The prison system

"At thirteen, Bobby was nabbed while robbing a Jordan Marsh department store. The remainder of his childhood was spent mostly in the state reform school. That was where he learned how to fight, how to hot-wire a car with a piece of foil, how to pick locks, and how to make a zip gun using a snapped-off automobile radio antenna, which, in those days, was just thick enough to barrel a .22-calibre bullet. Released upon turning eighteen, Dellelo returned to stealing."
[Source: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande]

See anything wrong in the above paragraph? Anything illogical that shouldn't be happening?
A criminal, spending time in government custody, isn't having anything close to a change of heart and a betterment of life; instead, he's learns more about crime, and returns as a worse criminal.
This is a real life story. It isn't an isolated event either. There have been many such reports of such happenings in daily newspapers and magazines. And, if you think about it, putting in many criminals of varying "expertise" in the same place is logically going to lead to this outcome only - the criminals are going to make friends and learn some new tricks. So, in effect, prisons are training centres for criminals, a place to meet different varieties of their own people and learn from them. Is this what we want our tax money to be spent on? Is this the way to curtail crime and make a better society? I definitely don't think so.

We've come up with so many advances in various fields, but in this one field, we're pretty much imitating what people did thousands of years ago. Well, except for adding new ways of torturing war criminals. Not much constructive experiments, not much innovative ideas. Our "prison reformation" ideas are limited to one or two prisons, one or two people like Kiran Bedi. If those reforms were so good as to deserve Asia's Nobel prize, why aren't they being implemented more widely?

I believe that the general apathy towards this area is because people think "prison reform" only means a better life for the criminals. And obviously, they couldn't care less about criminals when they've got their own problems. But that's completely missing the point: we need prison reforms not for the criminals' sake (at least not only for that), but for building a better society for ourself. When we have prisons where the criminals have an opportunity to better their lives, ways to learn and improve themselves, we'll have a better society, one with less criminals. It would mean the difference between a one-time hunger thief becoming a lifelong burglar, and becoming a doctor or an entrepreneur; it might mean the difference between losing your life savings to him, and having your kid's life saved by him.

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Endhiran - my review

If you know me, you'd know that I'm not the movie-reviewing type usually, but I felt Endhiran deserves one, not only because it's a sci-fi movie, but it's a good sci-fi movie.

(Warning: Here be spoilers!)

I (as is becoming usual) missed the first ten or so minutes of the movie, entering only when Vasee asks Chitti to drive the car and others back off from the journey. Rajini has a very good scientific nerd look as Vasee, suppressing his action movie image and appearing as the intellectual he should be. Chitti, while managing to look truly handsome, did not impress me at first. "Ok, he's the usual robot that does some things awesomely and some things stupidly".

However, the scenes where Chitti takes care of neighbourhood noises brought me back into the movie. He explains why he's able to operate the stereo (it's infra-red) and then does it without directly fighting the enemy guys off  (which would have made this a clichéd action movie scene). Same with the "Chellaattha" loudspeaker guys - he does not pick a fight with them, instead using his electromagnet and disarming them. It turns out to be an amusing comedy (especially with the ladies starting to pray to him as Kaali and then standing confused as he drops the weapons).

The thing that impressed me about the movie was the absence of any glaringly-obvious and embarrassing pseudo-science that's present even in a lot of Hollywood science movies. No superman style flying for long distances, no reading-your-mind-because-I'm-an-awesome-robot stuff.
Ok, the mosquito scene was somewhat stupid. Even if it's the future and we've figured out how to make machines talk to mosquitoes, it doesn't explain the mosquito talking back to Ash. But leaving the scientific viewpoint, it was a well constructed scene, except that they ruined it by making it too long. This is a theme that repeats throughout the movie - almost every single scene in the movie stretches longer than necessary, testing our patience.

Rajini's acting deserves a special mention. The robot and the human are always distinguishable, from their tone, body language and expressions. In the scene where Chitti rescues a bathing girl and is chided by Vasee, his confused response "But she's alive!" reminded me very strongly of Sonny's "But I have to inject the nanites!" in I Robot.

The movie also seemed to contain a lot of references to sci-fi or the-average-Indian-movie. The mosquito scene reminded me of the butterfly scene in Ejamaan where Rajini fetches a butterfly for Meena after jumping through fields and gutter. The scene where Chitti's eye gets damaged and he replaces it with a red colored one feels to be a homage to the Terminator where Arnold Schwarzenegger does the same. The scene where Chitti takes Ash to his magnificent place guarded by other Chitti's is mildly amusing in that it's the usual "villain kidnaps heroine and takes her to his awesome palace guarded by thugs" in average Indian movies, except the villain and thugs this time are robots.

The robots taking formations into spheres and snakes, while obviously done for the "Wow!" effect, also makes sense in context, and each formation is done for a reason which makes it completely excusable.

What's inexcusable is the all-too-frequent and not-so-pleasant songs. They're made tolerable only by the beautiful visuals and the direction in the songs too. Shankar is awesome in this film's songs, Rahman is not. The re-recording is also too noisy and too obvious, the kind I would have expected from a newbie music director - not Rahman. The "thamizh semmozhi" song and the songs in this film make us wonder if Rahman is no longer concentrating much in the Thamizh side after the Oscar. Hmmm.

