The book, And Another Thing, seems to be the greatest/worst thing since the discovery of DNA (if you don’t get the joke — Douglas Noel Adams was born in the same year that Watson and Crick discovered DNA). Most sequels to famous books/series end up being pale imitations of the originals, and in some cases just completely lousy. So I have been looking forward to this book with mixed anticipation and trepidation. I loved the Artemis Fowl series (the first three books — the later ones seems tacked on), but H2G2 is a tough act to follow. Wouldn’t it have been better to complete the third Dirk Gently book first?

In any case, Nicolas Botti was one of the (un?)lucky few who was given the opportunity to read the first half of the book — some three months before it is due to be released. His review states pretty much what I expected.

Is it funny? If you read Hitchhiker to have a good laugh, maybe you’re going to be disappointed. I didn’t find it very funny. There are some good funny moments (mainly at the beginning) but Colfer’s ideas being less original than Douglas’, you are less surprised. And he has not the same grip on comic timing than Douglas had.

However, he ends by saying that,

I don’t want to give the feeling that it is a bad book. It is not. But maybe I was expecting too much.

Still, I’m going to read it the day it hits the stands!

Demetri Martin has taken a bunch of palindromes and strung them together to make a “poem”. It’s interesting, and has it’s virtues – but I’m not so sure it’s a good poem after all! What do you think?

A 224-Word Palindrome – Neatorama

One of the things I was worried about when I got a slider phone was whether it would be sturdy, and here I can most unequivocally state that there is nothing to be worried about. While I haven’t tried throwing it about or banging it on the floor, I have not been overly cautious, and there have been no squeaks or rattles at all.

The other thing that I like, as I said earlier, is the WiFi. It makes using email and other internet enabled applications simpler and faster. But there’s an odd problem with WiFi on the Kaiser. As it was shipped out of the box, the performance/power setting for WiFi was 50/50, but I was unable to browse. Later, when I moved it to 100% performance, I had no issues.

But coming to browsing – when is M$ going to ship a decent browser with their mobile software? I want something fast but useful. When I try browsing with IE mobile, it sucks. Then I tried Opera Mobile, which is nice, but sucks because it is too heavy. Maybe when Fennec gets released, it will do for the mobile web what Firefox did for the desktop.

And as I see it, the problems with the Kaiser are mainly with the OS. Even the keyboard problem is a software problem – mainly. Adding a calendar event – go to calendar, click menu, new, and then enter the details. In PalmOS, just go to calendar, tap on a time and start typing. It’s quicker to create complicated events in WinMo, but for a basic event, Palm wins hands down.

It’s very similar throughout the OS – whether it’s contacts or tasks or messaging. And then there are such glaring inconsistencies. For example, cut and paste. In some applications, I can tap Menu->Edit->Cut/Copy/Paste. In some others I can just hold down the centre button of the d-pad and a context menu pops up, and in other cases I have to tap and hold on the screen for the context menu. Why can’t we have one consistent method (or preferably all three in all apps)?

The biggest advantage, though, with regards to the OS is the flexibility of installing a huge variety of 3rd party applications. Even though it is claimed that PalmOS has more applications available (especially free ones), most of them are now outdated and not maintained. WinMo applications cover a whole lot of ground ranging from ones that almost completely hide the underlying OS like SPB Mobile Shell, to others like Fring and Dashwire for communication, to proper RTS games like Age of Empires. And unlike with the iPhone, anyone can make software (the SDK is free to download) and you don’t need to use iTunes to add applications. And of course, Apple won’t be around to stop you from selling the app you make.

It’s much nicer to use the Kaiser than most other smartphones that I’ve seen, especially because of the touchscreen+keyboard combination, but it’s not perfect. It’s not as neat and clean as the iPhone, but it is functionally more powerful. It’s not as simple to operate as a Blackberry, but is more extendable. So, for now, I like it – mainly because there is nothing really better out there. But if it were up to me, I’d want a Treo Pro running Android (in about six months when the hardware and software settle down)!

So, with great trepidation, and not much choice about it, I have jumped the sinking Palm OS ship and jumped straight on to the Microsoft bandwagon. So this review deals both with the Kaiser (when I say Kaiser, I mean the TyTN II) as well as with the Windows Mobile 6.1 platform.

