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July 28, 2005

Movie Review: Swades

[I am quite notorious for seeing fairly well known movies long after they come out. I saw the landmark Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge for the first time more than 8 years after it came out. I saw Swades only recently, even though it has been out for at least half a year now. Nonetheless, here's my belated review.]

Swades: We the People is an introspective, whimsical tapestry of vignettes woven around the experiences of Mohan Bhargava (Shahrukh Khan), the story's protagonist, who visits India after spending some time in the United States. Mohan is a project manager at NASA, whose mission is to launch a satellite that measures global precipitation. Standing at his balcony overlooking a stunning view of downtown Washington, D.C. (just how much does he make?), he realizes that he has grown too self-absorbed recently and forgotten his nanny, Kaveri Amma. Just as news of his successful petition for American citizenship comes through on his voicemail in the background, he decides to pay her a two-week visit in Delhi. When he reaches Delhi, he is told that Kaveri now lives in a village more than a hundred miles away. He rents an RV and drives to this village, but not before running into an enigmatic schoolteacher (Gayatri Joshi) in a bookstore. Mohan quickly surmises that behind her pretty face lies an idealistic, opinionated and culturally correct mind that is lightning quick with arithmetic (his calculator use in this scene is an amusing sop to Indian audiences about how arithmetically 'soft' he has become after moving to the United States).

Mohan arrives at Kaveri's village and finds out that the enigmatic schoolteacher from the bookstore was Geeta, his childhood playmate, who lives with Kaveri (how serendipitous!). Kaveri moved from Delhi to the village to raise Geeta, when she lost her parents. Geeta teaches at the local primary school started by her parents. Mohan's affair with the village and with Geeta begins in right earnest. Mohan is simultaneously touched by the simplicity and frankness of the villagers and appalled by the quality of life in the village. Electricity itself is a luxury and the local postman, who appears to be the most educated of the lot, hasn't even heard of the Internet. The village is too riven by caste politics to unite and do something about these inconveniences to their lives. In fact, many of them are used to these disruptions and have learned to carry on just fine. When reminded how dismal their lives are, they cling to India's millennia-old culture and heritage that they will always have no matter how tough the going gets.

Mohan decides he will have to prolong his vacation. Starting a crusade somewhat reminiscent of the President he serves, he sets about fixing the situation using persuasion, tact and several dollops of Shahrukh Charm (tm). Geeta's school is in imminent danger of being downsized if enrolment doesn't rise. He hits the road and lobbies the villagers to send all their children, not just the boys, to school. He deplores how the villagers lead dismal, disunited lives, while clutching at the culture-and-heritage straw at every oppotunity. He boldly states that even with its great and cohesive culture, India is not the greatest nation on earth, but merely has the potential to be so. He also challenges centuries-old prejudices that prevent villagers from different walks of life from coming together to tackle their problems. As the villagers start waking up to their own potential, he initiates a project to build a local hydroelectric power plant and sees it through to completion, backed by his NASA experience in project management. In a very real way, he positively affects the lives of the villagers, who have been swallowing their sense of helplessness and shame for so long. He returns to the United States filled with pride at what he accomplished and remorse at having left behind Geeta and the simple village life.

If the movie had ended here, it would be convincing, short and sweet. It would have noted India's glaring deficits in the material plane and would have illustrated how these could be overcome. However, it is not just for NRIs (referred to once in the movie as Non-Returning Indians) that this movie was made. In a somewhat unabashed act of pandering to the love story-hungry RIs (resident Indians), the unconvincing and weakly played out chemistry between Mohan and Geeta is made a pivotal reason for Mohan's return to the same village a few months later. Through most of the movie, Shahrukh's Mohan seems to be bursting at his seams to apply puppy-eyed, dimple-cheeked Shahrukh Charm (tm) upon Geeta with full force. However, the screenplay and direction keep thwarting his special Shahrukh moves, so that the audience is left wondering, "He left his cushy NASA job and apartment with a stunning view for this"? At one point in the movie, Mohan openly admits that Geeta lives by a totally different set of values and ideals than his. It is fortunate that the future of Mohan's and Geeta's relationship is left unclear beyond Mohan's return to India, because foisting their wedding on the audience would have been too much.

Even with the unconvincing ending, Swades has several sound points to make about the state of India today, and the complex conflicts tearing Non Resident Indians apart when they make their life choices. The musical score is by the multi-talented A.R. Rahman and provides a pleasant counterpoint to the progression of the story. All in all, the movie definitely deserves at least one viewing, if not a few more, for all the subtle references to sink in. Taking a line from the one of the movie's concluding scenes, it is more important to think of what the audience gains by watching this movie rather than what it has to lose.

