28 May, 2007

Shootout at Lokhandwala

I could also call it - The Ambush at The Trocadero... because I felt physically hurt as I walked out with envigoman after watching this movie.

You can find the plot details here but nothing can prepare you for the mess that the director and the scriptwriter have concocted. The cast of the movie had its highs and lows - Amitabh Bachchan, and Sunit Dutt but also so called heroes like Suni(e)l Shetty and Tus(s)har Kapoor. The plot is based on a 14 hours shootout which happened in the early 90s in a residential suburb of bombay, where 6 goons were shot dead by the police. The story, being a real story, is real enough here too. (I like saying positive things about a movie, I need to be balanced in my approach).
Bad things about the movie -

1. Music
2. Tushar Kapoor + Vivek Oberoi + the other four goons - they looked more like high school bullies from a boys only school who then get to meet women for the first time.

Overall, I am not sure about what the director was trying to achieve - Was the movie about police brutality or about how the police has had to evolve to counter the new breed of criminals? Or was it just some cash rich produced who wanted a tax writeoff? Amitabh for the whole movie was mouthing one cliche after the other, the encounter sequence had exquisitely bad screenplay, the movie had songs in the flashback and if I remember correctly, even had a dream sequence :)

Avoid this one more than plague - the plague can only kill you.

27 May, 2007

The sinking of the bank holiday

Three days of holiday. Three days of uninterrupted rain.
I had the super idea of checking up the weather map and heading out into that part of the country which does not have any clouds in the satellite picture.
This is what I saw.....
£$%$@~@~#'#'#'@@#!!!!
All hail the gloom!

17 May, 2007

To enable with energy

One dream. Two people. Three ideas. Four weeks.

We had decided to call it envigo, and then angelboy opened a blog.
was thrilled when I got the opportunity to create Envigo all over again
Below is an excerpt - This boy is really cool.
"Present is all we have. Past is lost. Future is fiction. Nobody fails. Nobody ever fails. Our plans fail. Too often we confuse our plans with our being. This confusion is the source of our frustration. When our plans fail, we start believing that we have failed."

Enjoy.

14 May, 2007

Travel ... These days!

We are going to be launching a travel blog - the idea being that people working here travel a lot and research their travel well and also go to unusual places, ,or go to the usual places but do unusual things, usually - so why not let our dear customers read about it and maybe even teach us a thing or two.
Getting blogs was easy enough and so was the design and development, however, this is the first time that my team is making something which is on the website and IS customer facing. Therefore the butterflies.
I caught a really cool movie over the weekend - Life... in a Metro. According to the movie, the following are true:
  • The world is very small - everything is interrelated
  • Almost all married men have affairs
  • Married women are less likely to have one, , compared to men, but for the right man, why not
  • Men are not emotionally involved in an affair, all the involvement is to ensure the woman does not bale out on them
  • Women are always emotionally involved in relationships, whether they realise it or not
  • Kangana Ranaut is hot, though she can not speak English very well. (Who cares - reminds me of "Talk!!!! who wants to talk!?!"
The music works wonders - Pritam (composer) and Syed Qadri (lyrics) reinforce their comfort and command over this genre of music which has been the domain of Pakistani bands. The songs take place in the movie, with the performers visible, but not part of the story with the characters going on with their lives.
I love Hindi movies!!!!
PS - So when you listen to "In Dino", remember where you first heard about it

13 May, 2007

My Life

I wonder if I have a life which is particularly interesting or that every one else has one like this. This trip to India had (note the past tense) suddenly opened up a lot of possibilities. There was a particularly intoxicating smell of possibilities in the air. I had to look away from the past and look towards the present for a fresh start and I managed to pull it off, only by focussing on what could lie ahead (
Alas (and apologies for the simile), what lay beneath blew up in my face, or rather, on the phone.
If there was a square one, I passed it so fast in reverse gear that I am not even sure how far back I am in the scheme of things to be.
(I know I am speaking in riddles, but this blog, apart from entertaining millions of readers all over the world and filling them with hope and contentment, also serves as a diary, and I need to jot things of importance down in some way)
What do to I now - this very moment, today, tomorrow and for this month?
Where will I end up?

The Heat is On

I saw the trailer of "an inconvenient truth" a few weeks ago and it has been nagging me. I will watch it as soon as I can get the time... In the meantime, there are a few questions which I wanted to put to paper .

1. How bad is Global warming? Is it really happening or is it periodic/episodic?
2. Can normal people like you and me make a difference?

I guess that short answers to the questions above would be:
1. Very. Yes it is happening. Does not matter if there is something periodic. We are definitely hastening it.
2. YES.

I think saving power, water, gas, fuel, food all add up in a big way. I wish I had numbers to show this, but this is the example which I can think up of -

Imagine the water that flows from the tap while you brush.

It has been sucked out of the ground, filtered, treated, pumped into the mains and then onto the supply and then to the overhead tank to the tap. And I let it flow. It then heads back through sewage, pumped again to be filtered and treated on its way to the river/sea.
Each of these verbs - sucked, filtered, treated, pumped has a carbon footprint because of energy needed to do them. The energy required per litre of water might be quite small in absolute terms, and CO2 produced might sound even smaller.
However, multiply that number by 3 times day, a lifetime of 25000 days and 3bn people, who live in urban areas and the factor is not ignorable any more.

The above example is something which people fail to realise. Given the number of people and the innumerable conveniences of modern living, there is a lot of energy being used up. By being careful and smart and just a little more responsible, it all adds up.

1. Saving water (look at above) by using the sun to dry clothes, using the dishwasher only when it is completely full (or better, cleaning them in the sink). My score - 4/10.
2. Saving electricity by not keeping gadgets on standby, tubelights or LEDs instead of bulbs, climb stairs instead of a lift, motion sensitive lighting in offices. My score - 2/10
3. Eliminate waste and recycle (this is something I do not do at all and need to work at). My score 0/10.

(By the way, whats with keeping shops and offices lighted long after business hours. Have a look at here and here. This is something we as consumers should make businesses realise - that a dark carbon neutral store would shine out more. always. I am proud to work for a firm which encourages recycling at the workplace and the lights are switched off at night, I would be proud to shop at a shop which does the same.
In Delhi, long long ago, they started charging for shopping bags at the cooperative stores. That made people reuse polythene bags. The trick was to price the bags high enough for it to matter to people.)

Update - Read another post about the same, hits closer to home- about developing countries and climate change here

Unrelated comment - Life continues to be more like some light with a tunnel fast approaching!