Going Silent!

I haven't written anything for 2 years on this blog !! Don't I have anything to say - which is more than Twitter length ? :) I will be back soon ...

Sachin for Bharat Ratna?

There has been a lot of debate of why Sachin for the Bharat Ratna. I don't agree that giving the Bharat Ratna to sports persons and film personalities is a bad thing. If people contributing to various arts is reason enough to give the Bharat Ratna, then sport persons cannot be an exception. The criteria for the award is "performance of highest order in any field of human endeavour", which is fair enough. Such human efforts serve as role models, so indirectly they do "national service" as was required by the original criteria defined for the Bharat Ratna. 

The question to ask is - does playing good cricket constitute performance of highest order? If the Congress government says yes, it is scoring a self-goal. It is an acknowledgement of the fact that they had brought the country to a situation by the early 90s where there were few things in India that were "world-class", there were hardly any role models. To excel at something as simple as playing cricket required superhuman effort. It was in such a time that people saw Sachin as a lighthouse of excellence in a sea of mediocrity. He carried the hopes and aspirations of a country. That is the reason he evokes such admiration. And that is probably the reason Dhyanchand, who is no less deserving in terms of achievement, misses out. Post-independence, we were a confident nation, full of optimism, and ready to build a new India. Playing great hockey may not have looked like national service then. Remember, we also had our best scientists before/just after Independence (CV Raman, JC Bose, Satyendranath Bose, S.Ramanujan, Homi Bhabha). But by the time Sachin played, our country had been reduced to mortaging our gold. In that context, Sachin's work stands out in the popular eye. The Bharat Ratna to Sachin is an indictment of our political class.

Mumbai to Thrissur by Bus

Yes, road travel is so much more comfortable these days. I really travelled from Mumbai to Thrissur by bus, albeit it was not a non-stop journey. It was peppered with halts at Bangalore, Mysore, Coimbatore and Palakkad. Yet, the ways roads have developed over the last decade, it is a feasible option. There is a rider - in God's own country's,  roads, like many other things, seem to be stagnated in Indira's India. You can still experience narrow and pot-holed national highways there, heritage structures which are endangered across most other parts of the country I have travelled to. To be fair, the state highways in Kerala are good. 

If you had to travel from Mumbai to Bangalore only a few years back, then a comfortable journey could be assured only with advance booking of train tickets. Now, the roads are broad and well maintained and the buses that ply the Mumbai-Bangalore route are just as comfortable as travelling in AC 3-tier class. And more time efficient. The Indian Railways have a funny sense of punctuality. If you can't run your trains on schedule, keep enough buffer in the schedules that it will be very difficult for the trains to be late even if the driver decides to doze off for a couple of hours. So, it is not surprising for trains on the Indian Railways network to be late by a hour at one station and then subsequently reach an hour ahead of schedule at some station down the route. 

Of course, all this comes at a cost. I didn't count, but there were quite a numer of toll booths along the road from Mumbai to Bangalore. The toll would form a significant component of the bus fare. The Build-Operate-Transfer ventures give the road contractors enough incentive to complete road projects on time and start milking the revenues. And the politicians have a very lucrative business to enter - owning the rights to charge on a major road is a near monopoly business. And satisfied travellers? In Kerala, as long as money flows in from the Gulf, the idea of a toll road is unthinkable. The very mention would lead to strikes the next day. The result is that the roads are in such a patheic state that private buses refused to ply for a few days on the national highway between Palakkad and Thrissur. It was literally a maze of pot holes masquerading as a road. No exaggeration! On the way back from Thrissur to Palakkad, I decided not go back the same way and preferred an alternative route via a state highway.

Local transport is also improving too. BEST in Mumbai is as efficient as ever, but Bangalore's public transport also rivals that of Mumbai today. In the mobile world, Google Maps, Nokia HERE Transit, the BMTC and BEST websites provide an easy way to good routes and schedules for these large cities. Pune was notorious for its inefficient public transport. I rarely travel in Pune these days, so I don't know if the coverage and quality has improved but there surely seem to be more PMPML buses on the roads. In terms of connectivity in rural areas, the transport networks are much better in Kerala and have been so for many years (atleast in the Palakkad and Thrissur districts that I know of). You can travel very easily between different villages at a reasonable price and with reasonable wait times. The one downside is the drivers drive very fast on narrow, higly curvaceous roads and if you don't get a place to sit, you are in for a gym workout. One point to be noted is that private buses run on most of these transport networks. I wouldn't accuse the Kerala State Road Transport Corporation of such efficiency! The less said about the Maharashtra State Transport Corporation the better. Its bus terminuses are pathetic and the bus fleet poorly maintained (except for the Shivneri A/C service). It is a nauseating experience to travel in one of those red buses that the MSRTC runs. In contrast, the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation buses are much better. I had a comfortable 5 hour journey in a bus of the same class the KSRTC operates between Mysore and Coimbatore, a route that has includes a 27 hairpin ghat in the Satymangalam forests. And the bus stand I saw at Chamarajanagar, a town of 77000 people, would put any bus stand in Mumbai to shame. 

