In Bruges…

I have just come back from the movie “In Bruges” starring Colin Farrell as Ray and Brenden Gleeson as Ken. The movie was so overwhelming that i had to note this experience down. I dont remember when was the last time a celluloid this sublime blew me away.Honestly speaking, the movie may or may not be very good and perhaps the unususal experience of the surrender of my indefatigability towards movies is a fleeting one as well. For the purpose that something stays of this moment, i write now.

The story of the movie is grim wherein three hitmen try to sort out their own right vs wrong and respectfully act according to their honour. The movie is in Bruges, Belgium where Harry has sent his two hitmen Ray and Ken to spend a good time so that Ken kills Ray because during his first job Ray killed a small boy by mistake. Harry, who is a man of honour wants Ray dead. Ray has become suicidal because that is the only way he sees to atone his sins.Ken knowing all this wants Ray to have another shot at life because he sees hope for him. 

The story line is grim but is underscored by some seriously good humour with allusions to the John lennon’s  murder,racist remarks, midget Vs dwarf mentality and great direction and superfluous number of  ”fuck”s for the rhetoric. This one definitely found a way into my all time favourite list.

(A & I) Donnie Darko – Part II

(Analyze and Interpret) Donnie Darko Part – I gave a very brief introduction of Donnie Darko but did not talk about the events how they happened. Did they happen the way they ought to happen or the story teller is merely making a fool out of me. Totally overwhelmed by the story, I had to find the right balance between the beauty, integrity,charm of the story and  the rationality,  chronology and  science involved in the events of the story. Was it schizophrenia ? Was it time travel ? Was it a alternate universe spawning along the lines of the original universe ? Was it all of this ?

My personal version of Donnie Darko is –  Donnie Darko was a bright lad or perhaps had a basic knowledge of portals, time travel and might have also had the knowledge of the cause and effect during these time travels (a.k.a. causality loops). He was also a schizophrenic. He  imagined the rabbit suited Frank. He imagined girl Gretchen whom he loved. In fact his delusions were so profound that he created an alternate universe in his imagination.

It might have happened this way. Donnie started to think about time-travel,  portal and the an object(the airplane wing) sent through the portal from the future.  Normally in the all the conventional paradoxes of time-travel like the ontological paradox, grandfather paradox, etc.  if someone or someting is sent through a portal from the future to the past then there is a scope that the events taking place because of this would not effect the events in the normal universe but instead would spawn an alternate or a parallel universe. For example, in a grandfather’s paradox, if one travels back in time and kills his own grandfather before the garndfather has met the grandmother, then his own birth would be jeopardized thereby triggering an alternate universe in which the time-traveller will not exist. Donnie knows about this theory and he spawns an alternate universe with Frank the rabbit to guide him in such a way so that Donnie does the needful in order to merge this alternate universe with the real universe in due course of time. And so the events take place in Donnie’s schizophrenic imagination leading to the point where his girlfriend dies and he himself kills Frank.  But in this version of mine, i cannot reason out the airplane wing crash which actually kills Donnie in the end.

But the actual crash of the airplane wing which kills Donnie is the turning point, the indiscernible , the inexplicable  and true beauty of the movie Donnie Darko. Whatever it may be,  this will be one of the best movies i have ever seen in the Sci-Fi genre.

Donnie Darko also has one of the most beautiful endings one can see on the celluloid. It plays a wonderful song “Mad World” by Gary Jules at the end and shows about all the people whose lives were touched by Donnie’s in the primary and the alternate universe. Perhaps i may never discern the actual meaning of the movie, perhaps there aint any. But what the hell, it is a beautiful movie.

Mad World by Gary Jules – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MyMOi4LEr4

(A & I ) Donnie Darko – Part I

Donnie Darko is the eponymous protagonist who also happens to be a paranoid schizophrenic and has stopped taking his medication. Ergo, Donnie now has a habit of sleepwalking. On October 2, while Donnie is in his bedroom, he is called by a voice and he leaves his bedroom to follow the voice. In this sleepwalk of his, he meets Frank – a hideous and menacingly huge rabbit. This rabbit tells him that the world is going to come to an end in 28 days. Meanwhile, a mortal airplane wing crash destroys Donnie’s bedroom.

