I saw Jab We Met. And if you have seen Ahista Ahista then the 2hr. and 22 minutes you spend on the former are a complete waste of precious(due to majors) time. Well, the latter one was a little worth watching. Inspired by White Nights(yes yes the same one which inspired Saawariya)- a story by Fyodor Dostoevsky, it was a slow paced romance. Once again the songs proved to be the big bone of contention. This is the biggest problem with Bollywood movies. The songs completely slacken a movie's flow. But the way songs have been handled in No Smoking, I was very impressed by the approach. The songs were used to highlight certain thematic elements of the movie and in fact didn't seem to break the momentum which had been gathered.

In Ahista Ahista a boy(Abhay Deol) loves a girl(Soha Ali Khan), who has earlier eloped but is then betrayed by her boy-friend(Shayan Munshi(that if you know who he is!), and by the time he proposes her ex-boyfriend appears out of the blue and feeds her a thrilling story which she believes in and ditches the new guy in her life. Jab We Met goes one step further(kahaani mein twist) and the girl, now replaced by Kareena Kapoor, goes back to her new lover(here played by Shahid Kapoor).

So nothing new in fact.

Just to remind the reader, my major exams are going on. We are supposed to study for them. The reason being that the two hours per course which you are supposed to spend writing exam, are completely wasted. I am not denying that you need to sit through the whole exam, or sit at all. But just in case you are unfortunate... So it is better to study a little and then spew a lot. Thus wish me lots of best of luck and bid me farewell for now...

Analyze this...

For some time now, I have been thinking of sharing this link.

http://brokensandglass.googlepages.com/home

The anonymous person has beautifully expressed his feelings. I have no idea how often he updates these pages but only recently he added this page 'Wings of Butterfly'. The site also provides links to some bizarre sites that deal with The Metamorphois by Franz Kafka which can be rightly called 'King of the bizarre'.

To Markov chains and circuit relays...

I spent the whole day understanding stochastic processes and power protection. In between, to not to lose contact with reality, I read a few pages of Linguistics by David Crystal and the evergreen ToI.

Just to get a feel of Markov chains I wiki-ed the term and found that they are used in myriad applications. From Music theory to biology the usage was marvellous. Then I looked up Stochastic Process and found that the Brownian motion which is exhibited by pollen grains floating on water surface is an example of continuous-time stochastic process. A very interestingly comical link which I found was of Markov Bible. The Markov monkey claims that each time you open a book of the Bible, the content will be different from that obtained the previous time.

Though the practicality of what I was studying increased by enthusiasm, but the latter part of the theory couldn't keep me awake for long.

Next I went over to Power System Engineering and it proved to be much more soporific than its predecessor. Even the match wasn't interesting enough.Test matches have lost their sheen to the much more exciting 20-20 format. Who wants to wait for five days when three hours are enough to decide? The common man seems to have given precedence to instant satisfaction, over class and beauty(aesthetic contentment) which comes out in full flow only in Tests.

The relays and their hardware were too bizarre and gross to digest. So I switched over again to Linguistics. It told me the importance of communication and how it differs from language in a very fundamental way e.g. the mention of the word 'automation' by a manager can have far-reaching consequences for the company. The workers might consider it to be a threat pertaining to attrition. Whereas the manager simply wanted to stress upon efficiency and optimization. This is 'communication gap' which can sometimes wreak havoc upon the company. Another point it stressed upon was that the 'speaking form' of English is very different from the 'writing form'. What is actually taught is the latter one with almost negligible stress on the former -a subtle mistake upon the part of the linguists scholars and teachers.

The drag carries on to the next day which will then be carried to the next and next and so on. Procrastination is my way, otherwise it's the highway!

It has taken me five semesters to understand some basic facts. But the discovery of these obvious facts has been bewildering me for the past few days. Well, it's a pity that it took so long even when the first year would have been enough for a prudent and straight-minded being.

I have realized many things which will take a very long time to explain over here. I'll thus be precise and straight-forward in my dealings with the reader.

I could never imagine that some day I'll be such a hard-core movie buff. What is even more amazing is that this passion has come at an expense of academics, which I have willingly accepted. Considering that before coming to IIT I kept my nose to the grindstone, it was difficult for me to acknowledge this paradigm shift.

The best thing to happen to me is of course Quizzing. A wannabe quizzer, I am still surprised that how this passion developed in me. I can still remember how miserable I felt after attending the first quiz in August last year. It was a Format A event and the presence of so many people inside a tiny SAC Common Room, gave me fearful jitters. Moreover, the plight of sitting ignorantly and gaping at each question and its answer is too embarrassing to reminisce.

But I know I have come a long way since then and that's not even a drop in the ocean. Even now, many a times I'm left completely clueless as to what's going on. That's the beauty of quizzing. The more you learn, the more you are motivated to learn. People say that quizzing is just remembering some bizarre pieces of information. Well sometimes it is that way. But an experience of a year tells me that quizzing is much more than that. To put it simply it is just about being as much aware as you can be regarding your surroundings and your world. It has made me much more culturally aware and has helped me transcend that ignorance which is actually a void in common man's persona. It changes the way you perceive the world.

All this has put motors and transformers in the back-stage. What can I do? If they have failed to enrapture me then it is not my fault. I know how pitiably I studied the machines course. Though Signals and Systems was much more interesting, even then it doesn't hold that much importance which I have bestowed upon quizzing and cinema.

Are these times contagious
I've never been this bored before
Is this the prize I've waited for
Now as the hours passing
There's nothing left here to mature
I long to find a messenger

Have I got a long way to run...
- Collective Soul

It never has been better.....

In the past two weeks, I have seen over 10 movies. So, I don't have the patience to upload the poster for each one of those. Being Cyrus was the most bizarre film I saw last week. The same goes for the Herzog-Klinski nexus as seen in Aguirre, the wrath of God. Others include a documentary called Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky(On the sets of Offret) which gave profound insight into the direction style of the cinematic poet.

Haasil was the most horrible movie among the ones seen. Apart from a strong(yet cliched) performance by Irrfan Khan, there wasn't much substance in it. By the end, I was completely pissed off. Stupid songs, a silly good old love story and 2 hrs 40 min of pure nonsense. That's what it was! Actually someone had suggested me this movie. May be I do better by myself than listening to others(at least some of them) in matters as grave as cinema.

The others don't merit attention because they were kind of inconsequential. La vita è bella didn't meet my expectations. At least as compared to Schindler's List(which I saw four years back), the director didn't consider Holocaust as serious an event as it should have been. At only some instances, the movie appealed to my taste. But considering the insipid performance delivered by Roberto Benigni(who surprisingly won an Academy Award for it) and others, it failed considerably to satisfy me. Some may argue that the Holocaust was presented from a different perspective, but I believe that in the light of the most degenerate event in history of mankind, there is no scope of laughter and a cock and bull story of people playing game to win a tank.

I like the bizarre. I generally like pitting my wits and senses against something eerily unusual. I can't explain that different sense of satisfaction which is reached after doing this.

But I definitely need to cut down on my movie-watching time. Majors are just round the corner and am already in deep water in a couple of courses.

Very strangely, I haven't been able to read a book since I finished the great odyssey. Though I have started On the Road by Jack Kerouac and The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, yet I find them boring after reading a few pages. I suppose it is just that cycle which goes on time after time. After a few days, I may regain my tempo.