On the whole, it's a movie that I left feeling clean and refreshed, happy that the arguably first sci-fi movie in thamizh turned out to be a good sci-fi. To be honest, as a movie by itself, it's not great. It's a somewhat confused mess of a sci-fi movie and a family-sentiment-masala-thamizh-movie. But the sci-fi part taken alone is very well done. Kudos to Shankar for that.

Verdict: It's a film worth watching once in the theatre, and storing on the hard drive for years. If you're a sci-fi fan, don't expect an I Robot or a Terminator, expect an average hollywood movie and you might be pleasantly surprised.

A few random things

Blogger has introduced a better preview option. Cool. If nothing else, it at least shows Google is still polishing Blogger and has not abandoned it.

I learnt that German is quite a beautiful language, at least in its pronunciations, while hearing to Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality in audiobook format. Names like Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstal have a beautiful ring to them that I'd heard so far only in French. The book itself is wonderful too, written for a layman interested in the history of the development of quantum physics. We can feel how the physicists themselves were bewildered by the bizarreness of it all, and only reluctantly accepted the theory. I'm now a little more than halfway through the book, where Heisenberg and Schrödinger have just given out their two formulations of quantum mechanics.
As a side note, it's interesting to note that Pauli shared my nocturnal habits, while Dirac too studied electrical sciences due to the urging of his father while his calling lay elsewhere.

Duck Duck Go is proving to be a great search engine to set as the default, with most other searches I need available at a bang's distance. The "bang" is simply the exclamation mark, which within this search engine can take you to most of the common lands on the internet. Search Wikipedia with !wiki, Amazon with !amazon, Wolfram Alpha with !alpha, torrents with !torrent, or resort to trusty old Google with a !g added to the query. In my experience, it's the best search engine when it comes to broad searches on a topic such as "rottweiler" or "diablo 2". There are about 25% of my searches that DDG does not understand and gives nonsense results, and I add "!g" to the query to go to Google's results instead; recently, this has been only needed for filtering out old results with Google's "Past year" tool. For the remaining 75% however, DDG is leaps ahead of Google.

Talking of Diablo 2, I hated that game. As a result of trying it, I've found that:
A. I probably hate the "hack and slash" genre itself, and games should involve some thought and strategy for me to like them
B. For me to enjoy a game, it should be either 2D like most flash games or The Battle for Wesnoth, or very realistic 3D like Batman: Arkham Asylum or Assassin's Creed II. The latter two are the most immersive and enjoyable games I've ever played.
Also, factor A seems to be more important than factor B, since Dead Rising too has a realistic 3D, but has failed to impress me at all so far.
I completed Batman a few weeks ago and am now into Assassin's Creed. It's difficult to describe progress in this completely non-linear game, but so far I've unvealed "Il Duomo's Secret" and "Torre Grossa's Secret", and have killed 4 of the major enemies (including at least 2 of de Pazzi family).

I felt compelled to write this post after more than a week of complete lack of communication with anyone I knew, friends or relatives. More and more, I'm coming back to my old ways of hating cell phones and electronic media of communication, and much prefer personal conversations. I keep thinking of visiting my friends at Marathahalli more often, but my laziness and nocturnal habits make that a difficult task.

I said "lack of communication with anyone I knew" because I've been communicating with random strangers at Omegle a lot. Amidst the various  "asl?" (asking for age, sex and location, mostly as a prelude to a cybering episode), or "Jesus can save you" stuff, there are a lot of interesting people there with profound ideas.
I chatted with an agnostic guy from the US who knew a surprising amount about Hinduism and Buddhism, and I had the opportunity to clear some things up and show that Hindu Vedanta philosophy was at least an internally consistent and beautiful theory, if not a true explanation of the universe. We agreed that while religion itself was unnecessary and often harmful, the practices discovered by Hindu and Buddhist monks were very helpful to cleanse and improve the mind, and should be adopted purely for their utilitarian value.
I talked with a Chinese woman who found India's arranged marriage system strange, felt all Indian guys she had met were wonderful gentlemen, and recommended two chinese movies to me (one was called "Aftershock" in English, the other translated to "Hawthorn"; I've not been able to find subtitled versions of either).
I also talked with a European guy (was it Sweden? or Switzerland? I forget.) who shared a lot of my interests, was living my dream life with having studied psychology as his major and now going on to neuro-psychology in higher studies. He was also exactly my age and shared my interest in books too. Unfortunately the conversation got disconnected due to a server error and I never got his contact details.
I'm learning a lot through these conversations and they're expanding the limits of my morals, thoughts, knowledge and imagination.

Thank you Tim Berners-Lee, for this wonderful thing called the Internet.

Forgiveness and me

I never learnt to forgive people. This is perhaps my greatest weakness. There are very very few things that bother me or make me angry, but once it has happened, there are very very very few things that can make me forget it and forgive those who did it.

This has cost me dearly in relationships, has murdered what were otherwise good friendships, but I have no idea what to do.

Because, I never learnt to forgive people.