Posts from — January 2009

Finding a great film or music you never heard about used to be happenstance. The next wave of music and film engines are making it easy for you to discover the long tail. It would have been impossible to find the music I like without Pandora. Unfortunately, it disappeared behind a copyright wall a year ago, when the music industry deemed that the site could only play the favourites of people residing within the US. Luckily there’s Last FM. Type in the name of an artist you like and you’ll arrive at a whole lot of others in the same genre without having to search for them.

Films have been a far more tricky proposition. People are loathe to spend two hours on a film they have never heard about. But Netflix developed an algorithm that pushed their rentals up by over 60% on films that were complete unknowns. They have tried everything in-house on trying to tweak the engine but got only incremental benefits. So they offered a million dollar prize in 2006 to anyone who could improve the recommendation by 10%. Hundreds of teams have given it a shot but the magical 10% goal has still not produced a winner. The problem apparently is ‘eccentric films’ the ones that polarise tastes of the people who watch them. They either hate it or love it.

Rotten Tomatoes is a great site to find obscure gems of films. But sites like Jinni are trying to make it even easier. Looks like we won’t have to rely on our friends to provide us even that favour. An algorithm wants to take that place.

As a street festival, it has an infectious kind of vibrancy. Immersing yourself in the crowd and fighting to get to the front of the queue to haul off a plate of Dindigul Venu\’s biriyani and holding it balanced above the head while finding a place to dig into it is humbling. Having forgotten what queues were like, it’s not fun to be caught up in one again. But for the kind of acts and the food that was on display, it was worth enduring. The karagattam competes with the other folk arts. Everywhere you turn, there are bodies swaying, drums throbbing and faces shining with sweat. In the middle of all this is the street food, made by the five star restaurants of the city and sold at very reasonable rates.

Then, we came across a troop of Bhangra dancers. Tall, fair and swaying to a completely different beat. The local crowd gathered and enthusiastically joined in. At 10 pm in the night, it seemed like Baisakh again. Where yellow fields of mustard painted the whole landscape. Watching performances where the performers are distant and elevated on a stage is completely different from having them in touching distance. it gives the art a kind of intimacy that rivals anything you can watch.

If this grows the way it is growing right now, Chennai Sangamam could transform Chennai’s already illustrious cultural landscape into a world-beating event.

Pop psychology is in. Somehow, the idea of getting blasted on television, doing tasks that make perfectly decent kids look like idiots is acceptable. They will not be lectured by their parents and teachers, but some pretentious MTV producer called Raghu Ram can throw four letter words in their face, abuse them in the foulest language possible and they are fine with it. Coming out of a ridiculous interview where they are asked in turn to be ‘interesting’ and witty’ at the drop of a hat, they either break down or speak glowingly about the chance to become ‘roadies’. It’s like boot camp made for TV. Not just guys but pretty girls as well.

It gives Mr Raghu the chace to play God. And does he revel in it. His claim to fame is that he’s produced a successful reality show. Done 92 shows at a trot. Abused his way to glory. There’s no background as to where he came from or what gives him the chance to permanently scar some poor souls who were looking at some shortcuts to fame and fortune. The promos show a task where guys are whacked in the testicles. It keeps playing. The guys are strung with their legs spread wide, hands tied waiting to be hit right between their legs. And their agonised reactions when they are struck where it hurts.

Makes for good television, all in the name of fun and reality shows. Tells you that we haven’t moved very far from the time when entertainment was about hangings and lynching people in public.

If you’ve heard the music of ‘Slumdog Millionaire‘ you know that this is special. Starting with the first track, where the sound of drums segues seamlessly into the train tracks, this is elemental AR Rahman. From the time he transformed from composing advertising jingles way back in the late 80’s and was known to the advertising fraternity as ‘Dileep’, he has never looked back after ‘Roja‘ in 1992.

He oeuvre is magnificent, especially for someone who just turned 43 this Jan\’09. It is the kind of work that is hard to pigeonhole and slot and while he does have his signature bits, they never rankle. Shekhar Kapur once said that Rahman can make music out of sounds that people consider noise. If you’ve hear ‘Ayudha Ezhuthu’ you know exactly what he means. There is the sound of breaking bottles, doors being slammed and crowd noises, all woven into the kind of song that throbs with energy.

There’s also the realm of the unfamiliar. You may never like an A R Rahman song on the first hearing, probably because it sounds so unfamiliar. But give it time and it washes over you, never to release it’s grip. The last year has 6 releases from Rahman. It’s hard to be good and prolific. Somehow, he manages to make it happen.

Jason Kottke is one blogger I have immense respect for. Not just because of the way he has soldiered on for 10 long years but because he picks the gems from the forest of trivia out there on the net. He has an eye for the truly unusual and he revels in revealing it. Almost like a narrator draws you into a never-ending story and points out all the interesting twists and turns along the way. I don’t even have to come here regularly. Drop by occasionally and I am sure to come away with some little nugget or information that I haven’t picked up yet.

There are a billion websites and 99% of them are the boring ones. It’s good to have a navigator who points out the interesting stuff. His domain ends with .org, unlike the .com that most blogs and websites prefer. He caught a trend very early on and rode it to success.

The headlines have settled down. The holiday season is over and people are back to work – those who have jobs, that is. Just read the other day about Wall Street bankers now trying their hands at comedy. Some of them may actually be glad several years from now that they found their true calling.

Losing a job forces people to to develop new perspectives. The same old routine cannot continue. Reassessing potential can be devastating or illuminating. As Tony Robbins makes the point in this inspiring TED Video, our choices shape our destiny. People losing their jobs can believe that their worth is destroyed or they can infer that they have been given a fresh chance to do things differently. How they act on this inference determines, to a large extent, their success or their failure in future.