Stats on 2021 Books – outsourced Audible post
Category: Reviews
Movie Review : Garuda Gamana Vrushabha Vahana
Garuda Gamana (refers to Vishnu) and Vrushabha Vahana (refers to Shiva), appropriately named after two childhood friends who went on to become an underworld outfit of the city of Mangaluru (previously called Mangalore). Then there is a police officer who orchestrates the events during the latter part of the storyline and hence appropriately named Brahmaiah.
Internet calls this an exceptional and deep Kannada movie and highly coupled with mythological characters. It’s an exception, alright; I have no dispute there. It’s refreshing to see a good Kannada movie of an industry that is otherwise infested with mediocrity. However, I wouldn’t call it deep, though. It indeed uses directional trickery and intelligent script, but not very deep. Not shallow, that’s for sure, which otherwise is a stereotype of this industry. And the movie being in Kannada, well! Unless you have a close friend, who speaks the Mangalore Kannada dialect, you will not appreciate the quirks of the dialect.
I’m afraid I also disagree with the ‘mythological connection’. Hari, the supposed preserver among the trinity, hardly preserves anything. The Shiva, a pot-smoking destructor, can dance tandava upon his victim, and that’s where the comparison ends. Brahmaiah, on the other hand, is shit scared against these two, the thoughts of which makes him cry like a little kid even before the first over been bowled. I have known people from Hassan very well, and Brahmaiah hardly fit that frame. A little more grit would’ve been nice.
What worked for me:
- Outstanding acting, exceptional direction, a good script, excellent background score, bold deception of gore, keeping it simple, local quirks, use of language, cinematography, cultural depiction, clever use of Symbolism and so on and on.
- Special attention was given to make it local; be it underarm cricket, Navaratri tiger dance, gutting the fish and many more – all overwhelmingly Mangalorean
- The movie is utterly devoid of women unless it was absolutely a necessity. I am not saying it’s good or bad, but it’s an entirely different way of telling a story, unusual.
- The movie does not consider the audience as idiots, especially about Symbolism. A sweet Pan, sports shoes, the weight of a cricket bat all have meaning, and they convey the story collectively.
What did not work for me:
- I noticed the trinity did not have surnames. Let me remind you, all Mangalorean’s have surnames, which generally gives out clues on what language they speak, lunch they eat, and God’s they prey. It looks like the creators of the movie did not want to risk offending any community by assigning surnames for a Don, a hitman, and a toothless cop. However, they did not think twice before using hymns in the background of gory scenes, which definitely would risk offending someone. This is inconsistency or even probably a tinge of hypocrisy.
- Again, for a movie that is exceptionally local and highly specific for a region, the theme music is made at par with a James bond movie. This does not fit well at all.
- There is a clever use of a folk song, Sojugada sooju mallige, a version of which recently went viral. This was used as a background score when Shiva does a tandava. However, the dialect of this song is not Mangalorean. When creators have become purists in attire, custom, language etc., this song will seem force fit. It is a beautiful song, by the way.
That’s it – that’s my post. Now please go watch the movie. It’s a masterpiece.
Recycling plastic water bottles & caps
Okay, I must admit that I am not an expert on plastic recycling, but I care enough to research when I see a red flag on what have just I read. Now, I certainly know a thing or two, just enough to identify an idiot who recommends counterproductive actions to the gullible public. While writing this, I am referring to this video that is making rounds on social media. Please have a look first, and then let’s discuss :
In this video, a gentleman with an expensive suit and authoritative voice urges commuters at a bus stand on how to avoid the reuse of their used water bottles. He asks them to squeeze the cap into the used bottle, crush it and then throw it. Apparently, this can avoid counterfeit water bottles being reused by small industries.
I have heard this argument many times already. Few of my friends and acquaintances tried to upgrade my knowledge based on the wisdom gathered through social media forwards. Somehow, people are convinced that this is the right thing to do! Let me give an attempt to explain why he is wrong and why it is counterproductive for an environmental cause.
There is a lot of misconception on how recycling of plastic works or how difficult it is. There are a day and night difference between technology/automation caught up between recycling something like paper against recycling plastic.
Ideally, in my opinion, recycling plastic should not even be there in your list of preferences on what you should do with garbage in your bin. Recycling should be one of the last resorts, positioned just above incineration or landfills. If you ask me, this should be your order of preferences :
- Avoid buying a plastic bottle for drinking water specifically. Instead, have one in your bag all the time. Carry one everywhere, which was refilled at your home while you left home that morning. In case of a scenario where you do not have one handy for some unfortunate reasons, go ahead ask for tap water. Most decent restaurants, food joints and companies have invested in an industrial-grade RO water purifier. Go for it. If not human grade, they might undoubtedly provide you with battery-grade demineralized water. You will survive the day.
