Believe "IT" or not: The Mystery of Evil Clown

The clowns are suppose to make kids giggle with their cool tricks; they are suppose to be funny and friendly to children. However, in Stephen King's IT the clown is depicted as evil and demonic creature .Since, it was Halloween, my girlfriend and I decided to watch some horror flicks. We have been hearing about IT a lot, plus I was not sure, how people can be scared of clowns.?So we ordered screen adaptation of IT, i.e a mini series which was aired in 1990, to see it for ourselves.

Plot:

It all starts with kids getting killed mysteriously in Derry, ME. Nobody knows who is killing the children of the town, except one guy who knows "IT" is back. He and his friends have defeated that demonic evil clown 30 years ago however, now it is again haunting the little town of Derry. This whole story is about seven friends, who are living their lives separately but get back together after 30 years to finish "IT."
Overall, the whole series is interesting and very well done for a show aired in 90s. Tim Curry was brilliant being IT a.k.a. Pennywise. The child actors were great too and one interesting fact: Seth Green still looks the same. The grownup actors were alright; not that great. However IT was good enough to keep us hooked for three and half hours.

We liked the series but not very pleased with the ending. The director, Tommy Lee Wallace, was very good in keeping the suspense till the very end. But the climax didn't work out great. It felt like the whole thing was buildup for nothing. The first half is obviously better then the second half, no doubt. However,there is always room for improvement. I will also say that seeing IT in these day n age does make the effects look poorly done, but you know it was very well suited for 90s and IT is considered as one of the horror classics. Therefore, I will say "IT" is good.

The Film Club: Review

The word film always excites me . Since I was five, I've always enjoyed watching movies. Even though, growing up we were not allowed to watch a lot of movies. My love for cinema increased with age. English not being my first language kept me away from watching English films till the age of seventeen; since then I have watched a lot of English movies, including classics. So, a book about film naturally grabs my attention, but I was very reluctant to get hooked to another book when I have a lot to accomplish. My girlfriend also wanted to read the same book , so we got a copy of 'the Film Club' from the local library. She read it first and after completing it she told me that this is one book which I would really appreciate. I was very apprehensive about reading it, but I started reading anyways. A couple pages later I said," I am hooked on this book."

To say it in one sentence: this is a story about a father and son who watched a lot of films together. It sounds boring, doesn't it? I felt the same way, I said to my self ," why do I need to know what movies they watched together? However, after reading a few pages, I realized it is a story about a father and son. Both of them are in different stages of life. Son is sixteen years old and he is dealing with all the teenage issues like hating to go to school and girls. The father is dealing with his own life along with being a dad to a sixteen year old. This story also depicts how they see the world and how their relationship evolves.

David Gilmour, is the author of the book "The Film Club". It is based on true story ; his life. It also covers a lot of classics and little juicy bits about the movies which avid movie fans will like to know. The writing style is very creative ; the author made sure that he is doing justice to the story along with movies. Plus it is not very hard to read, very entertaining and keeps you hooked.

Cheers
Mragendra

Village WITCHES : Consequence of superstitoon and illiteracy

It is Halloween time, so discussion about witches and witchcraft will sounds commonplace.However, recently five women were tortured for allegedly being witches in India. The details can be seen on http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8315980.stm

It is so horrendous that people in third world countries still believe in ghosts, witches and all sort of superstitions. I blame the the illiteracy as the contributing factor towards this kind of behavior. This is neither the first case that ever happened nor that last case that we will see. This incidences are very common in the rural India.

India is one of the fastest developing countries. When people talk about IT , economics , and for that matter, any thing ; India will always be mentioned. India is competing with developed countries in all the aspects, head to head;shoulder to shoulder. People love Indian cuisine, Bollywood is one of the biggest movie industry of the world; they make more movies per year than Hollywood. However, apart from this developed side there is one aspect of India which negates the entire achievement of it as a country. The underdevelopment of Indian villages.

Majorly people in rural India depend upon agriculture as occupation. However, farming in India is not the most coveted profession and farmers are not the rich people. Most farmers in India live below poverty line. They have not enough money to feed their families. The whole family work hard to get the bare minimum to survive. Generally these villages are deprived with the basic necessities like electricity and water supply. In some villages ladies have to walk ten miles to get a gallon of water, everyday.

Generally education is not very popular concept among the villagers. Government of India, spends million of dollars to create awareness in rural areas about literacy; but it is not impacting the masses.Corruption also have a part in it ,but that is another can of worms.However, the school enrollment among the kids in villages is increasing day by day. Though, it doesn't change the fact that there are still uneducated superstitious people living in the villages; who believe in ghost, and witches.