Next morning , Donnie goes to school as always. Donnie’s family – Donnie, parents and two sisters are now staying in a hotel at the expense of the airport authorities, who themselves seem to be confounded by the airplane wing crash on the Darko family’s residence.

Days continue to pass fairly ordinarily after the October 2nd crash. But Donnie continues to sleepwalk, meet Frank and on his advice, vandalize school property, a celebrity house and so on. Meanwhile he also starts to like a girl named Gretchen. In the days, Donnie was going to school, meeting Gretchen and leading a normal life. But during the nights, he continues to sleepwalk and do as directed by the big rabbit Frank.

On October 30th, amidst Halloween day celebrations,also the day when the world will come to an end according to the prophecy of the rabbit Frank, Donnie alongwith Gretchen and two other friends goes to a house where he feels that he would find some answers. There, he lands up in a fight with some school bullies and in an unfateful accident, a car crushes Gretchen leaving her dead. Donnie loses control and kills the driver by putting a bullet in the driver’s right eye with a pistol. To his amazement, this driver is dressed in the same menacing rabbit suit just like Frank always does and name of the driver is also Frank.

Donnie takes the dead Gretchen in his arms and goes over to the top of some hill from where he watches the sky and sees the portal** from where the airplane wing came and crushed his room on October 2nd. The Date is now reset from October 30th back to October 2nd and Donnie is sleeping in his bedroom. And suddenly the airplane wing crashes in his room and kills Donnie. The movie ends giving the viewers a last look on all the people whose lives were touched by Donnie’s life before October 2nd and after October 2nd in the alternate unstable universe where Donnie had lived for 28 days more than in the real universe. The movie ended and i was not sure of what to make out of the feeling i had. I was not bored. Hell No, not a bit. It was more like an uneasiness which one feels when he does not understand a simple coherent line of thought which he has witnessed all along from its conception to its execution but has not understood fully.

At the end, i personally felt this biting uneasiness. The movie was progressing along so well and then suddenly i found that i missed the point, not by much, but missed the point nonetheless.

Part II of this post will analyze the theory behind sequence of events in Donnie and the interpretation of the one of the best Fictional movies ever.

** portal – A technological gateway between two distant locations in space or time.

Paradise Lost

All my childhood, cricket was the only game i knew. I would dream in my classes about the sixes i would hit that evening on the playground and if by one of the bleakest of the means they actualized, i spent the next day in the class thinking of how i could have gone on to actually hit a half-century. I was a total nut case, which normally all adolescent boys are. When it was a holiday, it was time to play. When it was about bunking school, it was time to play. When it was about taking a repose from the diligent study sessions before the exams, it was time to play. And there no no other meaning to the word play other than cricket.

Cricket was the only pastime i knew.Apparently the only time we did not play and stayed back at home also was to watch Cricket on Tele. I and my brother used to play Antakshari with cricketers’ names and the game lasted for several hours. Same was the story of almost all the normal young boys who have grown up watching Tendua , Dada, Jammy , Jumbo and VVS define what the words sublimity, resilience , endurance , courage, perseverance , elegance and hard work stand for.

I know we have not been the best cricketing team but we had our moments and over the last 10 years we have been having them too often. Hrishikesh Kanitkar hitting the boundary to stomp over the arch-rivals Pakistan by chasing the then highest ODI score of 314.Tempest Tendulkar swept the OZ bowlers in Sharjah when he hit back-to-back centuries and in a manner i had never seen before. Kasprowicz and Moody were hit for the best sixes ever. Dada improvising to hit Ntini , the RSA seamer, to hit a six on the square leg . Laxman’s maiden double ton in kolkata against one of the meanest bowling attacks in the world. Dravid was always there serving the purpose of a true aegis for the team. Kumble’s 10 wicket howl will always stand out as one of the greatest spells.

