Badlapur Review ... Bollywood movie of the year 2015

While seeking revenge, dig two graves - one for yourself.
                                                      ~ Douglas Horton

I have been meaning to review Badlapur for quite a while now, but couldn't get my lazy ass to do it. Finally with nothing better to do, I decided to give it a shot. Badla (Revenge) is one of the most basic of human urges like love, lust and jealousy. Everybody has felt that urge at least once in their lives. But most of us think of revenge in the heat of the moment, thankfully not many of us have the nerve or tenacity to plan & execute revenge. Often the thing that keeps us from exacting revenge is life itself, we get busy with living & learn to forgive & forget. But what if everything you live for is snatched away from you in an instant, what would you do? 

1. End your life
2. Live for the sole purpose of exacting revenge on the person(s) who ruined your life 
3. Or do you live & learn to forgive & forget.

Badlapur is the story of a man who chooses to live the 2nd option. But unlike most films on this theme, Badlapur is as much about the antagonist as it is about the protagonist. I was careful not to choose the word villain & hero in the previous sentence, because in my opinion the movie had neither in the conventional sense. 

Raghu, played by Varun Dhawan is a young man with a beautiful wife and cute little son, living a seemingly happy life. But his life gets upturned one day by 2 bank robbers who kidnap his wife & son & hijack their car to flee from the scene of crime. During the escape the kid falls from the car in a freak accident and in the ensuing scuffle between the robbers & Raghu's wife, she gets shot accidentally by one of them. One of the robbers, Layak (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) then asks his partner Harman (Vinay Pathak) to jump from the running car and run away with the loot. Layak gives himself up to the police and tells them that his partner masterminded the crime and killed the lady. He is innocent as he was just driving the car. 
When Raghu reaches the hospital he finds his son dead & his wife breathing her last. In the days following the crime the police Inspector in charge, played by Kumud Mishra tries hard to beat a confession out of Layak & force him to give up the whereabouts of his partner. He is unable to do either. Raghu hires a lady private investigator to find out more about Layak. She finds out that Layak has a mother who runs a tea stall and a girlfriend named Jhimli (Huma Qureshi) who is a prostitute. Raghu visits Jhimli and entices her with a lot of money if she can find out about Layak's partner. Jhimli doesn't take the bait as she believes Layak is innocent. Raghu finds himself helpless and wanting even as the court sentences Layak to life imprisonment.
Raghu wanders the streets aimlessly for a bit, his state of mind is beautifully captured by Arijit Singh & Rekha Bharadwaj in the song Judaai. He then completely drops off the grid, takes up residence in a small town outside Mumbai called Badlapur waiting for Layak to get out of prison.

All this happens in the first 30 minutes of the movie. The next 40 minutes or so belong to the inimitable Nawazuddin Siddiqui. This movie wouldn't have been half as good without Nawaz in it. Nawaz hit the right balance between charming & creepy that made his character much more interesting that any other in the film. I will leave out the rest of the story for all those who haven't yet seen the movie. The story takes many winding twists & turns from this point on with Raghu & Layak each trying to better the other. While Layak tries different ways to get out of prison and run away with his share of the loot which his friend is still holding for him; Raghu plans to stop him in his efforts and find out the whereabouts of Layak's partner, who he believes is his wife & son's killer. Both Raghu & Layak have their lives consumed by a single purpose, often seesawing between desperation & frustration. As the story unfolds you come to realize that each of them is living in his own hell, unable to break free. The boundaries between good & evil are blurred and you find yourself questioning who is the villain here? In the end the movie is about two lives destroyed, one by revenge and another by greed. There is some redemption though, but you will have to watch the movie to find out for whom. 

The director was able to capture the lingering meaninglessness of the lives of both the characters in a subtle and non intrusive way. There was a conscious effort by the director to mask some of the more intricate scenes in the movie with light humor. The most notable of them was a fake sex scene between Raghu & Koko (Radhika Apte). Another great feature of this movie was its handling of the subject of lust. It can be difficult to grasp the importance of this topic when you watch the movie for the first time, but I was able to understand this better on my 2nd viewing. When a man looks permanently distraught from the loss of his wife & child, it is easy to think of him as bereft of love & happiness, but the director reminds us, twice, that he is also a man of flesh & blood driven by lust but torn between the need for gratification & the guilt associated with it.

