• Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle If you have been watching documentaries week after week, this is what you need : A feeble story, heavy metal music, lot of skin, and unbelievable stunts. Terrible, but watchable.
• The Incredibles The idea of a dysfunctional American family has been beaten to death in movies and sitcoms (Simpsons, Malcom in the Middle, American Beauty). So the idea of dysfunctional American family with ex-super heroes does not have any novelty. After watching so many Pixar movies, I had great expectations of this movie. But throughout the whole movie I laughed only once (towards the last scene when the little baby morphs into fire). Everyone in the theatre were laughing like crazy, but this movie did not do it for me.
• Vasool Raja MBBS (Tamil) This is a remake of the Hindi film Munna Bhai MBBS where Kamal Haasan plays the role played by Sanjay Dutt and Prabhu the role of Arshad Warsi. I hate to say this, but Sanjay Dutt was better in that role. Since I had seen Munna Bhai first, there was this constants comparison thread running in the background and I found the Hindi version better than this one.
• Thitthikuthe (Tamil) This movie had a melodious song (Thaayarum Ariyaamal…) sung by Unnikrishnan which I liked. After watching 30 mins of the movie, I was looking for a wall to bang my head.
• Nandanam (Malayalam) A servant girl’s faith in Guruvayoorappan translates into her wishes coming true. She sees the hand of the Lord in everything, which others around her do not see. MT Vasudevan Nair had a movie called ‘Ente Swantham Janakikutty’ which revolved around a similar theme of personal faith and seeing what you want to see. This movie has excellent songs too and was a nice Malayalam movie after a long time.
• Swapnakoodu (Malayalam) The film has three heroes and two heroines and could have been the world’s first pentagonal love story. But they make one hero tie the rakhee on a heroine. Then they kill one of the heroines. So the problem was reduced to the most often solved mathematical puzzle in Indian films – the triangular love story. Everything ends predictably. Good songs and excellent characters make this a good movie to watch.

• Lion of the Desert (Anthony Quinn) A very touching movie on the life of Omar al-Mokhtar who led the resistance in Libya against the fascist forces from Italy in the 1920s. Anthony Quinn gives a superb performance in this lavish production. Must see.
• Iraq: The Cradle of Civilization (Documentary) Host Michael Wood takes us to various places in Iraq which is called the cradle of civilization (Kak etc. calls India as the cradle of civilization). Wood takes us to Uruk, the first city of Sumer, the home of Abraham and where writing, wheel and art was invented. We get to see the garden of Eden at the meeting point of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers analyzed life of the people now and in ancient times. Excellent
• God and Buddha: A Dialogue (Documentary) In this documentary Professor Robert Thurman and Deepak Chopra explore the parallels between Buddhist philosophy and Vedanta and they find that there is no difference except for some semantics. If you are not very spiritually inclined, most of the discussion will fly over your head. Excellent watch.
• Enakku 20 Unakku 18 (Tamil) A guy and a girl meet on a train from Mumbai to Chennai and separate without knowing much about each other. Then they try to find each other in Chennai. I saw this movie due to some good A R Rahman songs which I had listened earlier. But the movie turned out to be 3 hrs of advertisment shots in between music video style filmed songs. The sweetness oozing out of the scenes will even creep out Suraj Bharjatya. Avoid it.

• Farenheit 9/11 A real hardhitting look at the Bush Administration and the Iraq War. Moore brings out all the unpleasant questions which the mainstream media have overlooked. He is as fair and balanced as Fox News and hence does not cover the autrocities of Saddam or his sons, but still this is one documentary that is a must see.
• Bush’s Brain A documentary on Karl Rove, President Bush’s Political advisor. It is based on a book by the same name and has many anecdotes on the man behind the President some of them really horrible. Worth watching.
• The Life of BuddhaThere are a million movies on Jesus Christ, there are even a few on the Dalai Lama. But this is the first documentary I have seen on the life of the Buddha. This film combines archaeology, mythology, and folklore to reconstruct his life. A must watch.
• Barbershop (Ice Cube, Cedric the Entertainer) A mediocre movie about a days events in a Chicago Barbershop. Lot of politically incorrect statements and lots of humor.
• Asambhav (Hindi) (Arjun Rampal, Priyaka Chopra) – The Indian President gets kidnapped in Switzerland by Pakistanis and Arjun Rampal from Special Group Force in the Indian Amry is sent to rescue him. Priyanka Chopra plays a completely “different” role, and you won’t believe it – as a club dancer. Can you retain your sanity after watching this movie ? Asambhav!
• The Bulletproof MonkChow Yun-Fat is a tibetan monk who is protecting a sacred scroll and he ends up in United States. There he pairs up with Seann William Scott (Stiffler of American Pie) and fights the bad guys. This movie has it all – bad dialogues, bad acting and bad script.
• Alexander the Great (Richard Burton) – This sweeping epic was so sweeping boring that I am now eagerly waiting to see Colin Farrell as Alexander.

