Another incredible 'Photograph Of The Week'

via photo.net

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The Hip-hop Novel

My conspiring friend and fellow lunatic recently got covered by Financial Express for his hip-hop style opera. Here's an excerpt from the story:

“My friends call me Marwari Mujahid,” he quips, letting out a hearty laugh, which sort of compliments his appearance. Someone who has a knack for changing jobs (four in the first six months), Fadereu is a quintessential storyteller. But his stories are not the kind you would expect your grandmother to tell you. Fadereu’s stories begin from circa 1910, when electricity first arrived in Bombay, and have names like Akkad Bakkad Bombay Boss.

It was a few years ago when Fadereu decided to change the format of a book that he was writing to something which would enable him to turn into a book himself. “I converted the novel into verse and adopted a hip-hop style narration,” says Fadereu.

The first version included 400 sonnets, put in nine chapters of one hour each. The second version of his text contains 20 songs. Since he is from Rajasthan, he tossed in some elements of the ancient storytelling technique from the desert, known as Babooji ki Phad (Babooji's screen). Fadereu then began to perform in front of small groups of students and corporate executives. The language he uses is pidgin—a mixture of Hindi, English and Rajasthani. But his training as an engineer has really not been left out. Fadereu is currently experimenting with a technique called Camera Obscura. It involves sitting in a dark box, lit up by one lamp. In this way, he won’t be visible to the audience, but they can see his shadow on a screen and hear his voice."

His weirdness and knack for absurdity keeps him in media almost on a permanent basis, and his blog is one of my favorites. If you ask him politely, he might even give you a copy of his novel. Though, remember, the best way to read it, is by inviting Fad for drinks, or to a party!

Kryptonite Found!

via ComixConnection.

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Importance of reducing dependence on the US economy

In the context of the current housing slump and lackluster GDPgrowth, it is interesting to read the following excerpt from Wikipedia.

"A recession is traditionally defined in macroeconomics as a decline in a country's real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for two or more successive quarters of a year (equivalently, two consecutive quarters of negative real economic growth). However this definition is not universally accepted. The National Bureau of Economic Researchdefines a recession more ambiguously as "a significant decline ineconomic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a fewmonths."

You can almost hear the buzz predicting an oncoming recession (though I continue to hear to the contrary). People are asking -- is it a sign for something bigger and more devastating? Eighty two year old Lee writes in his book 'Where Have All The Leaders Gone?':

"Had Enough? Am I the only guy in this country who'sfed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the course." Stay he course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damnedTitanic. I'll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out! You might think I'm getting senile, that I've gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don't need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we're fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That's not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for.

I've had enough. How about you? I'll go a step further. You can't call yourself a patriot if you're not outraged. This is a fight I'm ready and willing to have. My friends tell me to calm down. They say, "Lee, you're eighty-two years old. Leave the rage to the young people." I'd love to, as soon as I can pry them away from their iPods for five seconds and get them to pay attention..." (more here).

Where Lee's opinions are objective, or whether its just a sensationalistic approach to writing, is a matter of viewpoint. However, even I have felt that somewhere down the line, the promise of US got lost. The Great American Dream, got corrupted. And, there is no real sign of improvement, or change in strategy.

But that's beside the point. The question that we ask here is -- if the US market does go into a recession, how badly is the rest of the world going to be affected? Really. How many of the large organizations in India (specially in the IT sector) can actually survive with a crumbling US economy? I wonder...

HitForge and The Mixercast Model

A year ago, I was the first from India to join a team of two entrepreneurs (Adarbad Master and Freeman Murray) who had come down from the valley with funding (from Com Ventures) to India to start a Web 2.0 venture. From a three people team, we have now become a full fledged 25 people team (in both India and US combined), and recently launched our product Mixercast. And with our CEO Jennifer Cooper pushing the throttle, things are looking damn good!

In the last one year, we gave gone through ups and downs thats typical of a startup, but the true beauty of the idea has been the ability to feel the market direction and rapidly adapt with an incredibly low burn. The cost advantage and talent pool that India offers turned out to be our biggest advantage over others who were aiming for the same market. It also gave us the ability to come up with a super-extensible platform that can now be integrated into a variety of different verticals.