The acting was generally good and the casting I will say was near perfect except for Varun Dhawan. Varun Dhawan tried his best although his emotions or lack of it was often overshadowed by his beard. Kumud Mishra, Radhika Apte, Huma Qureshi & Divya Dutta all did justice to their roles. But Nawazuddin Siddique took the cake with his effortless performance. I especially liked the chemistry between Nawaz & Huma, reminded me of Gangs of Wasseypur.

2015 was a disappointing year for Bollywood in my opinion. Detective Byomkesh Bakshy & NH 10 are probably the only other 2 noteworthy movies of the year. I was disappointed by Bombay Velvet, although not as much as most people, and I frankly didn't understand what the hell Piku was about. Badlapur was the movie of the year for me, I am waiting eagerly for Sriram Raghavan's next.

Review - Anurag Kashyap's Ugly

When you wait for nearly 2 years to watch a movie, you want it to be good, reeeaallly good. You almost want to be swept off your feet by the movie. Ugly was 1 such movie, its release was delayed due to a protracted and some would say unnecessary battle between Anurag Kashyap and the Censor Board. When it finally was released thousands of AK fans rushed to the theatres to watch it with huge expectations in their minds. I was one of them. I was not disappointed, but I wasn't swept off my feet either. It felt more like I was hit hard on the back of the head. And then I realized my expectations were wrong. I was waiting for an Anurag Kashyap movie not a Christopher Nolan one. How could I expect to be swept off my feet? Anurag Kashyap has delivered one of the most dark and disturbing movies I have seen in recent times. In a way he has gone back to his basics. The feeling I got after I walked out of the theater was quite similar to what I felt after watching Boys Don't Cry and Revolutionary Road. The film true to its name is an ensemble of some of the most selfish and wicked characters you can find. But unlike the rich and powerful mob bosses or politicians we are used to watching as villains in most Bolywood movies, the characters here are common people, even the cops in the movie seem all too familiar, not unusually wicked or corrupted but abrasive enough in their behaviour to make you want to stay away.

There is a police station scene towards the beginning of the movie. A man whose daughter went missing has gone to the police station with his friend to lodge a missing persons complaint. The cops there are more interested in knowing how to save a picture as a caller id in the mobile than to look for his daughter. And the hapless father sees that his only option to get them to move on with the investigation is to show the damn inspector how to do it. I guess many of us would have faced similar indifference from the police. And that's the beauty of the scene. In an otherwise grim movie this scene provides comic reprieve but as the scene moves along you start feeling that this is real life, this is how most police stations work in India. And its then amidst the humour that you start feeling for the father and the missing child. The scene its said was planned for just 1.5 mins but it dragged on to more than 10 mins as the actors kept improvising. Anurag Kashyap is one director who doesn't stay bound to his script. He goes by his gut feel.

The story in one line is about the search for a missing child. But the movie is more about the characters than the plot itself. There are lots of characters all with their hidden crooked agenda behind the case. There is an alcoholic mother, a struggling actor for the father, a strict and honest but regressive senior cop who spies on his wife, a casting director who is the father's friend and financer and many more. And some of the characters are related to each other by some twisted connections and circumstances that makes the whole ensemble look like a spider's web. The plot has lots of twists and turns giving the feel of a whodunnit, but the truth when it surfaces paints a sorry picture of human nature. Anurag Kashyap has the knack for looking into the dark recesses of human nature and dig out pessimistic stories from there. In that regard Ugly is probably his most pessimistic.

Moving on. I will remember this movie more for its music and some scenes in particular than anything else. The background score composed by Brian McOmber totally gels with the plot and theme of the movie. 2 songs in particular are stuck in my memory - Money by Christopher Stanley I think was composed for this movie. and the other One day baby we'll be old by Asaf Avidan an the Mojos an Israeli rock band. AK has some taste in music !!

Talking about the memorable scenes, I have already mentioned one.