But now that era has started to come to an end. Like every beautiful possession is lost and every time well spent has to come to an end, we now see the era of the great Five ending. I know that the blog is redundant and this is the news now, but i write this to pay my regards to men who have been a part of my life and made sure that when i watched them play cricket i forgot everything else and relaxed. The great five when i remember what i remember will be – Sachin – majestically noble, Dada – princely tiger, Kumble – perseverance and endurance personified, Dravid – reliable and elegant, VVS – lazily sublime.

My childhood days are long gone.Things like cricket with these great players around used to make me remember how i grew up. Now even this is going to end. Cricket will never be the same for me. An Indian team without Sachin, Saurav, Rahul, etc. is imaginable but would not be COOL. There will be no more watching the cricket match with a bunch of crazy friends and shouting our wind pipes out. I do not watch TV the way i used to when i was a kid. But now there will be one less reason to turn it on.

Exit Light. Enter Night.

The day when Ratan Tata and Tata Motors walked out of Singur was marked as the beginning of the end of economic resurrection of West Bengal. The project to manufacture Tata Nano, arguably the world’s cheapest car, was of singular importance viz. economic development of the state. The project was the most important investment in the manufacturing sector in recent times. It could also have changed the commonplace attitude of the external world towards the investment options in the state.

It is an basic human instinct to leave an impression on as many people as possible and Ms. Bannerjee is no different. There was no other way she could have gained such unprecedented popularity. Emboldened by the success in the local panchayat elections in Singur, she, alongwith Krishi Jami Rakshya Committee (KJRC) stoked the insurrection by the so-called dissatisfied farmers and people who claim to have lost their lands. After all villains of the society must have people to look up to.

This Singur Nano problem is as irrational as the quota enforcement in the premier educational institutions. Irrational things can never be debated over but unfortunately events do not transpire the way they should. Rather than the media asking us to SMS them, to post comments on questions like “whether or not Tatas should leave Singur?”, it is much better for them to ask real questions like “who will get hit the worst due to the Tata ceding back ?” or “Can political mileage become so important that politicians can blatantly desecrate the very the ideals of communism for which it stands – the betterment of the community, society, the people as a whole?”

If even the government backed projects do not get implemented, should we not re-think what democracy means! Can the will of a few stall a government’s decision! Then there is little left to choose between an anarchy and a democracy.

One of the tags i have added to this blog is shame. What better epitome exists for “shame” on the day when even the masquerade that politicians exist for the overall betterment of the society was ripped off and the little hope for the talented people of Bengal to achieve economic prosperity in its fullest sense faded away.

How can we know about ourselves if we haven’t played a sport before?

The tagline sucks but i hope the blog doesn’t. A slightly distorted manifestation of the idea proposed by the great Chuck Palahniuk in his book “Fight club”.I took that line from the movie which is even more majestic and imposing.But i do not wish to delve into the arcane world of fight club, a real mindfuck!

Coming back to the tagline “How ……… before?”, Most of us who have a so-called normal life have a job we do not like. One would rather enjoy tilling the vast green fields of scotland.One would rather be a football scout travelling places and watching young talents play.A person can do a million other things more effectively than whatever he is doing now.

Man is the greatest robot invented by man. The life we are living is robotic with the experience of the same emotions daily as if chosen by a master.Any software pro experiences emotions not very different from any other software pro’s.For that matter they are not different from any other white collar’s emotions who is working a 9-5 job.Every person is different from another.He must be, thats what makes us unique and human.

But then there are always times when I have vicarious experiences.An epitome for the same is sports. Every time i see a Rooney piledriver, a great catch in the slip or a sloppy Dada in the outfield, reminiscence takes me. I become nostalgic. Every morning when i getup to jog i cannot run more than a kilometer and start panting, but when i am on that field i keep running continously for one and a half hours for the football and can still find the strength to fight the opposite team when in a feud.A surge of energy, the adrenaline pumping into my brain, i do not know where do they come from, but they do.
I am apathetic towards the insipidly palid day to day activities at my workplace.Who the hell cares if person besides me got married yesterday or if i do not know the names of every single person of the group.Why do i want to know all that? To act as if i do,it is not me, the real me is somewhere inside the deepest places of me.

