Living comfortably amidst a permeation of such ether, I was rudely awoken on coming across a 2010 essay by Paul Graham titled The Acceleration of Addictiveness. There have been quite a few writings and books in recent months looking at the impact of this kind of technology on our cognition, attention and other aspects of the mind. Graham mentors and funds a lot of startups in this very technology and hence my surprise to see him discuss so frankly about it.

Graham brings a different perspective to this topic by using the history of cigarette smoking in society. Smoking was an accepted social addiction, until its harmful effects were discovered and social norms evolved deriding it.

When cigarettes first appeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through a previously isolated population. Smoking rapidly became a (statistically) normal thing. There were ashtrays everywhere.

[...] In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit [...] A lot of the change was due to legislation, of course, but the legislation couldn’t have happened if customs hadn’t already changed.

Today’s technology is bringing us both improvements and addictions at a much faster pace. Since customs (like those against smoking) take a long time to form, it will be disastrous to rely on customs, society or our friends to decide what to accept or reject. So, it becomes our responsibility to observe and decide which and how much of these technologies to engage with.

As for Graham, he says he stopped using his iPhone and compares the iPad to a hip flask! The thought that stuck with me the most was:

Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction—the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations—we’ll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how. [...] We’ll increasingly be defined by what we say no to.

No matter how cool or popular a new technology seems to be, we will need to observe and analyze whether it makes sense for our life before we incorporate it into our lifestyle. Deciding not to go along with any particular popular technology will get increasingly harder, but will be necessary if one wants to lead the life he wishes to. Life without them seems miserable, but so might life with them.

I watched Bachna Ae Haseeno (बचना ऐ हसीनों) recently though I have been listening to its songs for a long time now. On a trip in Switzerland (this is a Yash Chopra movie remember? ) Ranbir Kapoor makes the innocent Minissha Lamba fall in love with him, only to unceremoniously dump her after the trip. A few years later he is cohabiting with a model (Bipashu Basu). When she proposes they get married, he is unable to draw the courage to decline and finally leaves her at the altar. Later in Australia he really falls in love with a taxi driver (Deepika Padukone) but she turns him down. He then realizes the hurt he caused his former girlfriends and proceeds to win back their forgiveness.

The first half of the movie is fast and fun to watch. In contrast, the latter half where Ranbir revisits Lamba and Basu is slow, long, boring and pointless. The plot does not help either making no strong case for why he has to endure such hardship when his former friends have moved on with their lives. While Bipasha and Deepika are pretty enough, I liked the tender pairing of Minissha and Ranbir in the first half. The movie spans the world and the scenic backgrounds are a delight. The music is good, my favorite tracks being Khuda Jaane and Aahista Aahista. Bachna Ae Haseeno is a tad long but is a good romantic movie of Ranbir.

I was in Bengaluru last week and decided to enroll for Aadhaar during this occasion. Aadhaar is a massive project by the Indian government to provide every Indian citizen an unique identification number. My parents informed me that the enrollment center nearest to our home was the Jayanagar Head Post Office. Proof of age and address are needed for the enrollment and so I headed to the post office with my passport.

Though it was a Saturday, there were only a few people buzzing around a post office official who was checking their proof of identification. I could not get an Aadhaar enrollment form since he had run out of forms, but informed me that I could get a photocopy of the form at the photocopy shop that is beside the post office. I headed out there since I needed a photocopy of the front (for date of birth) and back (for address) of my passport anyway.

The Aadhaar enrollment form is surprisingly bare, requiring these basic information: name, sex, DOB, address, email and phone number. It was refreshing to see transgender listed as an option for the sex entry. The official checked my form and my passport and let me in to the enrollment area.

