Early Adulthood And Lost Childhood

Todays children become adults very fast and don't behave their age any longer. It may be due to the influence of things like computers,Internet,TV and mobile phones,but we have a tough time handling them. Some studies see children who are barely aged 9 getting depressed,because they don't find a partner from the opposite sex. There has also been some confirmed reports that when some school students go out,they find some partners to make out. As a result,students who are left out feel marginalized and get confused about their identity. Fearing their children may go the wrong way,parents of high society appoint escorts to monitor the activities of their children. A factor which has changed young kids behaving like adults is the early attaining of puberty among girls. The harmone change causes drastic behaviorial shift among the girls. As the young tweens behave like adults they are also very conscious. With the help of iPill, the rate of abortion has come down. Parents of girl children complain that their daughters are more interested in applying make-up and buyin high heels. There is another danger here-these girls face attacks from some prying eyes among men-due to their mature look.

3 Idiots -A Mini Review

Rajkumar Hirani has made 3 Idiots on the screen and 3 million idiots in front of it.

For all the hype in the media and among the movie goers and for the director's pedigree,I chose to watch 3 Idiots in a theatre.

The first half an hour went okay. Particularly the sequence in which a student hangs himself. The transformation from fun to tragedy in a minute was excellent. It also made me believe that a dark film was in store for me. What followed was a mega serial on big screen.The way the story unfolds suggests you are watching a TV soap,not a film.

Let me ask a few questions to the people who loved the film. To make a film,you have a plot,a script and dialogues. And then the plot is executed as a film. Come back to 3 Idiots. What is Rajkumar Hirani's contribution as a director here? Is film making just the plot,script and dialogues? Where has gone shot-making? Where is execution here? Gentleman Hirani has forgotten cinema's proxy name, motion picture. At least in three quarters of the film, I didn't feel like watching a motion picture.

For every ten minutes someone weeps badly and gets on our nerves. And in fact I cried in a sequence whenMadhavan's father agrees to his son's career switch. I cried at Mr.Grace of Tamil Cinema's fate of being reduced to a mega serial star. Add to it,the background score and the mega serial is complete. That is one of the worst film sequences I have ever watched. Is Hirani a film maker or a stage play director?

Ameer Khan lets out a barrage of thoughts in the film. Sadly,there are not many of them,which wouldn't have struck anyone who has crossed 25. If the system is faulty and stupid,then the movie is more stupid than the system it denounces. Mr.Hirani,please do some justice to the trade you are in and then criticize the system!

I can tolerate a bad film, but not a TV series played in theatres.

Rating : * (Actually,I have dropped another star,which the movie deserves,for launching an attack on my cinema senses)

Tennis And the Joy of Reading

Not quite to an extent of Cricket,but the sport I follow most after Cricket is Tennis. My good or may be a bad habit is that if I am interested in something,I will start reading about it. Cricket is one such thing and then to a good extent,Tennis. I spent some time on Formula 1 too,coz one of my friends talked too much about it. After I learnt a few things like "pole position", my friend stopped talking about the sport. I used to buy the Sportstar, a popular sports magazine from The Hindu just for R.Mohan's columns. It happened many years together. As it happened,the magazine carried some features on Tennis too. It was then I knew about Nirmal Shekar, who wrote some spectacular features on Tennis, particularly on Roger Federer. I read about the contemporary players of those days like Pete Sampras,Andre Agassi,Goran Ivanisevic,Jana Navotna and a few more. Trust me,if watching a sport is fun,then reading about it is much more joy. Once I remember watching an epic game between Agassi and Ivanisovic at Wimbledon. The headline of a newspaper screamed next day : Agony,Ecstasy and finally Agassi!

YouTube

YouTube is an online video sharing website where you can view and upload videos. Since the advent of the Internet,there are a few websites which made a revolution. Google is one and then there is YouTube. In just few years of its launch,YouTube attracted millions of visitors to its website. You can watch videos from various categories. Sports,Music,Art,Cookery,Technology and the list is endless. If you visit the website once,you will be addicted to it. However,keep a check on your broadband usage,as videos consume a lot of data. Just the other day, I learnt how to wrap a book from a YouTube video,amazing aint't it? You can also watch many rare videos you haven't got to see. Sometime back,I enjoyed Shahid Afreedi's innings of a 35-ball century against Srilanka. I was longing to watch this video for years. Similarly,I heard and read about Mike Powell beating Bob Beamon's record of 23 years in the long jump event. Now, I am so lucky to be able to watch that video. It is not just sports,you can watch some music videos,children's god-like laughter,youngsters' prank on their friends and it goes on and on and on.

