Beware of the Blog

and they all shine on

2009-06-27T21:18:00.003-04:00

[link courtesy: Siddartha]

The Shiney Ahuja affair has already given the media enough to produce reams of speculative trash and jabber including meaningless discussions about morality, worries about the dark alleys of Bollywood (attention! paging Madhur Bhandarkar!) and general features on parties supporting and condemning Shiney Ahuja. The most rewardingly inevitable consequence was the emergence of films based on this incident. Qamar Hajipuri is about to unleash upon our senses a film starring unknowns named Divya Dwivedi and Hiten Rajgour. The film's title is emphatically unsubtle -- Chamak - The Shyning. It's a pity that Kabeer Kaushik's poorly welcomed sophomore flick wasn't released now. It could've benefitted from some cool marketing.

The other flick is a veritable tribute to Madhur Bhandarkar's exercises in clichéd exposés with a single word for a title. It is also helmed by Bollywood's finest living B-maker, Kanti Shah (you know, the guy who made Loha [the newer one mateys, not the Raj Sippy multistarrer with its ode to the silver-bodied Lassie Prima] and Gunda (yeah! you've heard of that one). The film is called Rape and we should expect to see a lot of that in it.

Since Madhur Bhandarkar was involved in a real-life case of his own and since that was already exploited in Madhubala, we must settle for whatever Messrs. Hajipuri and Shah have to offer.

when he would have been 70

2009-06-26T23:34:00.002-04:00

The late Rahul Dev Burman would have turned 70 today. Since he passed away in 1994, he has achieved the iconic status reserved only for those who pass from the world of the living to the world of the dead. He has his share of fans and detractors. He gets his share of criticism for all the "inspired" songs he made. There will be the occasional article, perhaps a new book or a new documentary about his music. One also hopes that efforts like the Panchammagic shows continue, if only in the hope that more people might find out why his work found a lot of praise, and fans and how his ouevre has influenced many.

There are so many examples in the work of the now separated Pandit brothers (notes about a recent discovery can be found here). There's that "Pancham" rhythm (hardly his invention, but something that shows up prominently in his work) showing up in songs (aaj ham ne dil kaa har from Sir). That isn't the only Anu Malik song that owes something to the late RDB. Consider paagal paagal from his non-film album Ho Raha Hai Sama, which sounds like it was composed while he was listening to raat krismas kii thii in a loop.

Meanwhile, it's a relief to know that there's always something new one can discover in the canon. Consider how the title track for The Train contains elements that showed up again in the title track for Trimurti (typical Bollyfare).

Excuse me, but it's time to go back and savour the joys of the little-heard title track of the Kumar Gaurav starrer Siyasat.

wuxia noir?

2009-06-26T21:22:00.002-04:00

Zhang Yimou (he who made Hero, among other things) is all set to remake The Coen Brothers classic Blood Simple. The Stunning Case Of The Three Gun Shots (echoes of Erle Stanley Gardner?) marks an interesting addition to an ant hill of trivia. The Coen exercise in modern noir derived its title from a Dashiel Hammett novel called Red Harvest featuring The Continental Op, a man with no name. Kurosawa's classic Yojimbo was reportedly based on this novel. Sergio Leone unofficially adapted Yojimbo into the first edition of his famous Spaghetti Western trilogy, A Fistful of Dollars. Years later, Walter Hill re-imagined Yojimbo in Prohibition-era Texas with Last Man Standing.
Yeah, yeah, I've written about all this before, but who cares.

the appropriator of melodies strikes again

2009-06-25T22:44:00.003-04:00

Years ago I caught a film called Bhavna on the good old DD one late night. The film was a Shabana Azmi vehicle about a woman going through almost everything that could go wrong. Several years later (aka today, dear patient reader), I fished out one of my many HamaraCD compilations -- a two-fer with Bappi helming the music console, Bhavna and Dil Se Mile Dil. Bhavna opened with Kavita Paudwal and Asha Bhosle trading lines on dekho din ye. The Rajesh Roshan-esque elements of the arrangement didn't do much to erode that strong familiar feeling of having heard this melody before. A few hours later, the proverbial a-ha moment arrived. Bappi was probably visiting one of Disney's numerous theme parks with his family when that infectious earworm by the Sherman Brothers called It's A Small World made its way into his tune banks, emerging, faster than you could say "Mickey Mouse," as a duet for Bollywood. Surely, he thought, this wouldn't hurt ol' Walter's feelings.