In that way, the model is very clear -- Have an idea? Come to India and startup in 1/10th the cost! Hell, you could even test waters in the Asian market before going global!

Today, I was delighted to read the following post in GigaOm, as a true formalization of the model we hit.

"HitForge is an entrepreneur cooperative composed of independent small teams, where people can apply with their ideas, join the team, and see their idea go from idea to product in a few weeks, largely with help of an offshore engineering team.

If it works, then the product is turned into a company. If itdoesn’t work, the product is killed, and the team moves onto something new. HitForge is out of a few thousand dollars. The team whose product got killed still gets to share in the hits that come out of the cooperative, Ravikant says.

Ravikant argues that the start-up creation model - have an idea, start a venture, raise capital and then release a product - might have worked in the past, but now it doesn’t, at least when it comes to consumer web start-ups. In the world of consumer Internet start-ups, only the hits win. Today while it takes less capital to start and launch a company, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is going to be a hit. As Ravikant says, “Web businesses are unpredictable despite the best of intentions and execution.”

“What these are, are products that needed to be tested out in the market before becoming a company,” says Ravikant. Only the hits should become companies, since hits are the only ones that get consumer adoption, and have some sort of an exit event. Hedge funds use this “momentum investing” philosophy, and so does Sequoia Capital, that has done well by betting on growth."

More on Mixercast very soon, but I think its high time that all VC firms and entrepreneurs realize the potential, and decided to do all their startups here. ;)

Grindhouse Films

I know that Tarantino/Rodriguez double bill release has done complete justice to the genre in terms of the marketing it has done in the theatres. But has anyone seen the classy website for the film?

The word "exploitation" itself is an old show business term for publicizing shows and motion pictures. "Exploitation films" are those whose success relied not on the quality of their content, but on the ability of audiences to be drawn in by the advertising of the film (for example, a common device used by the more notorious exploitation films is to advertise the banning of a film in a certain country).

Ephraim Katz, author of The Film Encyclopedia, has defined exploitation as:

Films made with little or no attention to quality or artistic merit but with an eye to a quick profit, usually via high-pressure sales and promotion techniques emphasizing some sensational aspect of the product

Given the above definition, I wonder if I could classify the entire of Bollywood 80s as Indian version of the "Exploitation" film genre. Check out the posters, for instance (yeah, you can even buy em!).

Dali on Life Magazine's cover

Found this outstanding photograph of Dali that appeared in the cover of Life.

Writings by Cho Seung-Hui

Link forwarded by a friend.

"The play by Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old English major, was submitted last year as part of a short story writing class. Entitled "Richard McBeef," Cho's bizarre play features a 13-year-old boy who accuses his stepfather of pedophilia and murdering his father. A copy of the killer's play can be found below. The teenager talks of killing the older man and, at one point, the child's mother brandishes a chain saw at the stepfather. The play ends with the man striking the child with "a deadly blow."

Needless to say, the writing is worth reading only as a peek into the mind of a troubled man. Mostly, its a cathartic outburst of the writer against something.

From Wikipedia

"While it may be simplistic to assume a straightforward "profile", the study did find certain similarities among the perpetrators. "The researchers found that killers do not 'snap'. They plan. They acquire weapons. They tell others what they are planning. These children take a long, considered, public path toward violence."^[6] Princeton's Katherine Newman points out that, far from being "loners", the perpetrators are "joiners" whose attempts at social integration fail, that they let their thinking and even their plans be known, sometimes frequently over long periods of times. The shootings seem as though an attempt to adjust their social standing and image, from "loser" to "master of violence."

Million dollar question is, are we going to see any change in US gun laws? I doubt it. Its like what my friend says -- first they dig a hole, and then they try to fill it, and then they dig it again, and so on...!

Video of Cho Sueng-Hui, shot by himself

Insane.

Interactive Multiplayer Movie Theaters

MIT Advertising Lab blogs about SS+K, the agency working on a unique game concept that requires collective audience participation.

"Several theaters in LA, Philly and NY will be equipped with a camera that tracks the motion of the entire audience. Projected on the screen will be a modified version of the NewsBreaker game and a faint mirror image of the audience in the background.

