Movies

The Perils of Owning Multiple 1TB Hard-drives

So there is an inordinately high number of movies on my hard drives. Most of them were downloaded over the last year, some from hearing a passing mention on some blog, others based on suggestions from friends, and yet others because of the primal urge to own 27 Gigs of Stephen Chow movies. They stay arranged in a folder called – duh – “movies”, and loosely grouped under categorical sub-folders called Anime, Korean, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and H.  Yes, “H” – which used to be called “Hollywood”, until I downloaded a Harry Potter blu-ray rip collection and found out that the filenames were long enough for the subtitles to not extract themselves into the location I wanted them to be in, and only after I removed “ollywood” did I manage to get things done the way I wanted them.

The sad thing is that there is hardly time to watch movies nowadays – I seem to have run out of free time, period. (The blog has not been updated in 6 months. You need more proof?) Dinnertime is about the only portion of the day I get any time to indulge in anything, and a TV episode beats a full-length movie every time. On top of it all, the obvious fail-points about a list of downloaded MKV/AVI/m4a rips: after a point of time, the names tend to blur against each other as the numbers increase. Until you forget that Mary and Max was the claymation movie and Lars and The Real Girl was the story of the blow-up doll, and most of the names are just….names. When I want to watch something, I would be like – “what the hell is this movie all about? When did I download this? Wait, did I download this at all or just copy it in some mass dump from someone else’s drive?”  At times, I even took to deleting the movies I was sure I would not watch. I mean, really, The Condemned?

The other problem is that of choice. You know how it is – you want to watch an action movie or whatever, and the only ones you want to see are the ones you’ve seen already. Or the one you want to see is in a DVD and that’s in the wardrobe and you’re too lazy to walk over and find it. (Ironic, because that was the reason I stopped buying DVDs in the first place.) The more the days pass, it becomes harder to justify why exactly I keep the movies still on the drive.

Anyway, I have arrived at ( what I think ) is a sane conclusion to this mess. I have moved everything into two piles – “seen” and “unseen”. The unseen folder will be the one I hit everytime I want to watch something. By December, if there are still movies in that folder, I will delete the lot. I figure that means there is some element of urgency to it, a bit of self-encouragement, for me to watch things that I have not seen yet.

On a side-note, I seem to be headed towards an ailment called NoMoreDownloaditis, caused by over-saturation of media.

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Life, Myself, Other People

Flicker

A and I were in opposite rooms, on the ground floor of our hostel. “Phok”, he used to scream at various points of the day. I remember him poking his head into my room, more than a little irritated because I would crank up my Frontech speakers a little too loud in the night. “Volume kam karr bey”, he would say, rotating his fingers in the air like he were waving an imaginary knife at me.  I would turn to the computer, reach out and lower the volume – Winamp allowed you to do so by pressing the down key, which was the coolest thing ever. He would slam the door, and the moment he was back in his room, I would press the up key again, repeatedly. And he would scream, from his room – “oh phok you man.” Every evening after an exam, he would be in front of the ladies’ hostel waiting for the lady who hung around with him for two years of college life, and he would grin at me as I would pass by on my bicycle. “How was it?” – I would ask at first, or if I had my earphones on, just throw an enquiring nod at him, more out of practice than genuine curiosity. And he would put his thumb and forefinger together –  in that time-honored gesture you don’t ever use in front of your parents, or anyone that knows your parents – and say “Phok ho gayaa, man.”

There was R, who had the saddest face in the world. I would see him in the canteen, or as he was coming back from class, looking vacantly to the ground, or just pass him by as I would head to my daily dose of tea just outside the campus. And the morose look on his face would make me feel bad about enjoying the evening. Not that he was sad, far from it. He had a deadpan way of being sarcastic, and would sometimes giggle to himself for a second or two, and then his face would revert to that same sad expression. He was the only person who could make you feel bad about cracking a joke. We used to have competitions in his room;  he would prop his pillow against the wall, and calmly sit on his bed, crossing his legs. And we tried to make him laugh. He would listen to whatever we had to say, look at whatever we were doing, but refuse to smile.