For your viewing pleasure, here's Richard Sherman and here's Bappi's (re)creation.

J2EE caesar (aka IT groans)

2009-06-25T22:18:00.002-04:00

Was Mark Antony the earliest known J2EE deployment engineer? You would think so.

In contrition, allow me to offer you a relatively less lauded Bappi gem from Hum Tumhare Hain Sanam (a movie that will make it to the history books for featuring Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan and Madhuri Dixit). Maya Govind spins a song rife with the clichés of the cold and the warm benefits of intimacy, but effects a masterful flourish by opening it with a rhyme joining two unlikely items -- a red tie and a cot at home. Go figure.

the thriller is gone

2009-06-25T21:28:00.002-04:00

I kid thee not. The King of Pop is no more. Smooth criminals responsible for "original" works of art like jii le (Avinash) [watch it] and golii maar (Donga) [watch it] may now step up to the microphone to tell us what a great loss this is.

In older news, Joginder Shelly passed away on June 15. If Ranga Khush doesn't ring a bell, don't bother scratching your brain cells to figure out who Joginder was. If you hear the gong, you'll also remember him from Mard (the one pitting the Big B against the Big Bad British), Loha and Mehndi.

vishal, hrithik: rumour or truth?

2009-06-24T15:54:00.003-04:00

JR has beat me to the news bit about Hrithik Roshan being in Vishal's next project. Since this is supposed to be an original work and not based on something from the Bard, one is eager to hear more and, as always, one must wait impatiently.

rondo rashomondo

2009-06-16T23:25:00.007-04:00

The beauty of American arrogance is that they can't imagine a world where they're not a step ahead.

Imagine Kurosawa's masterpiece stripped of any personal perspective, stripped of any engaging surprise, peppered with a rudimentary mix of politics, intrigue, elementary conspiracy theory and what might be the most expository intertitles ever invented. That might suffice to give you an idea of what to expect from Vantage Point. We open with a time. No date. Just a time. And then we get the first of the many converging short episodes. We get Sigourney Weaver skipping about the fence between a professional doing her job and an actress slumming miserably. We also get Forest Whitaker earnestly trying to convince us that all the praise lavished on his acting prowess (not to mention that Oscar for The Last King of Scotland) was all a big mistake. The film unfolds as a set of sequences conveniently bookmarked with a stark helpful note that we are about to get a flashback from a different angle. Each segment ends like all smart soap operas with some character dropping his or her jaw in shock -- the unsuspecting audience is denied a peek at what the character sees. As the intertitles get dumber and surpass all expectations of exposition, we are treated to a furiously edited car chase, some shooting, more crashes, an accident (more than once), some closure and a tribute to JFK paranoia. Dennis Quaid looks sincere (or perhaps he's just suffering from jet lag) and William Hurt's quiet earnest seriousness feels like an art cinema tribute to David Caruso's silky Horatio on CSI: Miami. Good product placement for the Sony HDV1080i, though

oye turing! turing oye!

2009-06-16T23:04:00.001-04:00

CAPTCHA goes to desiiland. 'Nuff said.

ramakrishna jimmy shankar blows out the candles

2009-06-16T22:26:00.005-04:00

ज़हर पीकर दुनिया को अम्रीत[sic] बाँटने वाला ... शंकर ... शंकर mechanic. चेहरे पर lorry के headlight की तरह जो दो आँखें लगी हुयी हैं न अगर उसे खोलकर देखोगी तो पता चलेगा ये रास्ता नहीं खेत है.

Don't you utter that name without रस्पेक्ट. Consider yourself lucky (pause) that you are born on this pious land (pause) where (pause) that noble आत्मा had taken बार्त. You ill-informed brats! You don't डिज़ार्व to be called Indians. You should be thankful to God (pause) that we work hard in the burning sun to grow crops for you worthless क्रेचर्स. Now get lost and don't step on this land again (pause) with your dirty feet. Get lost!