Posted by Vishy at 11:35 PM | Comments (3)

July 27, 2005

Vishy's Indian English Dcionary: 420

420./FOWR·TWEN·tee/ (also char-sau-bees /TCHAR·sow·BEES/, Hin. four hundred and twenty). The condition of being guilty, either directly or by association, of petty crime. Also used of a generally sketchy person -- someone the British would call 'dodgy'. Origin appears to be from Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code (don't giggle like a 12 year old -- this 1854 statute instituted by the British is the closest to a general code of criminal procedure in India), which deals with petty theft and other small crimes. The closest U.S. equivalent would be a small-time conman with a longish rap sheet. Petty crime in general is referred to as char-sau-beesi -- the business of being a 420. In some slang subcultures, 840 (420 x 2) is used to denote someone who oversteps the boundaries of sketchiness circumscribed by a mere 420.

It is an interesting meeting of minds that 420 is used in the U.S. in the context of drug-related char-sau-beesi. 420 is a signal word for marijuana and other related activities. The origin of this sense of 420 is linked with a ritual of several school students gathering in the school parking lot at 4:20pm to smoke pot.

Posted by Vishy at 03:26 AM | Comments (0)

July 21, 2005

How different are they really?

India came of age as I was growing up there in the 90s. Three pivotal moments stand out in my memory as having had particular significance to Indian society. The first was when our current Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, then finance minister (approximately Secretary of the Treasury, for you U.S.ians) opened up an antiquated socialist economic system and paved the way to globalization, thus allowing American products to be sold in Indian markets with greater ease. The second, around the same time, was when the Gulf War began and cable channels started beaming it and American television shows directly into Indian living rooms. A few years later, the Internet became accessible to Ashok Kumar, the Indian equivalent of John Doe according to Wikipedia. American culture, which had heretofore been beheld with a mixture of suspicion and fascination because so little of it came through, was flooding through the airwaves and encouraging a glamorous shop-till-you-drop consumerist attitude.

India had opened up. The air was infectiously electric with the thousands of possibilities that lay before the numerous starry-eyed youth. Of course, the sudden flood of American culture was not universally greeted with optimism. A band of culture vultures, claiming to guard true Indian culture against onslaught from evil Western culture, sprang up to warn the younger generation against aping American culture too literally. The extremists claimed American culture was so different from Indian culture that adopting it would necessarily mean the end of Indian values as Indian society knew it. The moderates among them prescribed a syncretic approach to the young generation and advised them to combine the best of the two cultures. I was encouraged to examine the postulates of both sides critically and choose my own path. I continued to think about which aspects of American culture to integrate into my life after I started living in the U.S. My observations and thinking led me to believe that aside from economic conditions, which influence Indian and American societies in vastly different ways, Indian and American cultures are really not all that different.

For starters, they're both highly idealistic and romanticizing cultures. Indian culture exalts people who have apotheosized human values such as love, pride and valor. India has had traditions such as sati, where a widow would jump into her dead husband's funeral pyre so as to join him even in his death. Then there is the much-idealized tale of Anarkali, a courtesan in the Mughal court of Akbar ('The Great'), who accepted a fate of death by being walled-in for the sake of love. Indian movies, especially in the mid-to-late 90s, were idealistic (sometimes sickeningly so) tales that revolved around family and the sublimation of individual desires and aspirations to the will of the family. We find a similar idealistic bent in the United States as well. The U.S. was born as a result of an experiment in democracy. In a significant departure from the feudalistic and royal traditions of old, for the first time, one document, the U.S. Constitution, was revered as the foundation of the country, to the point of almost being worshipped. A lot of American idealism springs from the fact that allegiance to the U.S. was fundamentally tied to believing in the idea of the U.S. After World War I, Woodrow Wilson worked enthusiastically to advance the ideal of an international organization, the League of Nations, where problems between countries would be resolved in peace. That experiment, however, failed to hold its own against the harsh realities of the interwar period. The role of the woman as a homemaker was idealized to such an extent in the U.S. that by the time feminism hacked it to pieces, it was no surprise. U.S. educational institutions are full of fraternities and sororities, organizations that are held together by nothing more than a few commonly held ideals. American romantic comedies are always received well by the American crowd, no matter how improbable their ending would be in real life.

