Penned Thoughts

A friend from Twitter listed A Wednesday as one of his favourite Bollywood movies, so I figured I’d give it a try, hoping to see it change my impression of the industry. I don’t think it did much in that regard.

It’s the sort of Bollywood movie that tries to portray itself as better than it actually is. It’s the kind of movie that bores you throughout and then adds an uplifting speech at the end to make it all seem worthwhile. It’s the kind of movie that most moviegoers feel the need to respect and like even though they may not actually have enjoyed it much.

I, for one, do not feel that need.

If everything else in this movie was stellar, I could have forgiven the absurd cinematography, but the rest of it wasn’t good enough to make up for it. There are at least twenty shots, totalling up to over two minutes of screen time (not all at once though), where the camera makes sweeping pans around the roof to show Naseeruddin Shah sitting, standing or roaming on the terrace in a pensive mood.

It’s almost as if it’s the first time the cameraman has discovered that a camera can be mounted on a crane and manipulated that way and wants to shove the effect in our face every five minutes. It’s like those people who buy iPhones just to show them off and have to fish them out of their pocket at the slightest opportunity. It’s annoying and immature. The score is horrible too, specially in the scenes described above.

It has absolutely no sense of pacing at all. This could have been a 40-minute TV episode and it would not have needed to sacrifice one bit of the plot.

The movie glorifies torture and police brutality and makes it look cool. Were we supposed to like Jimmy Shergill’s character and applaud the way he beat up criminals and took the law into his own hands? What if he beat someone up and it turned out that he was actually innocent? The movie does not address that.

For a serious movie, the subject of torture is not something you can use for comic effect and then brush under the carpet. The writers and directors of this movie have typical knee-jerk reactions to corruption and terrorism in India and they think their ill thought out solutions are the best ways to fix these problems. Clearly, they are not.

And the much ballyhooed monologue at the end, which seems to be the entire reason why people like this movie, was not great either. The sentiment was right but the dialogue was pedestrian and Naseeruddin Shah did not do a particularly good job of injecting the ordinary man’s plight into it.

The movie made great promises but failed to deliver on them. The only good thing I can say about it is that the acting was better than average, and that is indeed commendable, but I still wish I hadn’t seen this movie.

I’d rate it 2.5/5.

Today marks the closing of Caramel Cloud and Notificant.

As anyone who has tried to contact me through my Caramel Cloud email address and the company’s Twitter account knows, I have been unresponsive for the past month. That’s because I have been spending most of my time attending to a new business in the offline world and some of it writing for Macworld and have not found the time to answer those communications with the evasive responses that I have been getting so much practice at.

This was probably not the best start to this post, but I don’t know what else would be either. How do you tell the world that you failed? I don’t know. I didn’t even want to be the one to write this post, but then again, who else would? I thought my friends, and above all, Caramel Cloud’s customers, deserved an explanation, so here it is.

I had high hopes for Notificant. It filled a genuine gap in my own workflow and I had expected that it would do so in others’ as well. And it did too. Almost all the reviews the application received, from both customers and reviewers, was positive and encouraging. Even the negative criticism was polite and well-intentioned and I was taking down those suggestions and requests for implementation into the app in future.

Guess that won’t be happening now, huh?

But I do really have this note in Notational Velocity that currently has 29 bullet points. From the really small fixes, like adding pagination to the archive in the web app, to some great new features like recurring notifications and CloudApp integration and support for TextExpander and Automator, text messaging, Twitter and Facebook, natural language scheduling…it was all planned.

I made mistakes. I spent too much, I made some bad hires, I was too lenient and polite with people who didn’t keep up their end of the bargain, I missed some deadlines, I tried to delegate some work that I later realised I myself was best suited to handle. I got too excited about things like getting contacted by Apple for a possible feature on the front page of the App Store. I spent too much time over-thinking things. I didn’t have enough business acumen to see this project through, to make it profitable.

