Communication

I saw the movie Babel (trailer) on BA on my way back from Mumbai recently. Unfortunately, thanks to the travails of traveling, I fell asleep mid-way and lost about half an hour of the movie. But it is no doubt a good powerful movie and worthy of the attention it is getting via various awards and nominations; though surprisingly Yahoo! Movies has overall ratings of B (critics) and B- (Yahoo! users). It won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Drama & been nominated for 7 Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. It was also considered a top contender for the Palme d'Or at Cannes but did not win, though Inarritu did win the festival's best director prize.

You can read the review in the LA Times and Roeper's review in the Chicago-Sun Times but I recommend you go in and see it without reading any reviews.

Amitava Kumar blogged about Babel some time back, calling it a movie about 'our moment of globalization.' Today, he revisits the movie and links to a review by Michael Wood, who writes about how the movie is more than your typical hyperlink movie, with multiple plots all tieing in to reflect the global fabric we all are a part of but is more about 'the sense that we are always about to step into an aftermath we can’t imagine.'...

To me, the movie was about the universal difficulty human beings have in communication - words come out but no one wants to understand or cannot understand - and the tragic fallout of this disconnect. Michael Wood puts it much better than I can, writing:

The stories of Babel are not about the limits of language but about the limits of understanding.

Indeed! We are confronted with a multitude of languages and different mediums of communication and yet there is so much confusion due to people not understanding each other. In the middle of all the chaos, the interaction between Brad Pitt's character and the Moroccan man who helps him, is a lesson in how basic human instincts can guide us to a common understanding despite the differences. So, does the universality of the human condition allow us to overcome these obvious limitations in communication in a globally interconnected world or are they unsurmountable because we lack the desire to understand? The disconnected feeling of the deaf-dumb girl in Japan or the disconcerted pleas of the Mexican lady at the US border...

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. - G B Shaw

The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate. - Joseph Priestly

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I had liked another movie, Crash, surprise winner of the best movie at the Oscars last year, much more but I really should not be comparing the two movies... esp. given the soporofic condition in which I saw Babel. Like Babel, Crash also talked about the interconnectedness of various people - although the scope was not global and everything happened within the confines of a city (Los Angeles), the message driven home was that we are all connected in ways we do not understand despite the prejudices, the stereotypes, and the hatred that divides us all..

A few years back, I had started seeing Inarritu's previous movie, Amores Perros (Life's a Bitch), but I was not in the mood for a gory movie - so, after the initial dog-fight scene, the DVD was taken off. I have his other movie, 21 grams, also with multiple interweaving plotlines, and enjoyed it very much. I thought that Traffic was also an Inarritu movie but just found out it was by Steven Soderbergh. Anyways, Traffic remains one of those good must-see movies that I never get around to seeing despite seeing it in the shelves at the public library (for free viewing!) many times...

The other movie to see is the Penelope Cruz starring Volver by the one and only Pedro Almodóvar. This movie has also gotten great reviews and all sorts of awards/nominations. Hmmm...too many good books to read, too many good movies to see, too little time, too little discipline...

Death be not proud - 5

Larry Stewart, known to the world as Kansas City's Secret Santa for his practice (from 1979 to 2006), died at age 58 on January 12, 2007.

He had made a habit of anonymously handing out small amounts of cash, typically in the form of hundred dollar bills, to needy people. The total amount he gave away is estimated to be 1.3 million dollars. Stewart successfully kept his identity hidden until 2006, when he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, which would later claim his life. He chose at that time to reveal his identity as part of an effort to encourage others to practice philanthropy.

David Rattray, a well-known historian and tour guide of the 1879 Anglo-Zulu war in South Africa, was brutally murdered on January 26th at his farm in KwaZulu-Natal in circumstances that are under investigation by the South African police.

Molly Ivins died last week (Jan 31st) of breast cancer. What a loss...so now which Texan will pick on the Bush family's exploits!! Expectedly, tributes pour in for this fiesty lady...

Alan MacDiarmid, 79, Professor of Chemistry at UPenn and Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry in 2000 along with Alan J. Heeger and Hideki Shirakawa for the discovery of conductive polymers, died yesterday.

He apparently died "after a fall down stairs in his home in the Drexel Hill suburb of Philadelphia while rushing to catch a flight to his native New Zealand, said his wife, Gayl Gentile. Dr. MacDiarmid was ill with myelodysplastic syndrome, a leukemia-like disease, and had expected to live only a few weeks, during which he wanted to go to New Zealand to say goodbye to his siblings, his wife said."

He is one of the few Nobel laureates I have had the luck to hear/see in person... having attended a seminar he gave in University of Akron in 2001-02.

And lastly, today, a sudden end to a bizarre life....

Reality TV star and former Playboy playmate (sorry..no links! :)), Anna Nicole Smith, is dead at age 39. She was pronounced dead after being found unconscious in her Florida hotel room.

India - mostly free

I had highlighted some articles on Independence Day last year on what freedom means in India...

Here are some more recent articles on the subject:

The 2007 Index of Economic Freedom is out. India ranks 104. Read more here. (via India Uncut)

Three articles from the new Indian newspaper, Mint (free registration required).

1. Niranjan Rajadhyaksha's editorial in the inaugural issue of the paper In defence of freedom.
   
2. Mistaking froth for fact -
3. Where's the Freedom Party? by Amit Varma, who has also cross-posted it at his blog.

Is India Overheating?
The government says no. The evidence suggests otherwise.