When the audience leans their bodies to the left in their seats, the paddle on the bottom will react with their movement and move to the left. When the ball makes it way towards the right, they will all have to collectively lean to the right to keep the ball in play, and so on. Like NewsBreaker, many of the bricks will have msnbc.com headlines (via RSS) embedded in them, that fall as the bricks are destroyed."

Note: Newsbreaker is a tile game where bricks become news items.

The Corposexuals (or, Marriages are made on whiteboards)

A few hundred years ago, the idea of having a "conversation through pressing some buttons" would have sounded alien-ish. When IM clients started spring up a few years ago, most people couldn't believe that users would actually type in their thoughts into a text box, and communicate with someone they knew. Over the last few years, IM (in its many different incarnations), has emerged as the chief communicating metaphor for a generation of IT savvy corporates. Is it a manifestation of man's need to connect in a severely fragmented universe?

Almost as a parallel development, the notion of "worker's union" vanished from the tech industry, although most other industries in India still have to deal with it. In its pristine form, the worker's union used to look after the benefit and well-being of the labour force as a bonafide entity. However, they brought in their own unspoken baggage, so their disappearance was considered a good thing. However, alongside, the employees work hours started climbing steadily. There came to be an unspoken rule that the 40 hours mentioned in most offer letters was just to keep the beaureucrats happy, and that reality was quite the opposite.

A colleague recently joked -- when a human being spends 80% of his waking hours at work, does his sexual and emotional being seep into his professional one? Does he become unduly "touch-feely" about his work? Is that something the behavioral analysts (read, psychiatrists) should worry about? Do the cliched childhood traumas manifest themself in some way at workplace?

I wonder.

Another colleague has the habit of calling mergers and acquisitions, marriages. "If we get married to X Inc... if Y divorces with us, we will have...". Heh.

Perhaps we are seeing the emergence of the Corposexuals? Asexual humans whose primary relationships are in their workplace. Relationships where the dynamics emerge from workplace roles. A relationship that's fast replacing all others in its intensity and devotion -- marriages, families, everything.

The Evolution Poster

Chanced upon this gem while I was searching for the existence of the word Corposexual. More on that in the next post.

Volkswagen Beetle Ad

From ADs of the World. Absolutely positively brilliant!

On the moral police and making wine

Day before yesterday, I took the customary three hour bus ride from Pune to Bombay, and found myself sitting next to a retd. Major General of Indian army. Within the next fifteen minutes, he gave me the recipe to make wine in India, the Indian way --

"Pour 20 kg of grapes inside a giant mud container... the one that's normally used to keep water thanda (cool), fill that up with water, and add sugar enough to fill one fifth of the container. Then roll your sleeves and start smashing the grapes, so that they split apart. Then put some yeast, and close the container (make sure its airtight as much as possible). Put half a bottle of rum. Now forget about it for four months. Then open it up and mix everything well again. Close it back, and then forget about it for next 3 months. After that, just filter out the liquid and your wine's ready to serve (of course, after you have chilled it)."

Interesting. I almost feel like trying rightaway. But, is it worth taking the risk of 20kg of grapes and incessant urges to open the container and check the "status"?

However, from wine recipe, we got into the conversation about the latest moral policing in Bandstand, Mumbai -- apparently, holding hands or kissing is now considered obscene behavior, and couples caught red-handed are instantly taken to jail and their parents informed. Of course, all this apart from a fine of 1200 rupees.

Amazing. Why do I think I have heard this before? The land of Kamasutra, now with a ban on kissing. What's next?

Pearls Before Breakfast

One of the greatest living violinist plays at the L'Enfant Plaza Station in D.C. in the rush hour. What happens? From an experiment conducted by Washington Post:

"HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L'ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a fewdollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'EnfantPlaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles:policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?"

Continue reading here.

Year Zero

Trent Reznor and NIN have produced an awesome marketing campaign around their upcoming album Year Zero. Check out this excerpt from wikipedia synopsis of the whole act:

"On February 12, 2007,fans found that a new Nine Inch Nials tour T-shirt containedhighlighted letters that spell out the words "I am trying to believe." It was discovered that iamtryingtobelieve.com was registered as awebsite, and soon several related websites were found in the IP range,all describing a dystopian vision of the world fifteen years in the future.