- Reduce. In a scenario where you have no option but to buy one, take this as a lesson learned. Then bring it back to your home and reuse it. Reuse it to store water, oil or any food items, including grains, till a point of time when your heart feels it’s old enough to discard. Then reuse it with downgraded usages such as craft, art or even home garden.
- Recycle should come as next. Now, this is the tricky part. With decades of research, the plastic recycling process has reached a stage that is very much below the desired efficiency. Unsurprisingly, the most significant contributor to the inefficiency of the entire process is segregation. i.e. at the end of consumers who act based on the advice of few idiots at bus stations.
For argument sake, let’s suppose we have a very responsible township and an enthusiastic team of kabadiwalas who have aggregated them with 100% homogeneous categorization. This will only encounter more hurdles, such as the paint, ink and labels, and the leftover food items. By now, we have a reasonable automated robotic process in place that can attend to these with a certain degree of efficiency. Suppose we clear all those stages and reach your bottle with the cap squeezed inside on the behest of the gentleman who advised you with his infinite wisdom.
Please refer to one of my previous 14-year-old post for the categorization of plastic.
Generally, the water bottles are made of PET food grade, and caps are PP kind of fibers. a PET bottle can technically be, recycled into a food-grade water bottle, again and again, perpetually for 1000s of times provided that you have an entire batch of homogenously segregated PET. Even a tiny %age of PVC in that batch can spoil the recipe. In other words, these fibers can be recycled with their own kind. Few can be recycled to the exact grade (e.g. Bottles again), some with the downgrade (Bottles to T-Shirts or Bags) and some never.
Now, your bottle has reached the stage at the converter belt where PP needs to be separated from PET. An Automated machine tries to segregate bottles with caps through a forced water jet, without avail. The idea is that PP caps sink and PET bottles float. My bottle, which I discarded with the cap, is now ready for recycling, but not yours. The only possible solution is to deploy thousands of sweatshop employees to dissect your bottle and separate PET with PP manually. This is obviously not practical or cheap, increasing the recycling cost overall. Many of the councils ask the consumers to replace the cap while discarding it rather than separating them.
Use this for your further reading How to Recycle Plastic Caps & Lids
In this case, for the batch of your bottles, the recycling unit will do the next set of available options :
- Incinerate them to release energy, but at the cost of releasing greenhouse gasses
- or Melt them and make roads – this is a double downgrade
- or send them to landfill it for it to degrade after a 1000 years
- or your bottle will turn up right here in the nose of a turtle or stomach of a seagull.
Well done.
Book Review – A Promised Land by Barack Obama
It’s been a while since I posted a book review here. It’s not that I did not start reading one, but it took time to finish the one I picked. I had chosen a humongous book named “A promised land” by Barack Obama. Its 800 pages of written content as a hardcover or 29 hours as an audible audiobook requires real dedication from you. For me, it took my reading schedule the entire March to finish!
Naturally, the first thought came to my mind when I heard the title the God’s promise on the land to Abraham and his decedents. Although Obama covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a chapter, the book is not about that promised land in the middle east.
Anyways, my verdict is – this is a must-read and an excellent addition to your personal library. Despite its length, it does not warrant laborious reading; it literally reads on its own – very beautifully written and well narrated. You will like it depending on how much you are interested in world politics and economics. Additionally, if you are a democrat, you might get goosebumps going through few specific chapters. It’s an understatement if I say Obama is a fantastic orator. He will never let get you bored while you are at it.
I personally loved it and would reread it sometime in future.
The book covers Obama’s political career leading up to the mid-term election. I believe the subsequent topics will be covered in his next book. That is the reason you would not hear him talk about Modi, but you would about Manmohan, Sonia and Rahul.
Also, the book covers his political and economic part of his precedency rather than his personal life. Michelle, Melia, and Sasha appear very infrequently, just about a few paragraphs, not more than he was absolutely obligated to write. Or perhaps he wanted us to buy Michelle’s book to learn the other side of the story. I am not falling for that – that’s another 19 hours right there. Even though the first couple of chapters cover his childhood leading up to his political career, it seems it was inserted for the benefit of one Donald Trump, who had challenged Obama’s birth origin and Americanness.
Overall, the content takes a frank tone, superbly detailed (29 hours, duh!!), leading you to wonder how he could remember all these details with such vivid description.