• In the 2nd one there is a dark quarter in a police colony in Mumbai where the police has kept Rahul Bhatt, father of the missing girl who is also a suspect in the case, locked up. A dotor accompanied by a policeman comes to the quarter to check him, to see if he was fit enough to be produced in court without the court raising questions over police brutality. When the guys enter the quarter, we see a dark room with just a 15 W bulb glowing, while the policeman proceeds to open another door that leads into a 2nd room, the doctor keeps staring at the camera, a look of shock in his eyes. They enter the room where the father is locked up, there is a scuffle there and Rahul Bhatt frees himself, takes the cop's gun, ties both the cop and the doctor up and takes off. But again while he is leaving he can't but stare at the camera again with a shocking expression. And then the camera moves around to show the audience what the actors were staring at. I just loved the way this scene was shot.
• The 3rd one is in the police lockup. The police has locked up Chaitanya, Rahul's friend and manager who is their 2nd suspect in the kidnapping. They have tried their best to beat him into confessing but it hasn't worked. Then they ask Rahul to confront his friend and get him to blurt out the truth. Chaitanya of course is not a saint, he has been lying to the police but its not entirely clear whether he is behind the kidnapping. When Rahul starts asking him some difficult questions, raising suspicions over his actions, Chaitanya launches into a tirade full of expletives against his friend. In this 2-3 mins scene I didn't count how many times he uses the word "bh****ke" and "ma*****od" but let me assure you it was plenty, almost 1 after every 2-3 other words. The interesting thing is till then, we haven't seen Chaitanya utter these 2 swear words at all, he doesn't look like a habitually abusive person. It captures beautifully how some people react when they are caught in an uncomfortable argument. They try to bully their way out of it. On the one hand Chaitanya is trying to counter every accusation his friend is making with a proper reason and on the other hand he is showing his disappointment in his ungrateful friend by abusing him, all the while shouting and swearing to force a quick end to the conversation.

Ugly's cinematography by Nikos Andritsakis is brilliant. Nikos has worked with Dibakar Bannerjee in Shanghai and LSD before. Through his camera he has made the dark look beautiful. The stand out actor in the movie was Girish Kulkarni, a National Award winning Marathi actor who plays a cop. Tejaswani Kolhapure as the depressed alcoholic mother of the missing daughter is also convincing. Ronit Roy as usual is good but I am afraid he has gotten himself stereotyped in Bollywood from where he will find it hard to come out. I was not convinced by Rahul Bhatt's acting who played the girl's father. I heard that he used to be AK's roommate during his struggling years, maybe that's why he got the part. I was also not entirely convinced about the movie's ending, I felt it left some questions unanswered. But I will leave it to you to judge that.

Ugly is a must watch for all Anurag Kashyap fans, but whether its his best, I am not so sure. Actually I would rather not think about it.

For all those who have watched Ugly, watch this. It's a short prequel that AK made. It narrates the events leading to Kali's birth called Kali Katha. Those who haven't watched Ugly don't watch this. Watch the movie first.

And here's the song One day baby we'll be old by Asaf Avidan an the Mojos -

Haider - a short review

I intend to write a longer review of Haider, but I will wait to watch it once more at least, on DVD to write a full review. That will also allow me to discuss the plot without spoiling the movie for whoever reads the review. To put in short Haider is a gem, may even be VB's best, but I will reserve the judgement till a second viewing of the film. Vishal Bharadwaj in my opinion has been able to capture the true essence of the great Shakespearean tragedy of Hamlet. Now I am no expert on Shakespeare, but you don't need to be one to assess why Hamlet is considered as one of his more tragic, if not the most, of all his tragedies. And Haider validates that feeling, with an omni present aura of impending gloom and dread through out the movie. 15-20 minutes into the film you will start getting a feel that this story is not going to end well, and the more you watch the feeling gets worse. And that is VB's towering achievement. He was able to create that sense of doom & despair with not just the expressions on the characters' faces, but with superb cinematography and a brilliant background music. Kashmir's landscapes looked at once beautiful, dangerous and depressing through cinematographer Pankaj Kumar's (Ship of Theseus) lenses. I also came to know that the screenplay is jointly written by VB and Basharat Peer, a famed journalist who wrote the book Curfewed Night on Kashmir. Haider has several incidents from that book. The acting was superb by everyone, including Shradhha Kapoor, but Shahid Kapoor was the one who stood out. The story was about Haider's mental turmoil, and Shahid Kapoor managed to look every bit as troubled & tormented as he was supposed to be. His deterioration from an innocent and calm young boy to a delirious and dangerous man consumed with revenge was meticulously scripted and deftly portrayed by Shahid himself. Some scenes stand out - like the one where he is standing at Lal Chowk Srinagar, with his head shaven, and speaking to a moderate crowd through a megaphone - "Hello, hello 1 .. 2.. 3 mike testing, awaaz arahi hai ...". Or the one where he ponders on whether "to be or not to be (revengeful)" with a gun in his hand. The dialogues were very well written too, some of them I believe translated as is from the original play. Haider's complex relationship with his mom was also very well written as it was central to the plot. I will not discuss the story, I will leave it for later. To sum up Haider is a must watch, for connoisseurs of cinema. Go watch it if you haven't already.

