Let the bubbly flow ..

Yesterday we started watching "Bunty Aur Babli" – another Bollywood extravaganza 🙂 This one did have a few things going for it, it had Amitabh Bacchan, it had Rani Mukerjee and the story was written (and the movie produced) by Aditya Chopra. It was also a kind of a landmark because this was another movie which involved two of the big Bollywood families – the Bacchans and the Chopras. Oh yeah, it also had Abhishek Bacchan in it but more about that as we move on …

The film looked good on principle but as the movie started off, except for the first song, nothing really grabbed me. I like get Abhishek’s movies whenever I can because he kind of has his father’s looks but he just doesn’t seem to have his father’s charisma. He always plays things low-key. In this movie, he seemed to be playing it lower still. The character was somehow muted. And Rani, I again like her but maybe it was the influence of "Black" or maybe I had seen too many movies with her playing various characters but she just seemed too old for Vimmi and each time she pranced or cried for her Mummy, I really wanted to throw up :p Well, no not really but she just seemed way too old to be doing that character – at least 20 years too old :p

But despite the not quite believability of the two main characters (or the actors portraying them), I kind of got into the whole Bunty and Babli (which are the two alter-egos of Abhishek’s and Rani’s characters) looting the rich and giving back to the poor thing. Of course, there were all those little Amitabh homages in there as well though I am not really sure that Abhishek actually carried through any of those with the same flair as his Dad, unfortunately :p We stopped around the mid-way point and so will have to see the rest today. Amitabh entered the movie just before we stopped it and so hopefully, it will get better. It is a likeable story so far but nothing extraordinary – the movie certainly had a few good comic lines but the chemistry between Abhishek and Rani was lukewarm to say the least.

And to summarize ….

This week’s been rather eventful … and it’s only beginning :p Actually, I guess I’m talking about last week. But given the fact that I only have a tenuous concept of time at any given moment, I might actually be talking about Sunday-after-next and still might not really have an inkling about what I’m really talking about :p Incidentally, I’m one of those people who believes that the week begins on Monday and so, I guess this is a new week. The past week had a lot of things going on and so I thought I’d do a recap here.

I finished my latest short story … either yesterday or day before. Strangely enough, it actually was fun writing it after I got going and wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be :p I kind of like how the world I built in that story turned out but not sure if others will think so. I want to try and submit this story to a couple of places but first, it needs a little bit more polishing. Laurie’s going through it first (and I need a bit of a break from it) and then I will go back to working on it.

I also started work on WriteTrack again. This was actually due to something else I finished this week – a new query letter. I submitted my query letter over at Absolute Write Water Cooler – a good forum for writers BTW – and they (or actually one really helpful person :p) tore it apart and re-built it from the ground up. I like how the new query letter turned out and couldn’t wait to get querying again :p So, I sent out a couple of queries using the new query letter and that meant that I had to track the new queries using WriteTrack :p I got to work originally to fix a few minor annoyances but then it turned into more serious work where I actually added in the last of the missing functionality in WriteTrack, fixed a few bugs, added suggested features by beta-testers and so on. I still have a few minor UI issues to sort out but once that’s done, a new build should be ready to go out … maybe today 🙂

Upgrades and changes

Recently, there seem to have been a lot of new minor releases – FireFox 1.5.0.1, Directory Opus 8.2.1.0 and WordPress 2.0.1 for instance. Now I do use all of the above and I upgraded to all of them. The FireFox upgrade required that I also upgrade the AI Roboform extension but other than that, it worked fine. The Directory Opus upgrade has not produced any issues yet. The biggest upgrade, for me at least, was WordPress since I had not yet made the transition from WordPress 1.5 to 2.0 yet.

As I’d mentioned before, I didn’t particularly want to upgrade to WordPress 2.0 since there wasn’t anything much there that I really wanted. However, what with the release of 2.0.1 and the announcement that they’d fixed 100+ bugs in it, I figured that I might as well upgrade now since all future fixes would come for the 2.0 branch anyway 🙂 The thing I hate about upgrading WordPress is that they recommend deleting all WP PHP files and then installing the new code. I have WP installed in a folder where there are hundreds (yes, really, hundreds :p) of other files and trying to find just the WP files can be a pain in the posterior. I have tried simply overwriting existing files and it has worked every time I’ve tried but being anal retentive, that just doesn’t sit right with me :p I *need* to do it just the way the documentation says.

