Chess Puzzle for you

White to play and win in five moves

Just idiot

I keep getting forwards to the posts of VigilIdiot. I have never quite figured why it is supposed to be funny. The wit is low and the idea is to bare the entire plot in ugh stick figures. If the inspiration is MAD, it bombs stupendously.This post on Guzaarish , if the first few comments are to be believed, is one of its best. 1757 people have liked it.

I think we, as a nation, still have a long way to go to have good comedy centered on things touching our lives; just like good literature. Till that time, VigilIdiot, Sidin Vadikut and Chetan Bhagat with rule the roost. 

Notes from a blood donation

The nurse files the form in a drawer and rises and ushers me to a room behind the desk, a small vestibular affair, with a narrow desk crowded with ampoules and instruments, and three straight-backed chairs circling it. Another door at the back, frosted glass plate embossed with the wing logo and trimmed with steel. Niranjan hesitates to follow us and balks at the door. The nurse ignores him and pulls a chair near me and, in a smooth flurry, shakes and slips a thermometer shaped like a schoolmaster’s paddle inside my mouth, straps the cuff of a blood pressure instrument tightly to my upper arm, reclaims the thermometer and notes my temperature in a small slip, works the machine, pumping the band around my arm and then releasing the air, notes the reading from the monitor in the same slip, removes and rolls away the cuff and then, taking my hand in hers, cleans the pad of the middle finger with a spirit-soaked cotton ball – all without looking at me once. I examine her face with unconcealed challenge: the oiled wispy curls fallen from the tightly-pulled bun beneath the cap, the dark pitted brow, the fixed eyebrows, the surprisingly long lashes, the thick wings of the nose, the clefts at the corners of the thick lips, the full and healthy juts of her breasts. We sit so close, her face bending into mine, that she must surely sense the trespass of my eyes, but she remains frigidly indifferent, the cold clamp of the palm wrapped around my wrist. The lapel pinned to the sari announces her name –

‘Are you from Bangalore?’

‘The eyes lift for a moment, ‘Kochi.’ They fall and that is it. None of the commingling affinities of the world outside, here, only the unmixing water and oil of the nurse and the subject.

The prick startles me but does not sting. She squeezes a drop from my finger, coaxing it like a much-used tube of toothpaste, onto a slide and slips it inside a small lidded box. She rises without a word or a glance at me, and opens the door at the back and steps aside. I turn to Niranjan who smiles and gives me a thumb up.

 The door opens to a vast white room, a row of donor chairs in blue vinyl running along the wall, each with its own set of stainless steel cabinet and IV stand and as snug as a private bed in an opium den. I take the chair she points to me; my neighbour, the only other donor in the room, looks up and nods; in his early fifties, strapped, the cuffs of his shirt rolled up and one hand spread on a luscious armrest. An orderly in shapeless light-blue pyjamas straps me with the same practised brusqueness as the nurse’s. My nerves tauten under the tourniquet like thin vine spreading on a wall. The dab of the spirit and the poise of the needle, the keen precision of its cold tip the very antithesis of the blue warm gurgling artery it moves to insinuate: it enters anticlimactically with the faintest sting.

chaaraa

The Egyptian Revolution and G

Extracts from John Berger's G. I re-read the book because of this very passage that I remembered in the wake of recent events.


They do not know exactly how many they are; but all of them sense that they represent the majority. This majority can claim what each has felt but cannot say when alone: Look at this head, this body -- ill-taught, badly-fed, poorly-dressed, overworked. It deserves the best the world is able to offer.

...It is they who have built the city and they who maintain it. They have discovered their creativity. In their regular lives they only modify presented circumstances; here, filling the streets and sweeping all before them they oppose their very existence to circumstances. They are rejecting all that they habitually, and despite themselves, inhabit. Once together they demand together what none can ask alone: Why should I be compelled to sell my life bit by bit so as  not to die?

Every ruling minority needs to numb and, if possible, to kill the time-sense of those whom it exploits by proposing a continuous present. This is the authoritarian secret of all methods of imprisonment.

The first volley simplifies, its echo kills all distraction. Nothing remains but what is in hand.

And my favorite:

The barricades are between the defenders and the violence done to them throughout their lives. There is nothing to regret because it is the quintessence of their past which is now advancing against them. On their side of the barricades it is already the future. 

Myths about "The Social Network"

Reading this rant, worth its weight in turds, and some other more distinguished, but still mistaken, reviews, let me dispel some myths riding on the steeds of fad-ridden hysteria, which we have seen earlier in the avatars of Dark Knight, Inception and, to some extent, Avatar itself.