For those of you who don’t know (or to refresh your memory), the specifications for the Kaiser are:

CPU:          32bit Qualcomm MSM7200
CPU Clock:     400 MHz
ROM capacity:     256 MiB (accessible: 145.2 MiB)
RAM capacity:     128 MiB
Display Type:     color transflective TFT , 65536 scales
Display:     2.8 " 240 x 320 Touchscreen
Networks:     GSM850, GSM900, GSM1800, GSM1900, UMTS850, UMTS1900, UMTS2100
Data:         CSD, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA
Expansion:      microSD, microSDHC, TransFlash, SDIO
Bluetooth:     Bluetooth 2.0
Wireless LAN:     802.11b, 802.11g
GPS Services:     Assisted GPS, QuickGPS
Main Camera:     3.1 MP
Secondary Camera:     0.3 MP
Battery Capacity:     1350 mAh
Keyboard: Sliding and tilt

If you’re not really technically minded, it means that this is a fast device, with a touchscreen and a slide-out keyboard which tilts up to make it look like a laptop. To top it off, it’s got connectivity anywhere in the world and it supports 3G, 3.5G and WiFi data.

For a person like me, the last one is really great, since in India we don’t have 3G and getting on the net from one’s phone otherwise really sucks.

So, the first thing I did on getting hold of the Kaiser was to upgrade the software from Windows Mobile 6 to 6.1. (Okay, okay, I’m a geek – sue me!). I was not really curious to see the difference between 6 and 6.1 and all the reviews said that 6.1 is far better, so there it was: I went to the HTC website, downloaded the update, plugged in my phone and voila everything worked – wonderful! Updates on the Treo were as easy, so it’s quits between the two.

One of the nicest things about the Windows Mobile OS is the home screen. It’s got a lot of stuff to see at a single glance and is easily customizable with a variety of plugins from a huge number of developers. I like the default HTC home page, but it is a little limited. Unfortunately, HTC decided that since they were going to ship a top-of-the-line phone they would not add the customizations that they had put on their slightly lower-end phone (the touch) like the Touch cube and the finger friendly optimizations. Luckily a number of developers have spent a long time working on porting all these applications, and now I have a really nice home screen similar to what you would get if you follow this thread on xda-developers. (btw xda-developers is clearly the best place to get started if you have an HTC phone).

Unfortunately, the phone dialer isn’t half as nice. On the Treo, the buttons were nice and big and SEPARATE! Here, the buttons are not nice, not very big and touching each other, so with my thick fingers, I often end up typing the wrong number. The good part about the dialer is that it tries to figure out my contacts based on the letters I type, so if I type 234, it finds ADItya sengupta. Since this is a clever device, if I type 273, it finds Aditya SEngupta. This is very useful, considering that I really don’t want to slide out the keyboard to find my contacts by name.

And this is the biggest problem on the Kaiser – the keyboard. As keyboards go, it isn’t bad. It has a nice tactile feel and the buttons are big and nicely spaced and you can feel the press of each button. But Windows Mobile sucks here. When I slide the keyboard, sometimes the screen rotates almost instantly, but sometimes I have to wait for it to realise – oh! the keyboard is out, the keyboard is out – and then run around madly wondering what to do next before it changes the orientation. And then, there’s the problem of auto-complete. Until I disabled it, auto-complete was making typing so slow that it s e  e   m  e  d to take forever to type a single word! I guess it’s useful if you’re using the onscreen keyboard or the transcriber, but using the hardware keyboard with it sucks. Also, the other funny thing. If I use the onscreen keyboard when the physical keyboard is hidden away, it still shows later when I slide out the physical keyboard!

On the Treo, on the other hand, the keyboard was much smaller and more difficult to type on, but it never needed to be slid left, right, up or down. It was just there, which made it easier to type!

Ok… this is getting to be a long long post, so let me cut it here. More in the next installment…

David Hasselhoff, the TV star everyone pans but still watches played the original Michael Knight. In his tight jeans and cowboy boots and with his overly ham acted performance, Michael was a unique character. Someone who was different, because they were – not because the script told them to be.  Justin Bruening just doesn’t cut it. He is stiff and starchy and carries a gun, something that the original Michael Knight rarely did. And of course, in deference to the original series, he starts off as Mike Traceur and then is “killed” and is reborn as Michael Knight (btw he is supposedly the original Michael’s son).

KITT has changed as well and how… Even though he now has Val Kilmer’s voice, he just doesn’t have the dry, sardonic style of the original William Daniels. And to top it off, the car has no personality (unlike the original Pontiac TransAm), because although it supposedly is a Ford Shelby Mustang, it morphs into a whole variety of other Ford cars and pickups, like a long running Ford commercial. And then there’s the voice modulator box. Unlike the original single glowing box or the later three bar design, there is a glowing orb, which just looks to weird, like an alien creature.

