Excursions

Emma Watson gave an impassioned and effective speech at the U.N. headquarters in New York. The address was as part of the launch of “HeForShe” campaign.

Overall speech from the U.N. Women Goodwill Ambassador is a must watch — not only for the fact that it was highly applauded & admired, but for a fresh view towards Feminism.

I was especially gratified to hear her speak on why gender equality is an issue, and a cause of concern, for men too.

Gender equality is your issue too. Because to-date, I have seen my father’s role as a parent being valued less by the society — despite my needing his presence as a child as much as my mother’s. I’ve seen men suffering from mental illness unable to ask for help for fear it will make them less of man.(…) I have seen men made fragile and insecure by distorted sense of what constitutes male success.

Men don’t have the benefits of equality either. We don’t talk often about men being imprisoned by gender stereotypes. But they are. And when they are free, things will change for women as a natural consequence.

If men don’t have to be aggressive in order to be accepted, women won’t feel compelled to be submissive. If men don’t have to control, women won’t have to be controlled. Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men and women should feel free to be strong.

It is time we all perceive gender on a spectrum instead of two sets of opposing ideals. If we stop defining each other by what we are not and start defining ourselves by who we are, we can all be freer.

Complex topics are rarely worded more succinctly. Respect for Emma Watson and empathy for the gender equality fight has risen manifolds in my mind.

Do watch the complete video and contemplate.

Typical Trilogy. Starts well. Goes haywire. Falls flat.

Such a letdown by the finale. Last third of the book completely ruined the build-up — which itself wasn’t too great. But this could have been so much better if the author did not fall for the pressure to jack up the number of pages — the effort, to stretch the story unnecessarily, clearly shows.

It’s all about the impending war. Amish can write battles well. But he struggled to put the battles together into an interesting story. Towards the end it was just a drag. There was no thrill, there was no surprise, there was no story remaining. It was just an attempt to conclude the trilogy, a miserable attempt at best.

There are too many characters, each seeking a closure of his own - leading to too many unnecessary side stories. Further surprising is no character behaves the way you expect them to behave. Parvateshwar doesn’t. _Ganesh_doesn’t. Even Shiva doesn’t - the biggest issue.

Sigh. It is not easy to close mystery trilogies. And the frustration at not being clear on how to do so, for Shiva, shows from the plot that unravels — left me fuming.

Spoilers Ahead

A side note on the overall series, I am completely baffled by how the tile & summary of the novels set complete different expectations than what the actual plot delivers. It applies for all 3 — realised first with “The Secret of Nagas”.

There was no secret of or from Nagas that was significant to earn a title. This one goes further ahead. At least in the second one, Nagas had significant role. Here, Vayuputras just have no f-ing role at all. It could very well have been some smart brahmin who owned the “nuclear” weapon and it would not have mattered a whit. And Oath? Which f-ing oath are you talking about? Plot goes on irrespective of it exists or not. In fact, one Shiva gives Mithra, he so uncharacteristically breaks.

Sigh! Every word in summary is to hype up the mystery. Titles are completely baseless. Not the right precedent this.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A great fun read with extremely witty subplots is how I remember this book. But then I think about it a bit and it is not how I felt throughout.

It is extremely slow, occasionally (just) funny in the initial half. It does have that moment of laugh-out-loud humour in between — but slow nonetheless. So much so that I had lost the interest in between. It was as if jokes were written around characters (mostly caricatures) and thrown in. And the pages filled in describing the fantasy land and the surroundings were too much at times. But that is before the plot picks up and fun kicks in again.

The novel is sheer pleasure after that. I couldn’t put it down and wanted to know what happens next. Frankly, more than what happens, I was interested in how Terry Pratchett words it. I have realised that Pratchett is a master of witty fantasies. It was not that rare when I used to pause and admire how unnaturally a feeling (like fear, anger , etc.) can be described without sounding stupid. If there ever was a university of metaphors, Pratchett would surely be the founder of that. And he would still be teaching a course on thinking big — weird, but big.

So here I am confounded for the first time after reading a book. Do I like the book, the story or do I like the way it is often spun? And it turns out I find the book to be just OK. But then I would pick it up any day, go back to my highlighted passages and admire the mastery at work.