Another A. He was a games fanatic, and the pinnacle of his gaming career, in college at least, was to sit for an Age of Empires session for 26 hours straight. Not on a network, not with anyone else, just him hunched over his computer in his room, blinking and squinting through his glasses at the screen, asking me to go get him a bread-omelet when I could. And the day I finished the extended demo of Half-life, which was also the day I resolved to stop playing demos of games – it was gut-wrenching to wait for a few more months before I could continue the adrenaline rush – I ran to his room downstairs and handed him the CD. He patiently waited through the credits sequence, because Half-life takes some time to get you in the thick of the action, and chuckled at the scientists’ nattering to each other. And then yelled very loudly and fell off his chair, when the first head-crab jumped towards him on the screen. “This is why I do not play first-person games, man”, he told me later, holding a wet handkerchief to the back of his head. “I get into them too much.”

There was K, much, much elder to me, but in the same batch and in the same room as I was, assigned together by the strange and random procedure that the college authorities followed every year. He didn’t know much English, but I knew his mother-tongue, so we bonded as room-mates, him and I. He made a mean chicken curry, and he also scratched his balls too often, which made eating his chicken curry a highly dubious affair. But hey, if you’ve had panipuri in India, such minor details do not bother you. He was into poetry, and would recite lyrical passages in a lilting voice that made me appreciate his language much, much more. He left the room after a month, because a former classmate from the same village asked him, and he was too good-natured to refuse.

J, whose idea of consoling me after a particularly messy break-up was to ask me, bemusedly – “Why didn’t you sleep with her? She would have never left!” And later, he cried on my shoulder, sitting in a darkened corridor in the academic building, when his girlfriend back in his hometown, who was supposed to wait for just two years more before he came back and married her, left him for his best friend. We fell out later, each sticking to specific ideals, not seeing each other eye to eye anymore. I met him once again afterwards, a few years after we left college, where the only thing he asked me was – “Are you still the same bastard you were in college?” I smiled, and didn’t say anything.

Too many of you. Too many names, too many faces, and I remember very specific things about you. I might even forget your names in a few years, and your faces might begin to blur into each other. I know that I will not meet any of you in the foreseeable future. I am not sure I want to, because the things I remember about you are so lucid, so representative of who you were to me that it would be a pity to lose those specific memories to some new, unforeseen trait you’ve developed in the last eight years. ( Yes, it’s really been that long, isn’t it strange? ) I am not even sure I really give a shit about how you are right now, and I doubt if you do about me because hey, let’s face it, we did not really have much in common beyond the fraternal feeling of staying on the same campus for four years. Hell, maybe we never really liked each other.

But yes, you are there, a part of you, versions of you from a decade ago, you are there in my thoughts, flickering into existence at the most unforeseen moments. What would we talk about if we meet again? Awkward conversation starters, maybe, a shared memory of someone else, a question about what we have been up to. And there would be a hasty exchange of numbers, and I would in all likelihood delete it by next month. It’s all good, don’t worry. I am good, and I know you are too.

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Music, Myself, Travel, Weirdness

Three songs

Leslie Feist – Mushaboom

Jussi, an old old friend – not in age, mind you, but someone who goes back quite a few years – flew over from Helsinki to come meet me in Cluj, Romania. We had planned a road-trip towards the Carpathian mountains, all the way to Castle Bran – otherwise known as ‘Dracula’s Castle’, and as soon as the man arrived, friends from the office helped us find a rental car agency, where we had to decide between a Volkswagen or a BMW. Jussi and I looked at each other, and he asked the question that was on my mind – “Do they have music systems with auxiliary inputs?” Well, the question on my mind was actually – “what color is the BMW?”, but I had to agree with my friend – priorities are priorities, and no self-respecting road tripper would venture out without ensuring that the car is well-equipped in terms of audio paraphernalia.

The Volkswagen had a CD system – “Plays MP3 CDs”, the person at the rental centre assured us. No auxiliary jack, though. The BMW had squat. Decisions having made, I  spent some time that night – after having imbibed quite a few glasses of wine ( I claim 7, others say 6) – burning an mp3 CD. And the next morning, as we started on our journey, we popped the CD in, waited for the music to play and then, nothing.

The music system only played audio CDs, goddamnit.

We burned two CDs on my laptop while having breakfast at a motel. One didn’t work, the other did. Wrote 4 more CDs in a hotel that night, 2 didn’t work. And finally, the next day, we burnt three more CDs, out of which one worked. That last CD included the song that Jussi had been trying to play for me the last few days. Leslie Feist’s Mushaboom.

