guzarish

sanjay leela bhansali (SLB) turns music director with this one. with a characteristic non-linear song tera zikr hai (shail hada should have been discovered in saanwariya itself). i wonder how much SLB influenced those non-linear tracks of saanwariya by monty sharma. can't find a better phrase than non-linear :)

 I've been meaning to watch guzarish. Right from the first promos, it has looked like another SLB epic - he probably outdoes himself everytime. The catch, however, is the characteristic mechanization (of thoughts, emotions, expression) that he employs - much similar to how the bengali school of directors 'ham'. I fear watching another grandiose dream which lacks a heart.

But, this isn't what inspired! me to write this post. It's this - dhobi ghat, the movie. kiran rao directs it, aamir khan is on with full-fledged publicity. its amazing how the doode never fails to lay finger on gold. and he has been doing it over and over again. its another low budget movie - with as much attention to detail and creativity as one would aspect, backed by the doode. its business acumen put to the service of bollywood, hopefully for taking it where it hasn't been ever in spite of amazing talent.

the promo was out sometime this week. the website oozes with meticulous marketing. and the background score in the promo is simply too powerful - gustao santaolalla, an argentine composer- mandolin (?) used so cleverly, with percussion providing the rest of the emotional drama. the guy has had multiple big movies - brokeback, babel, motorcycle diaries, 21 grams, amores perros, and i'm simply ready to be enthralled by this movie's track.

and yes, I watched udaan. Its set in jamshedpur and its amazingly powerful (except perhaps the conclusion). I wish the movie had dhobi ghat kind of backing. To reiterate a cliche: we need to tell our own stories! not just tell, but scream out loud! :)

intuition

A wonderful post about formalizing the intuition. Multiple quotes:

“Often you write something down to clarify your thoughts. In particular when you’ve reached a real impasse, when there’s a real problem that you want to overcome, then the routine kind of (mathematical) thinking is of no use to you. Leading up to that kind of new idea there has to be a long period of tremendous focus on the problem without any distraction. You have to think about nothing but that problem – just concentrate on it. Then you stop. Afterwards there seems to be a kind of period of relaxation during which the subconscious appears to take over, and it’s during that time that some new insight comes.” -- Andrew Wiles

 “One thing is to prove it by equations; the other is to check it by calculations. I have mathematically proven to myself so many things that aren’t true. I’m lousy at proving things — I always make a mistake. … So I always have to check with calculations; and I’m very poor at calculations — I always get the wrong answer. So it’s a lot of work in these things. … If [we] can do a real physical problem with real physical things in them, then I’m sure we have the right method.” - Feynman

“Our brains are complicated devices, with many specialized modules working behind the scenes to give us an integrated understanding of the world. Mathematical concepts are abstract, so it ends up that there are many different ways that they can sit in our brains. ”
“A given mathematical concept might be primarily a symbolic equation, a picture, a rhythmic pattern, a short movie—or best of all, an integrated combination of several different representations. These non-symbolic mental models for mathematical concepts are extremely important, but unfortunately, many of them are hard to share.”
“Mathematics sings when we feel it in our whole brain. People are generally inhibited about even trying to share their personal mental models. People like music, but they are afraid to sing. You only learn to sing by singing.”  -- Bill Thurston
 
I particular love the last one - perhaps because it relates to singing :)
 
 Finally, “Intuition is natural ideas, concretely instantiated, that sing in our minds.” -- John Sidles

A nice lecture here.

jhootha hi sahi

ARR is back again with this wonderful album. Prolly its Abbas tyrewala's directorial debut and he manages to get Rahman work for him hard. Beautiful fusions jazz and classical. I'll be waiting is probably the most intriguing song - how seamlessly it flows from jazz to pure classical with the awesomest vivid lyrics. Rashid Ali recreates his kabhi kabhi aditi magic twice over again in Call me Dil and Cry Cry. Maiya yashoda is a crazy interpretation - wonder how that fits in.The whole album is a blast! Movie shouldn't disappoint either. I'm glad Sonu nigam sings for ARR again tho the song Do Nishaniyaan disappoints a bit.

what are the odds?

of attending a south indian instrumental classical concert in iowa city, when
- you went to the city for completely unrelated and in comparison, uninteresting reasons.
- it was your first visit and you didn't know a single soul in the city.
- you never knew there was such a concert.
- you were wondering how to kill the evening in the boring city.
- you meet a known writer from bangladesh during the morning breakfast.
- the writer (apart from telling his stories) also tells you that there is an evening concert in the town.
- the writer also kindly shows you a flyer with the pictures of the musicians.
- your old acquaintance from grad school was playing the ghatam.