So, this time what I did was, I pulled out the WP 1.5.2 zip file, extracted the contents to a temporary folder, got a file listing and created a shell script from the listing to move all WP files to a temporary location. I then extracted the WP 2.0.1 install ZIP file’s contents on to the location where WP had been installed and we were up and going in a short time 🙂

Of course, now that I had WP 2.0.1, I had to go upgrade some of my plugins and remove unused ones as well. I found that I had a bunch of old plugins in the plugins folder for no reason – so out they went. Then I upgraded to Spam Karma 2.1 since I still had 2.0 installed. Now that I had WP 2.0, I could also go for the AKismet plugin to combat spam. I didn’t want to install the built-in AKismet plugin though since I prefer Spam Karma. So I got the Akismet plugin for Spam Karma and we were all set! Incidentally, Dr. Dave who develops Spam Karma had some stuff to say about a new breed of spam-bots but that’ll have to wait for another day …

Are we free to talk?

The freedoms that we enjoy, they sometimes confuse me :p People say, "I have freedom of speech, I can say what I want". And I guess this is right. But what exactly does the freedom of speech entail? What are the boundaries? What can you say and what can’t you say? I guess the general answer would be, "there are no boundaries, you can say whatever you want!" But is this correct?

The whole idea of "free speech" is a veritable minefield as far as I’m concerned. If you insult somebody because you believe what you say is right, you’d think it’s freedom of speech. The other person might think of it as a mortal insult punishable by a beating. Take the same situation, but you don’t believe in what you say – you say it just so that you can annoy the other person. But you’d still be covered by freedom of speech … or would you? How far exactly does freedom of speech go? Can you say anything you want about anybody you want just because you are free to say it?

This is the question which perplexes me. And if you aren’t free to say whatever you want, who judges what you are allowed to say? The government? Your neighbour? The collective opinion of the "people"? Who is to say that any of these people are right in their censorship? Can anybody be entrusted with deciding what can be said and what cannot be said by somebody else? I am not so sure they can.

So freedom of speech has its drawbacks and censorship certainly is not desirable. What are we left with? We can try to impose a (theoretical) code of conduct on freedom of speech such as, "Say what you honestly believe and do not say something that you wouldn’t want said against you!" (I’m just thinking aloud here). Would that work? You know it won’t :p You can honestly believe, based on evidence that seems irrefutable to you, that your neighbour is a litterbug and you might say so out loud and clear. Unknown to you, the littering might be done by another person who wants to implicate your neighbour. Was your exercise of your freedom of speech justified?

Yes, I know I’m simplifying the issue :p Rabid proponents of freedom of speech might say anything ranging from "You speaking out against the perceived littering by your neighbour opens the room for dialog to find the real culprit" to "It’s your freedom to say your neighbour is a litterbug and it’s his freedom to deny it or to call you a name!". Mind you, I’m neither for nor against freedom of speech. I just want to understand how it is supposed to work without it actually being abused – intentionally or unintentionally. For the life of me, I can’t really see it working – not with humans the way they are. Now if we were rational, ethical, non-impulsive creatures, perhaps … but that’s just too much to ask for :p

The Distinguished Competition and the Marvels of comics

I think I wrote a while back about how I really liked what DC was doing with their various comics. I also wrote about how I picked up a couple of Marvel titles after that and found that surprisingly, I liked them too. That was over a year ago. Since that time, my perception of comics (both Marvel and DC) has changed again.

Originally, I wasn’t so sure about "Infinite Crisis" since it seemed to be just another effort to cash in on the old "Crisis on Infinite Earths" twenty years later. But as the story progressed, it has become interesting, engrossing and I love how the story affects so many corners of the DC universe. I just finished reading the "Rann-Thanagar War Infinite Crisis Special" and all I can say is "Wow!" One of the changes I’d hated about the new DC universe was that Hal Jordan was back (not to mention the way he made the entrance – decking Batman, eerily similar to how Batman decked Guy Gardner when the JLI was formed. That seemed like a cheap shot on the part of Geoff Johns to me but YMMV). I actually liked Kyle Rayner as Green Lantern way more than I’d liked Hal Jordan and now that Hal was back, it looked as if Kyle was going to take a back seat. But the "Rann-Thanagar Special" shows that Kyle is going off in a completely new direction and Ron Marz is writing the story. Wow! Double wow!! (Yeah, I like Rayner, think Jordan never amounted to much – get over it :p)