In the day to day life, i am very friendly to all my peers, if they do something wrong to me i keep my cool, i let go. But when someone on my team drops a catch, or gives away a goal in the playground, ill scream at them, the profanity in me comes out with no regrets. So,when was i posing and when was i being myself? That is not even the question to be asked. The question is why am i posing at all? Why do i act different than someone who i am ? Why am I supposed to ostensibly manifest an artificial countenance upon my face?

The last time i was scared shitless was when i had three strikers coming on my goal with the football and no-one behind me. The last time i felt tense was before the penalty shoot-out that was to decide the fate of the tournamant. The last time i felt on the top of the world was when i hit that penalty.
I remember them because no longer do i experience those emotions.If someone does, he is doing what he is destined to do.It is when you are playing with people who are in the same state of mind as you are, apothegms like trust in others, believing in them suddenly start making sense. It is when one can understand what true team-work is.

I do not consider appearing for an exam scary, I do not consider appearing for a presentation to the client scary. I am no longer concerned about what my boss thinks of me. I no longer am concerned what is the befitting appraisal for me this quarter. This blog is not meant for sissies who would shit in their pants just by the very thought of flunking their semester. I am darn sure they never played a real game.As very correctly said, a man can only know himself if sees himself act under great depression, under state of great mental stress, as if in a war.We do not have any great war, we do not have great depression,games are the only ways through which i can see myself, i can be myself and i do.

An insight into the word “Linux”

When i was new to the linux OS, i heard new terms like free software, open source movement, kernel, gcc , etc. The biggest confusion was the difference between UNIX and Linux.Why is an operating system not being called by the name it has, Some say it is linux, some say it is UNIX but no one knows what the difference is.”What is the big deal ? the commands are all same”would be the obvious response. I may not be able to answer all these questions but i might be able to throw some light on issues which many first-timers on linux might be interested to know. Some of the questions i feel i have done justice to are like what is the difference between a Linux and a UNIX ? What is this free software and free software movement all about? And perhaps “Linux” might not entirely represent an operating system !!

(FREE AS IN FREEDOM and not as in FREE BEER)

 Free of cost is not the point in consideration. Even if one “buys” a proprietory software, one has to use it the way it is. One cannot customize the software pertaining to their needs. One cannot redistribute it. Imagine the world filled with proprietory software exclusively. One can not see and learn from source codes of applications they want to. People wont be able to learn from others’mistakes.The term “improvement” of the software will be restricted to the developer of the application and if that programmer goes blind or gets a brain hammeroage there ends the life of the software as well.Proprietory software hampers the knowledge sharing between the programmers of the world. Knowledge must be shared for the sake of technical advancement of the human race. What is the point of reinventing the bulb again.Had he not told us that, we would have been ten years backwards in technology than we are today.Effectively, proprietory software hampers the development of the technology.

Richard Stallman – Born in 1953, Richard Stallman is pioneer of free software movement. He went on to join Harvard for graduation in Physics in 1971. At that time, he started working in Al lab of MIT, where he became a hacker and he was called RMS(M for Mattew’) as mundane real names were no longer in vogue. He continued to work in Al lab after completion of his BA in Physics in 1974. As more and more programmers around the world started getting licenses and charge for their softwares, it was clear that proprietory software was going to be the norm. The event that made RMS realize the need of free software was when he and his fellow hackers wer not allowed the access to the source code of the Xerox printing machine(Code name “Dover”) for customizing the software for the intimation of completion of jobs to the users.He considered, and for that matter still considers, selling a software for money to be a crime against humanity.RMS initiated the GNU project in September,1983. The ideology was “to develop enough free softwares to get along without needing the services of softwares that are not free”.

