Author: Rahul Razdan

Krrishi Darshan

Media & Entertainment

To all those souls who grew up spending an agonising 30 minutes every evening watching Doordarshan for want of a better alternative, here is your chance to exorcise the agony of those two words — Krrishi Darshan!

In the world of entertainment there are three instances of father-son relationships that make me go back to my dad and want to be his little boy — Life is Beautiful, Finding Nemo, and Hrithik in papa Rakesh Roshan’s films. Perhaps that’s why no one else presents Hrithik the way his dad does — for not only does he (Roshan senior) make films as a business, he also discharges his responsibility of presenting his son in the best possible manner. The son obliges. And together they don’t disappoint.

So is Krrish a great movie?

Continue reading →

Most popular on YouTube

Zeitgeist

This video 'Evolution of Dance' is the all time Most Viewed video on YouTube with 25,092,279 views at the time of writing this post. The next most viewed video had only half as many views — 12,584,122! If you see the two videos, the first is a 'performance-based-entertainment' piece, while the second is a 'spoofy-video' on the Pokemon theme song. But why such a huge difference in views?

The answer to that is what I shall indulgently christen the 'leader-feeder effect'. Which states that:

In a democratically evaluative framework, given two equally performing contenders, the one who takes the lead gets fed by a greater number of patrons (whose behaviour is in conformance with the zeitgeist), leading to an exponential difference between their performance metrics, thereafter.

In fact, if you see the views for the videos ranked after these, they tend to 'even-out'. So the videos ranked third, fourth, fifth and so on, do not have such a huge magnitude of difference between them. Now hypothetically, if YouTube were to remove these top two videos, the video currently ranked third, will see an exponential rise in the views it gets, and end up having a much bigger lead. Similarly, the next in line video will also see a rise in views under the diminishing leader-feeder effect.

Disclaimer: In case there is already some theory/postulate/model in economics that addresses this phenomenon — I haven't read it! And if you don't trust me, and would like to go along with 'that original research' — you just provided empirical evidence for my 'leader-feeder effect'. Q.E.D

Related (but hopelessly out-of-scale) trivia:
At last count, my video Brokeback Claymation on YouTube (which you can also see here) had 569.000 views (Oh yeah that's a decimal in between!)

They searched this and found Swadeshe

Humour, Zeitgeist

Even as my new post struggles towards completion, I thought it might be interesting to see what contributes to the trickle of people coming here from search-engines. Just to add value (and create some stickiness for the post) I have added my estimate [on a scale of -100 to 100] and remarks as to how much ‘user satisfaction‘ the visit could have provided!

Search Terms for 7 days ending 2006-06-19

Today:
jayalalitha karunanidhi funny picture

  • Sorry no pictures of Jayalalitha (even though the text in an earlier post had the inadvertently saucy string “…100 pictures of Jayalalitha and 100 pictures of karunanidhi…”); and one may just-about find the Karunanidhi picture funny [50]

masood nasser

  • This certainly was Masood checking his own name on Google ;-) [100]

“Mahir Cagri” 2006

  • Only Wikipedia or Swadeshe would have any fresh information on Mahir Cagri in 2006 [80]

picture of shahid afridi advertising pep

  • Must have been some fan wanting to check out Afridi in a pep(si?) advertisement; only to find him here in the chuckers roll of (dis)honor [-50]

Yesterday:
rahul razdan

  • This most certainly was me, in search of myself! [100]

guy goma clip

  • Yessir! Perhaps the second or third best Guy Goma repository — after Wikipedia and GuyGoma.com [70]

shahid afridi pepsi adds

  • Hmmm. Now this must be some Pepsi ad… I’ll also look up [-50]

sign board manufacturers in chennai

  • Sorry folks! Wrong sign-al [-40]

pics of karunanidhi

  • I assume this would be an arm-chair publisher or a gerontophile :-p [70]

6/17/2006
kurt cobain post mortem pics

  • I just had a mention of Kurt Cobain. But post mortem pics…??? I would think positive and assume this was a medical student doing some research [20]

shoaib akhtar sings song

  • Had that been Sachin Tendulkar – I would have assumed these were Kishore Kumar songs. But my un-educated guess is, these could be songs from Tere Naam! [-50]

kauntest

  • Ok  [80]

rani mukherjee round face

  • No Rani Mukherjee here. No round face here. But nice insight… [-20]

Bowling Arm

  • Yessir! You are at the right place. Chucking is all about misuse of the bowling arm. [80]

6/16/2006
“pardesi pardesi” lyrics in English”

  • If this were a focused search, then sorry to have disappointed. But contextually, I did give you other ‘pardesi’ songs… [30]

6/15/2006
shahid afridi interview

  • Whenever/where ever you finally read that interview, if it talks about Shahid Afridi chucking, please please send me a link. [20]

hindi to ek khanabadosh, saara jag mera

  • Wow! That was an interesting search query. Did I help you? [50]

6/14/2006
None (Aww! A bad query day)

6/13/2006
pardesiya lyrics in urdu

  • If this were a focused search, then sorry to have disappointed. But contextually, I did give you other ‘pardesi’ songs… [30]

pardesiya yeh such song lyrics

  • ditto [30]

shahid afridi youtube

  • Yes this one fits. Once you read how Shahid Afridi chucks, you may want to check out a clip or two on YouTube. [60]

6/12/2006
urdu point funny picturs

  • Too early in the life-stage of this blog, but as an aspiration I would like to provide for that query eventually. [10]

arm hand puns

  • Oops! If only I had known it before ‘hand’ — but no ‘arm’ in trying even now… [0]

Chucking: Acute angle, obtuse logic

Sports

As young kids when we played cricket, the competition was always intense. No quarters given, no favours demanded. I remember very clearly two players from our team who were prevented from bowling as their actions aroused suspicion of the other teams we played matches with.