The Mysore-Bangalore leg of the journey was the most exciting. Travelling in an A/C bus is boring, but in a normal bus the wind blowing onto your face and the sun beating down on you makes you feel that you are really experiencing the place you are travelling. The lush green fields irrigated by the Krishna Raja Sagar dam in Mysore district give way to the somewhat drier landscapes of the Chamarajanagar district. Villages pass by, you see people, billboards, etc. something you never see when you travel by train. The bus makes its way to the forest checkpost before entering the Satyamangalam forests. I have the best tomato rice I have ever tasted at a small hotel at the checkpoint. I guess it is because there was a local flavour to the food. Otherwise, in Mumbai, Bangalore, Mysore and many cities the food tastes almost the same. Except of course, I learnt the 'Mysore Masala' that is dished out is totally different from what you get in Mysore. The best part of the journey is the drive through the Satyamangalam forests, which are in the Western Ghats, where you see trees along mountain slopes that stand in gravity defying postures because their roots entrench themselves in myraid ways on the slopes. The Ghats are nerve-wrecking, 27 sharp hairpin curves that follow each other, and you see the debris of a couple of vehicles that have overturned recently while negotiating these turns.

Reading two column format documents on Kindle

One of my problems with my Kindle reader has been the inability to read two column format conference papers. It is a pain to keep scrolling on the device to switch columns and none of the converters I have checked out could reflow such documents correctly. 

Finally, there is a good way to convert two column format pdf documents to azw format. And the solution surprisingly comes from Amazon! Its been around for sometime, I believe. 

You can use the Send-to-Kindle feature to do the conversion. For this:

-  You have to configure your send-to-kindle e-mail id (say, anoopk@kindle.com) in your Amazon account from Manage Kindle->Personal Document settings and authorized senders' e-mail ids. 

- Now, to convert your documents, just send a mail to anoopk@free.kindle.com attaching the document and with 'convert' as the subject. You can send multiple documents  for conversion. 

- You will get a mail, with a link to down the 'azw' format file. 

- The bonus is, if your Kindle is on Wifi - the converted document will be directly delivered to you Kindle. 

Some observations:

• The columns are correctly detected, so the reading experience is great. 
• Footnotes are a irritation, wish there was a way to get them deleted. 
• Tables, formulae and diagrams don't get converted properly, so it isn't very useful to read conference papers loaded with such stuff. Of course, the workaround is to have the pdf too on the Kindle and switch between the two versions. 

Onam away from home

I missed the Indian monsoons in the French summer. And now there goes Onam! Not even a semblance of a festive mood thousand of miles away from home ! I suppose this is the first time I am not at home for Onam. The big thing is I miss the OnaSadhya. Given my rudimentary culinary skills, I did the best I could. I made some decent sambar with help from MTR, but the 'payasam' was a disaster! However, Onam ended on a sweet note as I watched Kamal's mesmerising movie 'Meghamalhar'. It is a very sweet and sensitive drama - beautifully scripted and embellished with fine performances from the lead actors. I won't say too much - the beauty is in the way the story unfolds. Long time since I saw such a wonderful Malayalam movie.

Book review: Between the Headlines

'Between the Headlines' by Shweta Ganesh Kumar is a slice of life story of a TV reporter, Satyabhama Menon, as she struggles to come to terms with the harsh realities of her cherished career. Lured by the thrill of being on national TV, driven by the altruism of journalism - she takes up an unconventional career path and works hard to finally become a TV reporter. The 'travails' that follow are well narrated, well paced and just about long enough to keep the reader hooked on. The fictional new organization NEWS India is a chaotic place, with all the chaos associated with a mismanaged organization. Reporters don't look like the most valuable assets of the organization, but instruments to used at the whims and fancies of the senior editors at the top. 

Is that the state of the TV media today? The book does paint a very gloomy picture. We have got a taste of that earlier with 'Peepli Live', the paid news cover-up and the Radia tapes, and the book only reinforces that image. The TV media has anyway become the butt of jokes in many living rooms, office and cafes around the country. But it is sad to see that many reporters understand this, feel ashamed of it but can do nothing just like Satyabhama. Truly, the news channels have becomes advertising and propoganda channels for corporates with 'filler' news thrown in. 

I don't know if the truth is as harsh as potrayed in the book. There seems to be nothing positive in the potrayal of the TV media. Even within Satyabhama's bureau, there seems to no sense of purpose or camaradrie but just office politics as usual. This forces Satyabhama to do make a tough choice - whether to endure all this purposelessness for the thrill of being in front of the camera or put her skills to do something that may make a difference -  but where she wouldn't be in the limelight. She chooses the latter. 

Nottam - movie

Nottam is a simple story which showcases the Sanskrit theatre art of Kerala, Koodiyattam and its allied art  Nangyar Koothu. I loved the movie for the extended sequences of this art form that are depicted throughout the movie, especially the finale. The movie beautifully depicts the lifestyle of a community of Chakyars (who traditionally play this art form) and their adaptation to the world around them as modern times take the art form out of temples to the stage. Nedumudi Venu gives a fine performance as the Chakyar patriarch and a reputed Koodiyattam artist. Margi Sathi, an accomplished Nangyaar Kothu artist is a delight to watch in her performance of the drama. Jagathy Sreekumar must be one of the most under-rated actors ever. We see glimpses of his talent in many myraid comic roles he plays, but in this movie we see a very nuanced performance from him. The songs (Pachepanamthate) and their picturazation, though out of sync with the movie are excellent and brilliantly picturized.