Free software has the following characteristics:

1. The software can be run any number of times.

 2. The source code is free and provided with the software so that one can customize it to suit his/her needs.

3. The source code can be redistributed to any number of friends or relatives.

4. The software can be improved and can be redistributed among the public for their use.

Now to start with fulfilling the very basic need for any end computer user,one needs to have an operating system which is freely available. Fulfilling GNU’s objective, an OS that is compatible with UNIX was conceived because of the fact that UNIX was already well proved and it would have been easier for the UNIX users to switch to the new OS. There are many things that need to be developed for a full fledged operating system like compilers,libraries,editors,device drivers and ofcourse the kernel.

Free Software Foundation(FSF) was found in 1984 to support the GNU project by providing the funds which came from tax exempted donations. These funds were used to employ programmers to develop softwares for GNU.Finally the OS was released in 1992 after using a third party kernel made by Linus Torvalds and giving the name of the OS GNU-Linux.Though Linux is only the kernel part of the OS but the name Linux became popular.The operating system called “Linux” now has only the kernel named linux and GNU has provided the other basic functionalities like the GNU toolchain, GCC (GNU compiler ), debuggers, etc.. So the difference between a Linux OS and UNIX is evident now. FSF – Free software foundation – set up by Richard Stallman in 1985 to support GNU movement for the development of the free OS as conceived by its founder, Sir Richard Stallman.As far back as in 1983 GNU was initiated. GNU is GNU’s not Unix. my favourite acronym because it is different from all others. The recursiveness along with the capability for the speaker of the acronym to sing it out aloud (That’s what they say) makes it standout from all its peer acronyms Writing an operating system involves a huge amount of work. An operating system requires compilers, editors, text formatters, GUI, device drivers, etc ….along with the kernel, the heart of the operating system.The FSF has developed most of the things in which the emacs,GNU emacs, GNU compiler collection and the GNU debugger has been written by Sir Richard Stallman himself, the linux kernel coming from Linus Torvalds. “Linux” was the name of the doctoral thesis of Dr. Torvalds. Linux kernel is a third party contribution to GNU. X window system, a networking protocol for the GUI and display, is also a third party contribution.

Reflection >>Process the Instruction

Reflection is about modifying the code according to the needs arising during the runtime. In the normal scenario, the instructions are executed and the data is processed. Going by the ways of reflection, as the data comes in for processing, the instructions are processed according to the needs based on the data coming in. For an example, consider a group of objects in a single collection object being sent to a method. While extracting the various objects at the destination i.e. the method, the objects being of different types are to be type casted according to the object class types, so at the runtime the object name will give the class name and we can type cast the object accordingly. In reflection, we do not hard code the entire program, but we only say what is to be done when a certain kind of data is received. There are different kinds of reflection, usually the reflection by default refers to the type dynamic reflection which modifies the code duing the runtime. The other kind being of the static reflection that takes place during the compile time vis a’ vis preprocessing of the macros in a C source code.Reflection does not pertain to a programming language per se, but to the categories in which they come in according to the ways of compiling and execution.

Consider an example in Java,
without reflection,

Bank b = new Bank();int a = b.getAC();

Reflection is used,

Class c = Class.forName(args[0]);
Method m[] = c.getDeclaredMethods();
for (int i = 0; i < m.length; i++)
System.out.println(m[i].toString());

One of the disadvantages of using reflection is that the code is not very readily readable and nderstandable. The other problem is the that some errors that we get during compile time in the previous code may not occur here and will only show during the runtime.For example, giving a wrong class name will show up during the compile time in the first scenanrio and will show only in the runtime in the second scenario i.e. with Reflection.This makes it tougher for the programmer to debug.
The conventional execution of a program in C and other procedural languages is preprocessing, compiling, linking and running(i.e. conversion to native machine code for the results). Then there are languages which are interpreted like Lisp and then there are others where first compilation takes place and then interpretation of the bytcode is done like Java. Reflection works by using the structure of the code during the runtime. Languages like C/C++ do not support Reflection as the compiled code does not save the metadata of the structure. The interpreted languages do save the metadata, so also Java supports Reflection.

Why do people like Chelsea and Jose Mourinho ???