Indian culture and American culture are both highly individualistic cultures. American culture is well known for its strain of rugged New World individualism, possibly inspired by the Iroquois nation. Indian culture, at first glance, doesn't encourage a devil-may-care, independent attitude. So what individualism am I talking about here? I once read an interesting article on Sulekha.com, whose thesis was that Indian culture is also fiercely individualistic not at the level of the individual, but at the level of the family. The whims of the individual are usually subject to censure by the elders, who represent the best interests of the family in the abstract. However, outside of a family, a docile, uncompetitive attitude is discouraged. Individual members of a family are driven along just as much to compete and glorify its name as individual high-achievers are in the United States to achieve personal glory. I have since lost the reference to this article, but I would be infinitely grateful if anyone could point me to it. We see examples of this drive for family glory even in the millennia old epic Mahabharata, whose plot revolves principally around family rivalries.

As somewhat of a corollary to their idealizing nature, Indians and Americans both live in a culture that encourages excess. The over consumption of contemporary American society, especially when contrasted with historically low incomes, is a well documented fact that leads to America's gaping trade deficit. This idea is expounded upon endlessly by the likes of Thomas L. Friedman and Stephen Roach. Americans seem to have absolutely no problems living hand to mouth from paycheck to paycheck, while simultaneously accumulating tons of credit card debt. Indian society too has historically encouraged stretching every last rupee one has well beyond reasonable means. Indian literature has an abundance of stories of men taking on ridiculous amounts of debt and slaving away for generations to repay it if only it would mean weddings and dowries of acceptable grandeur for their daughters. Indian cuisine and American cuisine also share a common thread of richness and excess. The sweeter Indian sweets are, the better. The more ghee that is used to make these sweets, the better. Similarly in the U.S., desserts try to bring together superlatives of every conceivable sort together. Deep-fried candy-bars, ultra-decadent brownies served à la mode with thick chocolate fudge and Ben and Jerry's ice-creams that combine three or four different flavors in one scoop are all the rage. The modern European esthetic of light, flufffy cakes and minimalistic desserts wouldn't fly very well in either middle America or India. As foods continue to get richer in both cuisines, the public health problem posed by various cardiovascular epidemics will be of epic proportions. The obesity epidemic in America has the impending diabetes epidemic in India as its companion.

Indian culture is therefore similar to American culture in many important ways that do not immediately meet the eye. So far, it has escaped some of the distinctive ills that plague American society, such as high divorce rate, crime, extraordinary litigiousness and unabashed consumerism. I am not entirely sure how, but I believe it is because the Generation Me of Indian society, which values individual needs over everything else and craves instant gratification, had not been born yet. Indian popular culture had and continues to have significant elements of middlebrow commentary, driven by the conviction that culture, education and high art are good for one's character. In contrast, American pop culture, as reflected in numerous contemporary magazines, has grown to be anti-intellectual, bland and excessively obsessed with celebrity lives. Times are changing rapidly in India though. India's Generation Me is being cultivated by relentless advertising on cable television targeted at the world's largest middle class. The improving economic conditions of Indian society and the birth of India's Generation Me might lead to Indian society's latent similarities with American society being actualized in the form of the same ills that trouble American society. However, Indian culture has been around for a lot longer than American culture and has seen several periods of affluence and decadence similar to the present day in U.S. Hopefully, it will prove to be resilient enough to come up with a creative and distinctively Indian way of avoiding these problems.

Posted by Vishy at 11:02 PM | Comments (2)

July 20, 2005

Taking a vacation

I will be taking a couple of weeks off starting today to travel to Singapore. I won't have broadband access and honestly, I will probably have better things to do than write on my blog. I will still miss writing on my blog though, and I'll try and sneak in the occasional entry. Fresh entries on my blog will resume with their usual regularity in early August, upon my return.

Posted by Vishy at 02:01 AM | Comments (0)

Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: From the Queen's English

The British may have introduced India to English, but India has since taken English and made the language its own. On an unrelated note, I think it's high time the entertainment industry in India wakes up to this fact and makes Bollywood movies in Hinglish and Mollywood movies in Tinglish. Back to the related note, despite English being a thoroughly Indian language, some words in it are direct transplants from British English. Some of these transplants have died out in British English but still endure in Indian English, to amusing effects. Without further ado, I'll simply list the words and the U.S. English equivalents. This one may be a fairly mundane entry for some, but these words deserve to be included if only for the sake of completeness.

