The Hurt Locker-Bringing the war home...

There are few movies that dare to explore war from close quarters, they either glorify it, deplore it, take sides or just pack a lot of ammunition and action into a package. But The Hurt Locker differs from the rest in this. Instead of zooming out of war and exploring the big picture, it wears a magnifying lens and goes deep, deep into the life of three soldiers who are three beautifully crafted characters. The story follows this a bomb squad through their last few weeks in deputation, their struggles, emotions, mutual trust or the lack of it, and above all, the inhuman, bloody and bizarre situations they find themselves in, day after day.

Brilliant performances from each member of the cast, especially the rash but lovable Jeremy Renner. The writer of the movie Mark Boal was a freelance writer who was embedded with a bomb squad in Iraq for a period of time (Source: Wikipedia) and it shows in the plain, hits-you-hard-in-the-face kind of realism throughout the movie.

After watching the movie, it is hard to wonder how soldiers survive in places like Iraq, and also makes one wonder if we can ever win this war!

Verdict: One for the DVD collection.

Not so lovely-The Lovely Bones

It is a tragedy to watch a story that could have made a phenomenal movie be dragged down to make an abysmal collage of what could only be described as a director's wild fantasies, seriously what was the guy smoking?!

The story is that of a teenage girl who is murdered by a pedophile neighbor and how post-death she watches over, and helps her father's efforts to get to the truth-or that is what it is supposed to be according to the trailers. I went in expecting to see a gripping drama of a father's struggle with a little bit of supernatural help. But what unfolds instead, is a story that drags on without direction, it is as if the director could not decide whether he wanted a murder mystery, or a family drama, or a kids fantasy movie, there is a little bit of everything, leaving one with a sense of lack of completion on any front.

Verdict: One to avoid.

5 Minutes to Help a Nation...

Have you ever had an opportunity that demanded just 5 minutes of your time, but resulted in millions of lives being influenced? Well, you are actually in luck...one such opportunity just presented itself! Isha Foundation needs your vote in the race to win a million dollars for Action for Rural Rejuvenation (ARR)-a bold, but practical initiative in India working tirelessly with the mission of rejuvenating the broken spirit of rural India and restoring lives.

The deal is simple, the organization with maximum number of votes received by 22nd Jan gets to win a million dollars to implement their idea. And that brings me to the idea-Action for Rural Rejuvenation. I have been personally fascinated by this project ever since the day I heard about it.

There is a side of India, that many of us conveniently ignore. Of course, there is the bright side-the dazzling IT sector, Bangalore, Chennai and all that fanfare..and then there is the rural side or rather the dark side. There are people who do not have access, even to basic sanitary facilities, leave alone clean drinking water or nutritious food or healthcare! Their livelihoods often depend on vagaries of the weather and many times even on the whims of unscrupulous landlords and money lenders. There are millions of people living in this condition and they are justifiably frustrated with their life and lack of support. Imagine what such a huge build-up of frustration could do to the country...and now imagine what would happen if all that frustration was converted into productive energy, what if they were given the opportunity to live a normal life and become positive contributors to the society..imagine the power that will unleash! If you thought the IT industry revolutionized India, you will be really surprised at this rural revolution-it can create wonders in the world.

ALL THIS IS POSSIBLE....we just need to start working towards it. I have seen ARR work in rural India, and they are bringing real change right to people's doorsteps. With mobile vans taking doctors to villages where there are no proper roads even, with Isha Vidya schools that offer free education to children-with emphasis on English learning and computers (something never done before!), with Yogashalas and community events that actually promote bonding beyond race, caste and creed (you have to watch one of these events to feel the energy in it!).

Many of us want to help, but cannot find the right source to contribute, our "busy lives" preclude us from going there to spend time with these people to understand their needs and figure out solutions. Here are people who have dedicated their lives to creating a better life for the rural Indian population. The least we can do is to spend five minutes to help them...Please follow these steps to vote for Isha:

1. Log into Facebook

2. Go to http://apps.facebook.com/chasecommunitygiving/

3. Become a fan of the Chase Community Giving.

4. Go to:

http://apps.facebook.com/chasecommunitygiving/charities/1111517

5. Cast your vote for Isha.

It is that simple.