On the last leg of the trip, the GPS on the car – the way to Cluj from Bran Castle – took us through a route that took us through a forest, and gave us a clear view of the mountains. There was not a single car to be seen, and the sun broke out of the clouds at brief intervals, but the overall atmosphere was that of complete serenity save for the open road in front of us. It was at that magical moment, when the two of us were more than a little tired from the trip, and a wee bit melancholic about the end of a good vacation, that Mushaboom began to play on the music system. And it’s because of that I’ll associate the song forever with autumn evenings, the Carpathian mountains and the open road.

The video was another source of joy when I saw it much later, making me feel giddy with laughter. Bacon bat wings, whee! Flying guitars! Empty carnival grounds, which are usually creepy, but suddenly seemed fuzzy and nice and welcoming.

Katie Melua – 9 Million Bicycles

So when I played Mushaboom to a friend in Romania the week after Jussi left, she asked me – “Have you heard Katie Melua?” I hadn’t. That was remedied within a few minutes, and as the strains of the Chinese flute opened ‘9 Million Bicycles’, the first song in Melua’s ‘Piece By Piece’, I almost held my breath and waited for the song to disappoint. Happily, it didn’t. This was one of those rare songs whose lyrics I paid close attention to during the all-important first listen, and smiled along to the references to light-years and the world’s population. Her voice is a combination of Norah Jones and Joss Stone, and the production in the album just quirky enough not be repetitive.

Later on, I learnt that Melua’s song invoked the ire of science guru Simon Singh, because of the line “We are twelve million light-years from the edge, that’s a guess” – and she apologized by coming up with a witty rephrasing of the stanza, which you can see in the snippet of video below.

Regina Spektor – Fidelity

And there are the songs that just come to you, flying out of nowhere just when you think you cannot be surprised anymore. A friend at the office enjoyed the two songs I played for him – no prizes for guessing which ones they were. He created a last.fm profile for himself, and as he was listening to my station, he asked me if I had any Regina Spektor songs. I did, and the next day, I loaded up his iPod with all the albums I had.

Last night, I sat down near the laptop, and the only music I had on the drive  ( it’s the office machine, and I don’t keep music on it, as a matter of principle. Also because it’s only 80 GB) was the aforementioned Spektor albums. I put on the first song from Begin To Hope, which happened to be ‘Fidelity’. I had heard the album before, a long time ago, but the way the song infiltrated my senses – at that precise moment – was unbelievable. Pizzicato strings, piano tinklings and Spektor’s voice kept me company for quite sometime. It’s still the only song I’ve listened to all day, and I have no doubt it will keep me company all of tonight.

And now I wonder – which song lies in wait for me next, ready to be discovered? What memory will I associate it with, and who will I think of when I listen to it?

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Quizzing

The making of a theme round

Theme round for Nihilanth 2010 India quiz.

(Note: If you are reading this on a feed-reader and you don’t see the Slideshow embedded into the page, you should probably click on the actual post link and read it first. Trust me.)

Every time I am done with a quiz, in addition to the ‘thank you’s and the ‘great show’s that come my way (and the occasional “you call that a quiz?”), there are a few individuals who ask me – “How do you come up with the questions?” Unfortunately, the moment just after the quiz is also the precise instant the adrenaline rush is wearing off, and you realize that you’ve been on your feet for a few hours, and your throat hurts like mad from speaking a little too loud. So the typical answers come out – “I read, and I watch movies, and sometimes the questions just come to you.” Which is all true, but does not really cover the mechanics that go into making a quiz question “sing”, to use a metaphor badly.

While I will go into details of making a quiz question – my personal experience of it, that is – in a future post, I thought it would be nice to write about one round in particular, of a quiz I did this weekend. Why this quiz, and this round, you ask? Well, because I came up with the idea of the theme, and the questions, in about an hour or so, on Saturday morning, when my flight to the venue – IIM Ahmedabad – was just a few hours away. I normally do not cut things so close, but the joys of late-night intercontinental conference calls forced my hand, alas. But the positive part of it was that coming up with this round left me feeling very pleased with myself. It was an India quiz for Nihilanth, the inter-IIT-IIM quiz-fest. Until a few days ago, I had thought about including a theme involving Kamal Hassan movies – which turned out heavily South-India oriented and I dropped the idea. Not all quizzes need theme rounds, so I gave up the idea and focussed on a round made entirely of connect questions.

