18. ASI Tukaram Omble

He was an unsung hero when I met him. He was also dead.
SO maybe I didn't actually meet him, I met the moment. The moment when India witnessed one of its bravest acts of police bravery. Thankfully, in the time that I read about it, then got indignant and cursed the media for not showing his face on TV, Times of India and Rediff got the same email forward that I did, and decided to put up the news. The gist of the email is as follows:
The untold story of the bravest of them all - Assistant sub-inspector Omble.

TAKING POSITIONS

Assistant sub-inspector Omble was asked by his senior to take up position on Marine Drive on Wednesday night, after the news of firings at Leo-pold Café, Oberoi and Taj Hotels came in.



THE ALERT!

Around 12.45 am, he got an alert on his walkie-talkie that two terrorists had hijacked a Skoda car and were heading for Girgaum Chowpatty.


THE ARRIVAL

Just minutes later, the Skoda whizzed past him.



CHASING THE CULPRIT

Omble jumped on to his two-wheeler and chased the car. A team from DB Marg police station was setting up a police barricade (nakabandi) at the Chowpatty signal.



OPEN FIRE

As the car approached the signal, the terrorists opened fire on the cops, but were forced to reduce speed because of the barricades.




BRAVE ACT

Omble overtook the Skoda and stopped in front of it, forcing the driver of the car to swerve right and hit the divider.



NABBING THE TERRORIST

With the terrorists momentarily distracted, Omble sprang toward one of them, Amir Kasab, and gripped the barrel of the AK47 rifle with both hands



BEARING BULLETS

With the barrel pointing towards Omble, Amir pulled the trigger. A spray of bullets entered his stomach and intestine



THE CALL OF DUTY

Omble collapsed, but held on to the gun till he breathed his last, stopping Amir from shooting anyone else.



GUNNING DOWN

The other cops, who by that time had killed the other terrorist, Ismail, pounced on Amir and captured him.



SOLE INFORMER

The investigation agencies were reported to have gathered a lot of information from the sole terrorist captured.




SUCCESSFUL ATTEMPT

There was no way assistant sub-inspector (ASI) Tukaram Omble, 48, could have survived the encounter. But before dying, he ensured that at least one of the 26/11 terrorists was caught alive.




MANY DEAD, ONE CAUGHT

Brave hearts like Omble gave India its honour back. It's because of them that the nation stands taller and prouder.

There's something the mail didn't have, and Rediff did; that was his picture.

Hope you get better media coverage in Heaven, Mr. Omble. RIP.

17. Define Quality?

Click on Image to View

Something I found when I was doing something AS boring as researching for an assignment. A "happy" coincidence.

16. Unanswered Prayers and Two Indias

They say there's two Indias. As I watch NDTV news telling me that, as of now, 7 blasts have taken place in Delhi, killing 18 people, and that some lame terrorist organisation has taken self-glorified responsibility for such cowardice - I recognise too many Indias to count. I wish it stopped at the official 4 of religions, 21 of languages or 28 of states.

There's an India that wants to cover up from their conscience, all that's going on. I've written this when Mumbai was in blood, that the spirit of the city was an excuse for not giving a damn. Except, its got Barkha Dutt's seal of approval now. Ofcourse, that doesn't change a thing, now does it? Go watch Mumbai Meri Jaan. The news is too real.

There's an India that doesn't see the beauty of its democracy, in all its failings. The kind of India that thinks that minorities are ill-treated here, that the flaws are bigger than the whole. For someone who seeks to improve this, yes, the flaws look bigger. We don't do anything half as well as they should be done, but we do them a lot better than others who claim success.

We are a happier country, in general. But that also makes us complacent. The same things that make bribery and corruption inherent to us, the same things that make us, by international acceptance, "the laziest on the planet", also make us slower to react to things, and make us an unaffected bunch. We're getting used to it, slowly, that bomb blasts will happen - we're putting them up there with the general inevitability of death. The only thing that doesn't quite sink in, is that it could happen to me. Not the city next door, not the people we don't know. It could be a neighbour, a friend, a colleague, a mother.
So when it happens, the grief, the rage is confined to those who are immediately affected.

I'm already writing cliches.

There's an India that figures in statistics. 7.2% unemployed, 25% below the poverty line. Unelectrified villages, dirty water, another village in Tamil Nadu that gets all of Europe's garbage. The children represented by the children in the !dea ad. Statistics. Like the people who died in Delhi.

There's an India that stars in statistics of a different kind. The 8.9(now 7.7)% of growth, the $million and $billion of mergers and overseas acquisitions by India Inc, the falling rupee and the Jack and Jill BSE sensex, all of which are rather impotent figures compared with the twelve-point-something inflation rate.