Google And Me

In the early 2000s,when Internet was just becoming popular,the very word "search" was new to me. If at all I searched anything I did it on Yahoo. I also used Yahoo mail,Yahoo messenger and MyYahoo. It was then I noticed that my colleagues of the company I had just joined were swearing by Google. Particularly my manager would insist me,if I got any error on my computer,I should just type the whole text on the search box on Google and find a solution. I was reluctant to switch from Yahoo to Google and I finally did. Little did I realize that my fascination would never end with Google. My association with Google is getting stronger everyday. Over the years,Google has enhanced its search capability. When you type an item in the Google search box,it would throw up a list of suggestions and the number of pages available related to your item. It is a great invention by Google. It gives the user a clear idea about the popularity of the item he searched. However,there is still room for improvement. I am looking forward to a situation where I hum a tune on my mic to search its related music.

Paa and Amitabh

I haven't watched many Amitabh Bachan's films,even though I was brought up in Mumbai. Amitabh Bachan is the Sean Connery of Indian Cinema.As a kid, I have enjoyed some commercial flicks of him. After I matured,I heard a lot of things about Amitabh by a knowledgeable few. Even when his films didn't click the critics have always lauded Amitabh's acting skills.In this background I got to watch Paa recently. Prior to that, I saw many friends and film critics heaping praise on him. But, I was disappointed with what I saw in Paa. Off late,make-up has had become an obsession in Indian Cinema. Actors change their looks by putting heavy make-up in order to make a difference(?). Kamal Hassan did it in Dasavataram and faced the wrath of many. I hated his misadventure as well. Point is, the same folks who blasted Kamal Hassan are seen lauding Amitabh in Paa. To me, Amitabh looks like a ghost in the make-up and looks scary. The film is good,due to the interesting script and execution, not because of Amitabh himself.You hardly ever to get to see any facial emotion by Amitabh even as he cracks wits throughout the film. His performance is a disaster.

Roger Federer

I follow a few games,notably Cricket and keep me updated with the latest from a few other sports. All these years,I have never seen any contemporary player being hailed as the greatest ever-except Roger Federer.There is Sachin Tendulkar, Brian Lara, Michael Phelps,Tiger Woods and Michael Schumacher who are hailed as one of the greatest,but never praised as the greatest. That is Roger Federer. It is so rare for a sportsman being called as the greatest during his playing days. And that too by his fellow players! The achievement of Federer in the Tennis world is unmatched. Many say the game has not seen a better player.I remember all the columns and features by Nirmal Shekar, sports correspondent of The Hindu on Roger Federer. If Federer gets to see him, he will lift him in delight. Such is Shekar's praise on Federer. Since he turned a professional, he has won a record number of Grand Slams and has been the King of Wimbledon. However,Rafael Nadal  played spoilsport in the last edition. Federer has won in all surfaces around the world. The French Open eluded him for long. He got his dream realized last year. He is a true legend of the game.

The Indian Premier League

The Indian Premier League or IPL is an annual T20 tournament featuring teams from major cities of India. The IPL was conceived after a rebel Indian league was formed by Zee television. In fact, the IPL is just a copy of the league named ICL. Unfortunately, the ICL has come a cropper and the IPL is a roaring success. It is because the IPL is supported by the Indian Cricket Board,BCCI and all other boards of the respective Test playing countries.This year, the IPL will see its third edition. Currently there are eight teams involved. Rajasthan Royals captained by spin bowling legend Shane Warne won the title in the first year followed by Deccan Chargers captained by another all-time great Adam Gilchrist. The IPL is held during summer to make sure it draws maximum number of viewers. It is also known for the involvement of some film personalities like superstar Shahrukh Khan, Preethi Zinta and Shilpa Shetty. Players from all around the world have seen a change of fortune with the high price paid for them. West Indian Kieron has been paid the highest price in the IPL history with a whopping $2.3 million.Funny, he has played only a handful of international matches.