Like all other Dan Brown novels this one also starts with a murder. The murdered person, Ensei Tankado was an employee of the National Security Agency, who wrote an unbreakable code which the NSA’s powerful codebreaking machine could not crack. Enter Susan Fletcher, a brilliant and beautiful cryptographer.
At the same time the deputy director of NSA has sent Susan’s boyfriend to retrieve a ring from the dead body in Spain where he is followed by a mysterious assasin. As Susan Fletcher discovers more secrets, you start turning pages more rapidly and as the cover of the book says

The NSA is being held hostage… not by guns or bombs, but by a code so ingeniously complex that if released it will cripple U.S. intelligence. Caught in an accelerating tempest of secrecy and lies, Susan Fletcher battles to save the agency she believes in. Betrayed on all sides she finds herself fighting not only for her country, but for her life, and in the end, for the life of the man she loves.

This book has too much excitement. Each chapter is like one page and ends in a cliff hanger. When you have three hundred such pages, it gets a bit boring and cliched. But you read page one and you cannot keep the book down.
With this book I have finished all of Dan Brown’s books and my favourite is Da Vinci Code, followed by Angels and Demons. Deception Point and Digital Fortress did not impress me as much.

• Bad Santa – Bad Movie.
• Cold Mountain – Slow but a very moving film by Anthony Minghella (The English Patient). Excellent perfomance by Jude Law and Renée Zellweger.
• Passion of Christ – The pain of Jesus gets to you in this powerful movie about the last 12 hrs of Jesus. It is a must watch.
• Samay (H) – If you want to see one good hindi movie, see this. Well made, well directed, and well thought out murder mystery. The end is not very believable, but then it is a Hindi movie.
• Cast Away – Boring for most part. But amazing performance by Tom Hanks
• Outfoxed – a documentary analyzing the biased journalism of Fox News Channel who still claim that they are “Fair and Balanced”. Must see.

While Globalization can mean many things, it is economic globalization that is the favourite target of protestors around the world. Who are these protestors and why are they bothered ? Some of them are outright hypocrites as we have seen in the World Social Forum and the Communists of Kerala. The anti-capitalism movement has now morphed into anti-globalization to anti-corporations to anti-American movement. Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University has decided to take the protestors head on and is the focus of his book In Defense of Globalization
The accusation against globalization is that it increases poverty in both rich and poor coutries, destroys unions and labor rights, harms women, destroys local cultures, and damages the environment. He tackles each issue one by one.
The author had worked in the Planning Commision of India in the 60s and the plan they came up with to decrease poverty, to make wealth trickle down to the bottom was to grow the pie. It required that the government would take steps to accelerate growth by building infrastructure and attracting foreign funds. But growth may not really pull the poor into gainful employment like the tribals in India and inner city youth in United States. According to Bhagwati, the poor’s access to investment can be made sure by replacing bureaucrats with the market. Another way to accelerate growth is by trade and the case he mentions is that of countries like Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. While these countries expanded trade, India remained closed and hence missed an opportunity.
Continue reading “Book Review: In Defence of Globalization” →

The invasion of Iraq by the coalition forces has upset many people all over the world for various reasons. But for Tariq Ali, the Pakistani writer and playright, it is not just the invasion of Iraq that is wrong, but almost everything on this planet Earth. His book Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq is an expression of his anger.
He writes that this event is a turning point in World History and is a part of the two-hundred year old war waged by the North against the South. After that he fails to explain what is this North and South he is talking about. Also first of all he declares that he is not one of those guys who believe that every disaster that has fallen in the Arab world is the result of Western intervention. This is like Fox News saying it is Fair and Balanced because the cover of the book is a picture of a child urinating on an American solider.
But even if your forgive that image as the work of an over enthusiastic publisher, the contents of the book do not change your impression. He claims to be impartial and says that he gets regular mails from both Israel and Palestine, but they just turn out to be letters about acts of violence committed by Israelis. Apparently the innocent Israeli civilians killed by the Palestinian suicide bombers never wrote him a letter.
Then for some reason he gets obsessed with jackals. Everyone in the world is a jackal. He quotes some poets who wrote against the occupation. People who criticised the poets were cursed jackals. The Iraqi Governing Council is a bunch of jackals. The jackal obsession is carried throughout the book till the end and he makes predictions like “the jackals and their masters will fail”.
No book on Iraq is complete without its history. So Tariq Ali writes a few chapters on which the world is composed of Communists, Communist Poets, British imperialists and Ba’athists. There were no Shias, Sunnis or Kurds in any major activities. He goes on touting the virtues of the Communist Party and how they were ruthlessly destroyed by Saddam Hussein. There are also many pictures of these martyred communists and Mr. Ali laments that this was not covered by a single American newspaper.
Continue reading “Book Review: Bush in Babylon” →

