The occasional light expression

Last week I went to see “I Hate Luv Storys”, a movie taking inspiration from superhits like Love Aaj Kal and touting itself to be the latest offering in the different-from-past-century-love-stories genre. IHLS and their ilk are trying to differentiate themselves from run of the mill love stories through some specific tactics and plot devices. These include taking potshots at contemporary Bollywood, reminding the audience of Bollywood love story cliches, singing songs that deride traditional love stories, and actors and actresses whose online and offline persona is oh-so-2010, detached from their Bollywood past, attempting to stand tall in the global landscape of modern Bollywood movies.

Well, I HATED the movie. Sure it has eye candy value, pretty stars and reasonable acting, fantastic locales and dresses, and the odd joke or two about lesbians and gays, about contemporary Bollywood, the occasional humor by first time side actors (Jai’s best friend is as plain speaking as Pratik Babbar’s character in Imran’s first movie), but the essential question kept bugging me as the movie plodded through: Where’s the bloody plot? Where? Under Imran’s chocolatey-goofy looks? Inside Sameer Soni’s strange expressions? Simply put, there is NO plot to speak of in this movie. Its almost as if the entire movie is targeted towards some kind of context-less, robotic, teenage and youth audience whose goals in life include making fun of everything contemporary and past, and living life in the moment with branded entertainment and clothes.

Even then, the movie would have made sense if it didn’t fall step by step, in the second half, into the very cliches, the very platitudes, the very hackneyedness that it tries to criticize and question in the first half. In the second half the director simply ran out of things to do, and forced a strange New Zealand angle, making Sameer Dattani look even more forced and pathetic than in the first half, making Imran and Sonam stare at each other inscrutably and making the audience almost heave a sigh of relief when he finally proclaims his love in the end, in the most cliched manner possible.

I would go so far as to say that I felt my heart yearning for the very classic contemporary Bollywood movies this movie tries to spoof/criticize/whatever else it does. The first few scenes of the movie are a montage from DDLJ, Hum Tum, and various other Khan classics, and I daresay, you realize how golden those movies are, when IHLS finishes. IHLS is so dull it makes Rajneeti, with all its hamming and cliches stand head and shoulders above it.

Now i need a good tightly scripted, gripping movie to cleanse my palette of all this pink bubblegum BS

After 4 years with Oracle (and the brief stint with PeopleSoft before it got acquired), I have moved to Yahoo for a new gig in User Experience Design. I started off last week and am based in the the very conveniently located Inner Ring Road office in Bangalore. I will be working on a couple of properties including Yahoo’s next generation open advertising platform and some emerging market areas. I’m hoping to retain some of my learnings from enterprise user experience but at the same time immerse myself in the consumer Internet space with a very open mind. So far the office’s been good, there’s an experienced and enthusiastic product and design team here and the India office has a nice casual vibe.
I hope to also blog more about my experiences in this space.

This July, I finished reading two excellent sci-fi pieces – Rudy Rucker’s Postsingular and Cory Doctorow’s sci-fi graphic novel – Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now. Both novels are freely downloadable from the above links. (Quite a stellar business model - fans like me are very likely to buy most of their books at some point).

Both books have been as refreshing as a splash of cold fresh spring water - made me feel how constrained my own vision of the future may have been. They also made me reflect on the smallness of the typical techno-utopian vision for the future shared by technologists and designers alike.

Postsingular is a novel breathtaking in its expanse of thought and scale of execution. You will find nano-scale intelligence and malintent, Californian street kids and geeks figuring out the Planck frontier, crossing between dimensions, futuristic interfaces and political marketing and a sweet twist on the traditional view of Nature and Gaia and post-human intelligence. I’m a fan and am waiting eagerly for Rucker’s next novel ‘Hylozoic’.

I also mentioned my inspiration via Rucker and Postsingular in a recent presentation on Design Inspirations from Science Fiction at Dcamp 2.0 Bangalore which I recently organized through UPA Bangalore.