While all that (and more) is going on with DC, what about Marvel? They actually seem to be sinking again. The "Young Avengers" started off well but now seems to be bogged down in the sexual choices of the characters and some weird Skrull storyline at the moment. It’s stopped being fresh and new. Marvel did the whole "House of M" thing which did nothing for me – I’d hoped that they’d at least bring Hawkeye back and while there are hints that he might be back, we don’t know for sure. The "Thunderbolts" have again gotten really convoluted and uninteresting. Peter Parker’s life is being turned upside down in Spider-man and I’m not really sure that’s a good. Basically, Marvel seems to be making waves just to be making waves or trying to play catch up with DC and not really concentrating on writing good stories. Now I hear that they have a "new" cross-over event coming up, "Civil War" and that Spidey’s going to get a new costume designed by Iron Man – wahoo. Yeah, doesn’t really spark much interest. But let’s see what the new year brings, maybe they’ll surprise me …or maybe not :p

Certainties and attitudes

Americans, not saying all Americans mind you, seem to be very certain that they know and use the English language better than anybody else :p Maybe this perception comes from the fact that most of the English speakers that you meet are from the US than any other English speaking country but still, the impression remains.

For instance, I had an American teacher in the ’90s. She was here in Sri Lanka for a year on a project. The place where we were studying, was set up to teach English and other skills to Sri Lankan students. I believe I’m being objective (but are we ever when we talk about ourselves? :p) when I say that my knowledge of English was at least on par with theirs. (So what was I doing there then? That’s a different story :p) Some of the other teachers accepted the fact that I knew English as well as they did and would even acknowledge the fact. But there was this one teacher who would not even consider the fact that her knowledge might be deficient. One particular instance that springs to mind is the word "rune". During a classroom discussion about something, I used the word "rune" and she said there was no such word. I, of course, knew better :p So I brought the word up again in a different class later, she again flatly refused to believe that there was such a word and even dismissed the very thought of checking up to see if there was such a word.

Recently, I got another comment, again from an American, who thought that I was looking words up in the thesaurus and inserting them into my writing because the word usage was different from what she was used to. Of course the usage was different! My writing’s closer to the British style (though a lot of Americanisms do creep in :p) because in Sri Lanka we are still learn English "the way the British do" (that’s actually common misconception – I believe Sri Lankan English and British English diverged paths a long time ago too .. but still the spelling and certain forms of usage is closer to the Brits than to the Americans). But to get back on track, this person totally dismissed the possibility that there might be other usages for a word or phrase than she was used to.

Is this just an American trait? I don’t know. But it’s true that so far, I’ve encountered this blindness only in Americans. I just wonder how you can come to be in a position like that – one where you dismiss all other possibilities than what you know yourself. Isn’t that also going to limit your ability to learn because you’ll keep rejecting new opportunities to learn because you believe the other person is wrong? That seems a little sad … but then again, I guess that’s humanity for you :p

When copies attack …

We started watching a Tamil movie yesterday, "Ghajini" and it turned out to be a copy of, of all things, "Memento". Now I loved "Memento" but wouldn’t have for a moment thought that it would have worked as a Tamil film. While flashback’s are common in Indian cinema, the constantly backward flowing storyline of "Momento" is something that would have been hard for the usual Tamil cinema audience to grasp. Tamil cinema, which I love, isn’t usually about innovation – it’s about mass appeal, just as Hindi cinema is, but then again, on a slightly different level. Hindi cinema seems to be more about the glamour factor as well as the sugar-sweet love stories. Tamil cinema on the other hand, has a much stronger family value thread running through it though the ever-present love story does rear its head even there.

But I digress – back to "Ghajini". Within the first couple of scenes, it was evident that this movie was totally "inspired" by "Memento". What I was curious about was whether they retained the original backward story telling. They didn’t. Instead, they opted for a standard forward moving storyline with many flashbacks to fill in the full story. And no, it isn’t the exact story of "Memento" – that again would not have worked with Indian viewers. This was simply the story of somebody suffering from short-term memory loss who appears to be on a rampage killing people for an unspecified reason. As the story unfolds, we learn why he’s on this killing spree bit by bit and also how he came to get short-term memory loss.

We only watched part of the movie last night – unlike Hollywood movies, the Indian ones tend to be close to 3 hours :p So I still don’t know how it all works out but I have a feeling that the flashbacks and the normal storyline will culminate in one event where the protagonist will have one last flashback which reveals what real happened to him and then he’ll end up killing the guy he is after – the guy responsible for the whole thing. Confusing? Yeah, probably :p Go watch the movie!