Many events reported on these websites take place in the year "0000." Digit Online later reported that 42 Entertainment had created these websites to promote Year Zero. Rolling Stone described the fan involvement in this promotion as the "marketing team's dream."Trent Reznor has however stated, "The term 'marketing' sure is afrustrating one for me at the moment. What you are now starting toexperience IS 'year zero'. It's not some kind of gimmick to get you tobuy a record - it IS the art form... and we're just getting started. Hope you enjoy the ride."

More about their use of USB drives and waveform messages here.

Hacking Memory

Ted Berger, a USC researcher, spent last 10 years of his life crafting silicon chips that would recreate thought. Their chips model less than 12000 neurons, as compared to 100 billion present in human brain. Yet, as we all know, once (it might takes decades for that to actually happen) the first barrier is crossed, its a matter of time when forgetfulness will be history. What sort of world would that be? I wonder...

"In wet lab 412C on the University of Southern California’s Los Angeles campus, Vijay Srinivasan is poking a long, evil-looking needle at a slice of rat brain about half the size of a fingernail. All around him, coils of cable are piled near hulking microscopes. Glass vials and fluid-filled plastic dishes compete for space with spare keyboards and computer chips. The place looks more like a computer-repair shop than a world-class laboratory.

“Watch this,” says Srinivasan, a design engineer working with USC’s Center for Neural Engineering. A thin wire runs between the needle and a tiny silicon chip hooked up to a boxy signal transmitter. He flips a switch, and a series of small waves shimmers across a nearby screen—waves that mean exactly zilch to me. Watch what? I wonder.Srinivasan explains that the chip is sending electric pulses through the needle into the brain slice, which is passing them on to the screen we’re watching. “The difference in the waves’ modulation reflects the signals sent out by the brain slice,” he says. “And they’re almost identical in frequency and pattern to the pulses sent by the chip.” Put more simply, this iron-gray wafer about a millimeter square is talking to living brain cells as though it were an actual body part...."

Rest here...

Photo.net -- Photograph of the Week

I have always been a giant fan of Photo.net. It is one of the oldest photography sites on the net, and is almost entirely created by users. As an example, check out the photograph below from their Photograph of the Week (yes, you can submit and compete as well), and tell me if its not better than anything you have seen on flickr or photobucket. And if you don't like this particular one, go check out their Photograph of the Week section.

Hit For Six!

First Caribbean-made film on Cricket is complete.  It is also the first Barbadian film to be marketed internationally. I couldn't find more details about the director Alison Saunders-Franklin, but the film sounds pretty interesting with its international crew and funding completely through PE.

First Caribbean-made film on cricket finally complete The Star, St. Lucia - 58 minutes ago Hit For Six is also the first film about a modern day cricketer and the first Barbadian film to be marketed internationally.All this was revealed yesterday at a press briefing at the Island Inn Hotel, where script writer and director Alison Saunders-Franklyn, of Blue Waters Productions, gave details about the process of making the film, from funding to final edit.   Prime Minister Owen Arthur has consented to be the patron at the premier on April 18 at the Olympus Expo.Hit For Six is the story of a West Indian cricketer Alex Nelson (played by Andrew Pilgrim), who was sidelined from the team for scuffling with his coach, Amir Misra (Nirmal Thani). The film also stars British actor Rudolph Walker, Barbadian Alison Sealy-Smith, Varia Williams and Jeanille Bonterre, a VJ (video jockey) on MTV’s Tempo...

Music Video -- Early Days @ IIM Joka!

Hilarious!

Who owns the rights to Ramayana and Mahabharata?

I have never really managed to find an answer to this question. When a myth has been told and retold through centuries, morphed, twisted, wrongly translated, bits forgotten and parts exaggerated, who can really claim ownership? Do I have a right to depict my own interpretation?

If so, then why is HinduJagruti.org out to claim that Nina Paley's animated Sitayana is "disrespectful and denigrating to Hindus at large"? For instance, how "factual" was Doordarshan Channel's depiction of the myth (with arrows that split up in hundred other arrows and two arrows colliding in mid-air and destroying each other)?

Check out the letter from HinduJagruti.org that I found on her website:

"Ms. Paley,

Some irate Hindus have brought to our attention your attempt ("Sitayana") at retelling the Hindu Holy epic, Ramayana ( www.ninapaley.com/Sitayana).