India overheats..
India cannot run as fast as China without further reform (from the Feb 1st print edition of
The Economist (available in full only to subscribers)

The Indian tiger is on the prowl. This week, in an apt piece of symbolism, Tata Steel, which dates back to the days of the Raj, leapt into the league of top producers when it bought Britain's Corus, which includes the steelmaking remnants of the old imperial power. Nor is Tata alone: younger Indian companies such as Infosys and Wipro are storming international markets.…

Unfortunately, you'll have to read the full article in The Economist itself (aah... no...trust someone to infringe copyrights...here is a link to the article. I am very divided as I link to this URL!). Also, an interesting discussion thread about the Economist article at the Indian Economy Blog.

The topic has been raised by others in December 2006 too, much before the press this month with the Economist cover story and its burning-tail-tiger cartoon on the cover

And finally.... I agree that we are over-heating in other ways too... as witnessed by me last week in Mumbai with temperatures soaring to a humid 35C in January... but lets not get me started on global warming now ...esp. with the temperature a frigid 12F (feels like -3F) here this morning... :)

Mint - India newspaper

On a personal front, I have lost any notions/illusions I had of being a 'writer' after reading the blog posts of Chandrahas Choudhury and Jai Arjun, whose blog I have highlighted before. I could never write this well! These guys are well read in the blogosphere and will hopefully slowly change the face of journalism in India in the near future.

During a recent trip home, I was so sickened by reading the tabloidish, nonsensical fluff in mainstream media publications in India, replete with the worst possible English - chockful of grammatical misconstructions and crazy sentence construction. It is easy to deride how bad Indian newspapers have gotten over time but maybe I just know better now through exposure to excellent journalism and articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, etc., and magazines like New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, etc. So the argument could perhaps be made that things have not gone any worse now in Indian media circles than what they always have been - the denouement of the newspaper to a tabloid-ish tone notwithstanding. Afterall, a movie review to us has traditionally been the nonsensical stuff from the likes of Khalid Mohamad and not the stuff that a Roger Ebert or a Pauline Kael indulges the readers with..

If you want to understand better where I am coming from -- here is an excerpt from something Khalid Mohammad wrote last week in the Hindustan Times, that I transcribed after recoiling in horror.... is this even English!!

Just yesterday, he thought I was a snake. And I thought he was a porcupine. To comprehend what made him behave the way he did - tetchy, suspicious - I sought to pub his mind-set. Well what the hell, after much air-clearing, I found an actor who feels that much wrong has done to him by the pen scrawlers. To give the Kal ka khiladi and today's versatile performer his due, straight off I asked him if he felt he can handle the arch-competition from the Khans, the Bachchans, plus the upcoming insta-fame kids on the block. To which he responded without hemming and hawing. So in the classic tradition, here are excerpts from our conversation.. conducted in a frigidaire cold vanity van parked on the helipad of Film City.

Need I say more?

However, there is hope.... so far, I like the content and quality of the articles I have seen so far in a newly launched newspaper in India called Mint. It is a collaboration between Hindustan Times and Wall Street Journal and is in a nifty Berliner format.

You can always go back home

Woman on the wrong bus lost for 25 years

A woman who boarded the wrong bus on an attempted shopping trip from Thailand to Malaysia has returned home after 25 years. Jaeyana Beuraheng told her eight children she accidentally boarded a bus bound for Bangkok instead of Malaysia, and once there she boarded a second incorrect bus because she could not read or speak Thai or English, The Times of London reported Wednesday.

Beuraheng, who speaks only the Yawi dialect used by Muslims in southern Thailand, said the noise and traffic of the big city confused and disoriented her, leading her to board the second wrong bus to Chiang Mai, near the border with Burma. The woman said she spent five years begging on the street in the city and was often mistaken for a member of a hill tribe because of her dark skin tone. She was arrested in 1987 on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant and was sent to a social services hostel when authorities were unable to determine her origins. However, last month, three students from her home village arrived at the hostel for training, and they were able to communicate with Beuraheng and help her find her way home.

No walking while on Ipod!

I am all for smoking bans and ban on cell phones while driving and maybe even trans-fat bans in resteraunts... but isn't this taking policing to new dismal levels... anyways, no more swaying to music as you walk around in NYC, it seems..

New York may ban gadgets while crossing street

New Yorkers who blithely cross the street listening to an iPod or talking on a cell phone could soon face a $100 fine. New York State Sen. Carl Kruger says three pedestrians in his Brooklyn district have been killed since September upon stepping into traffic while distracted by an electronic device. In one case bystanders screamed "watch out" to no avail.

Ro-oo ya Has-oo

Or in other words, I cannot make up my mind if I should rejoice at the amazing new find of a rare species or cry at the loss of an amazing creature...

Rarely seen 'living fossil' shark caught off Tokyo

A goblin shark -- a rarely seen species often called a "living fossil" -- was caught alive in Tokyo Bay but died after being put on display, an aquarium said. The grey, long-nosed shark was caught in fishermen's nets around 150 to 200 metres (500 to 650 feet) deep. It was discovered by officials of the Tokyo Sea Life Park when they took a boat with local fishermen on January 25.

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Related links: A piranha seems tame compared to the Candiru (via.) Also, see an ocean sun-fish and a rare shark captured on film, and a not--so--lucky giant squid. Also, be amazed by the bio-diversity in Antartica.