A couple of days back I was talking about how sometimes ethics and helping someone might push you to an uncomfortable choice between them. I even gave an example of a story about a Barber who is driven to make a similar choice when the Dictator of his country walks into his shop for a shave. You can read that story here: Just Lather, That’s All

Today I got an wonderful example of the exact opposite situation. This one was thanks to a beautiful short story, The Missing Mail from the book Malgudi Days by R.K. Narayan.  The televised version of the story is embedded below (If you cant see it, you can view the video here: Malgudi Days: The Missing Mail)

The story is about a postman and one of the families of Malgudi. The postman is a wonderful man and is present at every important instance of the life of Kamakshi, the daughter of the family. When its time for her marriage, he also helps in finding the perfect groom for her.

A couple of days before the wedding the postman sees that the family has a letter informing them that the uncle of the bride is critically ill. The next day he receives a mail that the uncle has passed away. Fearing the marriage might get postponed, the postman takes the call of not informing the family until the ceremonies are well past.

This again was similar predicament but handled in a different way, but the things at stake were different… Ironically in both stories(the other one being of the barber) the final choice seems more acceptable for the reader. I believe its in interest of the writer to work in favor of the reader’s sentiment.

If the postman had done his job and delivered the letter it wouldn’t have been a good story. In choosing a different path the writer suddenly added depth to the character and whats more gave the audience what they wanted.

Thats the important distinction between stories and life. Stories are sometimes over simplified to meet the reader halfway. In that simplification the writer makes the call as to what details are important to the reader but you don’t get that choice in life, all details are there and you make the final call.

So where does that leave us… In all the pondering on this topic the one certainty that I encountered was that its impossible to judge what is the best choice. Its also important to realize that the maker of the decision probably had different priorities than you…

Hemanth left a wonderful comment in the last post, there he says:

How you feel is relevant only to you, but what you do (even as a result of how you feel) is relevant to everyone around you ….. the hard truth. So i guess it comes down to saying,either … i am going to play this one for me, or…. i am going to play this one for someone/everyone else.

Its amazing how true and well put that is…

Sounds like a cool name for a show right? Apparently there is a show with that name. The Big Bang Theory creator Chuck Lorre uses vanity cards at the end of every show, they are like really fun blog posts where he scribbles off some of his thoughts. At the end of the latest episode of The Big Bang Theory he writes about a Belorussian version of The Big Bang Theory. (Yeah Belarus is the name a country).

He writes in the card:

Belarus does have a bustling TV production industry. One of their most recent hits is a sitcom about four nerdy scientists who live next door to a beautiful blonde waitress. The characters are named Sheldon, Leo, Hovard, Raj and Natasha, and the show is entitled, The Theorists. Each episode begins with a rapid-fire montage of images which takes us from the dawn of time to the present moment.

Here is a video clipping from the show:

Ps: I have been a big fan of the vanity cards for a while now. You can read them here: http://www.chucklorre.com/

If you didnt know, I happen to have a huge media collection. Everybody has Giga bytes of music and maybe a few episodes of their favorite tv shows. I have that and about 80 unwatched movies on my comp at any given time

For me one of the biggest problem was to decide which movie to watch next. Normally what happens is that, I read a review of a movie or someone recommends one to me… I get my hands on the movie and forget about it. Months later I browse thru the names and wont recognize the movie… I am too lazy to lookup IMDB each time so that basically means I wont watch it for the next few months as well.

Recently I found a super solution for this problem, A media center called XBMC. All I need to do with XBMC is point it to the folder containing my movies/tv shows/music and it loads them to its library. It picks up the names in the background and automatically downloads all the relevant info about the movie/tv show. After a while you have the entire details of you collection – IMBD ratings, actor info, genre info ect. Now you can search the library based on Genre, Actor, Director… hell even the production house!

So lets say, one fine day… I decide to watch a movie, my mood tells me ‘comedy’… I can simply go to Movies->By Genre->Comedy and check out what movies I already have that are good comedies.

To add to the features, XBMC even gets you the short plot description which you can check to confirm you want to watch this movie right now!

What I love about XBMC is its Eye-Candiness… One look at how it handles TV Shows and I was totally fida over it. Anyway here are some screenshots of it.

If you store all your media in your comp and want an awesome way to catalog and seach it, give XBMC a try… its totally worth it

Ps: Its open source, and available for Win, Linux and MAC

So after making sure that he wasn’t exactly trying a late April fool’s joke, we explained to him the television phenomenon that hit Indian television in the early to mid 90s. The brilliance that is the twists in her stories and the number of records her serials end up breaking(mostly related to no. of episodes and no. of times a character gets married).

Now its not that everyone should know who she is. But considering that he watched a decent amount of tv (at least thanks to his family) and is very often(understatement) on the internet, it was only fair to assume he had encountered the ‘phenomenon’.

Anyway jokes aside, how many of you read the first line and googled “Ekta Kapoor”?

I just finished reading Volume 1 of the Mahābhārata known as the “Adi Parva“. Mahābhārata is one of the two greatest epics of India, the other being Ramayana. The epic has Eighteen Volumes, each of about 300 pages of Sanskrit Poetry. The english translation I am reading is about 850 pages in length.

As most of my friends I have spent a lot of my childhood listening, reading and watching stories from the Mahābhārata. I remember waking up early on Sundays when I was a kid to watch an hour of the TV adaptation of the book (That TV show apparently holds the record for the most watched show ever!). The characters from the book, let it be the famous Arjuna or the divine Krishna or the giving Karna or the brave Abhimanyu or even the cunning Shakuni, were characters we knew even as kids. We grew up hearing their stories and understanding their greatness. In every sense, Mahābhārata has been and will always be a huge part of me.

I have always been in love with mythological stories. I should probably thank my grand-mother for that, she never hesitated to tell us the stories when we were kids. Stories that triggered our imaginations and left us in awe, how many ever times we heard them.

A few weeks back I felt the sudden urge to read the great epic. There were a lot of events in my life that precipitated this desire and I knew that this was one of the things I simply had to do. I had gifted a translation of the book to my friend Swetha a couple of years ago. Once I picked up the book from her place I was on a reading spree.

I tend to get very little time in the day which I can dedicate to reading. I usually choose the few minutes before I sleep each day but that is hardly enough. With this book it was different. As the story was unfolding I could not keep the book down. Sometimes I would have to force myself to go to sleep coz otherwise it would mess up my next day(I cant do without sleep ).

Personally this has been the best book I have ever read. I can take all those fun, thrilling and entertaining books I have read in the last few years and Mahābhārata simply stands out. Maybe it was the anticipation of each event in the book which had me hooked, all I know is I haven’t felt this happy reading a book ever before.

The first Volume talks about the birth of Beeshma, one of the pillars of the story of Mahābhārata and the ancestors of the Pandavas, the early life of the princes of the Kuru dynasty, their training and the adventures in their youth. The stories that I loved included: Beeshma’s vow, Birth of Radheya(Karna), Drona & Ekalavya and Draupadi’s swayamvara.

The story that I loved the most is the romantic story of Subhadra and Arjuna. This was one of the stories I had not heard before and the entire love story had me dumbfounded. Considering that I am a sucker for romantic stories, the idea of two people in love with each other having never met or spoken to each other, was something I had to enjoy.

Now I move onto the “Sabha Parva”, the second volume of the book. It is a comparitively shorter volume but has events in it which would define the fates of the heroes and the villains.