Posted by Vishy at 01:52 AM | Comments (1)

July 19, 2005

Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: eveteasing

eveteasing. /EEV·TEE·sing/. Acts of making lewd comments at, staring at and generally harassing girls walking down the street. In some pathological cases, the distant precursor to eventual sexual assault on the target of these acts. Usually performed at street corners by so-called roadside Romeos, men who have nothing better to do than shower their unwanted and unsolicited attention on girls and women passing by. Like ragging, occasionally happens at educational institutions as well. Origin appears to be from Eve, the first woman according to Judæo-Christian mythology.

Posted by Vishy at 08:31 PM | Comments (3)

July 17, 2005

Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: SC/ST

SC/ST. /ESS·CEE·ESS·TEE/ Short for Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes. These are castes or tribes that have historically been disadvantaged in Indian society. The Indian government makes reservations, India's own form of affirmative action, in employment and education to benefit members of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. The origin of the term is apparently in the Government of India Act, 1935, the last major move towards Indian autonomy enacted by its British colonial rulers. Today, the castes and tribes defined as SC/ST appear in the First Schedule of the Constitution of India. The term SC/ST is sometimes used as an adjective to describe a member of such a historically disadvantaged group. The term SC/ST sometimes includes other protected groups, such as OBC (Other Backward Castes), DT (Displaced Tribes) and NT (Nomadic Tribes). A powerful political force in India in recent decades, members of all the above protected groups sometimes collectively refer to themselves as Dalits.

In recent years, reservation quotas have grown to such an extent that it is advantageous to be a member of the above protected groups. Members can get documents from the government certifying their protected status for use in employment and academic applications. Such certificates are probably in as much demand as baptismal certificates among illegal immigrants in the United States.

Posted by Vishy at 09:39 PM | Comments (2)

July 15, 2005

Vishy's Useless Factoid of the Day #17: The subliminal sensuality of the Starbucks siren

You definitely know it seems like there's a Starbucks coffee shop practically at every street corner in Manhattan. Have you been enticed by the spacious (for Manhattan anyway), well-lit spaces of their coffee shops? Or is it the warm feeling of a $4 latte down your yuppie gullet that you desire? Could it perhaps be something else? Surely you have noticed the Starbucks logo by every store. Does the woman in the logo try to seduce you subliminally into having Starbucks coffee? Let's find out.

The other day I heard a couple of my friends mention that they'd heard that the Starbucks logo is seductive in a subliminally sensual way. Initially, I dismissed it as the stuff of urban legend but later I consulted the almighty G on a whim and found something interesting.

The Starbucks logo features a siren surrounded by the words Starbucks Coffee. Sirens, in ancient Greek mythology, were sea nymphs who sang sweetly and lured sailors to destruction on rocks surrounding their islands. The siren has been linked to the symbol of a mermaid in other cultures. Recently, Starbucks was forced to change its logo because customers found the topless double-tailed siren in the original logo lurid and too overtly suggestive. A simplified, stylized logo, where the wavy hair of the siren covers her breasts, was introduced in its place. The double-tailed siren, a decorative motif found in many European churches and cathedrals, represents female sexual mysteries, according to an excellent article on the symbology of the siren-mermaid as it relates to the Starbucks logo. The article reviews a lot of cultural symbology related to the siren-mermaid in a Robert Langdon(à la The Da Vinci Code)-esque manner. I never realized that the two appendages to the left and right of the siren in today's Starbucks logo were her fins. In the original logo, however, the double-tailed siren is holding them apart in a suggestive pose reminiscent of an ancient Indo-European mother goddess of fertility and sexuality, known as Sheila-Na-Gig (potentially not safe for work).

So the next time you find yourself being lured into Starbucks' plan for world domination, ask yourself if its the sensual siren who is drawing you in...*wink*

Posted by Vishy at 07:41 PM | Comments (0)

July 13, 2005

Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: Lady's finger and brinjal

Today's entry features two of my all-time favorite foods.

lady's finger. /LAY·deez FIN·gər/. Any of a finger-length thin green vegetable with a downy covering on the outside and small white seeds covered in a gooey substance inside. Known within the United States as okra. Origin should be clear from the iconic resemblance. Lady's fingers are crunchy and very tasty, especially when prepared with the right spices. Unlike fingers attached to real ladies, they have no central bone that must be spit out after consumption. Unfortunately, lady's fingers are largely consumed boiled in the United States. This style of cooking turns a most delicious vegetable into a green goo with green bits, which resembles alien protoplasm. Fall not for this, O naïve Americans. Carry yourselves to an Indian restaurant and eat it as God intended it to be prepared.