Here are our concerns regarding your attempt:

Ø It appears that you are not fully aware that the Ramayana is a Holy Scripture for Hindus. Over a billion Hindus all over the world hold it in reverence. What you call as the characters in Ramayana are divine Incarnations worshipped by Hindus.

Ø While we understand your painful personal incidents discussed on your site, your "Sitayana", which basically re-tells the Ramayana as matches your own life, is contrary to the life of Lord Rama and Goddess Sita as given in the Hindu Holy texts. Thus, even if inadvertently, your "Sitayana" has proved to be deliberately disrespectful and downright denigrating to Hindus at large.

Ø One cannot understand divine Incarnations by trying to fit them into limited human paradigms. It takes rigorous spiritual practice to attain the spiritual maturity to understand and experience the attributes and functions of divine Incarnations.

Ø Even if one were to hold such views in private, out of lack of knowledge or understanding, you have gone on to publicly display your views on the World Wide Web. To publicly comment on something held in reverence by many, one should have some authority on the subject. Kindly let us know what spiritual authority you exercised to publicly alter and mock a Holy spiritual text revered by millions?"

It goes on and on. Check out the rest of it here.

Poster Boys!

Link from Rohit Gupta -- Tarantino and Rodriguez pick movie poster's here.

I am also a big fan of Bollywood posters from the 70s. Recently, I came to know from a friend that the artists still live, only getting business from b-grade Indian films. The market for this seems pretty much close to death. Long ago, I learned to paint from an artist who started his career on the streets of Kolkata painting film posters and shop walls.

Alas...!

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Steve Jobs spearheading DRM death with EMI!

Will DRM Die Today?

"Will DRM die today? In five hours we’ll find out. At 1 PM London time today EMI CEO Eric Nicoli and Apple CEO Steve Jobs will hold a forty minute press conference. Lots of press were invited early this morning to attend, but no information was distributed other than “to hear about an exciting new digital offering.”

The Wall Street Journal seems to know a bit more, though. They say (behind a paywall) that the two are set to announce that a significant portion of EMI’s catalog will be sold online without any DRM. EMI is the third largest music label after Universal and Sony.

Labels like DRM because users can’t easily copy songs to give to friends. Users hate DRM because they are locked in to one device or service. Earlier this year Jobs wrote an open letter to music labels calling for them to “abolish DRMs entirely.” In that letter he noted that only 22 out of every 1,000 songs on the average iPod, or less than 3%, were purchased from iTunes. The rest were ripped from CDs and obtained illegally."

From Techcrunch.

FICCI Frames 2007

So, I went to the FICCI Frames 2007 Conference in Mumbai. Very crowded, and thronged by media industry from across the world. Interestingly, there was only one talk on UGC (User Generated Content), and everyone kept talking about DRM and IPR and such kind of primitive crap.

I don't understand when the TV industry is going to realize that UGC is actually beneficial to them, and stop pretending to have control. On one hand we have a rapidly growing mobile market with high-res cameras, along with hundreds of site which make it easy to post content. On the other hand, we have a small group of TV industry crowd trying to cope with loss of content control.

I tell you, humanity could have achieved the "Back to the Future", "2001 - A Space Odessey" world, only if we weren't spending billions of manhours trying to deal with myopic viewpoints.

Heck. I should just stop ranting probably, and go edit some videos or write some perl.

Albania's quirk

Just had this article in Guardian forwarded by a friend:

"In the rigidly patriarchal society of the remote mountain villages of northern Albania and beyond, they have a unique way of providing a head of the household when there is no male heir, or the men of the family have died in battle. A girl - or her parents - may declare that she has become a "male". From then on, she - now he - will be brought up and dressed as a boy/man, perform male tasks and mix socially as a male with boys. He will become the head of the family, organise the division of labour and wealth, be permitted to carry a weapon and uphold the family honour in blood feuds.

It has always been assumed in this region that every unmarried female is a virgin but, with a change of gender, the "sworn virgin" swears to celibacy for life (traditionally an oath to this effect was taken in front of a dozen village elders - all men, of course). He may never revert to the gender of his birth. In this way, inheritance of the family home and land is assured in a society in which women may not inherit property."

Bizarre.