Oh well. You live and you learn. There were a few days after the initial buzz over the release of Notificant for iPhone had died down and sales were precipitously dropping to unsustainable levels where I was horribly down. I don’t know if that’s what they call depressed but that’s what it felt like. People in my family, my parents, they knew something was up.

Eventually, I just let go. I decided not to pursue this any longer. I know it seems like a very hasty decision, and maybe it was, but there really was no way out. This was a self-funded project and it was clear that I’d have to spend more to work on further developing the app. At a time when I hadn’t been able to recoup even 25% of my original investment, that did not seem like a very good idea.

I am dragging this out. The point is: Caramel Cloud and Notificant are no more. I have pulled the apps off the App Stores, but will keep the service around for a few more months, probably till September, to let its most recent purchasers get some value for their money. Maybe it won’t be enough; please pardon me for that. I wish there was another way more than you do.

…

The good news is that I did sell 2,200 units overall (iOS and Mac OS X combined) in the month of May. While that was nowhere near good enough, it was still our bestselling month by far and for that I am very thankful to all the people who spread the word about our app, to the kind folks in the media who wrote about it and to the customers who went out and bought it. Thank you.

I usually go through and proofread every post I write on this blog but I am leaving this one as it is because I may not be able to publish it if I start reading what I have written here. Please pardon the typos and other errors that must inevitably have found their way into this post. Thanks for reading.

-Aayush

Banks in India—and, I suppose, all over the world—are obsessed with security, as well they should be. Unfortunately, however, most of the restrictions and checks they put in place in the name of security not only make banking inconvenient, they actually make it less safe.

HDFC Bank, for instance, forces you to change the online banking password for your current account (and maybe other types of accounts as well) every three months. Needless to say, this is a monumental hassle. Even beyond that, however, it is a glaring security risk.

Human beings are not good at remembering passwords. And when you force them to try to memorise a new one every few months, they are going to do one of two things—they’ll either start using the same two or three passwords in rotation (which significantly reduces the security this measure was put in place to provide) or start writing them down somewhere, most probably on a much less secure location than their own memory.

This essentially ensures that, at some point, they will either forget to write down the latest iteration of their password or lose the full list somehow, whether it be on a scrap of paper or in a plain text document on their computer. In any event, it is clear to me—and please feel free to correct me if you think I am wrong—that requiring your customers to change their password against their own wish is a recipe for disaster.

Even setting aside the security concerns, it is just a pain in the rear. I am a reasonably tech-savvy person and have enough sense to not keep my pet’s name as my password and to not write it down on the back of the diary in my wallet or the notes application on my phone.

I use the immensely useful 1Password application on my iPad, iPhone and Mac to keep generating new and complicated passwords and keep track of them. I am not very paranoid about security—some would even say I am very not paranoid about security, to the point of being reckless—but in the age of web services getting hacked left, right and center, I figured it was a good idea to have different passwords for different accounts. 1Password takes almost all the headache out of managing all these passwords and allows me to securely keep them on hand at all times.

Even so, when HDFC Bank last asked me to reset my password, I was on my iPad, where the 1Password app is not, due to Apple’s restrictions for third-party applications on iOS, as well integrated as it is on Mac OS X and could not step in to replace the old password automatically when I changed it. I seem to remember having opened the app manually and replaced the password but, in any case, I cannot log into my online banking account using the password I have saved in 1Password’s database now.

And this is me, tech blogger extraordinaire, who is having a hard time keeping up with password changes that are abruptly and unexpectedly forced on me; just think of the poor masses who set “jony123” as their password everywhere and still manage to forget it at inopportune moments!

-Aayush

Apple is known for providing the complete solution. The iPhone ships with the SIM card inserted and, for the carriers that are officially supported by Apple in various countries around the world, the carrier settings preconfigured. In India, before the advent of 3G, you could purchase a factory unlocked iPhone from one of the countries where it was available (Australia, China (Hong Kong), New Zealand and United Kingdom), insert an Airtel or Vodafone SIM card in it and instantly start using EDGE to connect to the Internet.