The concert simply brought me home that evening in the unknown city. The coincidences followed. Another musician guy playing the mridanga has his home less than a mile away from mine. The dinner with them had more in store - one or more CS phd turned musicians and tv producers, one of more stories of lost and regained romanticism. The night was brought to a hasty end by the heavy rains.

All morning flights canceled due to fog. Unsurprisingly, we meet and dine again at the airport.

I don't find anything wrong in believing in randomness/serendipity. Its all well-planned. :)

Just put the new ARR jhootha hi sahi on the player. Getting drawn irresistibly.

P vs NP: Mass hysteria

This is fun. Rocking fun. If I'm going mad just being an observer, I wonder how the author or even the close readers would be surviving. Call it an India-Pak cricket match for lack of an analogy.

Vinay Deolalikar  circulated a proof of P != NP to a private group on Friday, which found its way to the online media, slashdot, et al. He has updated the proof document 3 times since then, starts with citing Gita and matri-pitru rin, and connects first-order logic with fixpoints with freezing phenomena in statistical physics to get the proof done. Its an epic size drama in the world of mathematics and computer science: a lone guy against a world of hardcore detractors and a not-so-few bunch of sympathetic well-wishers. The odds are 101% against him, and yet he's fighting it out.

What is particularly new and awesome to this event is the amount of crowd sourcing that it has attracted.
An up-to-date wiki with all changes/discussions/objections to the proof methods, media coverage, ..:
http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=Deolalikar%27s_P!%3DNP_paper

Richard Lipton's blog with hoards of discussion inside comments:
http://rjlipton.wordpress.com

I'm still not sure why I'm fascinated by all this. Perhaps being able to appreciate some aspects of the proof is driving me crazy. Perhaps because the proof is so accessible and elementary. Perhaps, the sight of a crowd of knowledgeable geniuses scattering their knowledge for free is incredible. Perhaps, because talking about such apparently deep stuff in a strikingly dinner-table fashion smells of a new world. I don't know, but I'm completely taken in.

A collaboration of such magnitude, where no one guy is able to understand the whole deal (and moreso, wants to spend min time to find an counterexample) - Vinay D (~ Dev D:) ) is partly to blame cos he did handwave at multiple places. On another note, feels like a bunch of advisers helping this doode out for his journal submission - I bet he would be most "simultaneously advised" guy in the whole world right now. Wonder how many he is seriously listening to. Perhaps, they should update the wiki with the necessary and sufficient list of papers to read  to prove/disprove the result - that will surely accelerate crowd-sourcing even more.

What I find distressing in this whole saga is that a large proportion of detractors (even highly knowledgeable ones) are not making crisp statements about the fallacies or the hand-waving. Instead, many of these comments (.e.g, on lipton's blog) appear to be merely their egoistic manifestations (as is common in usual intellectual conversations) of the learned commenters without allowing Vinay D the benefit of doubt, even though they haven't read the document properly. The really targeted crisp objections, on the other hand, are put quite gently, allowing the author plenty of room to adjust and argue. This (despicable) facet of intellectual conversation will probably never go away.

Don't know if the proof is going to survive for long. But the event is an historical one, and I'm glad to be a closeby observer. Also, some thoughts on obscurity vs clarity in math presentation:
http://www.jmilne.org/math/tips.html

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound strive for obscurity.

---Nietzsche.

khatta meetha

Being not well has its advantages. I could slip back into a more relaxed mode - finished watching once upon a time in mumbai and khatta meetha. Once.. is well-made with wonderful dialogues balancing both dialoguebaazi and poetic form. KM is a pure priyadarshan epic - an ensemble of grey characters, awfully cunning, rendered with unemotional, unforgiving brazenness. The gangster movies bring out lot of depth in the characters, priyadarshan never has time for that. He takes the ordinary, mixes it with as much dirt and filth he can imagine (or has seen?) and just blurts it out on the screen.