Myths 1 & 2 are presented straight from the ill-informed and half-thought article in hyperlink; the others from what I have heard ad nauseum almost from all quarters.

Myth #1: The Social Network is about “how social networking has changed our lives”

Nope. It is about the lives of people behind the scenes of social networking. The growth of the phenomenon is a score mentioned then and there; a tempo, ticking and building in the background, raising the stakes and the pitch of the ambition and ruthlessness of the actors, with each college conquered. The only instance an immediate social need is being shown translated into a feature is the “relationship status” feature.

If anything, the movie is about one guy behind the phenomenon, an asperger-ridden genius pitted against the glib and privileged lot (rich beautiful Harvard grads whose lives and ambitions can hardly be mistaken as a dipstick for the average “us”) whom he sees as incarnates of the all-pervading mediocrity that denies him his dues. More on this next.

Myth #2: Zuckerberg is the villain

To quote: “Eisenberg's character is also a conscienceless manipulator who is seduced by power and screws his friends in almost every way imaginable. He's not exactly touchy-feely.” 

Au contraire, asshole. Eisenberg's character (let’s agree to call him Zucker, sucker) is a very sensitive guy (that means touchy-feely). His pure genius, ruthless and impatient, is denied the credit due to it by the suave vocabulary of snobbery he does not possess –social gestures, stereotypes and pretentious rituals. Rejection stings hardest when the fraternity he was waiting an invitation from  goes for safer stereotypes of harmless well-meaning and half-talented blokes like his room-mate. It is a privilege flaunted to him by two other chappies, the “row crew” twin who come to recruit him and who, he knows, together equal half his IQ and a tenth of his vision.

Zucker is not seduced by power, but the need to make a statement (I'm CEO, bitch!), especially given that he cannot express his anger any other way. A statement of a scale he knows only he can imagine. This suppressed need is brilliantly seen in that super-duper scene when Zucker first meets Parker, and realizes that for the first time he is talking to someone who is thinking at the same  wavelength as him, throwing-up-his-hands relief as Parker glibly rolls his tongue around the thoughts, the grand vision, he had never been able to wrap his own inarticulate one around. The scene sizzles with the chemistry of two genius minds acknowledging each other across the table while the third (if you forget the mall), the CFO, remains blissfully unaware in his ignorance of the scale of what is being thought – is my favourite.

  

“If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook."

This is the answer the artless genius gives to his detractors. It is a statement of genius consummated, the sum of the protagonist’s life; it is the statement of the movie.

Zuckerberg is the hero, very much so, and deserves all the sympathy and admiration from us, but it takes a subtle mind to read the simmering anger and hurt beneath that brittle indifference.

Myth #3: The subject was “unfilmable”

I am hearing this a lot. Really. Granted it’s a tough subject, but can it get any tougher where the protagonist in a first-person narrative has a hand trapped in a boulder through the movie?

Myth #4: Nothing like this has been done before

Uh-huh. Put Van Gogh from “Lust for Life” instead of Gordon Grecko and you’ll realize a zeitgeist-ic context for genius and the price of its pursuit is a subject that has had few takers, yes, but not entirely untouched.

Myth #5:  The movie is purr-fect

There is no denying the fact that the movie is fantastic. Its dialogues come as close to perfect as anything can. Why I would still take one golden star from it is the fact that for a movie that deals with the working of a complex socially-gauche genius, it explanations of the motivations are too facile. Everything – everything – starts with the break-up at the very start. 
Zucker tries to vainly sell himself to his girlfriend as a passport to a fraternity she would otherwise never get to mingle in, cocksure of his own admission in it, and, when later passed by the fraternity, he turns on the half-wit happy-go-lucky “only friend” just because the guy he deemed his intellectual inferior made it through. Erica, the girlfriend, mentions “row crew” and his grouse against the twins is that they are just that. These underpinnings are reinforced in scenes when Zucker ends a funding pitch to the friend for his grand plans with a Freudian aside underscoring his envy; and the pause and the deliberate repetition of “row crew” when the twins introduce themselves.

The naive interpretation forces the only slackness in the tight-like-a-man's-anus script and dialogues in the end, when the lawyer-girl tells Zucker before departing that he’s not an asshole, it’s just that he tries so hard to be (Erica's departing taunt, you see.) 
That five-minutes exchange is the sum of everything Zucker goes on to do - the big-bang to the demons within him.The dialogues from the very first scene come thick, fast and relentless, a machine-gun salvo making no allowance for average intelligence – if only the director had done the same with the subconscious impellents of the protagonist. Our motivations and fears are too complexed, too deep rooted in our infancy (as opposed to a date), to be explained so glibly. If only the movie had chosen not to explain everything, only suggested - and a little beyond a date - this movie would have been perfect.