The enrollment setup for Aadhaar is simple and fits on a small table. It consists of a computer with two displays, a webcam, a fingerprint scanner, a handheld iris scanner and a printer. Both the displays show the same information, the enrolling official sits in front of one and the candidate in front of the other. The webcam is fixed on top of the candidate’s display. First, the official entered the information from my form in English and Kannada into the Aadhaar data-entry software. She asked me to verify whether it was correct. Next, I was asked to remove my glasses and a photo was taken. Since the interior of the post office is dark, they had pointed a table lamp at the candidate’s face to illuminate it. After this, scans of all my 10 fingers were taken. My fingers were quite dry and it took a few tries and pressure for the scan to register. Finally, she placed the iris scanner on my eyes to capture a scan. After another final verification of the data, she printed out a confirmation form and I was done. The entire enrollment process took less than 5 minutes!

Despite all the brouhaha against Aadhaar, I am convinced that every Indian citizen needs an identity. Time will tell whether Aadhaar is helpful or just another white elephant. I look forward to receiving my Aadhaar card, which I was informed will be available within 2 months of the enrollment.

Tarka (ತರ್ಕ) is a Kannada whodunit that was the debut of director Sunil Kumar Desai. Shankar Nag is a murderer on the run from the cops. He manages to hide in a house by threatening the lady of the residence (Vanita Vasu). He is in for a shock when he discovers the murdered body of her husband (Devraj) in her cupboard. In exchange for hiding in her house, he helps her dispose off the body. Soon after, they start getting calls from a mysterious person who claims to know about their heinous deeds.

Though released in 1988, Tarka manages to be a good mystery to watch. Shankar Nag delivers a straight performance, that is thankfully devoid of his swagger. The movie sticks to a tight plot and there are no songs or distractions of any kind. As the viewer learns more about the shady pasts of the protagonists, new connections are formed and the mystery only deepens. As in most mystery novels, here too the viewer can never really pin the culprit since the creator has not revealed a crucial piece of the jigsaw puzzle. Once that is disclosed in the final climax, everything falls into place nicely. Tarka is an enigmatic little gem from the 80s.

Race is yet another thriller from the Abbas-Mustan stable. Saif Ali Khan and Akshaye Khanna play two brothers who have inherited their father’s vast property and stud farm in Durban, South Africa. Saif runs the business, while his younger brother Akshaye is a useless drunkard. Or so it seems until Akshaye turns the tables by hatching an elaborate plan to kill his brother and get the $100 million insurance policy in his name.

I cannot remember any movie as preposterous as Race! Every scene screams of unnecessary extravagant splurging, which only cheapens the feel of the movie. Most movies have a twist or two, for example the single twist (or reveal) at the end of The Sixth Sense. What Abbas-Mustan have done in Race is to throw in every single possible ridiculous twist into the plot! These twists are so hyperbolic and they are revealed with such regularity that Race reaches new heights of ludicrousness. Also, thrown into this melee is Anil Kapoor as a cop who spouts extremely poor jokes and double entendres. The acting and editing are unbelievably tacky for a movie of this budget. Music thief Pritam has stolen a few more Korean songs for Race and Pehli Nazar Mein is the one I like. There are too many songs and their videos are all similar: a guy and a gal dancing at a club. These songs have been literally thrown into the movie at random points. Race feels like a movie made by an amateur wedding videographer if you gave him 100 crores. No wait, even he would do a better job than Race!

The Hindu has finally woken up and taken up the cudgels against the dumbing down of newspapers in a new advertisement campaign. The Times of India recently entered the Chennai market by airing TV commercials that showed The Hindu as a sleepy old newspaper covering boring news. This seems to have prompted the staid old lady to launch an advertising campaign to counter it. The print images and the TV commercials from this campaign can be seen here.

The print advertisements are clean and purposeful. The tagline “Stay ahead of the times” takes a sporty jab at ToI and the Hindustan Times. The TV commercials on the other hand are quite something else. The 3 commercials feature young adults at a college, hanging out at a mall and at a workplace respectively. They are asked basic questions (Where is Tahrir Square? for example) and they appear clueless and unable to answer them. Later, they are asked a trivia question about Bollywood gossip and they promptly answer this correctly. Finally, they are asked what newspaper they read and unsurprisingly their (bleeped out) answers are all ToI.

