Paradise Lost

“If there is a Paradise on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here” - So said the 5th Mughal emperor, Jehangir, on the splendour and beauty of Kashmir. Alas, not many of us even dare to go to that place now, a place which was the quintessential element of success for any Bollywood movie in the 60s and 70s. A place which has just remained in postcards and news headlines now. 

The flag shown in my previous question is that of the state of Jammu and Kashmir – the only state to have its own flag and constitution. 

Only one winner this time – ace quizzer, popular quizmaster and fan of the second best club in EPL (Arsenal), Vinod Ganesh. <clap><clap>

Now coming to the next question and the last question for this week:-

It was originally created for one of the works of X. But Y hijacked it, added some jazz to it and reproduced it for one of the works of Z. Identity X,Y and Z and tell me what is being talked about.

Identify

The next question is a just a simple identification question. Whose flag is this and what is so special about it?

Never since, never before – Satyajit Ray

Yes, many of you’ll may not agree with that title. Some many even comment, “I don’t get it. What’s so great about Satyajit Ray’s work? I mean, it’s slow, too serious and all he does is show a young village boy running around the fields. So?!”. Well that’s the kind of generalization that a lot of people tend to do i.e. Satyajit Ray = Pather Panchali and that’s all there’s to him. What they may not know is that this same person created another gem called “Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne” and its sequel “Hirak Rajar Deshe” which had all the dialogs delivered in rhymes and produced as memorable and lovable characters as Hirak Raja (Utpal Dutta). A far cry from a serious movie, it is one of the most unique comedies ever made. What they also may not know is that those really melodious songs of that same movie were composed by the same man, an exponent of both Hindustani and Western classical music. This apart from the numerous other movies he has made on various subjects and genres touching so many different facets of people from all the strata of the society (Teen Kanya – spine-chilling horror, Pikoo’s Diary – short story as seen from a child’s eyes, Charulata – lonely life of a wealthy housewife, Sonar Kella – thrilling detective story of Feluda series, Shatranj Ke Khiladi – how the nawabs wasted time in petty games). And of course, movies were just one of his many abilities. Even now, Ray’s writings in the form of his short stories or Feluda series or Professor Shonku series sell like hotcakes. I agree that language may have posed as an obstacle in spreading Ray’s works much beyond Bengal. (BTW, one read of any of his English works and his lucid mastery over the Queen’s language is easily evident). But truly, that in no way undermines the greatness of this person. Not just as a master artist, but also as one who read society and human emotions so accurately and reproduced them so brilliantly in his works.

My last question was just a feeble attempt in showcasing some of his lesser known accomplishments. The first pic shows some of the fonts that Ray created (Ray Roman, Ray Bizarre, Daphnis, Holiday Script) — A great enthusiast of calligraphy, Ray spent a lot of time in coming up with new fonts and designs for the movie posters, book jackets and print ads. The second pic is the poster of E.T. by Steven Spielberg. The story of E.T. is supposed to be a lift from “The Alien” by Satyajit Ray which, of course, was vehemently denied by Spielberg. The truth is still debatable but we Bongs fans would like to think otherwise . Third pic is the movie poster of Shakespeare Wallah by Ivory Merchant – one of the rare movies for which Ray composed the music but didn’t direct it. And the last pic which shows the logo of Doordarshan was a really toughie — The first non-live program to be shown on DD after it started colour television broadcasting, was the movie Sadgati followed by Shatranj Ke Khiladi, both directed by Ray (this was in 1982 when the first program to be shown was the PM’s speech on Independence Day) . I know, this was too far fetched but guess I used it to massage my “quizmaster ego” (nyah-hah-haah!).

And am super glad that three people cracked it. That’s like 75% of the readership of this blog cracked it! All got the connect, but Vinod Ganesh came the closest only missing the DD connection (which can be ignored, I guess). Kudos to you all. With that you confirm yourself as a Ray fan in my book and win yourself the opportunity of getting tortured by my lecture on Ray, the next time I meet you.

Winners:

Vinod Ganesh

Sourya Biswas

Rajorshi Biswas

Cheerios,

Paulie

Yet Another Connect Connect

So after a whopping response to my last post, I come back with another connect question. In all, I received one reply and thankfully, that turned out be absolutely correct. And this came from one of the best quizzers in the city of Hyderabad and may I add, in the country itself – Priyambad Pattanayak. WTG Patt! The connection is the legendary band, Boney M, which I was listening to all day before setting the question. The first pic shows the female American outlaw, Kate “Ma” Barker (inspiration for the song “Ma Baker”), then Gregory Rasputin (song “Rasputin”), Andy Warhol (song “Painter Man”) and finally city of Babylon (song “Rivers of Babylon”). The picture of Malaika Khan Arora was meant to be a lateral clue of sorts (song “Malaika”).

Now coming to today’s question – Connect these pics to one person (full explanation would be nice). And given the genius of this individual, I could never come up with an exhaustive list of connections related to him/her.