Thats the idea of statistics, you see - they don't care about each other. All these numbers look good on presentations and news articles, but otherwise, they're just as meaningless as whether 18 died in Delhi or 20. As meaningless as the spirit of a city covering up for "I'm not dead so let's get on with it."

There are more Indias, I guess - I meet a new one every other day. And thanks to my ability to forget stuff faster than I believe I will, this is pretty much what I managed.

And if some of this stuff reads contradictory, I'm Indian finally, remember?
All I know is I was trying to pray when the reports said no one was killed and the injuries were at 30. This post is my frustration at an unanswered prayer - maybe a prayer too late.

15. The Hyphen Strikes Back

MOOD ----> Eccentric, as usual
POST TYPE : ARTICLE
LISTENING TO - Evanescence - My Immortal (Instrumental)

Some time in the recent past, the OED dropped hyphens from 16,000 originally hyphenated words in one go. Predictably, the itchy blog fingers of the literary world rushed to the crime scene and delivered their postmortem reports and conspiracy theories about the hyphen. However, because I was busy NOT reading blogs at that time in 2007, I didn't notice this. Most of these articles dealt with how "ice-cream", "cry-baby", and "bumble-bee" would now be "ice cream" , "crybaby" and "bumblebee"(i.e., in the dictionary as well). Here's one of those articles, and I suggest you read it to understand my outrage at it : "Demise of the hyphen"

In any case, like I said, I'd been completely ignorant of this news report, though I did experience some deja vu reading it.
Until someone at work posted a link to one of these articles on the company intranet. Spurred by the word "demise" applied to something as undeserving as a hyphen, I ranted off a reply to it. Here it is:

While everyone has been speaking of the hyphen's "demise", I was drawn into the hyphen's apparent conspiracy for its survival. Yep, the hyphen, or at least its creators, are the originators of a plot that's been around [sic] since at least the birth of printing. The very purpose of the hyphen ensures both its seeming demise, and its actual resurgence.

Here's why.

The hyphen, regardless of what it was originally intended to do, is a method of legalizing inexistent words now. Just as pot-belly was slang once, and potbelly is acceptable today, the first step towards a compound word getting official OED sanction is using the hyphen. Until we use a hyphen, the compound word isn't one, its two words. "Ice cream" would have been added to grammar textbooks, with "ice" as an example of a modifier for "cream". If not for the hyphen. If today, its an accepted OED freshman, its because of its association with the outcast hyphen.

In other words, the very words that seemed to have lost their hyphens, exist only because of it. The hyphen is like Cupid. Two words meet because of it, and then, it leaves, having served its purpose. (I never knew a hyphen could get me this mushy.)

In addition, while the news article that hinted at the hyphen's death seemed to presume that informal writing and e-mails have made people less inclined to hit the hyphen on their keyboards, it has also made people lazier at looking up or learning the right word for what they intend to say. In most probability, given English's tendency to swipe words for new objects from other languages, and even otherwise, they won't find any proper, acceptable word in most cases, that doesn't draw a few "what-a-nerd" jeers from others. For example, "what-a-nerd" has no known substitute. That's two hyphens, right there. One each for fig leaf and pot belly. Take that. Creative writing is the new breeding ground of the supposedly extinct hyphen.

For every fig-leaf or pot-belly that the OED ditches, for fig leaves and pot bellies, there will rise a "what-a-nerd" or a "don't-talk-to-me-that-way look" to resurrect the hyphen in its own hippie, counterculture avatar. The hyphen may not be official, or approved, but its one damn good survivor.

The John-Rambo-meets-Nelson-Mandela of punctuation.

4 more hyphens there.
Amen.

14.Writer 3: The Drunk Writer

MOOD ----> SO not drunk
POST TYPE :THOUGHT
LISTENING TO - The Vodafone ad "Every day I want to fly..."



I don’t write much, to be very literal. Half the time, I write drafts inside my head, edit and scrap (the old meaning – to crumple and dunk it into a waste paper basket) them – all in 10 minutes, at the most, of brainstorming. That way, I need to write less, but it also means that the meanest critic of them all tears my stuff to shreds even before I get to write it. Today I went ahead and disabled the little personal censor in my head, to try to be a prolific writer- a “writey writer” – the kind that sits at his desk, and turns into a (rather slow) human printing press.

However, on embarking upon this endeavour for “generating more output”, I was stumped – How DO you write more than 2 things a day?
I’ve already bled the “Think On Paper” maxim dry, so I needed something more intelligent than that, though finally, its all we ever do, and its all I’ve done here.

The train of thought derailed, soon my mind was searching in little word clouds, looking for something to write in a sea of randomness, till I found an intoxicated man with a dishevelled beard and an old fountain-pen in his pocket, hanging on to some driftwood, and evidently trying to paddle his way to some destination. Similar predicament.