However, since these companies introduced their respective 3G services in the country, Apple’s preconfigured carrier settings have become outdated and it has not bothered to update them yet. If you insert a BSNL SIM card on your iPhone today, you can manually configure it for 3G access, but with an Airtel or Vodafone SIM card inside it, the iPhone tries to spare you the complexities of manually configuring the carrier settings and therefore hides the relevant options.

How Do I Configure an iPhone for Non-Official Carriers?
How Do I Configure an iPhone for Airtel or Vodafone 3G?
This Is Too Complicated. Is There an Easier Way to Do This?
How Do I Find Out What Speeds I Am Getting?
What Speeds Did You Get?
Anything Else I Should Know?

I just purchased a book with a price of $40 in USA for $6 on an online bookstore in India. Those are savings of 85%! This is why I find the non-regionalised prices of digital media absolutely unfair. A Kindle book that costs $10 in USA should cost no more than $2.30 in India and an App Store app that costs $2 in USA should cost $0.45 in India. And the prices should be listed on these online stores in INR.

The only reason these prices seem to be absurdly low is because they are written in US dollars. But if something costs a dollar in the United States, it has no business costing over Rs. 10 in India. The value an Indian places over ten rupees is roughly similar to that which an American places over a dollar.

This is not simply a complaint about stuff being expensive, it’s a complaint about it being made artificially expensive. As it stands today, you can choose to buy an actual physical copy of a book, one that you can display on a real bookshelf and allow your friends to borrow, for much less in India than its virtual counterpart. The very idea is absurd.

If traditional publishers can pass on the savings made possible by local publication of books on to the customer, there is no reason why publishers of digital books can’t lower their arbitrarily set prices to account for the lower average incomes of customers in developing countries. There aren’t even any costs associated with mass publication and distribution of these books (bandwidth costs do exist but they are negligible compared to actually printing and shipping physical copies of books all around the globe).

By going digital, an Indian is not only paying a much higher upfront cost, they’re also shelling out significantly more money per book. No matter how convenient the searching, space-saving and automatic bookmarking features of electronic readers may be, they are not enough to justify paying ten times more (than the traditional option) for virtual copies of any book.

Here’s a man standing on the third man boundary in the last over of a World Cup match. The bowler just has to bowl sensibly to win this game. What the man at the boundary sees is four rank balls bowled without any sense of focus or planning. India loses yet again in circumstances where he has done just about everything right.

He does not cry. He does not show any emotion. He keeps his head down and leaves the field. He has been standing witness to these failures for 22 years now. The whole world has seen these failures. It is impossible for us to even imagine what goes on in the mind of this man.

That’s why I would never want to be Sachin.

He has single-handedly lifted the moods of this entire nation an umpteen number of times. He has been an inspiration for us to rise above our mediocrity. Nobody who has ever lifted the willow even comes close to this man’s genius. His dedication and mental strength is unparalleled.

Think about the man himself. He is 37 years of age. He has been playing almost non stop for 22 years. The way he was running and diving around the field that night would have put 22-year-olds to shame. The way he played some of the best opening quickies in the world was breathtaking. He just keeps getting better, which is, by the way, humanly impossible. It’s not for nothing that people call him god.

But I still don’t want to be in those shoes. We struggle to keep our relatively simple lives straight, lives which affect a limited number of people. Imagine the magnitude of the inner struggle for him, pain both mental and physical, tears that have frozen with time, knees and ankles and every other joint in the body that is either bandaged or needs to be attended to every night, eyes that don’t sleep before a big game, bats that have scored 99 international tons and still see expectations from a billion people. 

And he just converts those expectations into reality. We watch in awe and feel privileged.

I think it’s time that his team realised that enough is enough. They have an obligation, not only towards their country but towards Sachin. They need to win this one for him. Stay assured that he himself will still deliver and leave no stone unturned to make sure India wins this Cup.

This is not just a game and he is not just a sportsman. It’s much more than this. Words fail here.

—Nipun Dixit, in a letter to the Indian Express