Happy birthday to the real Guru.

DB entendre

2009-06-15T20:40:00.003-04:00

It is unlikely that anyone will displace database administrators as the practitioners of scatalogical innuendo in the world of information technology. DBAs have elevated a simple four letter word to epic floors of meaning, thanks to the importance of the solidarity and integrity of data as well as the need to create copies of working systems quickly. While others may take comfort in the different ways database servers help you, we can flush our woes away with some choice utterances.

What do I do with an 800 MB dump? (betrays the speaker's incompetence in babysitting Godzilla)

अगर तुम मुझे अपना dump दोगे तो मैं अपने dump के साथ क्या करूंगा? (reveals a strain of possessive insecurity)

we can restore the dump in minutes (what goes out must come back in)

shutters down?

2009-06-14T08:48:00.003-04:00

Perhaps it's just another one of those terrible trailers that the clueless marketing types in Hollywood create. Perhaps it's meant to be an ode to B-movies. The trailer for Martin Scorsese's next film Shutter Island is out and I am not really excited. Although it marks the first Scorsese film to feature Ben Kingsley and Mark Ruffalo, it also marks the return of his current muse Leonardo DiCaprio sounding like he just got off the sets of The Departed. It's the third Dennis Lehane book to make it to the screen (I liked Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone) and is the first one pitched as a horror/thriller. That alone might mark a first for Scorsese with its mix of gothic horror and B-movies. Perhaps this is Scorsese doing The Devil's Backbone. Perhaps I'm just being unjust to a promising cast (Max von Sydow, Jackie Earle Haley). Oh well. Let us pray for number 67.

RGV does the unseen

2009-06-05T23:44:00.003-04:00

If RGV is to be believed (spoiler!), the audience of Agyaat (theatrical trailer) will never see what the ill-fated film crew see in the film (yes, yes, yes, The Blair Witch Project but most importantly the legacy of Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton). You, dear viewer, will not see what makes Nisha Kothari's pupils (and her body) dilate in fear. Wandering in the jungle (Predator), the crew presumably suffers a reduction in force (that's just my reading of the film in advance -- a "horror" film as a metaphor for the job situation in America) à la And Then There Were None (or Gumnaam, if you so wish you Bollywood-loving ignoramus). The clips confirm this and also offer a preview of the familiar RGV tropes including the Evil Dead-esque POV jaunts through the jungle (a place RGV has explored before). Enjoy the Sri Lankan foliage and Amar Mohile's thundering foreground music. I just hope RGV doesn't pull a whimper at the end of the bang (see: Raat). Could this be the movie that marks a return to form and appeal? Wait till this can hits the marquee. Until then, go watch Army Of Darkness and mourn the death of Duke Nukem Forever.

google docxs

2009-06-02T09:33:00.003-04:00

Google Docs has added support for the DOCX and XLSX (YuckX!) formats that Office 2007 uses. I found out about the lack of support late last year and was waiting for this day. I like the new formats because you get smaller files, you deal with ZIP archives based on a rather well-documented format that uses XML and you also get to do cool things because of that. The last bit may not matter much to most people, but I think the new format makes it easier for people to write tools to do cool things with the files. WooX HooX!

never on sundays

2009-05-30T12:14:00.000-04:00

I have often been stumped at how some restaurants around the Atlanta area, especially the ones that I like, decide to remain closed on certain days -- the choice of days seems rather arbitrary.

The humble Tandoor is closed on Mondays.

Bhojanic, the only restaurant that begs to differ from just about every other Indian restaurant I've seen around town, decides to dip the shutters on Sundays. No lunch. No dinner. Zip.

The Real Chow Baby has inexplicably decided to abandon offering lunch on Saturday and Sunday. This is really disturbing. Not only does this seem to kill a fair amount of business, but it also means that the only way you can "create your own stir fry" at lunch prices (about $4 less than the dinner price) is to show up during the working week. This was a recent move too: I had lunch a couple of times on Saturdays at the new outlet in Cobb Galleria last year before they flipped the sign to "Closed". I don't remember anything different in the lunch and dinner versions of the stir fry, which seems to imply that this move was purely for the $$.