Interstellar Review

This review contains spoilers. So if you haven't watched the movie don't read it.

I have always been a fan of Space Operas. Floating through vast stretches of nothingness is a singular experience, I may never know that feeling for real but I am content with the virtual cinema experience. But making a good Space Opera is no mean feat. The visual effects and the technology have to be meticulously crafted to give an authentic feel. I can think of only a handful of films that have done that successfully. Kubrick's 2001 is of course at the top of the list, followed by Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity and Danny Boyle's Sunshine. And then Nolan decided to make Interstellar to reset the queue. Interstellar does complete justice to the word Opera, in fact it sets the bar quite high for future space films to reach. Nolan transported me to a hitherto unknown and unseen world from which I did not want to return. There were some breathtaking shots of Saturn's rings, the blackhole called Gargantua and mile high tidal waves that made me want to leave my planet and go on a space voyage. This was the most visually enhancing space experience I have had till date, and just a year back I had thought that Gravity would be difficult to beat ...

Let me give you a brief recap of the story. Sometime in the future the earth gets afflicted with Dust Storms and crop failures. There is food scarcity world over and the dust has become a permanent feature of everyday life. The American Govt has shutdown NASA as the need of the hour is farming and food production and not space research. And to drive the point further, the Govt has modified science textbooks to teach kids that the 1969 Moon Landing was fake, done just to rattle the Soviet Union and increase their space budget !! I loved this part. Coop (Matthew McConnaughey) is a retired NASA pilot who like everyone else is a corn farmer now. He lives with his 2 children and father-in-law. Coop's daughter Murph has an imaginative mind and she believes there is a ghost in her room who throws books from the shelves. Coop after ignoring her daughter for a while one day actually observes strange phenomenon in that room himself, but being an engineer he is able to understand that Murph's ghost is actually a gravitational anomaly. And one day that anomaly leads Coop and Murph to a secret underground location where NASA is still active. He meets his old professor Dr Brand (Michael Caine) there who tells him that this planet is not meant to be saved, its meant to be left. NASA, or whatever is left of it has been secretly working on a mission to find other inhabitable worlds where humanity can be moved to save them from extinction. To help them in their quest "they" most likely extra-terrestrial beings from a higher dimension have placed a wormhole in our Solar System near Saturn that allows you to jump through space-time to another galaxy far far away where there could be earth like planets. NASA has already sent 13 manned missions through this wormhole out of which they have been getting promising signals from 3. They ask Coop to pilot one last flight to save humanity, travel to these 3 planets and find a new home for mankind. If a suitable planet is found there are 2 plans to save mankind - Plan A where Dr. Brand will figure out a way to take the entire population of the earth to this new planet. And that would involve unlocking the secrets of gravity and jumping into another dimension. Plan B was to send some frozen fertilized human embryos with Coop's mission who would enable humanity to grow once again after everyone on earth are wiped out in case Plan A fails. Coop is to be accompanied by 3 scientists in his flight, one being Dr Brand's daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway). Murph doesn't want to let her father go as she is scared he may not return, but eventually Coop leaves promising her that he will return 1 day. Coop and 3 others then set out for their journey into outer space, they travel through the wormhole and explore 3 planets one by one, the last of which becomes humanity's next destination.

A lot of things happen during Coop's space adventure which I have omitted for brevity's sake. Some of it made scientific sense and some didn't. As the film progressed the science became more and more obscure and slightly difficult for the layman to follow. Unfortunately there were some glaring mistakes in Interstellar's science which Phil Plait (an astronomer himself) has written about here. That's surprising considering that renowned astro-physicist and black-hole expert Kip Thorne was a consultant for this film. I suggest you to read Phil Plait's blog to understand all the scientific errors he has mentioned. I personally feel  a science fiction book/movie is allowed to take liberties with the science to a certain degree, if it serves the story's purpose but I was shocked/confused by 2 points which I will mention here and which Phil Plait has also mentioned. It was too high a leap of faith that Nolan was asking me to take, and I wasn't prepared for it -

1. 2 planets revolving around a giant black hole which are considered habitable with organic matter. Where did they get the heat and light from? Black holes are known to absorb all sorts of energy from their surroundings.
2. How did Coop manage to cross the event horizon and enter the black hole? His space shuttle should have been fried or torn to pieces when he attempted that. Even if I consider that the tesseract built inside the singularity was to protect him from disintegrating but I am confused how he even reached there. Although this part was central to the film's plot, maybe that's why Nolan just decided to go with it.
3. And I am adding a 3rd here as a bonus. The dialogue where Amelia compares love to a higher dimensional entity, something that we don't fully comprehend because we don't understand higher dimensions and hence dismiss as irrational. Duh ... I didn't like it.