brinjal. /BRIN·juhl/ or /brin·JAWL/. A plant known for its long purple fruit, which is consumed as a vegetable in Asia and Europe. Known also as aubergine in the United Kingdom and eggplant in the United States. Origin is from the Arabic al-badhinjan, which was transformed in two ways in 'downstream' languages. With the al, it became the source for 'aubergine'. Without the al, it was transformed into the Portuguese berinjela (also Spanish berenjena), which ended up in Indian and Sri Lankan English as brinjal. Brinjal is either loved or reviled by Indians. Ayurveda, the ancient Indian system of medicine, decries brinjal because it induces tamas, namely inertia, sloth and passivity. More recently though, brinjal has been shown to reduce cholesterol. In fact, an excellent cholesterol buster is a diet consisting of brinjal and lady's finger. That's one diet I definitely won't complain about.

Posted by Vishy at 09:29 PM | Comments (0)

July 11, 2005

Vishy's Useless Factoid of the Day #16: Manhattanhenge

Manhattanhenge is a unique phenomenon that occurs on the island of Manhattan on May 28th and July 12th every year. On this day, the sun sets flush along every Manhattan cross street. The name is by direct analogy to Stonehenge, the ancient Celtic structure along whose length the sun rises and sets on the day of the Summer Solstice, June 21. If the island of Manhattan were oriented exactly east-west, Manhattanhenge would happen on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

A similar phenomenon happens twice in the winter along MIT's Infinite Corridor, once in November and once in January. By the same analogy, this phenomenon is called MITHenge.

The beauty of both the above phenomena must be seen to be believed. Manhattan's streets and the Infinite Corridor light up in a fiery orange. Watching the sunset on these days fills me with awe at the precision with which all of nature operates. Try it -- you'll probably feel everything is right with the world.

Posted by Vishy at 09:42 PM | Comments (0)

July 10, 2005

Choice of Operating System and U.S. party affiliation

In my senior year of college, I took a class with Marvin Minsky, one of the undisputed fathers of artificial intelligence. He was so steeped in the Zen of AI that classes would deal more with questions of the mind than representations of knowledge and AI implementations. This was only some of the time, though. The rest of the time was solely for those who hung on to his every word. One day he made a remark about how Google provides a good platform on which to base a common sense knowledge base. All you needed to do was to take a pair of complementary phrases that couldn't both be true at the same time and compare their hit counts on Google. For example, 'The sky is blue' yields over 12 million results but 'The sky is green' yields 9 and a half million results. Because the sky can't be blue and green at the same time, the blue sky wins out.

I decided to use the Google 8-ball approach to determine a relationship between choice of operating systems and orientation towards the Democratic or Republican parties of the U.S. Warning bells must be going off in the mind of the alert reader by now with regard to both sides of such a relationship. First, partisan orientations in the American polity are fraught with gray areas and danger zones. There are pro-choice Republican voters as well as pro-life Democratic voters. Second, not everyone cares about the operating system they run. Twenty years ago, running an Apple operating system might have been a fashion statement, compared to Windows 1.0, which looked utterly clunky in comparison. These days, not only are computers more of a necessity, people care more about what they can get done on various operating systems rather than about the operating systems themselves. In other words, they don't give two hoots about which operating system they run if it can get your email, give you Web access and occasionally let you write letters or longer documents. Still, because Google seems to be the answer to all of the world's problems today, I decided to put it to this test as well.

Here are the results:

Linux republicans149,000 hits
Linux democrats192,000 hits
Linux libertairan169,000 hits
Mac democrats519,000 hits
Mac republicans451,000 hits
Mac Green Party1,610,000 hits
BSD republicans16,100 hits
BSD democrats18,600 hits
BSD libertarian17,900 hits
Microsoft Windows democrats170,000 hits
Microsoft Windows republicans131,000 hits

I think the results are quite in line with my as-yet unstated hypotheses. My first hypothesis is that people who run an open source operating system are highly likely to vote Democratic. Free-as-in-speech software operating systems emphasize a level playing field for software development and usage; their stated goals frequently resemble those of progressive social justice advocates. When the above hit counts are normalized by the number of users of each operating system, it should be clear in the case of Linux that it tends to attract Democrats rather than Republicans. I should note, however, that on another harsher plane, the open source model of software development represents a laissez faire of ideas in its purest form, similar to the dream of free-market fiscal conservatives. My second hypothesis is that only those who run an operating system other than Windows reflect marked partisan preferences. Microsoft Windows has become very highly entrenched in the computing world, for better or for worse. Many people run Windows these days not necessarily out of choice but as a default. This fact reduces the predictive power of someone's running Windows with respect to their political preferences. Windows users are thus likely to come from a broad spectrum of political orientations, including complete political apathy. On the other hand, people who make a choice not to run Windows and thus willingly deviate from the majority to make a statement are more likely to have the courage of their convictions to hold a political opinion and party affiliation of some sort.