Active Server Pages

Being a surfer, you must have heard this term HTML. All the websites and web pages you visit on the Net are composed of HTML tags. However, with HTML you can only create static pages, meaning that there won't be any interaction between you and the webpage or server. Active Server Pages or simply ASP is a technology with which you can create webpages with dynamic content. This means that you can interact with the website. There are similar technlogies on the Internet, but ASP is the most widely used. When you create an ASP page,you will save the page with an extension .asp. The ASP tags will be embedded with HTML tags. An ASP page will also have a scripting language such as VBScript or JScript. Unlike a plain HTML page which is executed at the client side,that is your side, an ASP page is executed at the server side. Microsoft supplies some objects for ASP which help you interact with databases. ODBC is the object you will use on your ASP page to work with a database. You will use SQL query to communicate with the database. With many other features, ASP is indeed a very powerful technogy.

Google's Page Rank

Many of us are not aware of Google's Page Rank. In fact, a casual surfer or a blogger doesn't have to know what it is. However, being the owner of a website, if you are interested in bringing many visitors to your website then you have to be worried about your page rank. Page rank is a number ranging from 1 to 10. Rank 1 is the minimum and 10 is the maximum. If the rank is 0,then there is no rank for your website. Page rank is awarded by Google, the search engine. It is just an algorithm developed by one of Google's founders and therefore it got the name. Page rank refers to the quality or value of your website in the eyes of Google. If your page rank is high, it will bring a lot of visitors from Google. Google normally awards the rank once in every 3 months,however it is not standard. Last time around, it made a round up in just 1 1/2 months. If your site has consistently original content Google will give you a high rank. If your content is copied and has links to some low graded websites, then you will get a low page rank. Also, the page rank will be according to the number of quality back links to your website.

All About Computers -For the layman

On this post,let me explain how a computer works from whatever I have learned. If you own a computer, you must see a display or a monitor, a tower-like cabinet called the CPU or Central Processing Unit,a keyboard and a little device called the mouse. You may also probably own a printer or a scanner. The tower-like structure called the CPU is the most important part of your computer. It has the necessary parts to perform all the operations. All these parts are just hardware and we need something which performs the operation. That is called software, which is essentially a set of programs which perform the tasks. Operating system is the mother of all this software which sends commands to various devices and monitors the control.You must have noticed something like "Windows" or "Mac", when you start your computer. That is called the Operating system. Inside the CPU, there are many parts like the motherboard which houses all the chips,memory and other devices. Suppose you are trying to add two numbers and want the result. The Operating system will reserve some memory space for the numbers, send necessary commands to the processing unit and finally displays the result on the monitor.

My Fascination With Dance

As other art forms like music and literature,I love dance too. However, I can't dance. I remember the extempores I gave during family ceremonies and public functions as a kid. Worse,I was appreciated for my dance skill.Kamal Hassan pleased my senses with his dance movements in films as he did to other movie buffs. Kamal is a great exponent of Bharadhanatyam, an ancient dance form meant primarily for women. I would tell my friends,no other male looked good when he performed Bharadanatyam. Meanwhile I could also appreciate other dance forms like western dance. May be that because I keep following various art forms,my idea about dance has evolved. What I couldn't like ten years back,I could enjoy it today. What appeared ordinary those days,looks enchanting to me today. However, the basic idea about dance remains the same. Dance is all about grace. One can be the best dancer technically and perform all the steps in the book,but if his dance lacks grace,then what's the point? I don't like Prabhu Deva, widely considered as the best dancer in Indian cinema, for the simple fact that he has no grace. Same with local boy,Simbhu. What he does is circus,not dance.

Mobile Phones and the Lack of technology

Mobile phones found its way into the Indian market nearly ten years back. All the popular mobile phone models looked like bricks. The mobile revolution happened almost ten years later as the mobile companies cut down the tariff rates.When it came down to making a call for just 1 Rupee, the market burst open and a common man thought of buying a mobile phone of his own. Along with this, the look and features of mobile phones changed drastically. Camera was the first invention. It started with 1.3 megapixel and now it is common to see 5 megapixel. However, the features of mobile phones are not worth talking about. Leave other features, I am just talking about text editing. It is strange that you cannot use a text file the way you use it on a computer.More strange is that you cannot have your own name for a text file. This annoying feature is common in mobile phones of any make or model. This is despite the premium price we pay for the phones. Other features are not great either. Using Internet is such a painful experience. Internet access remains just a show off in many mobile phones.Hope I see better things in future.