Drunk, Doped, Stoned – Dishevelled, Inebriated, and Social Nuisance by choice – is how a few successful and way too many wannabe writers ‘conduct themselves with dignity’. Ever disinclined to create such a spectacle of myself, and hence suffer that kind of social visibility and notoriety, I’ve always been an abstainer.

Maybe not in the perfect sense of the word, which would raise embarrassing, though irrelevant, questions regarding my sexual orientation, among other things. However, atleast for the drink part of the bargain I can say I’m free of even the fateful desire to “try it just once”.

I’ve tasted just enough of the vile stuff to gauge its utter lack of taste. However, anyone who has progressed beyond the “taste” part would enthusiastically tell me it never was about the taste – its about losing yourself, about getting roughly 2 screws in your knees, one in your neck, a few hundred in your spine, and a hell lot of nuts in your head loose.

There IS a subspecies that prides itself on appearing ‘reasonably sober’ after an insane amount of booze – “holding your drink” – an elite club of people such as my friend Sujeet Ghanvat and Oskar ‘Schindler’s List’ Schindler. It’s a limitation, but most often a skill, in a world that gets dead drunk and drunk dead when it means business – so I’ll reserve any discussion of it for another day. For now, this article will deal with the singular destiny of drinking – as a means for writers to get drunk.

Writers get drunk, evidently , for the same reasons that other mortals do – to get those ole’ joints a little less stiff – though, being more mental in their acrobatics than other mortals, the idea is to get the mind more flexible. Writers who drink, essentially heighten a particular desirable mental faculty or suppress one that creates noise and disturbs the thought process. Ofcourse, it goes without saying that none of this is, or can be, planned in advance, and our sorry sozzled scribe can only hope its time for Cinderella and not Mr. Hyde.

The writing I admire is so often a critique of society, and good writers so often unique in their revelations about it, that driving to their unusual destinations would require the driver to be “under the influence”. Ironically, however, it is quite possible that when the mind is drunk, it is more immune to any external influence that may temper, sober, censor or otherwise ruin a masterpiece.

So in my quest for today’s third article, I wondered if it would help me to booze a little, or make me another wasted wannabe in some more-than-beer brawl, losing my head instead of a few screws. But then, aren’t there extraordinary men of letters who haven’t touched a drop? People who seem to get the required hardware loosened up enough to beat the commandments embossed in their grey cells, without requiring any chemical interference?

The way I put it, it almost seems superhuman. Drunk without drinking.
Brings images of people like Jackie Chan in “The Legend of the Drunken Master” and Johnny Depp from “Pirates of the Caribbean” to mind.
It was a mild, heavily-veiled jibe I often endured in college – that most of my mates kept their heads about them better after drinking, than I did, without it. That my comprehension of the world, and hence my means of getting through life, were both rather simple, in comparison to theirs, which rivalled chess moves. My honesty was initially appreciated by new acquaintances till they realised it wasn’t deliberate at all, much less voluntary.

For my part, I’ve enjoyed the slight, and sometimes well-pronounced ripples I’ve always seen in my reality.
Like being drunk, I’ve always found it easier to fall in love, and harder to stop loving than the average human-sans-drink, because my intoxication, and the love, didn’t wear off.
I’ve found it easier to understand “Maya” and other alternate realities, descriptions of utopias, anti-utopias and dystopias –worlds different, better or worse, dream-like or nightmarish, or maybe just ever so slightly different. Knowing that the world we know is just one of infinite possibilities, that its hard-lipped deadlines and all the progress we’ve known could be a digital joke or a never-ending drug trip.
I’ve floated and levitated and felt vertigo at sea level.
I’ve touched hearts, literally, and felt heartbeats pulse through me.
I’ve sung without reason or talent, and not bothered about how good it sounded.
I’ve done things just because they could be done, not judging my sanity – I’ve loved losing it.
I’ve danced alone, and danced long after the music was heard no more.
And yes, I’ve gotten into more-than-beer brawls and lazy-tongue slurred speech, all without the benefit of a single drop of more-than-beer, or beer, or dope.
Most of all,
I’ve been as much of a writer as I could be right now, without the benefit of any obvious writing talent – because first and foremost, a writer, I believe, should show the world, through his life, the absolute bliss of complete, drunk freedom, and I believe it my privilege to be a writer without much writing, and drunk without drinking.

Nothing singular about that privilege, though, because I also believe that attaining the state of forgetting yourself, or of acute awareness, both usually associated with intoxication – is possible for anyone without introducing any chemical agent like alcohol or narcotics. All we need is to know that our boundaries are neither limited to, nor do they begin with, the outline of skin.

Happy Inebriety to You.

Well, I'm happy.