I'll also mention some other interesting patterns, so long as we're eyeballing the results. Linux users seem to be more Democratic than BSD users. The BSD family of operating systems are governed by the BSD license, under which you can incorporate open source products into closed source products. You can pretty much do anything you want with BSD-licensed software so long as you preserve the original copyright notices and attributions. BSD-licensed software, which is considerably more non-interventionist that GPL-licensed software, is likely to appeal to libertarians, who are for as little interference in their lives as possible. People with a libertarian political philosophy have tended to vote for conservative parties in American polity because they espouse low governmental intervention in the market. Macintosh users seem overwhelmingly to be associated with the Green Party. From its very beginning, the Macintosh has brought computing to everyone with its friendly Macintosh smiley face. Contrast this to PCs, which initially excluded anyone who was unwilling to type long strings of computerese at the DOS prompt. The Green Party's principles emphasize grassroots democracy, decentralization and community based economics. Macintosh operating systems have also been focused on the future and have been a lot more innovative than PC operating systems, something the Green Party tends to agree with.

On a parting note, I apologize to all my non-U.S. readers for apparently making this post a bit too U.S.-centric. I realize there are probably more users of each operating system I've mentioned above outside the U.S. than inside. I'll let you in on a little secret though. Rarely do you find a with-us-or-against-us political system similar to the one in the U.S., over which conclusions from bogus science can be applied so easily. It's an operational matter rather than a gesture of political favoritism.

Oh, and one more thing. Google 8-ball -- thanks a lot. I love you.

Posted by Vishy at 03:16 PM | Comments (0)

July 08, 2005

Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: rubber

rubber. /rəb·ər/. A useful writing tool that is used to erase marks made by pencils. Generally known as an eraser in the United States. Why? Because it erases things! How then does 'rubber' make sense? Because it rubs things out!

If you are in any doubt about the sanity of referring to to such an operation as 'rubbing out', perhaps you'd like to know that you have used rub out many times by now, unless you are a touch typist that hasn't made a single typo in your life. RUBOUT is a sequence sent by keyboards to computers when you need to erase a character previously typed. RUBOUT (Ctrl-H, or occasionally Ctrl-?) can be interpreted as either a Backspace or a Delete depending on the settings of the computer system. Early Unix keyboards didn't have separate Backspace and Delete keys. They had one Rubout key, whose behavior could be configured.

Of course, the conventional usage of rubber in the United States is to refer to a male device for contraception and STD prevention. Many Indians come to the U.S. unaware of this fact and use rubber to refer to an eraser. There was a fairly painful scene in American Desi, IIRC, which used this fact to provide supposed comedic value. An Indian graduate student is teaching a recitation in a banal New Jersey university as a Teaching Assistant. During roll call, he pronounces Jesús not as /che·SOOS/, but as /JEE·səs/, as Anglo-Americans do. Later in the roll call he makes a mistake noting down somebody's attendance and asks a hot girl in the front row, "Miss, do you have a rubber"? Because she obviously interprets it as him asking for a condom, she says no. He goes on and asks, "Jesus, do you have a rubber?"

While I am talking about school stuff, I might as well give props to Devraj from Dick & Garlick for having undertaken a similar mission to mine in the area of demystifying Indian English. He makes another excellent Indian English entry which has eluded me: by-heart, used as a verb. By-hearting is the most used schooling technique in India and around the world. I owe a lot to by-hearting for getting me where I am today.

Posted by Vishy at 11:21 PM | Comments (1)

Vishy's Useless Factoid of the Day #15: Duane Reade

This factoid is more useless than average; it will be useless only to those who live and work in the New York City area.

The drugstore and pharmacy Duane Reade is everywhere you go in New York. In fact, 'Everywhere you go' is their motto. Probably the only chain more prolific than Duane Reade on Manhattan is Starbucks (not sure of this fact -- merely guessing). I wasn't sure why the store was called that. Perhaps it was because of Drs. Duane and Reade, who founded so many of these stores as a token of their pharmacopoeial magnanimity.

One day I was walking down Broadway a few blocks away from its busy intersection with Canal St, where one fifth of all humankind always seems to have gathered at any given moment. (In fact, because that intersection is smack dab in the middle of Chinatown, I am not far from the truth.) I passed two streets in succession -- Duane St and Reade St. Their juxtaposition in the non-Cartesian maze of Lower Manhattan was simply too much of a coincidence. Were Drs. Duane and Reade buried nearby? Were two consecutive streets along Broadway named after them because they wished to be united not just in the many neon signs of their eponymous store but also in the hereafter of Lower Manhattan's map? Consider my astonishment then that I found myself standing at a Duane Reade between these two streets! The plot was surely thickening.

It thinned completely and disappeared disappointingly when I went to investigate the mystery of Duane Reade's name at their website. I quote:


Duane Reade takes its name from the Company's first successful full-service drugstore, which opened in 1960 on Broadway between Duane and Reade Streets in Manhattan.

So it wasn't Drs. Duane and Reade giving their names to a store, which then got so famous that it gave its names to the streets. The streets named the store!

That, fellow New Yorkers, was today's more-useless-than-usual factoid brought to you by the World's Largest Repository of Useless Knowledge.

Posted by Vishy at 12:12 AM | Comments (0)

July 06, 2005

Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: Matrimonial

Matrimonial. /MAT·ruh·MON·eeyuhl/. An advertisement announcing the availability of a person for marriage. Provides some details about the person's looks and employment and lists their preferences in a potential mate. The simple act of advertising for a girlfriend landed a man some coverage by BBC. However, in India, eligible single people have been advertising their availability for marriage for several years now. When someone replies to a matrimonial ad, more complete summaries of the two peoples' lives are exchanged with the hope of finding a match.

If you have read my earlier ruminations about The Aunties' Network of arranged marriages, a matrimonial can be thought of as similar to a query posted to the network. Matrimonials differ from aunties' network messages in just two ways. First, because matrimonials appear in print or online publications, they have a much wider reach than the network of aunties accessibly from any aunty peer. As a result, they result in matches trickling in from outside one fully connected section of The Aunties' Network. Second, because they have a wider reach and are more impersonal, matrimonials contain fewer details than a query on The Aunties' Network. Queries on The Aunties' Network include significant amounts of verifiable information and sometimes include natal charts as well; details in matrimonial ads are mere teasers in comparison.

Matrimonials have led to an interesting subvocabulary of Indian English that deserves a multitude of 'Vishy's Indian English Dictionary' entries. Here's a page of sample matrimonials. Here are some explanations for words that appear in this page and in other matrimonials:


alliance

A match and the resulting coming together not just of two people but of their families as well.

bar

Constraint/consideration. Phrases like 'caste no bar' mean that the caste of a responder will not be a consideration.

wheatish

An adjective for complexion. The color of wheat -- not quite fair but not dark either, assuming a baseline Indian complexion. Some publications, adhering to the noble principle of being color blind, refuse to accept matrimonials with certain keywords in them, such as 'fair'. Clever matrimonial advertisers circumvent this restriction by substituting 'fair' with 'gori', the Hindi word for fair. White people advertising in a matrimonial shouldn't use 'fair' to describe their complexion. However, 'riceish' may work.

habits

Unhealthy habits, socially unacceptable to varying degrees, such as smoking, drinking and narcotic drugs.

domesticated

Not used in the 'When were dogs domesticated?' sense, domesticated is a term applied in particular to prospective brides that indicates a good sense for maintaining a home and cooking good food for her prospective husband.

Posted by Vishy at 02:30 PM | Comments (1)

July 04, 2005

Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: French beard

French beard. /FRE·nch BEE·yurd/. A pattern of facial hair with a thin moustache, which wraps around the lips to continue into a beard that covers the chin region only. The rest of the face, especially the cheeks, are clean shaven. Known generally in the United States as a goatee.

Origin unknown. The closest I could find was a mention of a facial hairstyle related to the goatee called the royale or impériale that was worn by French officers. Maybe the British taught this word a while back to the English speaking Indian classes to express their contempt at this hirsute hauteur and make fun of the French at the same time.

Posted by Vishy at 01:43 PM | Comments (0)

July 02, 2005

Separation between an application and its host runtime: a case study

The free availability of source code for modern object runtimes such as the .NET CLR and JVM is very helpful in figuring out the internals of these industrial strength runtimes. If you are an independent learner, perusing the source code and somewhat terse specifications of these runtimes goes quite a bit further than visiting your local bookstore for a technical book. Sometimes you end up learning things that you wouldn't otherwise notice when working with these runtimes.