The lack of education also stops people to think rationally. Although,Social evils like discrimination on the basis of Caste, Child Marriage, and Dowry are illegal ;they are still being practiced in the villages. Yes, in this day and age. If you are unfamiliar with these words I will suggest to google them. I mean discrimination on the basis of caste not only exist in smaller villages but also in big cities. Several, ladies are still being burnt alive because of dowry all over the country. Every once in a while there is news of child marriage in the news paper.

So, when I saw this news I was not shocked actually; however, felt sad about the situation. I think I was fortunate not to be born in any of those conditions and be able to get education so that I will be able to distinguish between right and wrong. These, villages needs awareness so that people living in villages encourage their kids to go to school and help in eradicating the whole concept of superstition.

Cheers

P.S. If you loved this or you hated it to the core or you are in middle somewhere please leave a comment and let me know how you feel about it.

Mad-Men: The Review

This AMC drama's takes place in 1960s. The show mainly depicts the life of people working Madison Ave New York in that era. Advertising, was emerging as a full blown industry in the same time as well. This drama revolves around the creative head, Don Draper, of the Advertising firm " Sterling and Cooper". There are other important characters as well in the show, to name a few Peggy Olson, Betty Draper, Roger Sterling,and Pete Campbell etc.

It is fascinating that how brilliantly the creators has delineated the mindset of people living in those times. It shows, how there was no such thing as sexual harassment exist back in those days. Women, in offices are not treated equally. Racism, adultery , and drunk driving was very prevalent. It also shows how people use to carry themselves in the social circles.

So, as far as screen play is concerned, it is written brilliantly. They did their homework very well. It doesn't look like a made up story. It also shows how the whole advertising industry became so big from being a very unthinkable occupation. They made sure it looks authentic.Few things I will like to mention are; The cigarette smoking,the alcohol consumption, the clothing style, and the setup it make it look more believable.

Over all the show is a good combination of creativity and originality. It keeps one hooked; very addicting.

Commercials Between the shows; don't you love it

You are watching your favorite Crime Drama, or your favorite game show or your favorite reality show; you are getting into the show and then animated detergent particles appears on the TV screen dancing and singing about their cleaning strength followed by a car commercial. You get the point; it spoils the mood. One thing I promise about this blog , there will be no commercials :).

TV is filled with either TV shows or Commercials. Who gets excited about commercials? No one; I mean, they are really annoying. They have no skin, they just drop by whenever they feel like. OK, I have to say commercials are not always bad. There are some great commercials which are very entertaining. However, the sad part is that they are not that many.

My problem is with all the commercials which are boring and they last forever. I hate the especially infomercials (Information Commercials). They are one of the most cheesy things I have ever seen. So, these infomercials always has some sort of great inventions which will transform your life forever. Once you get that product you will get all the virtues in the world. You are now confident all the girls wants to hangout with you and suddenly you became rich. Infomercials always have 'before' and 'after' concept;Before this person was such a loser and after using the product he is Super hero. For my astonishment these infomercials actually works on the people. Apparently, people buy a lot of things from these infomercials. Since we are talking of infomercials it will be shame if we don't discuss"Snuggie". This product is the most ridiculed product; however, Snuggie made $80 million since it came out, even in this economy. Recently , they came out with new designs for Snuggies i.e. Zebra and Leopard print.

Now lets talk about some of the good and creative commercials. The commercials which actually make you laugh and helps you in remembering the products they are endorsing. For instance Geico commercials are one of the most liked commercial;especially the Cave-men commercials. Their tag line:"15 minutes can save you 15 % on insurance" actually helps in remembering about their services . So, when you think of insurance the first thing comes to mind is Geico. Contraceptive, commercials are also very creative ones too; unfortunately majority of those commercials gets banned before they even get aired. If you want to check out those commercial go on www.youtube.com and look for banned commercials; there are loads and loads of banned commercials and these are the commercials which are funny and entertaining.

Now, lets talk about the commercials which are boring and they infuriates us when it comes on tele. Erectile dysfunction commercials are the worst. They show a couple doing outdoor activities and the narrator is talking in double entendre. I will consider those ED commercials are poorly made also how can you solve bedroom problems in outdoors. It giving out the wrong message. Now second worst commercials are car commercials. They start out interesting only to kill your suspense by showing a car in the end. When I see some interesting commercial, I hope it doesn't end up as car commercials. Let talk about the commercials which talk about "those days" or "monthly gift". I mean, do you really need to show on TV at prime-time how much liquid a sanitary pad can soak in a day. I mean there are many other ways to skin the cat advertising agencies should find a good way to represent it.