13. Close Encounters of the 3D kind

POST TYPE :  Article
Listening To --> Pirates of The Caribbean OST -He's a Pirate

            Thats a great piece of work you know. The theme I'm listening to. 
Some guy called Klaus Badelt.
Amazing work though. So are the movies that this theme belongs to - the Pirates trilogy. Besides a sterling performance from Johnny Depp as the now-iconic Captain Jack Sparrow,  all three movies utilised a generous but inconspicuous amount of 3D Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI). Gigantic, slimy sea monsters, the mutated crew of an entire cursed ship and in one particular sequence, the perpetually half-drunk Captain himself was changed into a skeletal, cursed being.

Yes, well thats it, rather weird sight, ain't it? The Pirates universe revelled in its weirdness, mixing fantasy into the ships and pirates as seamlessly as you would...mix guns into a Western. And CGI played no small part in this.  Here's a visual CGI marine treat if there ever was one :

Thats Davy Jones for you - go watch the movie if you want to know, all ye lazy landlubbers! or use Wikipedia like me *yawn* lol I'm quite obsessed with these movies at this point of time to showcase 3D from any other movie, if it isn't obvious already.

What you see above is fantasy being transferred from imaginative minds to 3-dimensional detail without approximation, without having someone walk upto you and say something about your imaginery being impractical -"Itne paise me itna hi milega" , whether you're the director of the movie or someone who went to watch it.

3D effects have been wowing us for years, but I think that after years of dabbling with it,experimenting, perfecting, we've finally gotten close enough to making it stand in for reality,which if I remember right, was the original purpose of good ole' "special effects".

It must be kept in mind that I'm talking strictly about creature 3D -of the moving, talking(grunting),living kind -aliens, werewolves, fantasy creatures. We've had fantastic lighting effects and still-3D(imaginary buildings, spaceships) effects as far back as Independence Day or even ET, or the faithful Star Wars lightsabres and Star Trek space- ..whatever those were. But each of these movies, and in recent times, movies such as Underworld or Van Helsing, used a mixture of 3D CGI and well-crafted models, which (, the quality of the sculpted models, and the skill of their sculptors notwithstanding,) have been used right from the beginning of fantasy movie-making.

As a software person myself, I felt rather disappointed that crafting these creature models was actually the more economic alternative to plain straight-out 3D CGI. Everything around me seemed to suggest that 3D CGI wasn't really a replacement, but an enhancement. If any of us has seen videogame trailers, they're always done tastefully, rendered to near-life dazzle or grime, they look real, and we think - "So its finally here. Real 3D. Wow." But nope, the game is released, and its back to cartoon graphics or compromised reality.

Real 3D will still take close to a decade to hit the videogame industry, since movie graphics are not rendered on minions like single Home PCs or Videogame consoles anyway, but on graphics-intensive behemoths. But judging by the spate of recent movies that have increasingly gone in for slick 3D over clay-and-styrofoam
models/creature suits for actors, such as the Pirates trilogy or the remake of King Kong, Real3D will be in the movies a lot sooner.

So what IS Real 3D? Real 3D isn't

"Final Fantasy : The Spirits Within" stuff, where everything is 3D animated, and any comparison with the real world is suspended in disbelief. Real 3D is where I can look at a computer-generated living breathing entityand observe its interactions with the real world. 
Think of  "Space Jam", and imagine Bugs Bunny being a well-textured, 
 almost tangible entity in Michael Jordan's universe. THAT's Real 3D.

To most of us viewers, including me, it honestly doesn't make a difference whether its models or Computer-generated virtuality thats populating the screen, as long as it looks real enough. but thats where my digital conscience sets in - If its a real thing, it will no doubt look real. You only need a good artist to work on a creature model to get it right -he needs to select the right materials, and get to work sculpting it. A good virtual 3D model depends on the programmer and the 3D modeller, and their ability to translate real-life physics and textures into a digital world - The basic idea of making lines of code do what nature does. Playing God again. (Incidentally, talking of styrofoam, the Davy Jones 3D CGI that we saw earlier in this article used the scanned-in texture of a coffee-stained styrofoam cup for his fishy-looking skin. 1 brownie point to the styrofoam guys.)


For someone who sticks to personal topics, talking of 3D CGI would sound strange, but this is where it gets personal. The realisation of that challenge -of making 3D behave realistically- is what excited me, and prompted this little article here. As for the immediate stimulus, it was the news of the impending 3D animated flick by South Indian ( and by earning standards, Asian) superstar Rajnikanth's daughter  featuring, quite obviously, him - here's a snap of the real thing and the virtual, juxtaposed.

And in case you want to see the video that made me stand up and feel good about Indian 3D animation - here goes :

Sultan - The Warrior teaser trailor

Jai Hind, if you liked the video. lol