I felt that the last bit of naming (and shaming) the competitor directly in the TV commercials was too low a blow and certainly does not suit The Hindu. Other than that, the commercials are spot on! Ogilvy says these commercials were made based on responses they actually got from people they accosted. I have no reason to disbelieve this claim since I have experienced first hand how clueless most folks now are about what is happening in the world and in their own country.

One of the questions asked in the TV commercials is “In the Ramayan, who is Ram’s father?” The fact that this remains unanswered is truly ironical. Students on a 1967 quiz show aired on Doordarshan could not answer a similar question about Ram’s mother, but they knew details of Greek mythology. This conundrum was what led Anant Pai to create the legendary Amar Chitra Katha comics to entertain and inform the next generation of Indians. 40 years later nothing much has changed, history and mythology have to now compete with cricket and Bollywood.

Today, most of the newspapers are tabloids in broadsheet clothing and the innumerable TV news channels use sensational and useless junk news to fill their airtime. Much like the people who choose to eat at McDonald’s despite availability of healthier choices, I believe this situation has been a creation of the consumer himself. The mainstream media is successful because it gives exactly what the consumer wants. The media cannot thrive if they offer something that he does not want. So it is the responsibility of the consumer to pick not just the chintzy offerings he is craving for, but also take in a steady diet of news that matters to him and the world around him. And that is why a wakeup call, like the one from The Hindu, is needed occasionally to remind the consumer to re-examine his diet.

Finally, though newspaper penetration continues to increase in India, most Indians spend far more time watching TV than reading. (A respondent in the TV commercial does attribute her ignorance to not having watched Ramayan, seemingly unaware that it can be read too.) One only needs to flip through the channels on cable TV to see how much full of crap all of them are. One does wish that there was someone to take the fight to the TV channels too.

Back in the good (?) old days when Star Movies was new in India, they had a small basket of movies which they cycled through over and over again. Alien, the first movie of the Alien series, was one of them. I have seen this movie innumerable times on Star Movies, but always in bits and pieces, since my process would typically be preempted to give up the TV resource to a higher priority process in the family.

Alien is a sci-fi horror movie, the intelligent kind where the scares and thrills come mostly from the dark imagination of your own mind. It starts off on Nostromo, a spaceship that is lugging ore from a distant planet to Earth. The crew is woken up from their deep sleep and asked to investigate a beacon from a nearby planet. They discover the remains of a giant spaceship there and inside it, the eggs of an alien being. One of the eggs hatches and the crab-like alien from it attacks the crew. They leave in their ship hastily, but their efforts to kill the alien on their ship gets scarier as it evades, kills and grows.

For a movie from 1979, Alien looks gorgeous even today. The grandeur of the alien nest is jaw-dropping and the white-red interiors of Nostromo are a joy to watch. The alien creature itself is quite something indescribable, like something fused from the elements of many horrible dreams. The plot is just a slasher in space, but director Ridley Scott and the writers have eked out a sophisticated creation from it. The Alien script was involved in quite a bit of wrangling by its studio and I did not really like the robot character that was thus introduced into it. The casting is perfect, and the young Sigourney Weaver is a delight. There is a comfort in watching good movies over and over again. I know I will be watching Alien sometime again for its fun ride.

Anyone who has checked out the stash of movies legally available on Youtube can see it is full of crap. Occasionally one finds something mediocre-to-good in it like Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji (दिल तो बच्चा है जी) for example. This is a romantic comedy directed by Madhur Bhandarkar. The movie puts three odd grown men under a single roof, united in their quest for love. Ajay Devgan is a dominated husband who has been divorced by his wife. Emraan Hashmi is looking for his next sugar mommy. Omi Vaidya (Chatur from 3 Idiots) is a romantic working at a matrimonial company. All three end up falling in love, but will it be reciprocated?

Despite some soppy parts, Madhur manages to squeeze out a good comedy in Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji. What I cannot understand is why he needs to make stereotypical depictions of homosexuality in it! Ajay Devgan shines and the rest of the cast delivers. Music-thief Pritam has given some good tracks: Abhi Kuch Dino Se, Tere Bin and Jadugari are on my playlist. Though nothing like Madhurkar’s other controversial movies, Dil To is a good funny movie to see sometime.