There were no cameras, no biomechanics, no electrodes, no trigonometric measurements — just the knowledge (not backed by overt admission though) that the bowlers' actions were not entirely defensible.

It becomes very clear to anybody who has watched the game for sometime, as to what is a good shot, and what is a bad shot. The same is true for the other player activities — fielding and bowling. You just KNOW, when it is good and when foul.

I have no doubt in my mind that the bowling actions of the following are (or have at a point of time been) foul:

Brett Lee
Germaine Lawson
Harbhajan Singh
Lasith Malinga
Mutthiah Muralitharan
Nathan Bracken
Rajesh Chauhan
Shabbir Ahmed
Shahid Afridi
Shoaib Akhtar
Shoaib Malik

They have either been 'throwing' — which involves the bowling arm being recoiled/flexed and then straightened out to generate a certain pace that would not normally come if the bowling arm were to be swivelled around the shoulder while at full stretch — or 'slinging' the arm in a slanted angle — where the bowling hand doesn't go high above the bowler's head at full-stretch. In the case of Malinga for example, the bowling arm is mostly at par with the level of the shoulder.

It doesn't take anything more than basic cricketing sense to endorse the above list of the defaulters.

What further obfuscates the issue is that the chucking debate centres around 'straightening' of the bowling arm. While in reality the problem is in 'bending' the bowling arm, which the bowler would then automatically straighten. You don't need to straighten your arm if you don't bend the damn arm in the first place!

And as if the misplaced debate were not enough, we have to contend with the absolute stupidity of ICC putting limits and measurements like eight degrees, thirteen degrees, fifteen degrees etc. and that too in exotic biomechanics laboratories! It is a hallmark of incredulous dodo-headedness that they don't think that the bowlers in question could bowl legitimately in the lab and sneak in the dirty ball during crucial moments in the match. (The biggest exponents of this are Shoaib Akhtar and Shahid Afridi).

Could the ICC stop this nonsense? Let the square-leg umpire call. For he, just like the rest of us, would KNOW when a bowler is chucking.

Like pregnancy — where you either are pregnant or you are not — chucking too is binary. You either chuck, or you don't. And there can be no measurements to it.

Semiotics, words & half-life

Language

Remember your school-time nuclear physics?
Half-life?
No?

A quick refresher here and here.

Point being:
Radioactive materials take practically forever to lose their radioactivity.

Now think of tonnes and tonnes of nuclear weapons stockpiled by all countries of the world. Even if tomorrow they decide to 'dump' these nuclear weapons, imagine how much time it will take for these tonnes and tonnes to become 'safe'.

Here is a simple challenge:

Think of a way to communicate this "Danger: This site is radioactive" in such a manner that a.) it stands for 24,000 years* and b.) people, 24,000 years later, can still understand it.

Don't waste your time thinking of phrases / icons / signboards for this. None of what you could think of is good enough!

Remember, that we have not been able to understand hieroglyphics even after 5000-8000years. The most popular language in the world, Mandarin, is understood by only around 800-900 million people out of the 6 billion people. English is understood by some 600-700 million people. (These figures may not be accurate, but well within range to make a point!)

I faced this question for the first time, in one of the workshops by my good friend Niyam Bhushan two years back. Niyam sent an email recently:

…here is my pet-puzzle that I've wondered about since more than eight years. It remains unsolved. For those of you who have ever attended my typography workshops, it may be familiar.

* http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-fi-forever3may03,1,7584113.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

Please take a look at it, discuss and share among yourselves and your friends.

"The arrow of education points towards illiteracy." – osho

* You may need to register at the LA Times website for this, but it's a quick, one-time registration, that's worth it.

An excerpt from the LA Times article:

As chief scientist of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Nelson oversees a cavernous salt mine that is the first geological lockbox for the "fiendishly toxic" detritus of nuclear weapons production: chemical sludge, lab gear and filters laced with tons of radioactive plutonium.

Nearly half a mile underground, workers push waste drums into crystalline labyrinths that seem as remote as the moon. A faint salty haze glows in powdery beams from miners' headlamps and settles on the lips like a desert kiss. Computer projections predict that within 1,000 years the ceilings and walls will collapse in a crushing embrace that seals the plutonium in place.

But plutonium remains deadly for 250 times that long — an unsettling reminder that some of today's hazards will outlast the civilizations that created them. The "forever problem," unique to the modern technological age, has made crafting the user manual for this toxic tomb the final daunting task in an already monumental project. The result is a gargantuan system that borrows elements equally from Stonehenge and "Star Trek." [Read more]
——————————————————————————–

A thoroughly humbling thought, that not only puts in perspective the madness of nuclear weaponry, but also the helplessness and inadequacy of all means of communication known to us…

And come to think of it, people argue that humans are a more evolved species because of language. Animals, by the way, may sense the danger 24,000 years later too.

 

* Why this figure of 24,000 years?
That's apparently the time it will take for the current dump to decay. And this is just a decimal (and dismal!) percentage of the total existing nuclear stockpile worldwide.