I have never come across an organization that is more intelligent, more humane and more ethical than Isha Foundation. Please let us help Isha do what is most needed in the society today.

Kuruthipunal (1995) - Review

Got to watch this movie a second time recently- just hated it the first time (I was about 10 years younger then). What a classic! This is the closest any Tamil movie has gotten to a Hollywood standard action thriller, at least among the ones I have seen. Just got to know that this was a remake of the Hindi movie 'Drohkal'-want to see the original sometime.

Needless to say, Kamal's performance stands out as an honest, brave police officer, torn between his duty and vulnerabilities as the protector of his family. Surprisingly, the performance of Nassar beats even that of Kamal, except for a few dramatic sequences. The dialogues hit home most of the time, and the cinematography is fantastic (it definitely shows that it is PC Sreeram on the driver's seat). Maybe this movie was way ahead of it's time, kudos to Kamal for bringing such bold stories to Tamil-and for doing it time and again.

Verdict:  This one is for the collection.

Photo Source: Google Search

Flawless (2007) - Review

A good one time watch-somewhat cliched storyline, but the setting of the story is different from most other crime thrillers I have seen. Kept me interested till the end.Was a bit surprised at the low IMDB rating.

<spoilers>

Plot: The movie is about a diamond heist set in 1960s, the protagonist is a brilliant manager in the world's biggest diamond company, who has been passed over several times for a well-deserved promotion because of her sex. Now, when she is almost at her breaking point, an interesting acquaintance comes up with a plan to rob the company and get their fair share to settle down in life. But can she be really sure of the motives of this man?

</spoilers>

Verdict: Good one-time watch

Photo Courtesy: IMDB

Reader's Digest

The once-beloved magazine is making news today as it files for bankruptcy protection. As a die-hard fan of Readers' Digest at one time, this might have come as a sad news to me...just about a decade ago, but today, I am simply happy that something is going wrong in the house, for it gives them a reason to take a closer look at who they really are, and fix some of the basics.

The magazine has become just a bunch of crap, from what it used to be 10-15 years ago. I used to love reading RD in my grandpa's house, in fact it formed an important part of my initial literary sojourns, as I am sure was the case for many other adolescents. One of my first expenses when I started earning in India was to subscribe to RD. I had a bad experience with it with so many insert-advertisements, sweepstakes invitations by mail, and lots of irrelevant, completely nonsensical content including interviews with Bollywood damsels! I thought to myself, maybe RD India has gone to the dogs, and the mother-ship would still be intact. Again, when I came to the US, I started subscribing to RD. and found it to be incorrigible! In one copy, I counted the advertisement pages to be around 30% of the book itself! I canceled the subscription after a few months.

There was a time when RD wouldn't even take advertisements, they did a huge readers poll just to start advertising, that too only small unobtrusive ones...from there it has been a steady decline, driven by sole objective of profit making, give your address for subscription and you start receiving all sorts of crap.

I guess, in the magazine industry, there are clear choices, you either go down the advertising path, add on subscribers just to shore up your numbers and make all your money from advertising and other activities (like selling the subscriber base contacts etc.). One good example of this in India was Business Week that gave away the subscription for next to nothing, but you get a lot of ads. And most of the time, these magazines are just "just another" magazine on the desk, you never craved to read it, you never waited for it in the mail, leave alone the thought of preserving one!

The other path, the more courageous one, that made great magazines like Readers Digest and National Geographic was to focus only on building a highly loyal subscriber base and meeting their expectations over and over, being always careful not to annoy them in any way. These were the ones you cherished, you wanted pass on those articles to your family and kids, you tried to preserve these for the future, the whole experience from subscription to reading to preservation was a joy in itself-this is precisely what RD and its owners failed to understand.

The result?

U.S. circulation at Reader’s Digest plunged 14 percent last year to 8.31 million from 9.68 million, compared with a drop of less than 1 percent for the top 10 magazines, according to Magazine Publishers of America.

