Appoose's World

I had bought a Sony Ericsson W580i 3-4 months back. I wanted to buy a non-nokia phone. And sony ericssion's feature set to cost ratio was impressive. In fact, they do in general perform well than the nokia's now a days.

But, I had a terrible experience with this model. I had bought this phone around 3 months back. Now the charger + usb interface seems to have failed. The diagonsed reason being liquid seepage in the connector joints. I am a person who treats my electronics equiment with respect. I used my earlier mobile phone for 5 years and is still in working condition. The only reason I can think about is some sweat beads getting into the connector track from my palm. If that may be the case this is a case of faulty design. Please note that the connector is oddly place in the side of this phone where the palm of your hand is in maximal contact with the joints rather than the customary bottom position. However since this is a liquid seepage problem, sony ericcson has devoided my warrnty claims. I wanted to eleivate the issue and sent them an email. I got a clarification email from their side. I promptly sent them the necessary information. Afterwards, it is a black-hole situation, and there has been no replies inspite of me pinging them multiple number of times. Calling the customer care did not help; save the trouble of explaining my condition and stand on issue to five different customer agent , all of them gave me the same reply, please send an email, you will get a reply within 48hrs. "It is 48 working hours, not actual hours", that is how the fifth customer care office replied when I informed him it is well past 48 hrs of I sending the email.

I am planning to give a consumer court case.

I am including the communication so far with the customer care. The only changes I have made is masking out sensitive information like IMEI and my mobile number

( communication with support )

Pure Cinema!

This is not an easy movie to watch. The pace is slow and the story-line grim. However the impact it creates, is massive.

There is a dinner table conversation scene in the movie; which is nothing short of a spectacle. Spectacle, due to the stark simplicity of the frame and motions. One of my favourite punch-line is by Hemingway "Don't confuse action with motion". The corollary to this will be "Don't confuse lack of motion to inaction". Camera is centered around the main protagonist; frame is so tight that some of characters often clip it; something that will not fetch points in a photography class. The conversation stream is mostly off-topic; but makes contact to the emotional condition of the protagonist at distinct and discreet positions; each of which adds to the tension periodically and systematically. Mind you, the main protagonist never participates in the conversation; and is the passive listener (so are we!).

The scenes in the movies are all brutally honest; direct and uneasy to watch. They are cold, cynical, descriptive - not analytical, let one draw one's own conclusions, and more importantly throw many questions at you. It is a clear and objective copy of the period and place it is set at. It doesn't have to be hypocritically pleasant, because the depicted period wasn't; it doesn't have to accuse, nor to justify: it must be cruel and to the point, and to reveal. And so it does.

This post might look almost obligatory for any movie-going/following malayaliees, in-fact it is! I am especially proud of the quality of malayalam movies during 80's and mid 90's. But towards end of the millennium something happened. The quality of movies started becoming bad. Last decade it moved from bad to worse. However, the irrationality of the situation, (even purely from a commercially perspective) is logic defying and beyond comprehension to me.

I just finished watching "Katha Parayumbol". I really liked the movie. There is no unwanted flamboyance in the movie. It is a simple, but an effectively told tale, in a non-complicated and charming manner. It has all the reminiscence and charm of the movies in the 80's. Well scripted characters, witty dialogue and freshness in story. In short, the movie works. I heard that it was a big success back in Kerala.

Now if you do simple recap of successful and memorable main-stream movies of the past 8 years, remove the movies of Sreenivasan and co out of it, very few movies will actual remain in the list. What really bothers me is why the heck are the movie makers adamant on modeling malayalam cinema like products from bollywood or Tamil industry ? Isn't it obvious that the sensibility of the people are different. Give people a film with a simple story, but with care taken to character building, it is sure shot recipe to success. Now, to put things in contrast, how many instance do we quote a dialogue or scene from a movie made in 21st century. Very little, I suspect. But I atleast use dialogues from movies made pre-21st century in my day to day conversations quite regularly. Be it about the Paul Barber in USA or the kilometers from Miami Beach to Washington DC or Pawanai- the serial killer or mera nam Ram Singh hai/ho/hui; these are still afresh in our collective imagination.