And then there was the question of "they". The film implied that "they" were actually not higher dimensional beings but humans from the future who had unlocked the mysteries of higher dimensions and hence had built that tesseract inside the black hole which Coop uses to communicate with his daughter in the past. I thought a lot about this, and I am still confused. It's an example of the Bootstrap Paradox or the Ontological Paradox, a term frequently used in context with Time Travel. This trick has been used in several sci-fi films/books before, doesn't make it any less mind boggling. More details here.

The scientific glitches aside Interstellar's message was loud and clear, and that for me was the winner!
The message was two fold -

• The first was that human beings are capable of doing anything to survive, sitting and waiting to die is just not us. In a way Nolan was urging the scientific community to strive harder and explore the vast uncharted Universe, although we aren't faced with any imminent danger right now, but who knows what future has in store. If we want we can do it. Maybe all that we need is a leap of faith. True that Chris Nolan. I am with you on this. All the greatest discoveries in science have been leaps of faith - take relativity for instance. To this day people are overawed by it. Just because one crazy guy (Albert Einstein) had the vision and courage to take that leap of faith. 
• The second message isn't a new one but nevertheless a classic - love and human connection transcend the boundaries of space and time. A father will do whatever it takes, travel through black-holes, jump dimensions and what not to keep the promise he made to his daughter.

All in all Interstellar makes for one experience which will remain with you for a long long time. I am planning to watch it again, and again and again ...

The rightful package

Recently I was offered a big (big is a relative term) amount as pay package from a software company.  While I am still in the process of deciding whether to take up the offer or to wait and look for other better offers, I thought it was worthwhile devoting some time to pondering on this question which has been on my mind for some time – “How much an employee should be paid?” A question whose answer every company needs to decide before hiring. But a company’s answer to this question maybe driven by selfish reasons, and each company’s decision will differ from others’.  Hence to answer this question objectively we will need to put more thought to it. This essay is an attempt to finding an answer to this question, through an objective analysis of facts ... well as objective as possible. I am not an expert in economics, so my musings may not be economically correct, but I am an observer of my country and my times hence I will try to look for an answer from that point of view. Also since I have observed the Indian software industry more closely than any other, my observations and theories will hover around the same.

I think the question of The Rightful pay package can be broken down into 2 parts –

1.   How much does one deserve (to be paid)
2.   How much does one need (to maintain a reasonable lifestyle)

The second question is much more difficult to answer than the first, and I doubt if it is ever considered by organisations in the real world while deciding pay packages for employees. While the first question is more likely to elicit unbiased and reasonable responses, the second question is bound to succumb to subjective definitions of the word reasonable. Hence I will tackle the easier question first. But before trying to look for answers it would be appropriate to give a bit of a background.

The Indian software Industry - Since the 90s there has been a boom in software jobs in India. So much so that a software professional’s life has become kind of synonymous with the good life. Some people may disagree with my view, because often we s/w engineers have been called cyber coolies and there is a section of people who think exactly the opposite – that a software engineer’s life is a bad life. I would say although this view exists, it’s in minority. I believe the predominant view among the middle class is that software jobs are good and software professionals lead comfortable and affluent lives. The primary reason for this belief is the salary that software engineers draw and the percentage of them living abroad. In India the biggest attraction towards a software job has been its onsite opportunities or in layman terms the opportunity to work abroad especially in the US. This has over the years also resulted in an incorrect belief in the minds of people (who are not part of the s/w industry) that the s/w engineers living or working abroad are surely better than those that are working in India. This is not necessarily true, most software engineers know it, but I will not digress into this discussion. With more and more software jobs appearing in the market due to globalisation and the profitability of outsourcing, the software engineer’s salary has been constantly on a rise. This is also perpetuated by rising inflation and a growing trend of consumerism in the cities. But a software engineer’s handsome pay package has a little more to do with than just industry demand.