To repeat, this is  a very, very good movie but let’s not get overboard like we did when The Dark Knight came. Far better movies have been made. Cleverness and slickness can only be vehicles for an essence. The movie, in my opinion, takes on a very tough and complicated subject but falls just a little short in doing it full justice.

Aamir's next movie about a washerman on a rampage

It's called Dhobhi-Ghatak.

Will the real Kambli please stand up?

aThe mantra for the times seems to be confidence first, content optional. And I’m not only talking about the questions the preening jackass-parade posed to the authors in Jaipur Litt Fest. I am talking about this article in IE.


I consider writing on cricket more and more a very brave career choice because the standard of sport writing in cricket is very, very high. National level commentators and writers of just a couple of decades ago would find it very difficult to make it past the district league. The other formidable breed which has risen is the statistician, no doubt because now anyone has access to all the data on cricket that could be ever conceived and the statistical analytical tools that come embedded in the pirated spreadsheet of your laptop which could not be imagined not so long ago.

But then, I remember, these are the very times which have also seen the surge of Mandira Bedi-style “democratic” opinion-makers. It seems to be in that very vein that IE has published this tupenny article.

Let us not get into the standard of English (Sentence construction a throwback to Women’s Era days; and punctuations: Aah! The following paragraph is Lynn Trust’s nightmare come alive: Quite a controversy this. BCCI has something to answer for in Kambli's case, even though the batsman' flamboyant lifestyle had angered the aficionados a lot. Yet he was a gem that India needed and the matter required that Kambli be treated with 'kid gloves', so to speak.) But, in fairness, worse crimes than this have been committed in stunted SMS lingo.

Let us just focus on the premise – that what happened to Kambli was unfair and can never be justified especially when his average of 55 is considered.

Now, IE knows that memory is short, especially the public one. And once assured that a person is really down and out, we can think in encouraging terms of anyone. Think of how someone you couldn’t stand a second while alive seems so particularly endearing once convincingly dead.

More than a decade and a half have passed since we last saw a flabby, bleary -from-last-night’s-party, bald and ear-studded, Kambli take his stance, dutifully pass all responsibilities to the batting partner during his short stay, and lumber back to the pavilion; while his “bosom pal” (insidious aspersion-casting quotes IE’s) battled alone and remained the lynchpin to the batting where his dismissal would cut TRPs to a tithe and any hopes for a win from a fervid prayer to a fatal depression.

Let’s just focus on the numbers that the very article furnishes forth as damning incriminations.

Even though the basis of my career so far as has been statistics and analysis, or perhaps because of that, I know the damn lies the thing can be made to confess once arm-twisted enough. But, as I said, let’s take the thing at face value and delve deeper into why a man who has better test averages than VVS Laxman, as the article points, and “Despite scoring back-to-back double hundreds”, Kambli was dropped. Only on the basis of statistics.

And so here it is. Kambli played 21 innings, with one not out, between Jan ’93 and Nov ’95. His average has monotonously fallen since July ’93 and his average in his last ten innings, spanning more than a year and a half, was 14.7.

We know how statistics can and does lie. And that’s why Laxman, who I believe is India’s greatest test batsmen ever, still measure so short of even one-hit jokers like Kambli, leave alone the other biggies. But, here, even it screams the same story.

This is also a pretty good illustration on why you need to have an adequate size of sample before you start using statistics. Singularities can dominate otherwise.

My sympathies for Kambli – no one likes to end up a loser in life. Some years ago, he had shown more honesty and blamed his own attitude for his fall, even though he had been quick to attribute all the hard work Sachin had shown to his having an elder brother to guide him. Let another decade pass and even Agarkar will ask why he was dropped inspite of being the fastest man to get 50 wickets once.

But what to do of the diarrheic outpour that passes for journalism?

Chhod do aanchal

Somebody please tell me why a geriatric actor, whose pedigree can be best described as Punjabi-raised-in-Bombay, and an even more geriatric-actress from the South are swelling with pride for a part of the country at least a thousand miles from their own land?

By the way, if this state is ever made, it would beat even Bihar in is glorious la(lu)wless days.

Better than coffee

Research has confimed that you jolt awake 23% faster if you smell the post-binge barf you forgot to flush last night, over the coffee.