In this day and age how many people do you think actually watch the commercials during the shows?The answer is not a lot of people. Generally the TV commercials focus on a market segment and the people in that market segment already have TiVos or DVRs where they can record the shows and watch whenever they want "Commercial Less". So, they don't have to go through the pain of seeing people wearing Snuggie and talking on the phone or any of the ED commercials. I think it will be good if the agencies will start coming up with the cool commercials so that when viewers are interrupted by commercials during their favorite show they don't get miserable.

Cheers
P.S. If you loved this or you hated it to the core or you are in middle somewhere please leave a comment and let me know how you feel about it.

How to get rid of Writer's block: Well tested Formula

The in-ability to think about something to write is called "writer's block". Writer's block not only incapacitates the writer; but also makes him/her feel horrible about one-self. Writer's block can hit you that time when you need your creativity most. Furthermore, it doesn't discriminate between writers or non-writers; it can hit anyone at anytime.

The symptoms of Writer's block are:
1) Blank face
2) Isolation
3) Distracted state of mind; in extreme cases people have been reported to start talking to themselves.
4) Very fidgety
5) Unable to hold conversation; in extreme cases people have been reported to start rambling random words which does not make sense at all.

If you experience any of the above mentioned behavior that means you might be infected with writer's block. Now, if you find out that you might have been attacked by writer's block, remember DO NOT PANIC, because the more you panic the more you will make it worse.

Dos and don't if you get exposure from Writer's block. I will start with "don't", first.

DON'T:
1) Do not panic, if you did not notice it above, in caps.
2) If you choose to ignore my advice then, DO NOT ORDER, "PIZZA". You think it will make you feel good, after have couple slices. However once you finish eating, you will realize the amount of calories you have consumed which will make you more depressed. Same applies with ice-cream as well.
3) Do not go on internet because you might read some tweets, Facebook message or YouTube video which might trigger inferiority complex in you; that might result in harnessing negative energy in you. Trust me you don’t want to do it.
4) Do not try to take nap because you will have nightmares.

Now I will be covering Dos
DOs:
1) Phone a friend; if you have left any.
2) Take shower, which you were avoiding for weeks
3) Pay your bills; because loosing money will automatically kick the writer's block of you head.

Now, I am going to cover few techniques which will help you in getting rid of writer's block.

1) Start writing random words on the piece of paper. I will explain this concept in detail about how it helps in elimination of writers block. Imagine writer's block as a water dam; which is stopping water to flow through. In our case the Writer's block is analogous to water dam and the water is ideas. So in order to break that dam we have to dig holes in the dam. These holes will let the water seep through the dam, and if we keep making the holes the whole dam will be collapsed and the water will start to flow. So, we are trying to accomplish something like that here. If this doesn't help, try the next method.

2) Take a pen and paper and act that you are about to start writing. Now I explain how this will help in knocking writer's block out of you system. When you start acting as you are about to write it will create a self doubt in writer's block which will weaken it and once its gets weak then you can knock it down. If this doesn't work, try the next method.

3) Start talking to your writer's block. Have a question answer session. I can sense that you are not convinced with this step. Writer's block might have some issue and nobody have ever given attention to it. It might need a shoulder to cry on. Give it the shoulder and then see how fast it will be gone. If this also doesn't work try this.

4) Write a blog about it. This will definitely work :)


Cheers
P.S. If you loved this or you hated it to the core or you are in middle somewhere please leave a comment and let me know how you feel about it.

Google Wave: A sneak peek

Recently everywhere, and by everywhere I mean on internet, people are talking about Google Wave. Its just a surge of people tweeting about "Google Wave"; facebook and myspace users are asking each other if they have a Google Wave invite. So, it made me curious to find out what all fuss is about Google Wave.

Google is generally a recognized term . It is also officially added in dictionaries like Oxford and Webster as the synonym for search. Google was started with a very basic idea: an algorithm which can search the internet for query words. It started as a small company in 1998 in Menlo Park, California, and now it is one of the fortune 500 companies.