There's no point ranting about higher prices for the same dishes on weekends -- it's something Indian restaurants do with their lunch buffets. There's also no point whining about restaurants that have a special lunch menu for the working week -- Thai restaurants do that; Chinese restaurants do that too. You get your choice of soup with your order and you pay less. If you come in on Saturday or Sunday, you get the deluxe version only -- more $$ for a different set of dishes, although you really wanted to try the lunch special. Pity.

honest to vitriol

2009-05-27T09:55:00.002-04:00

Suparn Verma's refreshingly candid when answering a question on plagiarism/influences in Rediff's new slide show on his next film Acid Factory, his first film with Sanjay Gupta (An old post hereabouts portended this collaboration):

Are your films mostly inspired by some movie or the other?

Not actually. Ek Khiladi is inspired by 14 con films -- Confidence and House of Game are among them. Chhal was not inspired. Qayamat was inspired by The Rock. Yeh Kya Ho Raha Hai was marketed as American Pie but it wasn't inspired by American Pie; not one gag of it was from American Pie. Zameen and Karam were not remakes.

PS: Rediff's new layout looks cleaner and nicer, but there's a problem with their slide shows -- you can't get a URL for a specific slide. The whole thing is implemented using JavaScript and the content of each slide is a string array and your clicks on Next and Prev are nothing but indexes for the array. The code's goop and that's the price you pay for the pleasant look.

blinded by uncontrollable cuts

2009-05-25T17:35:00.004-04:00

I never thought I'd rant again like I did about Hancock. With Quantum of Solace, Marc Forster and company have piddled gloriously on the fine efforts to rejuvenate the franchise in Casino Royale. A direct sequel may sound like a great idea, but all the writers on the film seem to have failed to give us anything interesting. James Bond was never really an action hero. What we get here, however, is an attempt to counter this notion. Right from the furiously edited chase before the credits, we are hurtled from one action sequence to another. Characters are introduced and revived during moments of relief. Levity is tossed in but the humour, mercifully, never threatens to enter the realm defined by the Brosnan films, whose jokes seemed like post-modern tributes to the Roger Moore films.

Ian Fleming wrote a handful of James Bond stories that explored new territory; they didn't seem to be "typical" Bond excursions -- The Spy Who Loved Me and Quantum of Solace were two of the most striking examples in this pack. It seems ironic that both lost their titles to films that had nothing to do with their content. SMERSH was clearly too old for this generation, but naming the organisation Quantum was/is a stretch. It's just too convenient. It would also be wise to perish any hope of seeing any trace of the meaning of the delectable phrase from Fleming in the film. Bond is still suffering emotionally, but all that was chucked in favour of a dogpile of crash-boom-bang.

The chaos and confusion in the opening chase is, as far as I can tell, enough evidence that Marc Forster (who made the reasonably engaging Monster's Ball, the compelling Finding Neverland and the interesting Stranger Than Fiction) cannot handle action. Having chosen to yield the unhealthy fetish for shaky-cam/jerki-cam and having opted for an editing style that looks like someone was in a real hurry to make it to a conference with Mother Nature should be state's exhibits. The opening chase has received plaudits in many quarters; all I could figure out was that a lot of automotive equipment was trashed and some people died. The feeling of having missed most of the details came later during the second chase -- which ends with Bond shooting the traitor dead. By the time the end (not a bang but a whimper) came, I realised that there was nothing in this film to even match the parkour chase from Casino Royale.

The film has its share of references to older Bond films, the most obvious one being the nod to Goldfinger (with the twist of replacing gold with oil). It also packs tributes to Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo, North By Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much). Mercifully, these references, unlike the hubris that buried Die Another Day, are not distracting. The rest of the film, however, is. Daniel Craig's faithful reading of the character is a saving grace. He remains unscathed by the morass around him, as does Judi Dench. The two deserve better as did all of us who awaited a more worthy successor to Casino Royale.

I fear that Craig's stint as Bond might look like Brosnan's -- starting off well, Brosnan ended up figuring in films that strove define new nadirs in the canon with their growing love for bombastic villains, flashy gadgets, quips and soulless action. Unless they decide to hire someone who disagrees with people like Paul Greengrass, there seems little hope.

altered discomfort

2009-05-23T14:32:00.003-04:00

Where's the Ian Fleming wannabe who came up with the egregious quantum of change? I saw this in some corporate email message and wondered what the writer was trying to achieve.

Was he trying to mock the blandness of corporate email? This seems unlikely when you notice that the rest of the email, embellished so finely by this piquant phrase, is laced with lapses in tense, punctuation and abused prepositions.

Perhaps he was trying to show off his skill at using neologisms and trying to achieve brevity (at the expense of clarity). What in the name of flying incontinent swine is wrong with just saying "because there are several significant changes"? This, my dear readers, must be the explanation. He was just being stupid by making an email message tougher to read. One nurses an iota of hope that he will soon resist the temptation for terse tripe.

black pearls: sab gol maal hai

2009-05-10T21:03:00.002-04:00

Jack Sparrow would have been proud of Bollywood's music directors. Their copious output hides several treasures that, in a matter of time, will make it to portals like Karthik's.

Ever heard of a film called Dhoondte Reh Jaoge? No no no, not the rip-off of The Producers. This was a 1998 flick starring Naseeruddin Shah, Javed Jaffrey. It was also one of those many minor movies that had songs by the now-defunct music director duo Jatin-Lalit. Known for the undeniably obvious influence of the music of R. D. Burman on their songs, they were (and Lalit Pandit still is) known for plagiarism from foreign shores, an affliction that most of the Bollywood music directors suffer from. Since any Jatin-Lalit soundtrack is always welcome (if only for a sampling), I was glad to have chanced upon the songs of the film recently. Things opened well when I realised that the brothers Pandit seemed to have chosen nothing less than Alan Mencken and Tim Rice's Academy Award-winning song A Whole New World from Aladdin with na tum bolo. A few tracks later, the "tribute" to the late RDB emerged with jaan-e-man jaane do, which lifted the melody from Bundal Baaz's kyaa huaa yaaro.n.

With which we move over to the all-encompassing genre of Indipop to examine the interesting album Sona that Sona Mohapatra cut with her now-husband Ram Sampath. Ram Sampath's been rather successful what with Tanha Dil and the stint with Siddharth Achrekar as Colourblind. But Sona, while showcasing a great voice and some enjoyable arrangements, opens with bolo naa, a song that works off a riff that's so much like the riff on Sting' Shape of my Heart. This is quite unfortunate given that a few years later, Ram Sampath was the victim of plagiarism.

getting onto the bullet train again

2009-05-10T14:12:00.002-04:00

When the experiment called The Bullet Train was released in 2003, I had posted an optimistic note of welcome. Years later, the CD still holds up on a few levels. It is still an interesting experiment -- a remix of tracks by the same music director -- a very special case of sampling, if you will. It also works as a mostly consistent peppy offering for the ears. Something that never struck me then seems rather obvious now. The remastering by Debashish Mohapatra at Pancham Studios is commendable, but it also exposes familiar problems with the original mastered tracks. The punch of the bass is weak on some; on others the sounds in the lower registers seem to have been stripped away. It's another reminder of the inconsistency of HMV's catalogue: consider how Pyar ka Mousum (1969) sounds older than Baharon ke Sapne (1967) on CD; consider the marvel of the combo CD Yaadon ki Baaraat/Hum Kisise Kum Naheen, on the other hand. It seems like a stroke of luck that the verve of each song made it over from the LP to the CD.

My doubts about the pathetic way companies like HMV mastered CDs from LPs got a shot in the arm when I got my hands on two spectacular compilations from the guys known as Bombay Beats, The Bombay Connection, Vol. 1: Funk From Bollywood Action Thrillers and Bombay Connection, Vol. 2: Bombshell Baby of Bombay. The lovely mix of the vocoder and the bass on the title track of The Burning Train sounded far stronger and fuller than any other version on CD that I had heard. The Bombay Beats guys had created CDs from LPs and their process fared far better than whatever the guys at HMV/GCIL had. The packaging was exquisite as well and it was evidence of more love for the pulpy excesses of Bollywood than anyone within the system could ever muster or design.

giving the censors a RANN for their verdict

2009-05-09T00:03:00.002-04:00

The trailer for RGV's Rann is his first ensemble of known names in a long time: the Big B, Riteish Deshmukh, Paresh Rawal, Rajpal Yadav, Gul Panag, Rajat Kapoor, Suchitra Krishnamurthy, Mohnish Behl(!) and Kannada film actor Sudeep (who splashed into Bollywood in RGV's Phoonk). Neetu Chandra's also on the roll, but I don't think I saw her in the montage. Something keeps reminding me of Irving Wallace's The Almighty (adapted by Joshi in Malayalam and Hindi -- remember Jeetendra in New Delhi?). Only time will tell. Meanwhile, the song on the background was enough evidence that RGV hadn't lost his love for controversy. It's a pessimistic modification of India's national anthem with much of the original melody intact. Predictably, the censor board has a problem with it. Only time, once again, will tell. Meanwhile, I'll return to the trailer of Agyaat, his return to horror sporting the familiar canted camera, the portent of horror with sound and visual suggestion and the occasional tip of the hat to Sergio Leone.

email according to microsoft

2009-05-08T21:18:00.002-04:00

It is only now that I see just how significantly Microsoft Outlook (and Outlook Express) have influenced sending, receiving and handling email.

In a bad way.

The proprietary PST format was only the tip of a compost heap. As with most Microsoft products, Outlook accommodates every email storage format as input, but refuses to let you escape the PST when you want to move to another email client. You're locked in. You're left staring at a horrible complicated binary format that eats up a lot of disk space (like you care).

Forums and newsgroups taught me the virtues of plain text, the value of HTML when used sparingly and only when appropriate, the importance of quoting. They also taught me about the flame wars dedicated to quoting/posting. Top posting was bad. Top quoting/Bottom posting and inline posting seemed better. Newsgroup management software managed threads. Every email message didn't have to look like it was responsible for managing the state of the conversation thus far. The corporate world taught me when top posting made sense -- it seemed like places shackled to an Exchange server and Outlook chewing away on everyone's disk never seemed to do well on communication. This meant that emails grew in size as the conversation went on until someone finally realised that one or more people who had to be part of this discussion had been left out. One "copying X" later, we have this snowball all set to mow another hapless inbox.

Until 2007, Outlook did a pathetic job with HTML (you remember all that XML cruft, don't you?). RTF is still around, though, and it's the default format. RTF still sucks. HTML is your best bet if you want to be nice to the Internet and the recipient's disk.

Outlook hates plain text. Make that "detests." Or "loathes." Condescendingly. Don't even bother thinking about quotation markers. Do it yourself. Text wrapping is awful. Outlook also employs what looks like one of the silliest wrapping algorithms ever known. No wrapping for the reader's convenience. If you try adding quotation markers, be prepared to send out email that looks uglier than Emran Hashmi. If you choose text, you get no support from the email client. To this cake of unpleasantness, add the icing of Outlook's "intelligent" handling of line breaks. It decides to strip "extra" line breaks in the copy that the recipient of your email sees. Your efforts in preparing a numbered list just got drowned in cowdung. Outlook can be configured not to do this, but try telling every possible recipient of every email you might send to configure their email client. Just try it. Go on. Try it.

I moved to Thunderbird and the move was painful. My obsession with folders and classification did not help. Proprietary email archival tools seamlessly "integrated" with the email client made matters challenging. It was arduous, manual and painful. At the end of it, I had all my email (except for some annoyances like embedded OLE images and the loss of BCC information) and it was not as demanding of disk space as Outlook was. Lightning was enough to help me respond to invitations and set up my calendar. Helpful posts on the Internet and having worked with LDAP helped me use the Global Address Book as well. There were other things I still needed Outlook for, but I had all my email.

All I have to do is deal with all the mocking snide remarks, the jokes and all that blah-blah predicated on "you Microsoft hater." I also have to learn to accept situations where top posting is unavoidable (this is when I use Outlook for the only -- IMHO -- thing it does well). I long for communities where email helps communication instead of heralding an avalanche.

I also have a chance to understand how even Thunderbird still has its share of annoyances.

I'm sure I haven't seen the last of TOFU, though.

multiplexing choice

2009-05-06T12:59:00.002-04:00

I wonder how many users of either ... or realise that the expression can accommodate exactly two choices. Think of an exclusive or in logic, if you wanted some way to remember this. Abuse of the expression to stuff more choices is rife in usage, especially in conversations. A little popup in Eclipse today offered evidence that the Javadoc in Sun's JDK was not immune; Here's the extract from the documentation for the getTimeZone(String) method in the java.util.TimeZone class in J2SE 5.0 (I have underlined the guilty snippet):

getTimeZone

public static TimeZone getTimeZone(String ID)

Gets the TimeZone for the given ID.

Parameters:: ID - the ID for a TimeZone, either an abbreviation such as "PST", a full name such as "America/Los_Angeles", or a custom ID such as "GMT-8:00". Note that the support of abbreviations is for JDK 1.1.x compatibility only and full names should be used.
Returns:: the specified TimeZone, or the GMT zone if the given ID cannot be understood.

a commencement of innovation

2009-05-03T12:49:00.002-04:00

I sat in a red chair at the Georgia Dome for the first time in my years in Sprawlopolis , one of many in attendance at Georgia Tech's Spring 2009 Commencement Ceremony for graduate students. After the obligatory blah-blah about "the nation's finest" and the "change the world" dogma, it was time for the meat of the ceremony, paradoxically the one least likely to be entertaining: the conferring of degrees. This is but a litany of names and the only ones who're really happy are the recipients who showed up and their well-wishers scattered in the crowd. However, if you have a place like Georgia Tech that is a melting pot of foreigners and you have an announcer who has to make sense of monikers that only look like different surreal flavours of alphabet soup.

Reportedly, each recipient can, on the piece of paper bearing his/her name, offer hints to assist in pronunciation. But IPA is not something you'd expect to know or use often. This means that most people don't really avail of this opportunity. People have also probably decided that the way their name is pronounced is hardly worth any importance in the ceremony.

This means that those like me in the audience who'd love any excuse to make the proceedings interesting welcomed the innovation of one of the announcers that evening. Faced with so many challenging combinations of vowels and consonants, she decided to be innovative as she tried to get her plosives and fricatives right. And we relished each inventive uttering; here are a few nuggets:

Sneha: snaaihaa
Chandrababu: cha.ndraabhaabhuu
David: daviiD
Madhav: madhaav
Deshpande: Desappaa.NDe
Elangovan: iilaa.Nguuvaan
Mayank: myaanak
Goel: gaaul
Nehil: naaiihiil
Jamsandekar: jamadiikhaar
Chetna: chaiintaa
Kher: kaii-iira
Kolhe: kwaalhe
Pai: peii
Panse: paan-saaii
Patil: paTiil
Devdutt: devaduut

I'd have shown up for the baccalaureate ceremony the next day but the roll call wasn't so promising.

f for franchise

2009-04-26T17:51:00.002-04:00

all i wanna say is that they don't really care about us
-- [They Don't Care About Us/Michael Jackson]

Salil just made my day with a pointer to the most significant achievement in the history of voting in India -- the shift to using the most famous digit on the hand to place the mark of a voter. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, all people fortunate enough to (a) have found their place on a voters list in their wretched constituency, and (b) have managed to be able to enter the booth, choose a name and emerge triumphant at having fulfilled their civic responsibility will now be able to respond confidently to the question "did you vote?"; One must note that just how savvy our politicians are -- the state CM clearly has no idea what he just did by waving that digit at the camera; "Hold on," you might say, "this is probably just everyone making light of such a funny thing"; However, I must say, it's going to take a few centuries before the Indian media become open and the Indian politicians are capable of laughing at themselves. Meanwhile, we will do it for them. You may now return to the floor to laugh your guts out.