Cause of the decay has been debated endlessly; blame game carried out long enough than necessary. But my argument is simple; the bulk of the movies which follow a bollywoodish or tamil-ish tempo have either fell flat on their heels or barely scrapped through in the box office. But on the other hand if you take the movies Sreenivasan scripted; his last three outing being Udayanu Tharam , Arabi Kadha and Kadha Paryumbol : all of them has got the attention and imagination of people. To put forward the argument from a different perspective, how many of malayali film adaptation in other languages are consider in par or better (if any) to it's original. The problem most of the viewer have is with the mismatch in sensibility, most often intentionally added by director who is targeting a different audience. Now if people are smart enough to understand that they have to change the treatment while adapting a malayali movie, why are they myopic to the reverse!! The statistics is out there in wide open, exposing itself crisp and clear, and there is bunch of jokers who is illiterate to see it, what a pity!

"Sir, extremely sorry for the inconvenience caused. But sir ........ "
This seems to be most irritating and dreaded phrase in the recent times for me.

Some times I feel guilty at yelling at poor customer care personal. Usually I am quite cool-headed. But, I am sure it would test any ones patience, if you have to reiterate the same mundane details to 4 different customer care staff, two times since the line got cut, one time because the personnel at the other end chose to keep me in hold infinitely during the middle of conversation, that too without any real notification and the final time he exposed me to the fine-print booby traps (sir, it is 48 working hours, not 48 actual hours, gotcha looser). But all the four conversations were served with the vintage punch line prelude.

The sheer inability of our people (be it customer care centre or the passport office clerk [I had gone to renew my passport yesterday]) to conduct a professional conversation petrifies me. Neither of them were interested in listening, let alone understanding my problem and they invariably come to their own sweet conclusion by hearing 20% of my story. Now, all I wanted to ask if when and if they will respond to an email which I had sent them couple of days back. All four personal insisted on me giving a complete story of the case, in-spite of my prior correspondence has matured beyond a formal complaint stage. However, chose to not to give me an option of following up and picking up the thread from where it is.

ps: Anyone who has prior experience filing a consumer court case please ping me. Need some info.

Quick and Painless Ennegram test. Got the link from diffdrummer journal.


My enneagram type is NINE (aka "The Mediator")

"I am at peace"

( Read more... )

You can find your ennegram score from here

Thank you folks for all the wishes. I survived past the deadline and managed to submit the paper. My batteries are recharged after a 14 hour long deep sleep.

Just found out that the deadline for the next conference (I am submitting a previously rejected work here) has been extended by another week. So the new counter is reset to this

Btw in news, Prof. Erik Demaine proves P=NP

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=998

My current deadline timer, at the time of this posting is set to 1 day, 23 hours, 14 minutes and 3 seconds

The live counter appears here

Wish me luck!

I sometimes feel the primary purpose of our life is to tell stories.

We are in a constant process of creating and exploring new stories in our mind. We act it out to others through our life, sometimes we write about them, sometimes we make pictures and at other times we sing songs about it. Whatever our expression means, the crux of our stories are the adjectives that we contribute.

The adjectives; the process through which we can join ideas and prioritise them is much often way more important than the subject, object or the verb. The mastery over these adjectives are the skills which endows us to touch, traverse and understand deeper territories in the fabric of our lives, but more importantly transmogrify us to master story tellers who can tell honest stories about human spirit and her perturbations.

This post is dedicated to Terry Fox.



Diagnosed at the age of 18 with cancer, one of his leg had to be amputated. Three years after he decided to run coast to coast of Canada in order to raise money for cancer research. He ran a full marathon distance everyday with one prosthetic leg. However, after 143 days of constant running he had to stop as the cancer had metastasised to his lungs. Terry Fox for me is a master story teller. The adjectives he chose to use in his story exemplified 'hope' and 'human spirit' like very few ever has and ever could.

