Kola Kolaya Munthirikka - review

KKMK is an attempt to make a laughter riot like Panchathanthiram. Edward de Bono suggests that the mind is a pattern-matching machine, and that it works by recognizing stories and behavior and putting them into familiar patterns. When a familiar connection is disrupted and an alternative unexpected new link is made in the brain via a different route than expected, then laughter occurs as the new connection is made. So essentially, you need a conflict for laughter to occur. The only group in KKMK which is fwith situatgoes through situations that have this kind of funny conflicts is a smart Veerappan and his dumb gang. Every other situation has characters with no conflicts or conflicts which are not really making new connections. That is why this movie fails to evoke laughter.

I felt Karthik has been made to overdo a bit in his portrayal of Krish. His strength  lies in naturally underplaying and being realistic in his roles. I don't know why he sounded loud in certain places ! Shika is a great dancer. Her effort to pronounce Tamil dialogues shows (though Suchi has done her dubbing) Anand raj is awesome, he should market himself for different roles like this. Jeyaram has been wasted, trying to do a Pink Panther. So are Pandiarajan  and Delhi ganesh who are known for their talent as comedians. I felt like crying out loud  - "Leave the professionals alone !" Radharavi is at his usual best, I liked his careless take on a dhadha. I don't know why the team tried so hard to keep Sarath Kumar's role under wraps. It would have been a good marketing if it was the other way.

Music by Selvaganesh was good, but the songs were terribly misplaced. I enjoyed the "Oru varam" by S.P.B and Chitra. There must have been a mandatory disclaimer at the beginning of the movie warning viewers to remove their brains. Point is, if I want just Crazy Mohan's dialogs for my laughs then I would go for his famous theater dramas. Movie, is a different beast altogether. Director Madhumita's arrow misses its target by a fairly long distance.

A piece of you everywhere, for everybody

The other day my wife made a strange observation that she gets promotional messages to her mobile based on what she spoke about in her conversations. For example, in one of her phone calls, if she spoke about having a clean drinking water for us, the next day she got Ads about water purifiers. To say that I was shocked would be an understatement. Being in the contact center industry for many years, I knew this was technically possible using Speech recognizers and caller segmentation. But would TRAI, the regulator in India allow the provider to do anything of that sort?

Much has been written and talked about Facebook's recent changes, the perils of it and how to safeguard yourself against it. Welcome to the next evolution of www, this is where we are heading - what Facebook or any online company wants to know and track is what you are doing everywhere online and offline , not just in their website ! Thanks to social media, wherever online we go, we can Digg it or delicious it, tweet it. Look at this company Blippy, which wants to know what you are buying and suggests it would be easy if you just give them your credit card numbers and they would track the information for you ! Do you know that instead of having various login IDs in various sites, you can be just one unified online avatar with an open ID.

So what happens with all these information about you and why is everybody after it? Well, a whole bunch of data mining companies exist doing things like social monitoring, social media discovery and much more. Considering the fact that every company (online or in general) wants has Social Media Management as a bulk part of their IT budget you realize how this information could be used to sell you anything. I guess the day we sent our first email, we all fell into the trap and trusted a stranger with information about us. And I don't think we are ready to go switch back to postal departments.

Digging further, we figured out my wife's claim was not correct, at least for now. I  and a couple of my friends also got the same SMS Ad the next day in my phone and we had not spoken about water over the phone.

Employee vs Employer

As an employee, right from my hardware engineer days in a very small firm through working in multinationals,  I was always confined to my own work responsibilities and never went bothered to even know about my employer. Forget going that extra mile to contribute to the company's growth. All I was concerned only about my takeaway in anything from training sessions to day-to-day work.

This is the single most important difference between doing business and being employed. As a startupper,(if I can put it that way) you always think about how you can add value to your customers. You think about how every situation and every person you meet gets benefited from you and / or your venture. One person who grew his business exponentially by this way of thinking is Mr. Dhirubhai as Mr Krishnamoothy explains here. We have an excellent ecosystem ostartups in India (TiE, Headstart, Startup saturday, NSRCEL ).But you are not gaining anything out of these forums if you are not contributing by way of sharing in these networks. Information sharing can be a start.

"Money is just a by-product" - well, I'm yet to understand how this works :-)

Mundhinam Paatheney ! - review

Five minutes of watching Mundhinam paartheyney I was like, "Oh my god, Another story about a guy desperately looking for the perfect girl !". Must have been the effect of Vinnaithaandi Varuvaya, Theeratha Villayaatu Pillai and numerous other recent Tamil releases I watched. But then very quickly, I realized this is going to be fun and different. The movie is fresh and entertaining. I felt like watching numerous episodes of a wonderfully written sitcom. And I missed watching this along with my friends, that would have been a blast. Music is refreshing though the songs slowed the pace of the movie. Special kudos to Thaman and team for the very creative re-recording and background effects. Good performances by almost everybody in the cast except a very few of Sanjay's friends. Sai Ganesh and the girl who played Priya have a promising future.

Magizh Thirumeni, the director, dares to walk along dangerous borders in a couple of scenes like the 12th grade student commenting about a condom in her brother's wallet and so on. He has chosen the narrative style for the movie, but there is too much of narration. Sometimes I wonder if he has forgotten the first rule of screenplay - "Show, don't tell". For instance, when the narration is through the hero's point of view, suddenly emerges a very short sequence of the dancer girl narrating her dreams of buying a house. This jump confuses the viewer. 

No doubts the dialogues are spontaneous and funny. A trick writers use during the "initial setup" phase of a  story is to start the scene in the middle of an event that is happening. For instance, a scene opens up in a staircase with Sai Ganesh refusing something. During the next dialogues we come to know that Sanjay had asked Sai to accompany him for Salsa  class and that is what he is refusing. This makes the audience more attentive and eventually follow the movie more carefully. But this usually this is not followed in the second and third acts of story telling since it would give a feeling of  the audience being left out  of the happenings. Unfortunately, Magizh follows this in-the-middle-of-the-event in almost 80 % of the movie. Something has already happened and you see one character narrating or explaining it to another character. And also, I don't see any need for the whole thing to be a flashback from London if the hero decides not to meet her again.

Nevertheless, I did enjoy a few interesting twists like the train scene and the way the truth behind gossips about a girl are revealed in the story. With a typical feel good movie, Magizh thirumeni shows the promise to be a Sekhar Kammula for Tamil

Google - Second for the first time?

Google, with the launch of its new search interface today, has probably come second or third in the search race for the first time. 

The new result interface of google looks very much similar to Yahoo! and Bing . As John Battlle explains in his book "The Search", the way Yahoo and Google handle the search intent of the user has been different historically. Google always tries to give the "objective" answers using a mixture of PageRank, downloading statistics etc. while Yahoo tries to be more "humane" and gives related and relevant results of the searched term based on what other users are searching for. Now with this latest development, is Google taking the Yahoo ! route ? Are we walking towards a consolidation in the search space ?

Funny thing, when you search for "Search" in Google, the top result is Bing and in Bing it is Yahoo ! :-)

It rained here !

Had been to DakshinChitra recently, our first official weekend getaway in Chennai. While I enjoyed the various exhibits and had a great time catching them through my lens, I was not sure if they capture the culture of the southern states completely. As a south Indian I felt the place was slowly becoming more of historical museum more than a center for arts. Perhaps a 2 hour stroll is not enough to get the  vibe of the place or I must have taken a guided tour. For an outside this place does serve as a great window to South Indian traditions.

I've always wondered why many tourist destinations in India have different entry fees for locals and foreigners? I have not seen this anywhere abroad.

I did not get a chance to witness any performing arts in DakshinChitra. But what came as a pleasant surprise was Rohini Thotta Tharani's art exhibition. I did get to see the man himself, but did not want to gate crash the party as he was with his friends. As for his daughter's paintings, well "புலிக்கு பிறந்தது பூனையாகுமா?"

Oh yeah, it rained here in Chennai !