Anyways, these are the chapter resonated well with me.
- The visits to the middle east and their ever-complicated politics. Obama calls a spade a spade without having an obligation to ignore the elephant in the room.
- Fascinating topic on Nuclear disarmament and Iran.
- The climate bill and carbon cuts and how he blackmailed BRIC leaders into Paris agreement (A little American hypocrisy here)
- The Greek Euro crisis
- BP deep-sea oil leak crisis
- The Birth-er debate and how he handled the Donald trump campaign against him.
- The middle eastern conflict – Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt etc.
There are several topics were failed to convince me.
- How picking up a fight across the world may be wrong, including bombing them.
- What a liberal democratic support to the repressive regime, including the autocracies, is still OK.
- How Hilary is correct, and Palin is an idiot.
- Subprime crises and his defiance on bailing out the Banks and why no banks have been brought to justice.
The books end with a very well narrated story on the manhunt of Osama bin Laden. Probably, Obama considered this as the singularly most significant important achievement of his career as president, hence, all the emphasis on the almost-fiction-like chapter.
I will be waiting for the next book and work love to hear from the horse’s mouth on:
- Obama care – his view on socializing the medicine.
- Trump – election and transition
- Modi wave in India
- China & the tariff war
- Diminishing free speech in American University campuses
- Charlie Hebdo – maybe?
- Raise of Antifa and PC culture.
Let’s see. Meanwhile, please go buy this book, and it is worth every penny.
Three stages of scientific discovery
“There are three stages of scientific discovery: first, people deny it is true, then they deny it is important. Finally, they credit the wrong person” – Billy Bryson.
This quote is often credited to Alexander von Humboldt as well. That is an irony to the quote itself. If that were accurate, then we have an example right in the quote’s attribution it originally intended to call out.
Anyways. The quote is abundantly clear on the sad truth behind the crediting the discoveries and inventions are concerned. Although somewhat exaggerated, It seems broadly accurate, especially with the innovations that came out of India. Be it number system, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, Food, Yoga, Meditation and even board games, all went through the three stages quoted above. Some of these are presently struggling at the third stage – even after taking great pain of producing the burden of proof.
Stage 1 is being called a conspiracy theorist for having made any claim on the original discovery. I have written about it in a post named Conspiracy Theories, Russell’s teapot, and Breast Tax. Stage 2 is calling the discovery snake oil or placebo. I have briefly touched upon it in my post-Ayurveda, Clinical Trials & Capitalism. Let us talk about stage 3 – the wrong attribution.
There is a formal name for this third stage, it is called Stigler’s law of eponymy. It says that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. Although it sounds like a gross exaggeration, you will be surprised to know how many scientific discoveries are wrongly credited to the scientist who discovered it at a later point in time or did not discover it at all. I am picking only Indian ones for now.
One example was Jagadish Chandra Bose, who was not credited for Radio wave communication instead of awarded it to an Italian Marconi. Among many others, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-1995) on his contribution of Black holes! Get this:
At the age of just 20, on his journey to Cambridge, he came with the idea that is now called the Chandrasekhar limit: the concept that above a certain mass, electron degeneracy pressure in the core of a white dwarf star is not enough to counterbalance the gravitational self-attraction of the star. Above the Chandrasekhar limit, stars explode or collapse into a neutron star or black hole.
But when Chandrasekhar presented his findings at the Royal Astronomical Society in London in 1935, he was publicly ridiculed by Sir Arthur Eddington, a world-renowned physicist who had until then acted as a mentor to him. The clash was between an internationally famous physicist and a young Indian student in a hostile environment. It set acceptance of Chandrasekhar’s idea, and by consequence, his career, back by years, and ultimately led Chandrasekhar to leave Cambridge in the hope of finding a better welcome elsewhere. In 1972, the first black hole was discovered, and Chandrasekhar’s theory was finally proven correct.
[Two Paragraphs and the image from the oxford-royale article Scientists Who Didn’t Get the Credit They Deserved ]
Traditionally, the Indian formal education system and mainstream media are designed to make us feel an inferior culture and did not contribute anything to the scientific world. Also, apparently, we have the west to thank for anything we have, which they brought to India on their civilization mission. Any attempt to dispute to this will face immediate and overwhelming ridicule in academic circles. This is how I grew up listening to how big losers we are with no hopes.
Things have changed, and truth had to come out eventually anyway. Now, get this, wikipedia a dedicated page for an extensive list of discoveries and inventions which finally attributed to Indians, after awarding it to a bunch of merchants, travelers and colonizers for centuries.
To be continued…
The Bach 