And just for this master Pratchett, I will pick up another of the Discworld novels soon and start taking notes.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Every time I read an article online that grabs by attention and interest, I am faced with a dilemma. I feel am gaining something without compensating for what is due to the writer or/and the owner of the website.

I run Ads-block extension. Well, the web publishers are themselves to blame. Look at the following tweet from me and I hope you feel the pain (i.e. if you do not, already).

So I am one less revenue node for the ads-driven sites out there.

I will not be able to pay the subscription price for every individual site I want to visit. That’s like watching, and paying for, television channels á la carte. What worsens the web scenario even further is there are zillions of channels out there instead of few hundreds. And everyone might create just that one interesting episode instead of a long drawn series.

So here's the situation as it stands then.

I do not want to see the ads. Majority, including me, cannot pay for subscriptions.

Ads are hated — considered, and rightly so, blots on the web. Subscriptions are costly, unaffordable.

What choice are the web publishers left with then?

Some time back, I read this interesting post at xkcd, a usual for these guys.

It made me realise, for the zillionth time, passwords are mess. This medium of authenticating a valid, and a human, user has overstayed its welcome. The way it is being used is not secure. Well, can you blame the poor souls who are made to remember the crazy letters every time they want to get something done online? Moreover, they are forced, as a security policy, to change and then remember the new passwords every some time. Sigh! Indeed, passwords are mess.

You need more proof? Try searching for the phrase “passwords should die”. This farce has to be one of the most cursed phenomenon out there.

But then what are the options?

1. Make browsers/OS’es handle the password generation and management: This is one of the oldest and most recommended solution for this issue. The problem is such machine generated passwords are usually random Strings; hence they are extremely hard to memorise. Good password managers can negate that need. However, they become a hinderance in an environment where there are multiple machines involved (for example, work vs home environment). Moreover, the security aspect of these are hotly debated topics.
2. Recommend ways for easy to remember, difficult to break passwords: An option that is evaluated a lot these days. The xkcd post linked above recommended one such way. It also opened a lot of threads discussing and analysing the accuracy and feasibility of the same. There were articles and papers written on understanding and improving on the suggested way. The problem is, eventually, it is a human, the lazy ass, who will decide what the password would be. What would end up happening is instead of ”password1” being a common password, it would be ”mypasswodiscommon”.
3. Go Biometric: Apple introduced a working and, debatably, secure implementation of biometric authentication in TouchId. By bundling it as a core feature of iPhone, Apple made it reach to the masses. Tons of articles were written detailing how it can solve the password problem altogether. Though possible, issue remains this would not happen until biometric authentication comes bundled across all technology devices, even the low-end mobile phones. Passwords remain the standard, and only acceptable authentication method till then.
4. Make passwords die, altogether: Finally, we come to the most interesting option that can be driven by the application developers themselves and not the users of the application. I feel, this will eventually become a reality.

Password-less Authentication

A lot has been said on this front too. There are articles and even open source frameworks, like Passwordless that want to target this by providing application developers ways to replace their login forms with password-less access. At high-level, key steps involved to achieve this are

• Make a user just mention his userid/email address
• Generate a one-time token for him
• Deliver it to him
• Authenticate him with the generated token

These are pretty standard and well accepted steps. However the issue remains in the 3rd step, how should these tokens be delivered. Whichever mechanism one selects will become the single point of threat to the whole system going haywire, be it then email (what’s the password for email account then?) or SMS (phone is lost, what now?). The hacker news thread on one such suggested system is nice rundown for the probable issues.

Now that thread is more than a couple of years old. Today, the best option would be to deliver the token to the device which has biometric authentication enabled. As an example, I really like the way Apple has enabled the two-factor authentication on Apple Id. It displays possible devices where the token can be delivered and asks the user to select one. Once delivered to, say, an iPhone, only the user who owns the iPhone can access it by authenticating himself with TouchId. This same mechanism can be applied for delivering the secure tokens of web/mobile applications too. There, the delivery problem is solved.

However, given that majority of the users do not own an iPhone or a similar biometric authentication enabled device, this method cannot become the primary way of authenticating users.

So even though I believe that, in John Siracusa’ words, on an infinite timescale, all applications will have password-less logins, we are some years away from realising that dream.