Somehow I got to reading about the Bharat Ratna – and the part about living recipients caught my eye. Voila, six people, and all of them quiz-worthy individuals. I had the answers to my theme questions, all I needed now were the questions themselves.

Now here’s a confession – every quiz I work on does its best to transform itself into an entertainment quiz – making it almost a matter of pride for me nowadays to keep the ent questions to a minimum. Considering that I was running short of time, and because the quiz was otherwise balanced enough  – and, heh, to add a little misdirection, I thought about making the questions ent-based. So the first question became the most obvious one – Lata Mangeshkar and her brief career as actor and music composer. Old chestnut, phrased in a gender-neutral way, with the answer directly connecting to the theme.

Now the second question in the theme is important, because as soon as the first one is answered, the participants are processing multiple possibilities to which the first answer can relate. An obvious answer, and you find your theme cracked in the second question, and one does not want that, really. So, instead of going with Amartya Sen directly, the question became about his daughter. The answer “Raja Ravi Varma” was completely unrelated to the theme ( as I would inform the participants as the quiz progressed), but hey, you could see Nandana Sen in the poster.

For the third question, I had multiple options – there was the one about Ravi Shankar having “remixed” Saara Jahaan Se Accha for the Doordarshan theme music, there were possible Beatles questions, maybe something about Anoushka Shankar ( the thought of which I ditched immediately, because two father-daughter connects would have been a bit too much ). Maybe something about the Grammies, because of the recent Indian nominations? But then a little serendipity came into play – just that morning, I had heard Nitin Sawhney’s soundtrack to The Namesake, and I remembered reading his comment Shankar’s soundtrack for Pather Panchali on the Guardian’s Top 50 OSTs list. Brief googling and yes, I had the precise context, and I remembered that I also had the PP soundtrack somewhere as part of another album. Couldn’t find it, and decided to play one of The Namesake tracks instead. Another question down.

Nelson Mandela’s question was straightforward – though there was the brief temptation to hunt for the comic that was made on his life and ask something on it. But Invictus was more relevant, it had just come out last December and was an Oscar contender. Since it was based on a book, and the book was not called Invictus, there you go. Straightforward, slightly long-winded, mostly-guessable question.

With Kalam, I was completely out of ideas. Time was running out, and I had absolutely no desire to go looking for his poetry or quotes from his books – there is a Rahman song written around his lyrics but again, too much work. So settled for reading his Wikipedia entry, and hell yeah, his Hoover medal, how did I forget that? Done, and sorry, I knew it wasn’t ent-oriented, but there’re compromises a man’s gotta make when he’s running out of time, and this was one of them.

Which left us with the last question, the one on Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, and I didn’t have to think twice. The first question of the preliminary round of the quiz was – “What was the first instrument seen on the video of Phir Mile Sur Mera Tumhara?” It was only fair to have the last question of the quiz to be about the original Mile Sur video, and yup, it made me happy to end the quiz on that note. One might argue that my quest for closure in my quiz made the last question too easy. But two points you have to understand – at this point of the quiz, there would be the people who had already cracked the theme, so chances that they knew the answer already was very high. And this being a college quiz, the percentage of the demographic who had seen the original video of Mile Sur was, in my opinion, very low.

Endgame: So, did it work out the way I had planned? Not really. For starters, mentioning that the theme was exhaustive kept everyone guessing. As expected, the second question proved misleading enough. But the unforeseen problem-child was the Pather Panchali question, which had everyone thinking Satyajit Ray instead of Ravi Shankar – a train of thought I had …uh…neglected to take into account. Obviously Ray was also a Bharat Ratna recipient, but one very much dead, defeating my theme squarely. It had participants guessing things like ‘people who received highest civilian awards from multiple countries’, or ‘Indians who have won the Legion d’Honneur”. Oh well, they did get it at the end, but in hindsight, I should probably have mentioned Ravi Shankar as the connect, would have made things much easier.

So there you go, an insight into how a theme was made. Not my favorite bunch of questions, and not the greatest theme of all time, but a quick and dirty way of doing it. Mind you, going in reverse is not the only way to go about creating a theme round. Maybe I will talk about the other way in another post, or maybe this post will get some proper quiz-masters to talk about the mechanics of creating a quiz on their blogs.