But the biggest problems with the show is the scripting and the story. Firstly, the original show was really about the car and it was technological, but it wasn’t un-accessible. Most of the stuff the car did was considered “Hey Cool, I wish my car could do that!”. But here it seems that everything is in the realms of half-reality and half-sci-fi where you wonder whether it exists, but you’re sure that you will never get a hold of it even fifty years later unless you work for the US Government or have as much money as Bill Gates (which reminds me, have you seen the really stupid Gates+Seinfeld MicroS**t advertisments? – a post for another date). Secondly, the story, at least for the pilot and the first episode, makes no sense. Some weird people do some weird things like cutting a guy’s thumb for his DNA instead of a blood sample! And the plot just meanders along at times while seeming over full at other times.

And of course, the biggest problem is the premise. The original series said that it was the story of “a young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless in a world of criminals who operate above the law…”, but here it seems to be a FBI operation which doesn’t say much for the original Foundation for Law and Government which worked on its own in a kind of vigilante way with tacit approval from the Government. And instead of Michael, KITT, Bonnie and Devon in a world of their own, we now have a dedicated team of FBI personnel which means leaks and stupidity and a bunch of idiotic people who sit around and stare at KITT.

Does that mean I won’t watch it? No… but I will keep going back to the old campy stuff!

Firstly there was Lucknow ’76 written and directed by Abhishek Majumdar on the 1st and 2nd. Then there was my Poile Sengupta’s play Keats was a Tuber on the 4th, 5th and 6th. And finally this weekend just past, there was Invisible River by Gautam Raja.

Seeing these three plays in short succession makes one feel that English language theatre in Bangalore in still standing and those (including yours truly) who were ready to perform the final rites, were a bit hasty.

It’s not that the plays/performances were without flaws but they gave one a sense that it was worth the while to travel an hour (or longer) in maddening Bangalore traffic to watch them.

Lucknow ’76 has an interesting premise. Working across two periods in the history of the city, 1876 and 1976, the playwright tried to show the similarities between British imperialism and the Emergency. His portrayal of the period in 1876 when Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India was extremely well done. Unfortunately, the 1976 period was not nearly as well done, nor was it clearly linked together with the other story. Overall, it seemed like a good effort, but needed just a little more coherency. The acting was good, however, since there weren’t enough brochures around, I wasn’t able to figure out who played what role! The lighting was a little off the mark, tending to come in after the actors had moved. The music was performed live on stage with a single guitarist who also sang. Again, thanks to the lack of brochure, I don’t know who he was. He provided a good mood for the performance.

Two days later, was Keats was a Tuber. Directed by Ashish Sen and produced by Voices, the play was a revival of a over-ten-year-old performance, again directed by Ashish, with a mildly different cast. Pathy Aiyar took over from Preetham Koilpillai in the role of Raghu, while Stanley Pinto replaced Chippy Gangjee and Chandana Vasistha Aiyar played Damini. The production was not bad, with live music from Jagdish and Madhuri, but I was disappointed overall (having read the book… sorry script!). The play is primarily about the problems faced by Indians who speak English as opposed to their native language. Set in the English Department of a small town college, it talks of life and love and the English language. Shiv Kumar, as Mr Iyer, one of the lecturers, was stiff and wasn’t able to bring out any nuance. Ranita Hirji (Mrs. Nathan) the head of department, who asks Raghu (her nephew) to join the department to ostensibly fill up a three month teaching vacancy before leaving for higher studies abroad, was limited to being a college lecturer (formerly one in real life as well!). Stanley was good, Pathy was competent, Chandana was incapable of acting. Overall, I would have expected the play to be done differently (again having read the script), but it is upto the director! Then again, I felt that most of the audience seemed to have enjoyed it – which was the point.

Invisible River by Gautam Raja, directed by Ruchika Chanana, is set on the banks of the Ganga in Allahabad where a young doctor fighting against blind superstition is trying to clean up the river, while a young scientist is trying to prove that the river contains bacteriophages (virii that kill bacteria) which may help save lives. Starting off slowly, the premise pushes the play along with strong performances from Pritham Kumar and Veena Appiah. As I could see, the play would do well with a better child actor (and better lines for him!), while the entire concept of the Saraswathi being the invisible river is forgotten by the end of the play, even though it’s in the title!

Whew! Long post! I hope you managed to catch at least one of these performances this week. I’ll keep you updated if I hear that of repeat showings.

Coming back to the mad movie weekend recently, A and I watched a range of movies, and finally didn’t end up seeing the movie that we had planned to watch finally!

It started off with us watching Gangster with a few of A’s colleagues. Of course, the plan was to go watch Darna Zaroori Hai, but due to a lack of planning and co-ordination, all the tickets were sold out (I guess most people forgot that it was opening night!).