Cheers,

Paulie

PS – You might be wondering, “What’s with this ‘Yet Another <some_word> <some_word>’ title thingie?”. Well, this comes from my fascination for the name of the Yacc parser in Unix.

Back!

Spurred by good friend Rajorshi’s new found love, I thought I should update this dying blog a bit. And what easier way to do it than to post a simple quiz question which in turn is inspired by what I was doing just before composing the question . Really, hosting quiz blogs is some fun — firstly, it’s fun to compose questions, especially the visual kinds with involved, tricky connections. Then it encourages participation by people which means more comments, more blog hits, more popularity. And that serves as motivation to keep the blog updated regularly.

No need of any creative writing here which involves, firstly, a great amount of thinking on what to write. Then when you finally get the topic and get down to composing, it involves a lot of CTL-Zs (new age form of the old practice of crumpling a sheet of paper and dunking it into the waste basket after not so satisfactory scribbling). Then a lot of revising which also includes changing the alignment, font, colour etc. a gazillion times till you get bored with it and correcting teh inivetable typos. And then, after all that, you finally muster the courage to post it and keep refreshing the page every hour the next 48 hours to see if someone has commented and praised your literary skills.

Nah, not my glass of Horlicks. Am quite happy with googling a few images, slapping them onto one jpeg file through MS Paint, constructing a shady connect question out of them, and posting it here. So here it goes:-

The pics in the first pic are some of the subjects of this particular “entity”’s creation. Identify each of them and tell me whose subjects they were. For full points, get me the names of all the respective creations. The lady in the separate pic is also one such subject, but in a lateral sense.

And before you start finding your old dusted thinking cap, let me assure you that this is quite an easy question if you can identify a few of them and if you are aware of that “creator’s” works — as many of us and from our previous generations would be.

So long,

The Yabber

Quiz – Identify

 

Well, thought about keeping my blog updated and what better way to do that than to post a quiz. This is one timepass that has really hit me over the last few years. Its fun! (I’ll leave the rest of the gyan for some wiser souls to impart)

Coming to the question, its a really simple one to start off with. Just identify the person in the pic. I’ll post the answer after a few entries. And I hope to come up with similar mind games in future in my blog. Is a good filler. The pic:-

Virtual-Reality

Just another passing thought before I sign off for the night (day?). And this is again related to a certain website that has been mentioned in some way or the other in my last two posts (figure it out!).

 

Is our online personality better than our actual one? Or is it just an extension of it? Or is it the same only? Or worse? I’ve seen so many people write and express much better than they do in the real world. One of the most common forms of communication in the virtual world is through texts — be it a chat message, an email, a scrap or some such musing as this. Reading them without knowing the person, we form such images of the person in our minds. How he/she looks, sounds, behaves etc. And more often than not, our imagination is better than the reality. And we all have heard of how such imaginations at times have led some innocent people to some bad traps.

 

I know, some people try hard to make their online personality seem better. For some it comes naturally. Social network sites and web platforms (like IMs) have really opened up an interesting chapter of human psychology. At least, it intrigues me a lot. Think about this and I am again taking the case of ‘that’ site – how much time do we spend peeking into others scraps? And what others replied to them? And so on. Isn’t this the new age means of gossiping and quizzing about each other’s private lives? Are most of us overlookign the fact that we are actually compromising on our privacy through such sites? Or is it a new way of making a statement to the peeping Toms? Are we trying to be what we are not?

 

Just a passing thought.

I can hear the early birds chirping. Few dogs whining. Time to go to put my mind to rest.

 

Signing off for the ‘night’.

We, the intolerant

Posting something which I had posted here before. Didn’t really lead to anything there. Not that I expected a revolution to come out of it. But some of the replies proved once more that casteism is very much prevalent in India in all sections of the society. Anyway, thought I’ll add one post to my dying blog for the sake of it. Read on…

A friend of mine has been looking for a rented flat for a few weeks now and though she has come across a few good ones, one major obstacle that she has been facing in those cases is this – “2BHK for Brahmin family only…”. Even if she were to be a Brahmin she still wouldn’t have made through ‘coz most of these ads come with the other caveat “only Vegetarians”. And all these being published in the leading dailies of India, the ads put forth by the educated upper-middle, elite class of India.

We always discuss issues of communalism, racism, casteism and all such isms in varying lengths and proportions as if these were all separate issues being faced by the world/country. But I say that all these are one and the same issue – Intolerance. Intolerance of the other group, the other group on whatever basis it is. And it is not just a problem with only the fanatics or the illiterate or the orthodox or some such specific “group” of people. It is within all of us. Look around you openly and you will find so many such examples of “Intolerance”. We grow up within a certain environment, within certain customs, certain habits and beliefs in such a rigid way that after a while we think of people following other practices as a different and in most cases, the inferior or the “wronged” group. Our beliefs are always right, not theirs. We can never bring ourselves to understand that different people might have different beliefs and practices and it is just a difference and nothing else. But no, we won’t stop there. Our minds are tuned to always perceiving difference as “us” being right and “them” being wrong. Intolerance. And thus the Brahmin can’t have a non-Brahmin family staying upstairs no matter how amicable they might be to stay with. We never waited to realize that the “others” are just as normal people as we are with just a few different opinions, beliefs et al. We straightaway rejected them.

