by indian community here, an apt response to such behaviour. In this country no one will tolerate such nonsense.
However I am not very happy with the punishment levied on that jockey, who supposedly has been suspended for a day.

i hope such events will not happen again, it will only tarnish the already bad image that Americans in general evoke around the world. To this end, I would also like to mention about an incident that happened in France, told to me by my friend.

This blonde girl goes to ticket station and is asked by the French ticket collector about her destination, ofcourse in french. This blonde american couldnt understand french and she told the guy in english that she couldnt understanf french, the response she got, shockingly, "So, I cannot help u then". My indian friend close to her was watching this incident unfolding and he had to intervene and speak to the ticket collector (ofcourse in english), to help this blonde american get her tickets. Surprisingly enough, this indian friend of mine dosent know french and he managed to survive in france with english pretty decently.

So there does exist discrimination against americans outside america in some way, I only hope americans in general realise this and take all measures to prevent such discriminations in this country, if for nothing else, to avoid any more 9/11s.