Ok, so what till then? This is what I would like the applications developers to do to make this password mess a bit less itchy for me. Decide first, do you really need me to secure my profile via a password? User forums/discussion groups, I am looking at you. I will give leeway to banks/financial apps to make me remember and enter the password. For all others, please make this process simple.

1. When a user visits the first time, ask for his email id/mobile number. Next, make him choose a word, an image or, preferably, a set of words/images to remember as “password”.
2. For every subsequent visit, just ask him for the email id or mobile number. Even better, just do not ask him anything. Maintain his profile information in cookie with expiration set for a longer timeframe.
3. Give him the options amongst which lies his password and make him “select”, not enter, that as the password. He gets a couple of chances, else make him fall back to one-time token.
4. If he does not remember the chosen password, or chooses not to, a click on a link sends him a token on email/mobile which he used while registering.

I believe this will ease the burden from majority of the people of maintaining the passwords without making them any less secure. Passwords can’t die yet, but at least they would be a little less painful.

This novel has left me with a lot of thoughts. First off, I am totally confused on what I really feel about this. It is one of the most difficult books I found to review. So I just won’t. I do not think I would be able to word my thoughts well. Well, they are confused.

So I would instead refer to one review that I completely concur with. Thomas has done a great job reviewing this at Goodreads. Here’s how he describes the style of prose in the novel, the “survival” journey of Mark Watney.

Watney discovers a problem. Watney worries for a sentence or two. Watney comes up with a solution. Watney enacts the solution with minimal struggle. Watney celebrates. Rinse and repeat.

There, Thomas has described what goes on in 75% of the pages. Sigh! This guy Watney is an unbelievable genius. No trouble or challenge is big for him. He glides over every challenge as one would with a game of toys. Actually that’s exactly how Andy Weir, the author, writes this; as if he is Andy from Toy Story spinning an action-drama around Woody during his play time. Throw anything at him, he would have the smarts, the resources and the luck with him to soar out of it. And you know right that at the beginning of every log Watney writes.

There lies the novel’s biggest drawback. It just has one tone, the tone of success. And you can’t build a thriller if the reader is just not thrilled for the protagonist.

To sum up, this is what Thomas has to say.

My overall thoughts on The Martian center on its lack of introspection and repetitive descriptions of action, its disconcerting lack of characterization, and the drought of struggle each of the characters underwent. Watney faces a difficult situation, but I at no point in my entire reading thought he would suffer, based on his Pollyanna tone.

Completely agree. I do not think Andy Weir wanted to write a thriller about a Martian. He wanted to jot down his thoughts on what will it take scientifically for a guy to survive on Mars. And the novel is a breezy light log of these thoughts. You can skim through it without getting involved, like any science paper/theory you read.

All said, this is a nice fleet of thoughts, dreams of Andy Weir. The efforts that Andy Weir has put in that “included extensive research into orbital mechanics, conditions on Mars, the history of manned spaceflight, and botany” for the novel shows. A one time read for sure just for that. Just don’t look for a thriller in this and you should be fine.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read a paperback recently; an incident that made me realise how wrong I had been to believe one will always feel nostalgic towards books with real paper. There indeed was a time when I used to look down on eBooks as format. I knew I wasn’t alone, the debate was on. I used to think reading them is futile, a fleeting pleasure. A pathway for a lazy few; the ones who do not appreciate the feel of a paperback in their hands.

That was before Kindle happened.

EBooks all the way

It was gradually that I started rejoicing eBooks. It was via the Kindle app first, mostly on my iPad. The built in dictionary was one of the most useful feature that pulled me in. It helps a lot when a person, not well-versed in English, can simply select a word to fathom its meaning. No need stretching out to fetch a dictionary and scan for the word. Either that or to make some broken sense out of the sentence without knowing the word. Not an experience one can call satisfactory.

There was another feature that I benefitted from the most, sync to the furthest read position. Be it an iPad, iPhone or the Kindle web reader extension, be it home, office or a lengthy queue of a supermarket, my book was always available, synced to where I had left it earlier. There is some relief in not maintaining a physical book and the nosy bookmarks. They are played with, they are misplaced, they are lost. They even are hinderance sometimes, often when you are in-fact reading. (Isn’t that generally a time one holds a book anyway?)

eBooks came handy. But there was still an issue I faced. iPads were heavy, iPhones tiny. Paperbacks (mostly) are best by size and weight. You hold them, read even at a stretch and don’t feel you have lost a limb. With iPads? Well, they really are not made for reading in long stretches. Not at least the iPad 2, which I own. Most of the time is spent in finding the perfect surface for resting the iPad on. Not really a painless experience. Inadvertently, I ended up reading on iPhone more.