Some more details about Terry Fox and his story can be found at http://www.terryfoxrun.org/english/marathon/default.asp?s=1

"And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong.

To measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing blind, deaf stone alone, with nothing to help you but your own hands and your own head.."

- From the short story Bear Meat by Primo Levi
- re-quoted by Christopher McCandless aka Alexander Supertramp


ps:- Those of who have not read or seen "Into the Wild", do yourself a favour. Go and pick up the book and the dvd (in that order).

I have been planning to print (i=4;) t-shirts, each sporting a different xkcd strip. It seems one more is added to the list (i ;)



The strip might be a good tool to take occasional digs at my theorist friends. The problem however is that, with most probability they will take it as a complement :-p.

For non-{cs|maths} people who might find it difficult to catch the humour, the joke is based on a problem in Combinatorial Mathematics called the Traveling Salesman problem. We are given a number of cities and the costs of travelling from any city to any other city. We have to compute the least-cost round-trip route that visits each city exactly once and then returns to the starting city. However, in-spite of 60 odd years of Computer Science research, no one has been able to 'effiicently' solve the problem. In fact, we are not clear if a general solution exists at all!

For more details have a look at http://11011110.livejournal.com/133469.html and Wikipedia:Traveling Salesman Problem

No energy drink can match a glass full of freshly squeezed out sugar-cane juice, especially after a 45 minute run. There is a new juice centre in campus. And it is awesome. I schedule my daily jogging routes so that it would terminate somewhere near the shop; the thought about the 'ganne ka ras' literately fuels my last kilometer or so.

Avial - Mallu Rock Band

I usually have a low esteem for Indian rock bands (notable exceptions being Parikrama and Antragani). However, this rock band caught my attention and to some extend took me by surprise. The lyrics and vocal melodies are directly from Malayalam folk songs. This threw me into a split reaction, the freshness in perspective vs scepticism over tampering with something as traditional and common as folk music. However, the quality of rock is pretty good and the level of cohesion in the merger simply amazing. Some of the words, inspite of it rolling down my tounge (thankfully, only inside bathroom) more than a thousand times, the thought of it serving as good rock songs never occured to me. Freshness content wins hands out over my scepticism in this case.

My favourite is Kavalam's Karukare.

More about Avial at http://avialband.multiply.in

You can purchase the CDs at http://www.musicyogi.com/asp/idpndDetails.asp?albId=ALB7036

An above average libido plus a massive armoury of vocabulary plus an over dose of contempt and cynicism (doesn't matter whom or what it is directed to) plus a reference to homosexuality seems to be a well know formula of converting thrash into masterpieces. The pity is that the most of the authors of such books, maybe because of their greed to attain economic and social gains, not only do not talk about anything further than what was already deliberated by the early 20th century masters (Freud, Bloomsbury group et.al), but also gives a rather dismal presentation of such grave issues which are not yet accepted or even debated by our rigid society.

I am walking, alone.. , the stars peppered in the night sky, some glowing strong, some so feeble that they are barely visible amidst the reflected yellow glow of the city lights eating away into the horizon. My muscles and bones are tired and a hint of ache cowling over me (courtesy my new found interest in jogging, supplemented by swimming lessons ). However my mind is afresh and vibrant, swarming with thought threads about my love, my body and my maths. I am busy making analogies between long distance relationship and black-holes, a state in which all your emotions are pulled right back into you, with very little opportunity for expression. I am setting mental targets about the amount I should run tomorrow, the route I should take and so on. Details about a mathematical model I am trying to craft for the last two weeks, and yet stumbling bad in it comes back to my mind. I tried rearranging few things around, nevertheless any progress achieved. Suddenly... All these thoughts vanishes, as if I was knocked unconscious. My iPod had changed tracks. The beautiful violin melodies flow out. Instantaneously I am transformed into a different space all together. It is made up of musical notes, emotions, thoughts; however all of them unlabeled and non-enumerable. My linguistic machinery falls severely short of faculty to trace out this space. Hence I am retiring such an attempt prematurely. However to move forward let me take the help of Sir. William Blake.