I might be just the right sample for Readers' Digest, they charged me a subscription fee of $10 for a year and then sent me crap which made me cut that to an expense of just about $3. Instead, if they had charged me double of that ($20) or even more ($25), without the associated advertising crap, I would have still subscribed to the magazine and remained loyal-I have discouraged some of my friends too from taking a subscription; a business can probably do just fine without a loyalist, but an active terrorist is a dangerous proposition :).

Book Reviews

The Siege: By Ismail Kadare

What are the first thoughts that come to you when you think of War? Death? Bloodshed? Glory? Tyranny? Kings? Soldiers? Strategy? Peace Treaties? Have you ever asked the simple question, if you took an army of 30000 people to lay siege on another nation, and it took 3 months to do it, where would you ask them to pee during that time? Assuming that you didn't want to make your entire camp a huge s***hole, you would want to create sanitation facilities on the scale of a city itself, correct? What about food supplies for these soldiers, again assuming that you did not know how long the siege was going to last, you would want to ensure a constant flow of supplies to the camp from *somewhere* right?

This was the first book on I read on war, that was not steeped in the glory or the tragedy or even the suffering. Instead it intelligently approaches war from the perspective of an operational strategist, planning supplies and facilities for an operation. At the same time, there is an enormous human struggle in the background between the attackers and the defenders (who we learn to sympathize with), the war room decisions, the actual execution of grand strategies, their successes and failures, are all told with the tastefulness of a master storyteller that Ismail Kadre is, building up to a fantastic climax.

Palace Walk: By Naguib Mahfouz

This was an immersion experience, into a totally different world. The novel is the first of a trilogy based on contemporary life in Egypt. It revolves around a single family with a dominant patriarch, his submissive wife and their children. What makes the read absorbing is the author's inimitable style of walking through the story, casually, patiently from each character's perspective. There are no magnificent things happening most of the time, still, the plot and the characters are so interesting that it urges you to read on. It gave a glimpse of the life in Egyptian Islamic families in the pre-World war era. Putting down the book, one gets the feeling of having lived in those settings for a considerable length of time, knowing those characters intimately. Am planning to read the next two parts as soon as I get the time.

யாருக்கும் வெட்கமில்லை-A Matter of National Shame

The recent expose by TimesNow of the "sale" of seats in medical colleges in Tamilnadu and Karnataka just confirms something that has been common knowledge to anyone who has been through the admission process in India, but still no one has been able to do something about it.

Death of merit: Capitation scam exposed

Brazen Auction of Seats in Bangalore

Just look at the video of the expose, especially look for the reaction of the minister at the end-he says he has never been involved with the institution, but then immediately goes on to say-"We have run the college for 25 years and there has been no capitation fee!" Shame on you! TimesNow also found the minister's name on the website proudly displayed as the Chairman of the institution, with his wife as the chairperson-the website has been taken down since then. There is a popular political satire by Cho Ramaswamy that I am reminded of-"யாருக்கும் வெட்கமில்லை" (Translates approximately to "No one has any shame left").

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkwoJUjHs-c]

We pride ourselves on being one of the best countries for primary and college education, but beneath the surface, that sophistication comes at an enormous cost to the common man and through a process that lets several of the corrupt political sharks get to keep the costs so extracted. Simple law of economics tells us that any time there are subsidies for a product or service, it masks the real price of it, and if there are no effective controls on the seller, he/she could extract the economic rents that represent the differential, to illustrate with a popular example, a Ford car model (I forget the name now) released with a price tag was lower than what people were ready to pay for it and over time the dealers found this out and comfortably increased the price tag with a "market adjustment" and kept the extra money for themselves.

Now, if there are people ready to pay the entire 40 laks for a medical seat, and there are enough of them, then the price of the seat should be 40 lacks and not 4 lacks! I am not suggesting that every student be forced to pay the huge fee, but let there be scholarships and subsidies to meritorious students to bring that amount down to the current fee levels, for the rest, let the government (and the medical college) collect the true price of the education they provide, with appropriate tracking mechanisms to make sure that the entire amount goes into the right coffers. That way, the system will be transparent, and any "minister" who demands an extra on top of the hefty fee will be fooling himself, as no sane person will be ready to pay for it.