Welcome Kindle

Kindles, the hardware, had just recently launched in India. I knew there were benefits to them. For one, they were made with reading as sole purpose. So they were designed to be best fit by size and weight. I had heard so many stories of how it changed people’s reading habits, made them read more. I knew I wanted one. A bit of research, a bit of playing around with them. I decided I wanted one. For reasons of mine (which I would go into someday), I settled on the Kindle, 6″ E Ink Display (Prev. Generation) with page turning keys, the non-touch screen one.

And the reading experience has never been the same again. I am reading more, I am reading longer. Surprisingly, it has made my wife too into an avid reader. A person who rarely considered reading as her hobby, she spends good amount of time finding and reading books. Paperbacks, ones with real pages, could never do that. eBooks did, especially Kindle.

So coming back to a paperback, it did turn out to be a painful experience. Holding the book was troublesome. Bookmarking was troublesome. Turning pages was troublesome. Wanting to read the book at office was worthless. At one point, I wanted to stop reading it in between, buy an ebook version and continue. The nostalgia, induced by the scent of real pages, can only take you so far. eBooks, for me, have ruined the pleasure of the physical books. Kindle has owned me now; and I can never go back.

Dark, Psycho Thriller with neither Mystery nor Thrill.

I started reading this book wanting, assuming, it to be a suspenseful thriller. I was unaware it is more of a sociopathic, twisted whine-fest. Some can call it a character study, narrative of flawed minds. For me, though, it is all whining. Sick. Sorry!

First. You get thrilled only when you long for some character, root for the happenings surrounding their lives. Gone Girl presented none too me. None of the protagonists, neither Nick nor Amy, interested me. They are too twisted for me to care for them. There was a time I wanted them to just get rid of one another.

Second. Plot progresses at unbearable pace. Not slow. “Unbearable”. It is either stagnant when author is flaunting her literary chops, narrating “character study”. Or it progresses to next sub-plot or twist way too conveniently. Nothing is believable here. I could not connect to, sympathise with or even imagine any of the events. Slow, lazy unwinding, I don’t mind. This broken, staggered recital I have problem with.

And then there is the crazy middle and end. [spoiler] When you make me read ~250 pages of whining, only half way into the book, you better not tell me it was all setup. Nothing you read is true.[/spoiler] The end is dragged so much that I was just turning pages to make sure it ends. I just didn’t care how. There is no buildup, there is no climax. It just ends abruptly. Not left open, but left carelessly unresolved.

Sigh. Anyway one can say I should not have read this after all, it is not for me. This dissection of human psyche, especially the twisted one, is not to my taste. All I recall is I have never kept looking at the percentage-read mark so profusely ever. And that’s where Gone Girl failed me.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

So, I finally watched Interstellar yesterday; after days of, literally, closing ears and eyes on every mention and reference of this word. It is difficult, not to know anything you usually want to know first-hand about. No one else to blame though; I should not leave the decision of ruining a movie or a book to others. That call should stay only with me after experiencing it. This post is about my experience of watching the movie I waited so long for.

Experience, yes. About the movie, no. There are too many intelligent posts already written about it. Reviewing it, explaining it. The plot, the science, everything. This is not a post where I intend to do any of that. This is post where I intend to jot down my thoughts of going through an extravagant experience like Interstellar in India. I want to do this especially given I was watching a movie after a break of more than a year & half. I wanted to see how technical advances have improved, if so, the overall movie going experience.

So here it goes.

1. Experience of booking a movie has improved since I last did it. Apps have improved a lot. I was pleasantly surprised when the app supported adding the movie ticket to Passbook as an event entry pass. Nice effect and effort of customizing the app to the platform it runs on. Surprisingly, and sadly, not many try to do that.