'Hello world' programs in both C# and Java look nearly identical, except for keyword differences. However, whereas Java requires the main method of a class to be both static and public, C# is satisfied with a main method of any accessibility level, so long as it is static. I will quote here two code snippets taken from the source code to the Java and .NET runtimes. In the file ${SRC_ROOT}/java.c from the source jar of the Java Virtual Machine, we see the snippet:



  /* Make sure the main method is public */



  jint mods;



  jmethodID mid;



  jobject obj = (*env)->ToReflectedMethod(env, mainClass, 

mainID, JNI_TRUE);





  ...

  mid = (*env)->GetMethodID(env, (*env)->GetObjectClass(env, obj),

 "getModifiers", "()I");



  ...

  mods = (*env)->CallIntMethod(env, obj, mid);

	

  if ((mods & 1) == 0) { /* if (!Modifier.isPublic(mods)) ... */



                    message = "Main method not public.";



	    messageDest = JNI_TRUE;

	    goto leave;

	

  }

Compare this to a snippet from ${SRC_ROOT}/clr/src/vm/clsload.cpp: 


 // Returns true if this is a valid main method?

 void ValidateMainMethod(MethodDesc * pFD, CorEntryPointType *pType)

 {

         _ASSERTE(pType);

                 // Must be static, but we don't care about accessibility

     THROWSCOMPLUSEXCEPTION();

     if ((pFD->GetAttrs() & mdStatic) == 0) 

         ThrowMainMethodException(pFD, IDS_EE_MAIN_METHOD_MUST_BE_STATIC);

These snippets show the main method of an executable class being looked up and validated for passing control into by the object runtime. The comments in the code should make things sufficiently clear. In the JVM implementation, it is mandatory for the main method to be both public and static. In the C# implementation, the comment declares that the runtime doesn't care about the accessibility of the Main method so long as it is static. With the additional restrictions imposed by the JVM implementation, you could, in theory, have multiple methods at the bytecode level named main, all of which take an array of strings as formal parameters, with different degrees of visibility. However, when emitting bytecode/IL, both Java and C# compilers prohibit methods with identical signatures differing solely in accessibility at the language level. In other words, the extra constraint imposed by the JVM implementation isn't because Java offers expanded method-naming features over C#. So, with that argument out of the way, which runtime implementation has the better approach?

In a managed object runtime, it is very easy to coalesce the logic of the runtime and the code it executes into one system, from a point of view external to both. The key question is to what extent internal boundaries are still maintained despite this apparent coalescence. The JVM implementation adopts a purist object-oriented approach. In other words, if the main method is not declared by the class as being visible to the world, it is not visible to the runtime either. The JVM implementation relies on and adheres to well-known definitions of member visibility from object-oriented theory. It does not make any assumptions about the function of a method that just happens to be named main, unless the method fulfils visibility (public) and instantiation (static) criteria. In stark contrast, the CLR implementation drops all pretense and says that if there is a static Main method available at all, it has got to be the entry point for the .NET application. The CLR approach too has its own merits. Naming static methods 'Main' when you don't intend them to be application entry points is extremely poor form for a programmer. Nonetheless, the JVM still makes fewer assumptions about the code it will host. In so doing, it demonstrates a philosophy of maintaining a more rigorous separation between the runtime and the code it is executing. Further evidence of this way of thinking of the runtime and an application as separate entities is seen in how the JVM has to be configured and invoked explicitly with the name of the main class ('$ java [options] MainClass'), rather than simply executing the main class directly ('$ MainClass.exe')

Applications can be written very efficiently if they make many assumptions about the underlying runtime and development environment. For example, exploiting implementation-specific quirks in how compilers generate code leads to application code that is as brittle and unportable as it is efficient. The problem is that such applications have effectively made the compiler and runtime part of themselves. I do not claim that the JVM necessarily maintains a better separation between itself and application code than the CLR. For example, the JVM does not have a counterpart to AppDomains, handy units of code protection and isolation in the CLR. The CLR can set up an application to run in an AppDomain separate from its own, thereby completely isolating itself from unexpected application behavior. However, in the simple matter of the main method of an application, we see a slight divergence in the philosophies of the Java runtime and the CLR. The JVM demonstrates a stricter separation between an application and its host runtime and takes the better approach.

[C# fans: the bad karma I have generated for myself by portraying my primary programming language these days in a negative light will be neutralized by vicious Java-bashing in a future blog entry. Worry not. --V]

Posted by Vishy at 01:12 PM | Comments (0)