Hiring* - While people in the software industry like any other industry are recruited based on their skills and expertise, their salaries are not always proportionate to their abilities. More often a software engineer’s salary is determined by his previous salary and his ability to bargain (for more). Hence a secret mantra (now no longer a secret) of earning more in the s/w industry is to keep switching jobs. A person who has worked for more companies in a given period of time invariably earns more than a person who has stuck with one company for the same duration. This system I believe is grossly wrong and discriminating. A person’s salary should be only proportional to a combination of his abilities and years of experience, irrespective of how many companies he has worked for or how well he can bargain. This system has led to glaring inequality in salaries across the software industry and is being wrongly taken advantage of by companies and employees alike. Most companies often do not bother to raise the salaries of their employees more than a minimum percentage, unless they resign and bargain for a raise. While the same companies will pay a new lateral employee much more than what they pay to an existing employee with same skill sets and experience. Another not so palpable evil of the system is that, it has made people greedy.  As some wise man said – “A raise is a raise for just about 1 week, after that it’s just your salary.” This leads to an insatiable desire to earn more, it’s never enough. One is bound to ask the question then, why do some people keep working for the same company for years at a stretch at all? Although the number of people working for the same company for more than 5 years is quite less, but there is a good number of people who stick with a company for 3-5 years. There are a number of reasons for that –

1. People are not adventurous. They are happy with the status quo and don’t want to make the effort to go and look for other jobs.
2.  Some people value job security more than a high pay package. This is seen more among the experienced people with families. Joining a new company has its share of uncertainties; some people don’t want that uncertainty in their lives.
3. Some people, although a small percentage are actually happy with their jobs and salaries and see no reason to change.

Here I have not counted those people who are not good enough to qualify/clear job interviews, they are holding on to their existing jobs by virtue of having been worked there for some time.

How much does one deserve? - But I have not yet answered the question – “How much does one deserve?” There is no standard answer to this question even if we limit our jurisdiction to the software industry. I am not sure how a person’s contribution to a project/software can be quantified, but if there was some way to do that reasonably this question could be answered. I am sure companies have some justification and thought behind the salary structures they design for different levels of employees, but I feel that justification maybe less rational and more prejudiced. I will cite a personal example here. In my last project I worked with a very talented and knowledgeable fresher (he was an M.Tech though). My package was roughly 3 times his. If I take out the value-of-experience factor, there was not much difference between his contribution and mine to the project. If anything he was probably a better Java developer than me and some others in the team. But just because he was a fresher he had to be content with a modest package. I took this simplistic example because I could feel the disparity closely in this particular case, the criteria for deciding the salaries of higher management maybe more complex and to quantify their contribution to the company more difficult. To sum up, I feel if a person is being paid more than what his/her contribution to his/her company/project deserves, he is being overpaid.

How much does one need? - Now coming to the question of - “How much does one need?” or to put in other words “How much is enough?” It’s a question frequently asked by environmentalists and socialists and deliberately ignored by capitalists. The definition for “enough” is relative; it is different for different classes of people. Since we are talking about salaries here, I think any salary that lets a person and his/her family maintain a decent and comfortable standard of living and provides for all the necessities, should be enough. But here is the problem. It is probably wrong to expect a person to continue maintaining the same standard of living throughout his life and not strive to improve it if he can. Along with that an economy following this kind of model is bound to become stagnated and sooner or later plummet into recession. Hence answering this question is considerably more difficult than the first. I have personally experienced that the “enough” is often defined by the limits to my spending capabilities. When I earned 15k per month, it was enough for me; I adjusted my lifestyle to manage within my salary limits. I paid less rent and lived in a modest house, I had a relatively cheap mobile, I used to watch morning shows at PVR in the weekends and bought less clothes and accessories. But this was 5 years back. Goods and services have become dearer since then. To maintain the same sort of lifestyle I would probably need 25k now. But not withstanding the effects of inflation, I have managed to increase my expenditure constantly with my rising income, and in the process I have discovered – “It’s never enough.” Part of the blame for this realization goes to my ever increasing desires and part of it goes to the rampant consumerism that modern India is experiencing. It’s no longer just about providing for oneself and one’s family, it’s about showing off one’s power of spending.

In a country where the disparity between the poor and the rich is so huge, where 32 % of the population is below the poverty line but 11 Indians feature in the Forbes list of richest billionaires, and the richest among them decided to flaunt this disparity by building a 27 storied house maintained by a 600 member staff just for his family; I find this trend disturbing. But then what is the solution? The only solution I can think of is Govt. Regulation over salaries and spending. But that would make us socialists! I am not sure if living in a socialist economy would be worse than living in a capitalist economy. The entrepreneurs and industrialists who have lived through the age of the License Raj would have something to say about that for sure.