New York Times gave it a “bad review”:http://www.nirajweb.net/mt/niraj/archives/002576.html. Now the Economist too thinks the same.
bq. Alas, �My Life� is very far from being great, or even particularly good. The book is so long-winded and ill-disciplined that the genuinely good bits get lost in the verbiage. Mr Clinton regales us with tedious lists of conferences, meetings and campaign stops. The editors should be hauled over hot coals for failing to hold their celebrity author to higher standards. If they had devoted a fraction of the energy to editing this text that they did to marketing it, then the turkey might have had a chance to fly; as it is, it is destined to sit on the coffee tables of liberal America, lightly thumbed and quickly discarded. [“Economist”:http://economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2787887]
But that has not prevented thousands of people from “camping overnight”:http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20954~2236129,00.html in front of bookstores to get an autographed book from the former President.
bq. Lori Smith, a 46-year-old advertising copywriter from Encino, was the first person in line, having shown up at 10:45 p.m. Thursday to beat the crowd. She was electric with anticipation as she waited for the doors to open. “I’ve never met him before. I’m just dying. I think I’m going to fall over backwards when I see him.” [“LA Daily News”:http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20954~2236129,00.html]
The former President still remains a charmer.

_Deception Point_, by Dan Brown Pocket Books, 576 pages
It is an election year in United States and President’s opponent is Senator Sedgewick Sexton. Sen. Sexton has focussed his campaign on attacking NASA and has made a promise that if elected, he would open Space exploration to private corporations. Senator Sexton has a daughter, Rachel, who does not have a good relation with her father and also works as a gister for National Reconnaissance Office.
A NASA Satellite finds a meteor burried deep in the Arctic ice. The meteor contains fossilized samples of some bugs which are the first samples of extra-terrestrial life forms discovered on earth. This discovery has deep implications for NASA as well as the President, who has always backed NASA even though they were wasting taxpayers money in many unsuccessful missions.
To verify the authenticity of this discovery, the President sends a team of civilians to the Arctic. One of them in Rachel Sexton, the daughter of the President’s opponent. Soon the civilian teams finds that the meteorite is one giant hoax. They also find that they are being targeted by Special Ops forces who want to just kill them.
This is the crux of the plot of this book. Like his other books, this one too is a page turner. Since I had read “The Da Vinci Code”:https://varnam.org/archives/000340.html and “Angels and Demons”:http://www.sulekha.com/expressions/column.asp?cid=305939, this book was very predictable. All these books have a similar plot structure, but with different locales and themes. The other two books were very clever in the way they combined religion with the plot. But this book for me was, yet another thriller.
“Plot Excerpt”:http://danbrown.com/novels/deception_point/excerpt.html

When America started project on the nuclear bomb with the aim of making it before the Germans, Richard Feynman was one of the young scientists involved. He moved to Los Alamos in New Mexico where the new lab was just coming up. The administrators had decided that two scientists would share an apartment. Feynman did not want to share his apartment. So he spread out woman’s clothes on the other bed daily and went to work. Everyday evening the cleaning lady would fold it neatly and keep it back. The Army which got the report from the cleaning lady was wondering who this mysterious woman was who stayed with Richard Feynman and since they could not find, they asked the cleaning lady to act as if nothing happened.
Another prank he was famous for was cracking safes. He used to open the safes of people in Los Alamos by knowing what project the safe owner was working on, and what physical constant he would use as the safe number. But this is not just about his pranks. There are very serious lectures, and many of them on miniaturization of the computer. These lectures were given in the 50s, much before everyone was talking about nanotechnology. There is also his famous minority report on the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster.
bq. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is a magnificent treasury of the best short works of Richard Feynman, from interviews and speeches to lectures and printed articles. A sweeping, wide-ranging collection, it presents an intimate and fascinating view of a life in science-a life like no other. From Feynman’s ruminations on science in our culture to his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, this book will fascinate anyone interested in the world of ideas. Newcomers to Feynman will be moved by his wit and his deep understanding of the natural world and of the human experience; longtime admirers will discover many treasures available nowhere else.
But the article I liked was where Feynman explains how his father, a uniform salesman, influenced him to be a scientist. His father taught him to identify patterns and always to keep an inquisitive mind. Some of the lectures in the book are very deep, especially the ones on miniaturization. But rest are all very interesting and some are extremely funny. This is my first book by Feynman and I enjoyed it a lot.