Uttoron Dp

This is my first post after a mini break and the very first one using my most awesome new phone! Yes motorola v180 to the touch diamond is quite a leap :) Anyway, here's a snap of the durga pratima at uttoron as captured by me on 11oct 2008 and of course happy festive season to all.

Is philosophy pointless?

Philosophy helps us understand and reconcile our situations often in cases where we feel our situation is controlled by factors we do not understand. If each person could control his life there would be no need for philosophy because the ultimate truth would be a person's will which controls his destiny. Some feel that the search for truth about reality gives hope and courage in times where we are at a loss to understand the present.

But then again, it is not wise to be excessively philosophical because philosophy is abstract, not necessarily purposeful. A pragmatist would think about philosophy as wild speculation which may not be directly relevant to a person's immediate situation.

Come to think of it ...trying to philosophize about philosophy is surely pointless ?! ;)

On Friendship..

The depth of friendship does not depend on the length of acquaintaince

-Tagore

The Namesake (Movie)

When you think of language and geography by themselves, you think of cultures, experiences, beliefs and values that people living in particular part of the world or speaking a common medium share.

What is fascinating about this is that you can combine geography and language in many ways and each different combination will give you a new experience tinged with those - had we considered language or geography independent of the other.

To me "The Namesake" is a movie that presents one particular combination of language and geography. It is a fabric woven out of threads in 3 different languages and 2 different geographical locations. Needless to say the experience is truly fascinating - the interplay of thoughts and actions as influenced by the beliefs and customs held so dear by those who speak a language or those who live in a particular geographical location.

While the book was great, i had felt that the challenge lay in presenting this interplay of thoughts spanning lingual, geographical and as a consequence- moral and ideological barriers in 2 short hours in a way some one can relate to, and Mira Nair has not disappointed.

Without revealing much i would recommend this as a must watch. You might be surprised to find a lot that you can relate to !

Related Links:
Trailer
Wiki Entry

Pan's Labyrinth

New York times calls it a "political fable guised as a fairy tale." Another review lauds it saying it is "gruesome, uncanny yet superbly imaginative". One particulary creative review i read decorates it as a "wicked wonderland of haunting horror". While not for the faint hearted, this movie is an absolute gem. Not just for the sheer imaginative brilliance of the director but for its ability to blend fantasy and real life exquisitely. While some may find the gore and violence excessive, i think it was presented immaculately in superb contrast to the land of fairies - a concept to which only the innocence of a young girl can lend credence. For those who shun fantasy as an intangible and surreal discipline as distinct from the cold and hard facts of real life, this movie might just help you appreciate why fantasy and real life are really not that detached and the fact that one has meaning only in the other's existence.

Related Links:
1. New York Times
2. IMDB

Tagging Music : Some thoughts...

I recently installed a plugin for ITunes which allows tagging music with multiple labels. Classification of music into a fixed set of genres is restrictive and i have discovered that music should always be classified by mood rather than by a rigid set of genres. Of course since the moods that a particular song might evoke in an individual are highly personal it is impossible to incorporate all possible moods as a feature into any music player.

This is where tags come in: helping you strike that balance between flexibility to choose music according to one's mood and the need for a punctilious categorization of music. Tagging allows you to associate multiple attributes to a song or piece of music.

Imagine being able to put all the different emotion categories that you have felt when you listen to a particular musical piece into a list of keywords. Then think of a situation when you are experiencing any of the different mood categories you have labelled (tagged) your music with. All you need is a search across your music library using your mood descriptor and voila! you have a mood based playlist customized to your unique persona...

The only problem is people might not always remember the mood descriptor (keyword) originally used to label/tag the song. Say i used the following labels to originally tag the Beatles number: "Its been a hard day's night"

a. soothing
b. calming
c. peaceful

and later want to listen to it after a gloomy day at work. I might only recall 'frustration' or 'anguish' as a keyword..how do we use these keywords to lookup this song. I understand that this is a trivial case and i am using it here only as an illustrative example. (It will be much tougher if the song evokes 'nostalgia' or some other emotion unique to the person listening) One simplistic solution might be to have a thesaurus/dictionary hooked into the search which can help understand the different connotations of the word. This in itself is an interesting problem.

Another thought is getting multiple people to tag the same piece of music. If some threshold number of people agree then assign a song that label...This would be a herculean task but i am aware of similar efforts (Google Image Labeler) which uses online collaboration to tag images. This of course goes against the philosophy that mood attributes are specific to a person and there is no universal correct answer. Nonetheless it would be an interesting experiment to try. Whether such an effort would be successful for music is debatable, but it is definitely something to think about.

Related Links :

Pandora: An innovative way of serving your musical tastes..
Google Image Labeler

Arundhati Roy

Recently i chanced to come across this video of Arundhati Roy's 2002 "Come September" speech. Reality seasoned with poetry, the speech certainly makes a telling effect.

Here is a link to her Come September speech.