So, now the question is: how does a company with only one application ,"search engine" get so big? The answer to this question is entrepreneurial brilliance and I will explain this in detail. When Google started back in '98 there were other companies, i.e. Yahoo and Hotmail around. These companies were huge. They had so many services such as: email, photos, news etc. plus most people were using Yahoo and Hotmail to do all sorts of searches. Moreover, it is one portal where one can go and get access to so many applications at once. However, there was one issue- these portals have so many applications on the main page which made it very bulky . This added with the very slow internet speed back in the 98s resulted in yahoo and MSN home pages to take forever to load. On the other hand, Google just had a text field along with the search button which which took one-fourth of the time to load the page. So when people have the option of going to something which will take less time to load and give result with the accuracy of 90%, they started using it. Since then Google has made a fortune. They introduced the concept of Pay Per Click and Pay Per Impressions. There are so many Google applications around, Gmail, Google Maps, Google finance, Google Documents and Google photos are to name a few. Google has launched new application,"Google Wave" on May 27 2009.

Recently, Google has released the beta version* of Google Wave. Only 100,000 people were sent invitation to test the Google wave. Google Wave is personal communicator and online collaboration tool as termed by Google. Google Wave is a web-based service, it is a platform which allows users to communicate with each other in multiple ways such as: instant messenger chatting, video chatting , short message texting, emails and social-networking. Moreover , for the online collaboration tool part , people will be able to share documents, pictures and videos along with their desktops in real-time scenario. These days all these above mentioned features are available, but in differerent platforms. So, Google wave will be the place to where you can do all the possible things by just logging into one platform. Google has also released a 1 hour 20 minutes video just as an introduction for Google Wave, if you certainly interested just check it out.

Google Wave have potential to impact all the majors online collaboration companies such as Cisco's webex , Citrix and Teamviewer etc. By making these online collaboration utility easily accessible , common users and small businesses will be more inclined to use Google Wave. However, corporation might stick with the old vendors, but I think it is too early to make any conclusion. Since the Google Wave was out it has created a lot of news. Once the final version will launch then it will be available not only on web but also on mobile phones especially Android(G-phone) .

Now, some juicy facts:

1) Since the Google wave is out it has become such a sensation that people are still twittering all about it.
2) People are selling Google Wave invites on ebay ranging from 99 cents to 80 dollars. Allegedly people have already bid in three figures on ebay.




*Once software is ready and functional the developer has to test those in order to find the bugs and discrepancies so that it can be made bug free and completely effective. So beta testing is one type of testing when they released a beta version to selected public and ask them to use. Now when these people find any errors they report these back to the developers to fix it. Developers follow the feed back fix the errors and release the software.


cheers
P.S. If you loved this or you hated it to the core or you are in middle somewhere please leave a comment and let me know how you feel about it.

The Nomads: Aren't we all

The nomads are people who wander from place to place. It doesn't mean they are crazy. That is why they are called "no mads." Most civilizations in history were originally nomads, however they started settling after industrialization took place . They wander from place to place in the search of food, water and shelter. There are still many nomadic tribes in today's world-no joke.

However, I am not going to focus on that aspect of nomads today. I would like to discuss more about how people in established civilizations have started to live like nomads. Yes, it is kind of a new concept, or say a lifestyle, which people are choosing to live these days. I personally have no problems with this type of lifestyle and this is just a new perspective.

Since the old days one aspect of us human beings that is not stable is "the mind". It wanders and wanders to the new dimensions of knowledge and exploration. Due to this instability of the human mind the whole world ends up with the most structured civilization. Now, the funny thing with humans is every generation calls itself "the prefect generation". People have always claimed this, even since the Roman empire and one thing which always remained constant is development. This wandering mind of humans has given birth to so many discoveries and inventions. Moreover, generation after generation, humans became more intelligent. I mean look at us! How much we have developed since the age of barbarians to the age of embezzlers.


During this development each generation has discovered what they want for their world and what they want to pass on to the next generations. One aspect of life which all the generations have in common is pursuit of happiness and the definition of happiness changes from generation to generation.

What do people want in today's world? Independence and freedom.

All the people have one dream to have a good life and a safe future where they don't have to worry about old age. If these two fields are covered people feel so happy. However, this is what's making today's generation act like nomads. People wander form place to place; first, to get education so that they can build their skill sets and then they start moving from place to place to look for jobs. Yes, people in a industrialized world are not nomads because we live in concrete houses. However, if we examine closely we are no different then nomads . We both(i.e our self and nomads ) are on infinite journey to find the things which matter to us most.


Cheers
MS
P.S. If you love it or hated it or you think you are in between these two extremes please live a comment and let me know how you feel about this.