"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."

As the song finishes a drop of tear entangled with a sigh escapes me. "It feels so good to be alive..aahhh....".

There is a magic hue, a magic colour, a magic note, a magic word, a magic pattern. When juxtaposed together it creates harmony and beauty. However, the inordinate soul I being, only when treated in melancholy do I realise how precious and special each one of them are

One rarely can escape attributing to Alice in Wonderland.

The movie left me with mixed reactions. So let me start with the positives.

I immensely liked the fundamentals of plot, though not necessarily it's exposition. It gives a good platform to deliberate upon the dynamics of cross-cultural interactions. A phenomena which is both contemporary as well as modern. After all we as a society has failed to reach an equilibrium even after centuries of co-existence. To a certain extend, I believe that Ashutoush Gowariker has managed to build upon this platform, however too uni-dimensional for my liking.

There are really spell bounding moments in the movie. There is a beautiful Quawali song 'Khawaj mere Khawaja'. Picturisation of the song is un-doubtfully to me the major highlight of the entire movie. Where the director scores the highest grades is in his ability to capture the innate spiritual aura from the song and enhance it up. Wow!

There are other great sequences like Akbar fighting the elephant or the final battle sequence which are finely executed. However, film fails in its implementation during macro-scale fight sequences. After the experiences technically exemplary Hollywood war movies like Gladiator, Troy etc has given us, I was eager to find out whether our industry's proficiency level has reached a comparable level. Unfortunately, the answer is no. But on introspection, this was expected. We not only make movies with 10% of Hollywood's budget, but also have little prior experience making period drama. However, one question still remains. Was the fight sequences relevant to plot? I would say at-least 40% of them were quite unnecessary. That too me was the prime fault of movie. There is unwanted redundancy in the narration. The result, a 3:30 hrs long movie, which should have been at least 45 minutes shorter. Film is brilliant when it is a love story, it showed traces of brilliance when addressing political, social and 'spiritual' issues. How I wish if there were more time and space alloted to it.

But overall, I would still recommend the movie to others. It is just that, it could have been much better a movie.

I don't get it! Are the majority of the journalist in our country pure complacent and lazy or pure stupid. I doubt very much they are either of the two. I am mighty fed up and frustrated seeing cricket stories(?) eating up the entire front page of national dailies.

* Script Snippet from The Gladiator *

					MARCELLUS
		Games?  He wants to hold games?

					GAIUS
		It's madness.

					GRACCHUS
		No... it's not...


					GRACCHUS
		He knows who Rome is.  Rome is the
		mob.  He will conjure magic for them
		and they will be distracted.  And he
		will takes their lives.  And he will
		take their freedom.  And still they
		will roar.  The beating heart of
		Rome isn't the marble of the Senate.
		It's the sand of the Colosseum.  He
		will give them death.  And they will
		love him for it.

* Snippet Ends *

"If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing."
- William Safire, Guardian Style Guide 

The halla-gulla that have stirred up courtesy the "monkey" word (maybe spit out with a bit of intent to tease) is fascinating indeed. The radio-DJs are having a gaala time giving gaalis to Bucknor, Ponting and co. Let me make a candid (and slightly shameful) admission that I am enjoying some of the takes on the umpire and the Aussie captain indeed. What is more amazing to me is how a country whose reaction on every thing else never seems to reach any sort of consensus and more dangerously most of popular opinion biased towards the non-tolerant side, suddenly find convergence to a singular verdict wrt cricket.

Let me mod up (+1) the disgust, anguish and sentiment of "11 vs 14"