It is around 730 am in the morning and I am headed towards Bangalore International Airport to catch a flight to Nagpur. The experience thus far has been reasonable enough - the Airlift shared cab was waiting for me on time on Old Madras Road, my Tata Indicom wireless connection (despite some serious troubles in activating it) seems to be giving enough signal strength to blog live and Outer Ring road seems a lot less maddening at this time of the day.

Where is the Bangalore ecosystem headed - its a question I ask myself everyday. On the one hand (now don’t start off with Roosevelt’s assertion about wanting to meet only one handed economists) it has the trappings of a network hub with the necessary knowledge infrastructure, talented and creative people, a pace of life which is still slower than Mumbai and Delhi by a healthy factor (some might argue that geographically the main Bangalore region is not more than a few Mumbai or Delhi suburbs), and a fairly aggressive consumer spending base not just through IT professionals but also otherwise. On the other hand having experienced the absolutely anarchic traffic situation, the 11:30 pm curfews, the mundaneness of the MG Road area, the soulless and relentless construction and the blase attitude of may of this city’s residents, I tend to also wonder if Bangalore is a blip, a brief burst on the horizon which fades away into the sunset with a one liner in history textbooks.
Anyways, I need some coffee soon in my system …

I’m starting my second year of blogging with a resolve to blog more often, blog on topics dearer to me, get a good spam filter, and start more interesting conversations within the blogosphere…

Yesterday night I attended a Landmark Forum session at St Joseph’s school. The usual forces were at play - buzzing Landmark graduates, no coffee/food, disoriented and generally happy or confused guests, more buzzing Advanced Course graduates, and Gopal Rao, the charismatic Landmark Forum patriarch, who has been doing this work in India for 19 years now. Gopal is a bit less physically charismatic than Praveen Puri, but both are quite powerful individuals.
One line by Gopal stayed in my head - “Life is a series of conversations….”. For some reason, i was reminded of reading J. Krishnamurthy, who i’ve always considered some sort of a Nietzschean shaman.

About 10 days back, I had a minor crunch on my front Swift fender from a speeding TVS fellow near Rammurthy Nagar. And a major loss of gravity and heartburn when I saw the frame sticking out near the left headlight.

I gave the car to the good repair folks at Mandovi, who told me they would pretty much replace the left front panel and repaint the car. I’ve been twiddling my thumbs for the past week waiting for her to arrive, waiting, waiting, waiting….

When I stood in front of my gate waiting for the car to arrive, I had a palpable sense of anxiety, excitement, fear, and that giddy feeling that one gets when there are pheromones in the air. And it was then that I felt - perhaps men do ‘feel’ something about their cars : )

As I drove to the neighborhood supermarket and slowly found my brain and hands and feet connect those many neurons required to drive safely in India, I felt this very simple joy. It was the simple joy one gets out of washing hands and brushing in the morning, or standing in a balcony and feeling the night breeze - that sense that all is right in God’s green earth. I felt peaceful, reflective, and generally content.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, one of my favorite psychologists and the author of some wonderful books on Flow and Creativity and Happiness has a nice note on how car driving creates a strong sense of flow and control in one of his articles…
“During flow, we typically experience a sense of control — or, more precisely, a lack of anxiety about losing control that is typical of many situations in normal life. This sense of control is also reported in activities that involve serious risks such as hang gliding, rock climbing, and race-car driving, activities that to an outsider would seem to be much more potentially dangerous than the affairs of everyday life. Yet these activities are structured to provide the participant with the means to reduce the margin of error to as close to zero as possible. Rock climbers, for example, insist that their hair-raising exploits are safer than crossing a busy street in Chicago, because on the rock face they can foresee every eventuality, whereas when crossing the street they are at the mercy of fate. The sense of control respondents describe thus reflects the possibility, rather than the actuality, of control.”