I went into the movie with trepidation considering that I quite dislike one of the two heroes of the movie, Emraan Hashmi, otherwise known as the Serial Kisser of Bollywood! I really can’t figure out why he’s considered so great. In any case, the other male star Shiney Ahuja, I really like, so it wasn’t like I didn’t want to watch the movie at all.

And I was pleasantly surprised at the movie. Remember this is a commercial Hindi movie, so those of you who can’t handle the style will not like the movie; but for those of you who can – well, be prepared for a interesting, but not great flick.

A young bargirl in Mumbai has a gangster fall in love with her and take her away from her horrid life. But he is hunted by the cops and his former criminal associates and has to send her off to Seoul after a young boy they adopted is shot by the cops. Being a *good* guy (inspite of his criminal tendencies), he hasn’t slept with her because they’re not married yet. In Seoul, all alone and getting drunk every night, she meets the other guy (Emraan), who takes care of her and seduces her at the same time. I won’t let out any more otherwise I’ll give away the ending.

While Kangana as the girl was good in bits, she has a funny way of speaking, so I found that a bit distracting. Emraan Hashmi was his usual self, if you’ve seen any of his other movies, you’ll know what I mean. But Shiney truly carried the movie. He was brilliant in almost every single scene.

The movie was a decent thriller with good music especially compared to the crap coming out of Bollywood nowadays. The camera-work up close was odd considering there were too many close-ups of the actors noses for some reason!

Not a great recommendation, but watch it if you have some time on your hands and nothing better to do.

First up was Brokeback. When Ang Lee’s previous movie, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon came out, both of us were hugely underwhelmed. I really couldn’t see what the hype was about. And this time too, I was prepared for disappointment. Unfortunately, some of my fears were not unfounded.

Let me start off by saying – Yes, this is a brave movie. Yes, we need more movies like this. Yes, congrats and all that. BUT(t?) it is not a great MOVIE by any means. I am sorry, but Heath Ledger cannot act. Mumbling your lines doesn’t make you a mid-western cowboy. And where is his passion for Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhall)? It’s supposed to be a romance for god’s sake. What about the chemistry (rather lack of it)? I’ve seen more chemistry between men on Will and Grace for god’s sake! I thought it wasn’t supposed to be about two men who f**k just because they aren’t getting any with the women. But the first time they do it, it seems just like that.

I am really glad that the Oscar went to Crash. As a work of movie making, it’s far far better than Brokeback. I understand that movies talking about uncomfortable topics are necessary, but one needs to make a good movie as well. Remember Philadelphia? It talks about homosexuality, AIDS, racism – you name it. And it was a brilliantly made, brilliantly acted movie.

Watch Brokeback, if nothing else, for the visual beauty. And for Jake – he was good, but let down by his partner!

Walk the Line, on the other hand, is a really good movie. The story of Johnny Cash well told. I hadn’t expected much from the movie and wasn’t sure why Reese Witherspoon won best actress. But after watching the movie, I can understand. Understatedly made, with really good performances from Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash and Reese as June Carter.

Watch the movie – it’s really one of the best movies of the last year.

Unfortunately our fears were not unfounded. Aishwarya Rai cannot act to save her life. The few roles where she was better than a mannequin were those with really great directors (in Raincoat, Devdas and Chokher Bali) and even there she was limited. Dylan McDermott was better, but there was no chemistry between the two of them. Some reviewers have harped on the inane conversations between Aishwarya and the spices in her spice shop, but seem to forget that these conversations are there in the original text (and are just as inane)!

The movie is so bad that I won’t waste any time telling you the plot – just imagine a watered down version of Chocolat. There are just too many things wrong with the movie. The director for some reason seemed to have insisted on the voice-overs being spoken extra slowly in order to make everyone sound short of intelligence. He also doesn’t seem to know much about India – while he sets the opening scenes very obviously in Kerala, the younger version of Aishwarya screams ‘Mummy’ and ‘Papa’ when her parents are attacked by thugs!

The only real redeeming factors about the movie are visual. The spice shop is beautifully created and Santosh Sivan’s cinematography is stunning.

Don’t watch the movie except as a visual treat. In fact, just turn off the sound and play a nice blues cd in the background. It might be far more worthwhile thatway!

Most of us have heard about the Knight’s Templar. We’ve read about them in school and we’ve seen books and movies either denigrating them (remember Ivanhoe?) or making them objects of intense curiosity, as in Dan Brown’s most famous book.