Communalism, racism, casteism are just blown up examples of this basic issue of intolerant feeling amongst all of us…

My sole question is – What will it take us to get rid of this inhibition? Why can’t we stop spending so much of our time and emotions thinking about how the others are and how they should not be as long as their actions/thoughts don’t affect us physically?

Or am I asking for too much?

Insomniac

Hmm…its 2:22 AM on my system clock and I have been wondering for the last 20 something minutes what to do. Meanwhile I kept on clicking the “Home” link of ‘you-know-which’ site to give my thinking some company. My status in one of the IMs reads “Indian Idle”. Picture all this happening in a dark, shady, claustrophobic room with an inviting steel cot in one end and a 6 years old P-III at the other. The monitor’s light providing the only source of light and yours truly typing/mulling away. Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” serenading on the earphones.

 

Welcome to the new night life of The Yabber.

 

It had to happen. The recipe was too good and all the ingredients were available. A young, confused soul, has strong affinity for the PC, a high speed broadband connection, a room to himself, a born insomniac, a bored soul, 4 hours of “full-volume” sleep in the afternoon, a very inquizzitive soul. Its all there. Sometimes I wonder, what happened to all those old-styled night reading habits. As I saiD, I have always been a late night sleeper. I remember how it used to be when I was younger and PC/broadband were all Latin and Greek to the average Indian. I used to be feverishly involved in one good habit I had then – reading. Ah! Those were the days. Dad would make a nice cosy bed for me with the mosquito net up, pillow and blanket placed very temptingly. All you had to do was to quickly brush through your *brushing* and dive in with your latest read. Bookmark nicely in place. And those were the days of reading fantacies and thrillers. So very soon you would start imagining all the scenes you were reading and slowly become the protagonist yourself. The book was the kaliedoscope to all things beyond that mosquito net. You were given a story, now it was upto you to do the direction. Choose the locales, the costumes, the looks, the shots, the angles. Boy, it was so much fun. I am not your quintessential bibliophile type as I seldom read a book during daytime or even thought about it. So that way, I wasn’t a book freak always. But yeah, it was somethign else reading them just before going to sleep then. I was setting up the plot for my next dream.

 

But then, those were the days. Things have changed now. No more cosy beds, no more mosquito nets, no more Dickens, Sakis, Hergés, Supandis. No more directing. Its a different world now. The innocence has been lost. There are too many things to ponder over now and the mind is all too willing to brood over them.

M$ Blues

Just did it for the gazillionth time – re-installed the Windows XX OS on my comp. And I guess I’ll never get used to it and will have the same worries and commit the same mistakes as I always do while installing it, especially because I have been installing it along with an existing Linux installation in a separate partition, for the last few times. Now, you might be asking why I don’t install the Linux distro too freshly. Simple, ‘coz the Linux distros never throw up any errors unlike their more costly (less stable) counterpart, Windows XX. In spite of some really clean installations and well mannered usage of the M$ products, they have never seemed too happy for too long. Very soon some error crops up and leads to the re-installation. So much so, that it has led me to one good practice – of keeping my data (absolutely any data/file which is mine and does not come with the Windows installation) separately in another partition. Has saved a lot of pain and sweat during those re-installations.

 

Then you might be asking me why I care to install any M$ product at all. And here I have to admit – no matter how anti-M$/pro-FLOSS I sounded in the previous para, I am actually, at the end of the day, a compulsive computer user who depends heavily on this machine for his daily bread, his natural need to interact with other humans and be updated and of course, for his daily dose of entertainment. Yes, I belong to that rapidly growing species of addicted computer users. This machine, which was declared the 1982 Times ‘Man’ of the Year, has really become the closest mate of a lot of people including me who’d rather not wake up from their sleep than to spend a day without their comp.

 

And with such dependence on this machine, I find it difficult to see how you can ever do without the M$s. I know that you actually can. But lets face it – so many popular games will run on only M$s, so many web resources are available in M$ formats, so many web sites run properly only on IE, almost all USB devices will plug in easily on M$s without any need of any driver installation and well, even in the workplace, so much of the development/setups are done on M$s. You *can* do without all of them but at the expense of a lot of compatibility issues and having to do with lesser quality counterparts. Love it, hate it, you just can’t ignore it.

 

I like Linux, I support FLOSS and I’d love to have only Linux installed on my system. But till the day the whole cyber world is ‘cleansed’ of all M$s, I don’t think I’ll be able to do without it on my system. And while such is the situation, I’d rather refrain from any more M$ bashing.

 

Except when I’d have to re-install it again.