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Comics

On Bill Watterson

After a long, long time, Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, has responded to an interview. Watterson, for those in the know, is a reclusive creator who prefers to spend his time away from the public adulation that came his way because of his strip. His ten years of newspaper cartooning ended with a self-imposed retirement, and along with his decision to end Calvin and Hobbes at that time, he also took the decision to not allow his strip and its characters to be used for merchandising of any sort, with the exception of collected book editions – the best-known of which was The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, the massive hardcover collection of all the C&H strips, published by Andrews McNeel in late 2005. I believe the last interview he gave was in association with that volume’s release, where he replied to questions from fans from all around the world.

This particular interview does not cover any new ground into understanding Watterson, his craft or his future plans. The questions that the interviewer asks are mostly to do with what the artist feels about his creation and its legacy after 15 years, his relationship with his fans, and his thoughts on his self-imposed exile from the comics world. Not surprisingly, almost all his responses are in tune with what he’s said earlier, with a wash of dry humor here and there. The only time we see a flash of hubris is in his concluding words about how he wants Calvin and his tiger to be remembered – “I vote for Calvin and Hobbes, eighth wonder of the world”. But knowing the way journalists invent soundbytes, or parting lines, I wouldn’t be surprised if these exact words were never uttered. Yep, we’ll never know for sure.

This link was posted in a forum I frequent, and some listers were quick to point out that  Watterson seemed to be a little holier-than-thou with his principles, and very disinterested in his fans. There were also comments made about the fact that he’s shown fans of his art two raised middle fingers by donating all his art to the Ohio State University – yes, that’s an original art forum, and people do get very testy about lost art opportunities.

Obviously, I do not agree. I do not find anything in the interview ( or the interviews of his that I’ve read so far) that says Watterson is repulsed or does not care for fans. He’s honest about the strip – he put a lot of effort into it and is thankful readers appreciate it, but he does not want to capitalize on its success. There’s a bit of self-deprecating humor to what he says ( the comment about the groupies) but distaste? Not really. Again, speaking from personal experience, most people around me are crazy about C&H. Sometimes to such an extent that they are willing to quote chapter and verse and punchline from random strips during conversations. Hell, forget the creator, *I* am a little uncomfortable with the philosophical/life lessons they seem to find in their umpteenth reread of C&H collections. ( And that, in all honesty, is one of the reasons I choose to downplay my personal love for the strip, just because I do not want to be counted as part of this brigade. So sue me!) I cannot blame Watterson for being realistic and moving on with his life – his work is done, and he does not want to be a rock-star living off anniversary reunion performances. Good for him!

I think that the lack of merchandising and pop-culture-bombardment is what has contributed to C&H’s enduring popularity. I don’t know about others, but seeing images of characters from Garfield , Dragon-Ball Z, Charlie Brown, Dilbert, (insert popular strip here) has this disconcerting effect of making them all seem overly familiar. Speaking from personal experience, with all the merchandised strips, there are multiple inlets to discovering the original – “oh yeah, I saw it on a t-shirt/tv show/calendar, so this is a comic? Never knew!” And by that time, the effect of discovering something completely fresh and new is offset by this superficial familiarity. In case of C&H, the only way to discover it, and to get into it, is to stumble onto the strip, and this elevates the effect the comic has to the first-time reader. Unlikely or not, it seems like Watterson was smart enough to think of, and maintain C&H as a comic and nothing else, and this has helped his creation in the long run.
Another thing that I appreciate about the man is that he’s been consistent with his principles all throughout. The act of donating his original art to Ohio State University is in line with the artist’s personal viewpoint. The strip will always exist, and his gesture ensures that the art used to create C&H is not a commercial commodity ( yet! I sincerely hope someday some part of it comes to the market, and hopefully by then my coffers would be brimming with green). Other artists have done it – Jeff Smith, for instance, and if I understand right, Steve Bissette plans to make a donation of his existing Swamp Thing art and preliminary art to a museum. Nobody will own it, and everybody will have a chance to look at it, provided they make a trip to Ohio. Fair enough.
That said, I sincerely hope Watterson someday figures out that he has another creation inside of him, something that can be completely unlike C&H, and yet a worthy successor. It does not even have to be a comic, actually – maybe a book, or some fine art, or even a musical album. The world needs more great art, and Watterson is an artist’s artist, a rare breed today, and by Cthulhu, it feels good to have someone like him still exist.
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