I seem to have been interested in the Templar worlds for as long as I can remember, well before the latest fad. (This may of course be largely due to my thirst for lots of bits of useless facts!) I had done my reading and one of my favourites was Umberto Eco’s brilliant tragic parody of the Templar legacy in Foucault’s Pendulum.

Short Recap about the Templars:

Here were these bunch of guys who went out around the world fighting the enemies of civilization (read: Christian Church). Now, the thing is, although these guys were supposedly monastic, they decided to accumulate a whole lot of wealth. They took money from Kings to fight the Arabs; they took money from the church because they were upholding Christianity in a Pagan part of the world; the took money from traders, priest and other sundries to protect them while they travelled to the Holy Land. And then they became the world’s first truly international bankers. Give them some money, they’d look after it, and give it back to you when and where you wanted, for a fee.

Now, King Philip IV of France wanted some of the Templar’s money, so, he said that they didn’t believe in Christ and were guilty of a dozen odd crimes against the Lord and his Church and he had them all rounded up and tortured.

Of course he never found the money. The then Grand Master Jaques Molay was burnt at the stake apparently not having breathed a word as to the whereabouts of the great wealth of the Templars (which also supposedly included the Holy Grail – another topic of great literary value – also included in DVC!).

End Recap!

The big thing among writers nowadays is the great treasure hunt. Find the pot of gold at the end of the Templar rainbow!

But it doesn’t exist!!!! That’s my point.

Ok. Assume that there were a few million gold coins or whatever among the remaining Templars. They needed to live, so they spent a few. So over the centuries there’d be a hundred thousand less left. And you’ve forgotten inflation. The equivalent of 1 gold coin in the 15th century might be equal to 1 US Dollar (though unlikely – far less to buy beyond food and clothes!) but look around you today. Even if there were half a billion gold coins (highly unlikely to start off with) there are enough people with far more than that nowadays. And that money had to be split up among the few templars! So it has almost no value today!

But coming back to the books themselves. Ok, fine, you’ve got yourself some sort of idea as to how to go about finding the money. If your idea was really practical, would you spend five years writing it into a book that other people would read? No. You’d get on the next flight to Israel and dig up the money with your grubby little hands and tell as few people as possible!

Unless you know that your ideas are a crock of s**t. So you put them down somehow into a 500 page or more page-turner (hopefully) and send it out to the publishers to earn your 10% per book royalty! That’s the good way to make the money.

The only people who suffer are the long-suffering readers. On one hand you’ve got those who buy the book as a way to pass time in hotel airports. This kind of book is okay for them because it’s better than staring at the blank airport walls or at TV screens filled with people speaking in a language you don’t understand. The second kind is the people who read pulp. Whether they read only pulp or whether they also read pulp is besides the point. They know that what they’re reading ain’t exactly literature. So it’s time-pass (as we Indians say!).

The third kind of reader comes into this thinking – Wow! A LITERARY thriller! Now I can boast to all my friends about my LITERARY reading habits. I can talk about the HOLY GRAIL and the KNIGHTS TEMPLAR and can be well read like that show-offy Aditya down the hall!

These are the people I feel sorry for. Because these books are junk. Pure and simple. Da Vinci Code was passable as a thriller, but had nothing great style-wise. The Templar Legacy, which I have the good(?) fortune to be reading now, isn’t even that good. In fact the writing is so bad it’s hard to not put down.

In the second chapter of the book, a bookseller is being questioned at gun point:
He picked up his mug and savored another gulp of beer.

I mean who savors their beer when they are afraid of being shot? And does anyone savor anything when you gulp it down? Wow!

One of the main protagonists, Stephanie, is supposedly someone high up in the US Justice Department. But she is so stupid, that she never listens to any advice, always manages to get into trouble, depends on the help of the man (Malone) she never listens to, and is rude to people she meets even without having met them before!

Also, the classic bad pulp elements are there- two sets of bad guys, or rather one bad guy out to get the money and one bad/good guy out to save the church, the supposedly clever but actually dumb heroine, the ex-SAS type hero who always forgets just the one important thing which would compress the story into just 40 pages, the rich helpful friend, the dying master and the helpful servant.

And the events are so unimaginative themselves. I’ve got to a point in the book where the hero and the heroine are asking the rich for information at his isolated house in Europe. He lives austerely and has few servants. There is no guard at the gate. The bad guys just walk into his compund and start listening to their conversation through the window. Sounds familiar?

Of course I am going to finish the book, if for no other reason than the fact that I’m travelling on work and prefer reading crap to staring at blank hotel walls in the middle of the night.

But unless you are like me, or have a good understanding that this is not even good pulp, I really suggest that you don’t read it. Read Eco instead, or if you don’t want something so heavy, Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown is far more entertaining.