Overall its done with such finesse, and fitted within the standard formula. But still, I remain dissatisfied. Its a core-dump, a mega brain-dump of the director/author. It has the formula, the message, plot, justification and everything else you could imagine bundled into one. Perhaps somewhere, it touches you too but it fails to move you - which is dissapointing given the movie contains so much depth and detail. Couldn't we avoid this fast-fwd rendition and focus on the core ? Perhaps what is missing is the elegance of portrayal - maybe the frugalness of presentation? I don't know.

I perhaps noticed this fast-fwd style of rendition in Mani Ratnam's Bombay first - Roja was also done in that hurried way, and later on Yuva too (Guru didn't seem so jarring, though). I earlier shrugged off the fast-fwd genre in priyadarshan movies by attributing the style to his penchant for slap-stick; now, it appears that perhaps he has been meaning more - perhaps he has been trying to put across his message stealthily. I admire his way of putting it across if that's the case - but then do it more beautifully, do it like munnabhai, not like a braindump.

Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya

The title means something like jump from heaven and come to me :) I came across this recent ARR album and the title song is clearly of the vellai pookkal genre. Mannipaaya is lovely too moving beautifully between Shreya and ARR.

Rajneeti is getting good reviews. Mora piya is classical khayaal fusion - I'm surprised how easy it is to intrigue the audience over and over again - Aadesh Sh. used the same stuff in tujh sang baandhi dor and baawri piya ki - in fact, I think mora piya is nowhere up there - perhaps ranbir and katrina jodi on screen makes the goosebumps persist. I'm yet to absorb the other two numbers - ishq barse and dhan dhan dharti.

I heard nice things about MM Kream in Vedam. I find only the last two tracks Vedam and E Chikati (the best one) worth listening. I seriously don't like heavy arrangements of the above kind whether it comes from ARR or anyone else.

and yes, I'll be at the ARR concert on June 12th.

love is an illusion?

I found this writeup on analysis of love - don't know why the guy chooses/needs to reason in/out of a doode called Schopenhauer. Still, interesting set of arguments. What I found more exposing was a comment to that post, which I inline here.

Romantic love is two people projecting onto each other, and mirroring that projection, for so long as it takes a child to be born and raised.
Think about it: the “honeymoon period” subsides when the bonding chemicals do, which is typically up to two years, long enough to get pregnant, maintain the pregnancy, and birth the child. (All periods when a woman’s mobility is reduced and she requires more food for functioning = therefore needs a protective, hunting, man.)
Unfortunately, the way we’ve set up nuclear families in our society, the expectation is that two people will live physically and emotionally closely for 50+ years; long after the bonding chemicals have subsided. To me, this is absurd – and pointless.
Romantic love is a high, anything after the “honeymoon period” ends is a mutually advantageous contract for raising children in *our* society (it’s preposterous that child-raising falls on the shoulders of one person in Western “civilisation”), an obligation, and more often than not a habit against loneliness that is rewarded by governments and peers.
There’s nothing wrong with that — but I wish people wouldn’t pretend that it’s otherwise.

I went ahead looking for more theories and definitions. Here is a contrasting claim from yahoo answers.

Love is not an illusion. It is the Greatest Gift that Nature has given this Universe. Love is the Inherent quality which is keeping this Universe afloat.

Love represents a range of human emotions and experiences related to the senses of affection and sexual attraction. The word love can refer to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from generic pleasure to intense interpersonal attraction. This diversity of meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, even compared to other emotional states.

As an abstract concept love usually refers to a strong, ineffable feeling towards another person. Even this limited conception of love, however, encompasses a wealth of different feelings, from the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love to the nonsexual. Love in its various forms acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships and, owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the most common themes in the creative arts.

"Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it...It really is worth fighting for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even more." 

shankar bona fusion

It can't get better than this.

Happy New Year!

with a long awaited format update. May the new year be as interesting as the last year and all previous years!