I would end this discussion here. I have reached the limits of my knowledge on the matter and my thinking abilities. I don’t think I provided any convincing answers to the questions I raised. Hopefully with time I will be able to refurbish my answers and present a more formidable case.

*hiring in other industries is probably done in the same manner but I am not aware of that hence I will confine my discussion to the software industry only.

Coriolanus - movie review

Coriolanus is one of the lesser known of Shakespeare's plays, which debutante director Ralph Fiennes (by no means a stranger to Hollywood  has adapted into a film, with some interesting changes. The movie is set in what looks like modern times - with TV news channels, mobile communication, modern arms and ammunition; but the language used by the protagonists is Shakespearean. Let me repeat this - Shakespearean. That's what makes the movie a difficult watch, it takes some time to get used to, but in general I could only comprehend about 40% of the dialogues. But never the less, the story is not difficult to understand. Coriolanus is the story of a military general Caius Martius(Fiennes) from a city that calls itself Rome, he is anointed with the title of Coriolanus for defending his city against the attack of the Volscian army led by Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler) in the battle of Corioles, but when Coriolanus runs for the post of Consul his pride and a general condescending attitude towards the people of the City of Rome lead to him being banished from the city. Coriolanus then vows revenge against the city whose loyal servant, he once was.

I will not give any more of that story out. Ralph Fiennes delivers a powerful performance, his expressions and his dialogue delivery gave me goose bumps. Ralph Fiennes has proved to the world again and again what a brilliantly versatile actor he is, his array of work probably is as diverse as it can get - the ruthless nazi in Schindler's List, the shy husband in The Constant Gardener, the hesitant and troubled man in The Reader, The menacing Voldemort in Harry Potter and now Coriolanus. Pity that he has been nominated for Oscar twice, but hasn't bagged one yet.

Vanessa Redgrave playing the role of Coriolanus' domineering mother also does justice to her character. One cannot but appreciate the work put in by the whole cast, to memorize the difficult dialogues and then deliver them with elegant poise.

There is an amount of willing suspension of disbelief expected of the audience to be able to appreciate the movie. After all  its an adaptation of a play written more than 400 years ago. But all in all I would still say, a Saturday night well spent.

The great Indian censorship dream

I don't understand this furore over censorship in social media. We have been pioneers of censorship ... always !! We ban controversial movie and book releases all the time. And we don't even need the Govt for that. Any Tom Dick Harry with a few strong muscular followers can do that any day and then assume some fancy name for their new formed group and formulate some ideology for themselves (coz ideology is required ... Ohh you've got 2 stand 4 something).

Worst case if Facebook and youtube is censored, the fun that we have by abusing and criticizing politicians ... well we would have to find some new pastime. There are plenty available in FB anyways !! 

I don't think Facebook will be banned though, there are a lot of companies whose main source of advertisement is Facebook, I am sure they won't let that happen. 

Censorship has always been a feature of our politics - as the Americans invade any country in the interest of national security, we censor anything in the interest of communal harmony. After all we have been neighbors to China for so long, we ought to learn something from them, good or bad. 

I don't feel angered at Mr Sibbal at coming up with such an outrageous idea of social media censorship, I don't think its outrageous at all ... at least not in India. What I am disappointed with is the cliched and hackneyed thinking on the part of the IT minister to take control over a dire situation. Any other minister in his position, no matter from which party he belonged, would have done quite the same thing ... or done nothing. If the Govt thinks that social media is fueling a lot of distrust and anger in the citizen's mind, what has the Govt done to build that trust back? Why can't they use the same social media to counter all those opinions ... Maybe they don't have anything to counter them with, maybe they don't have anything to show off now ... 

The Govt has already given up I feel, they themselves don't want to continue ... the kind of mismanagement they have shown in the past few months ... might encourage B Schools to create a new course in their curriculum called - How not to manage (The Congress Way). If the majority party can't have a hold over the parliament's proceedings, how could you expect them to do well in governing the country !! 

For all those who are reading this note (that's a big assumption on my part) and thinking whose side this guy is anyways? Well ... I am just a regular pessimist, I don't have to pick sides ... I just happen to know some English and like to show off my writing skills occasionally :)