The blog could also have been like “Why do people hate Chelsea?”, but for me and many of my collegues who have been following the premiership for the past few years, the question is unanswerable, instinctive,visceral,something that is as trivial as the process of breathing itself. Whenever one starts to feel the heat of the premiership, the natural instincts drive his loyalty towards the stronger teams having good players. For me, an Indian, who had all the options to choose from, chose to be a partisan of Manchester United F.C. only because it had the great names like David Beckham,Ruud Van Nistelrooy and the legendry Roy Keane. Manchester United is not a team that was built in a single day. ManU like other great teams has a history to be proud of. It took a couple of months for the interest to metamorphose into passion.

The most challenging part in managing the football team is to build the team. Manchester United, Arsenal,etc. are already have elite ranked players. The job of managers of the teams who come in place of the relegated teams are perhaps the most difficult. They are not rich clubs. Perhaps their full year’s tranfer budget is less than a week’s wage budget of a rich team like Chelsea. Managing such teams is a challenge. Even teams like ManU and Arsenal have budget restraints.

Ever since Chelsea was bought by Roman Abramovich for 60 million pounds in 2003, the clubs fortune has changed. The club’s gaffer has invested over 300 million dollars and has incurred losses of 100 million dollars to the club. As far as Mr. Abramovich is concerned, it is no more than buying his children peanuts on a hang out. So forget the fact that Jose Mourinho is no businessman. The prodigal gaffer has time n’ time again created new records in the transfer market. The Andriy Shevchenko transfer has topped all EPL records at 30 million pounds. No other manager in the world will pay 30 million pounds for a 29 year old striker. Then again, with Ricardo Carvalho -27 million dollars, Essien- 24 million pounds, etc. and there are records still to be broken. There is nothing in the transfer market that money cannot buy, for everything else there is Mr. Roman Abramovich.

The real fans of football want to watch good football. We want to watch players who have a talent to develop into world class players. But what happens when a talent goes in a team where it is not recognised.Chelsea, undoubtedly, has one of the most deadliest squads in the world. But in the process what it is doing is keeping talented players away from the field. An epitome of the same is Shaun Wright Phillips. One of the main reasons of his exclusion from the England world cup squad is because Sir Sven Goran didnt have enough of his on field performances to look at.

Having the world’s best coaches to teach the world’s best talents, having the world’s best scouts to find the world’s best raw talents.Keeping world class players at every position and for also for the back up positions of the team doesnt test the manager’s skills.All you have to do is let them out in the field and there is always a very low probability that they’ ll loose. Even a ten year old can manage a team like that.

So where does Jose Mourinho come in…??? The prodigal gaffer!!!
All in all, for a team like Chelsea,whose wage budget exceeds many team’s transfer budget,it is not the manager but the perennial river Moolah flowing that manages and wins matches.

The Beginning…

Finally!!! Manchester United is doing what it does the best- being at the top. For some of the last seasons, ManU was in dire straits. There was a big hole created after the formidable four formation of the midfield broke. Keane, Beckham, Scholes and Giggs formed one of the deadliest midfields of all times. But after the departures of Roy Keane, David Beckham and the injury problems to Scholes, only Giggs was left behind on the left back.

Darren Fletcher and John O’Shea just filling in, could not do justice to the expections of ManU fans. Now with Cristiano, Carrick, Giggs and Scholes back, things are changing for the better. Ole Gunner Solksjaer, Rooney and Saha are doing their jobs pretty well up at the front. Nistelrooy leaving Old Trafford didnt hurt us much as most of us thought it would, because Saha is playing exceptionally well.

Louis Saha is one of those players who are underrated but have world class abilities. Cristiano and Rooney are the kind of players who even if not in the best of forms, are able to lift the morale of the team by their runs, skills and determination. These, alongwith the players like Zlatan Ibrahimovich, Edgar Davids are such a kind who keep up the tempo of the game and make others feel more confident as a team. The defense is going great guns. With the signings of Patrice Evra, Vidic the gaffer has again manifested the picture of his great experience and insight into a player’s abilities. This may well mark the beginning of a new era, or may bring back the golden era of Manchester United back. All in all, this is the new beginning.