2. But using the said pass at the movie theatres is still not possible. I searched for the machine or the person to whom I could flash the pass and enter without a physical ticket. Not possible yet, at least not at all the movie theatres. You still have to collect a physical ticket, show it to a person who tears a part of it & hands over what remains as a proof of your approved presence. They do have a machine to collect the tickets though. However anyone, with the booking id, can print the ticket without any validation. He, then, can flash it further as a valid entry pass. Plus it’s heading read ”Booked by Internet”. Sigh.

3. Multiplexes continue to ruin the theatre experience in India. The aim to maximize the earnings out of the small retail spaces is punishing the viewers. Each “Screen” has a maximum of 8-10 rows, with each sitting 15-20 folks. That limited is a Screen. In such small spaces, we have 3 tiers of convenience, Silver, Gold and Platinum. Like a regular middle class person, I selected the middle-tier. Surprisingly, the distribution is as any corporate evaluates its employees’ performance. 10% are awesome. 10% suck. All others are regular blokes who are just okiesh. Same was the case here; 1 row of platinum folks and 1 row of silver. In between the 8 rows of fools. Platinum folks sat with their necks held high, not because they paid more. But because they could hardly see what rolled on the screen without doing so. Then I do clearly recall a “silver” person turning around and laughing at the “golden” dummy sitting behind; pointing at his silliness to have paid more. Sigh.

4. Because “Screen”, the hall, is so small, the actual screen itself is made small. And so very close to the eyes. To be frank, except for the darkness and the silver bloke pointing & laughing at the dummy goldie, this was not that much a different experience than sitting a foot from my LED television at home. Interstellar deserved better. Multiplex are to know that. Sigh.

5. Every movie is to have an intermission. After all , we believe in giving businesses to many. If there’s no intermission, how are the samosa, pop-corn walas to get their earnings? So a movie is abruptly stopped. Usually I feel every Hollywood movie-maker is aware of this fact; so I could find a logical break being put in every movie. But I think the person who is handed this responsibility uses it to break when he has to pee the most. Be it, then, at the most inopportune place, in middle of some secret revealing dialog. Who cares; he has pee to handle.

6. People still chatter during the movie. That is after they have settled into their chairs after arriving late. Especially when in a group during a Hollywood flick. More so if the said group is all guys surrounded by another group of girls. Some smarty has to show off his knowledge or crack a foolish, unrelated joke. Happens.Every.Single.Time. I literally watched half the movie with my left ear closed to avoid one such Einstein explaining every single scene that unfolded on the screen.

7. And then the ‘usualities’. National anthem is still played, with half standing in respect and others poking there noses around. Head-shadows of late comers are still seen. Mobiles are still not on silent mode. Samosas and pop-corns are still money-wise costly and taste-wise cheap. Torch-bearers still enlighten the lost and side-tracked, searching for the seats. Sigh!

Anyway, Interstellar was a great movie; it deserves a better treatment than is accorded. Wish I had chosen a single screen theatre, booked a balcony ticket after standing hours in queue and experienced this marvel on a huge screen listening only to the whistle, and not chatter. Or else simply stayed home, catching it on my LED television. A foot away. Sigh!

Agatha Christie, a name I saw at every bookstore and avoided every single time. The books ‘looked’ short, felt they had to be short stories for pre-teens. How wrong was I, to neglect the suggestion not to judge books by cover, by how they ‘looked’.

And Then There Were None has to one of the finest, sharpest and crispiest whodunit mysteries I have ever read. Everything is perfect, to-the-point; all about the main story and the characters involved. Chapters after chapters, new plot twists are revealed. The story never stagnates. No character eats up the pages. No sub-plots are introduced just to thicken the book binds.

But most importantly, there is no single person that knows-all-but-shows-none. Incidents occur and they are presented with all the details visible to the characters involved. Nothing is hidden, made visible only to the selected one, the detective. Because there is none.

The experience reading this gem is amazing. I pride myself to foresee the final mystery way bit early than it actually is uncovered; or even hinted at. This one bowled me over. Almost all the 10 characters were on my criminal radar at some point. None stayed there for significant time though. Even post the final chapter, I stayed stumped, wondering what has been uncovered. Because, frankly, nothing is. This, indeed, is a novel of a kind.

If you love mysteries and haven’t yet hopped this ride, you must. Agatha Christie says this was the most difficult novel for her to write, she took utmost effort to make sure she pens a perfect, unsolvable murder mystery. All I can say is she did succeed.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars