Day before yesterday, I took the customary three hour bus ride from Pune to Bombay, and found myself sitting next to a retd. Major General of Indian army. Within the next fifteen minutes, he gave me the recipe to make wine in India, the Indian way –

“Pour 20 kg of grapes inside a giant mud container… the one that’s normally used to keep water thanda (cool), fill that up with water, and add sugar enough to fill one fifth of the container. Then roll your sleeves and start smashing the grapes, so that they split apart. Then put some yeast, and close the container (make sure its airtight as much as possible). Put half a bottle of rum. Now forget about it for four months. Then open it up and mix everything well again. Close it back, and then forget about it for next 3 months. After that, just filter out the liquid and your wine’s ready to serve (of course, after you have chilled it).“

Interesting. I almost feel like trying rightaway. But, is it worth taking the risk of 20kg of grapes and incessant urges to open the container and check the “status”?

However, from wine recipe, we got into the conversation about the latest moral policing in Bandstand, Mumbai — apparently, holding hands or kissing is now considered obscene behavior, and couples caught red-handed are instantly taken to jail and their parents informed. Of course, all this apart from a fine of 1200 rupees.

Amazing. Why do I think I have heard this before? The land of Kamasutra, now with a ban on kissing. What’s next?

One of the greatest living violinist plays at the L’Enfant Plaza Station in D.C. in the rush hour. What happens? From an experiment conducted by Washington Post:

“HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L’ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a fewdollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L’EnfantPlaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles:policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?”

Continue reading here.

Trent Reznor and NIN have produced an awesome marketing campaign around their upcoming album Year Zero. Check out this excerpt from wikipedia synopsis of the whole act:

“On February 12, 2007,fans found that a new Nine Inch Nials tour T-shirt containedhighlighted letters that spell out the words “I am trying to believe.” It was discovered that iamtryingtobelieve.com was registered as awebsite, and soon several related websites were found in the IP range,all describing a dystopian vision of the world fifteen years in the future.

Many events reported on these websites take place in the year “0000.” Digit Online later reported that 42 Entertainment had created these websites to promote Year Zero. Rolling Stone described the fan involvement in this promotion as the “marketing team’s dream.”Trent Reznor has however stated, “The term ‘marketing’ sure is afrustrating one for me at the moment. What you are now starting toexperience IS ‘year zero’. It’s not some kind of gimmick to get you tobuy a record – it IS the art form… and we’re just getting started. Hope you enjoy the ride.”

More about their use of USB drives and waveform messages here.

Ted Berger, a USC researcher, spent last 10 years of his life crafting silicon chips that would recreate thought. Their chips model less than 12000 neurons, as compared to 100 billion present in human brain. Yet, as we all know, once (it might takes decades for that to actually happen) the first barrier is crossed, its a matter of time when forgetfulness will be history. What sort of world would that be? I wonder…

“In wet lab 412C on the University of Southern California’s Los Angeles campus, Vijay Srinivasan is poking a long, evil-looking needle at a slice of rat brain about half the size of a fingernail. All around him, coils of cable are piled near hulking microscopes. Glass vials and fluid-filled plastic dishes compete for space with spare keyboards and computer chips. The place looks more like a computer-repair shop than a world-class laboratory.

“Watch this,” says Srinivasan, a design engineer working with USC’s Center for Neural Engineering. A thin wire runs between the needle and a tiny silicon chip hooked up to a boxy signal transmitter. He flips a switch, and a series of small waves shimmers across a nearby screen—waves that mean exactly zilch to me. Watch what? I wonder.Srinivasan explains that the chip is sending electric pulses through the needle into the brain slice, which is passing them on to the screen we’re watching. “The difference in the waves’ modulation reflects the signals sent out by the brain slice,” he says. “And they’re almost identical in frequency and pattern to the pulses sent by the chip.” Put more simply, this iron-gray wafer about a millimeter square is talking to living brain cells as though it were an actual body part….“

Rest here…

I have always been a giant fan of Photo.net. It is one of the oldest photography sites on the net, and is almost entirely created by users. As an example, check out the photograph below from their Photograph of the Week (yes, you can submit and compete as well), and tell me if its not better than anything you have seen on flickr or photobucket. And if you don’t like this particular one, go check out their Photograph of the Week section.

First Caribbean-made film on Cricket is complete.  It is also the first Barbadian film to be marketed internationally. I couldn’t find more details about the director Alison Saunders-Franklin, but the film sounds pretty interesting with its international crew and funding completely through PE.

Hilarious!

I have never really managed to find an answer to this question. When a myth has been told and retold through centuries, morphed, twisted, wrongly translated, bits forgotten and parts exaggerated, who can really claim ownership? Do I have a right to depict my own interpretation?

If so, then why is HinduJagruti.org out to claim that Nina Paley’s animated Sitayana is “disrespectful and denigrating to Hindus at large”? For instance, how “factual” was Doordarshan Channel’s depiction of the myth (with arrows that split up in hundred other arrows and two arrows colliding in mid-air and destroying each other)?

Check out the letter from HinduJagruti.org that I found on her website:

“Ms. Paley,

Some irate Hindus have brought to our attention your attempt (“Sitayana”) at retelling the Hindu Holy epic, Ramayana ( www.ninapaley.com/Sitayana).

Here are our concerns regarding your attempt:

Ø It appears that you are not fully aware that the Ramayana is a Holy Scripture for Hindus. Over a billion Hindus all over the world hold it in reverence. What you call as the characters in Ramayana are divine Incarnations worshipped by Hindus.

Ø While we understand your painful personal incidents discussed on your site, your “Sitayana”, which basically re-tells the Ramayana as matches your own life, is contrary to the life of Lord Rama and Goddess Sita as given in the Hindu Holy texts. Thus, even if inadvertently, your “Sitayana” has proved to be deliberately disrespectful and downright denigrating to Hindus at large.

Ø One cannot understand divine Incarnations by trying to fit them into limited human paradigms. It takes rigorous spiritual practice to attain the spiritual maturity to understand and experience the attributes and functions of divine Incarnations.

Ø Even if one were to hold such views in private, out of lack of knowledge or understanding, you have gone on to publicly display your views on the World Wide Web. To publicly comment on something held in reverence by many, one should have some authority on the subject. Kindly let us know what spiritual authority you exercised to publicly alter and mock a Holy spiritual text revered by millions?”

It goes on and on. Check out the rest of it here.

Link from Rohit Gupta — Tarantino and Rodriguez pick movie poster’s here.

I am also a big fan of Bollywood posters from the 70s. Recently, I came to know from a friend that the artists still live, only getting business from b-grade Indian films. The market for this seems pretty much close to death. Long ago, I learned to paint from an artist who started his career on the streets of Kolkata painting film posters and shop walls.

Alas…!

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Will DRM Die Today?

“Will DRM die today? In five hours we’ll find out. At 1 PM London time today EMI CEO Eric Nicoli and Apple CEO Steve Jobs will hold a forty minute press conference. Lots of press were invited early this morning to attend, but no information was distributed other than “to hear about an exciting new digital offering.”

The Wall Street Journal seems to know a bit more, though. They say (behind a paywall) that the two are set to announce that a significant portion of EMI’s catalog will be sold online without any DRM. EMI is the third largest music label after Universal and Sony.

Labels like DRM because users can’t easily copy songs to give to friends. Users hate DRM because they are locked in to one device or service. Earlier this year Jobs wrote an open letter to music labels calling for them to “abolish DRMs entirely.” In that letter he noted that only 22 out of every 1,000 songs on the average iPod, or less than 3%, were purchased from iTunes. The rest were ripped from CDs and obtained illegally.”

From Techcrunch.