Stereotyping Current Telugu Movies

I used to watch a lot of movies during my days in graduate school. I still do but a lot less than I used to. But I do keep in touch with the current movies and their trends. Recently I was driving and listening to NPR where the host and guest were discussing a hypothetical thought-if aliens would somehow get to see today's movies, TV drama or any literature, what kind of opinion would they form of us. They would think there was a lot of drama with violence and people hardly worked as most of our current literature rarely touches on the day to day aspects of our lives. This post is my crude attempt at extending this idea to Telugu Movies alone.

Imagine in few decades or centuries, humans do not exist and aliens landed in the part of India where people speak Telugu. In such a time suppose that aliens reach there and find videos of our current successful Telugu movies. If they were preserved without a blemish and these movies are their only means of knowing our world. What sort of opinion would they form? Here are my ten thoughts on what they could potentially theorize.

1. Men are from Orphanville: Most of the males of our times are orphans. They are either bastards whose mother dies giving birth to him or lose his parents when the guy was a kid in some violent or tragic accident.
2. Women are from Desperateville :The female protagonist is always trying desperately and unsuccessfully to make our male lead fall in love with her. Add to this drama, there is always competition - another lady tramp who is falling for the love of her life. She eventually succeeds.
3. Macho Men: Our male lead is macho in every aspect; no matter his upbringing and family history. He can make men and vehicles fly by touch of his fist. He is like a bee that will sting when disturbed and can make people(mostly men in white lungis) fly at regular intervals. Some guys machismo can make trains move.
4. Teleportation: The male and female lead can transport themselves to a distant colorful land(either a snow clad hilly mountains or just a small room with colorful sets) where they jump, dance and sing their guts out. The amazing thing is that there is big group of other people sharing the joy of our leads and dancing to the tunes that are well synchronized. They would be surprised as to why these guys are joining in on the fun; they have no relevance to our leads and disappear as quickly as they come.
5. Dreadful Dads of Beautiful Daughters: The father of the female lead is evil and very unpleasing to the eye. You wonder how he could have had such a beautiful daughter. If he is not a mafia don, he is factionist leader, or just plain evil dude who dotes on his daughter but doesn't like the guy his daughter is dating.
6. Bad Governance: The politicians, police and law are all evil and work hand in hand in creating trouble to our leads.
7. Dog like Friends: The male lead and female lead hang out with a bunch of loyal chums who are willing to follow and do anything for them. The male lead often abuses these chums but they still follow him with no animosity.
8. Sibling Situation: The male leads' sibling often end up in a tragic death. The female leads sibling often elope which makes parents become more protective of her. Tragedy of such measure is followed by locking her in a huge palace or bunch of goons escorting her where ever she goes.
9. Parallelism - humor and tragedy happen in life: Our society believes in parallelism. While there is tragedy and drama going in the main story, there can be humour either interwoven with the main leads or sometimes disconnected with them.
10. Disrespectful, Alcoholic and Violent Youth: Young people of the society were prone to drinking alcohol, disrespectful of elders without repentance and prone to violence.

Songs that stick

I have this habit of listening to a song over and over again until it bores me out. There are times when some songs just linger on in the inner corridors of my brain. They make me sing voluntarily, involuntarily and repetitively to the point of embarrassment. There are several songs that got stuck in my head some that I passed the fever to someone else to my own detriment.

It was probably 1996 and I was in my second year of my bachelors degree. I managed to gain access to a computer lab as part of the research project I enrolled under a professor. As I started spending more time at the lab, I got friendly with the lab maintenance guy who would lend me his collection of music CDs. The CDs were ofcourse donated by the users of the lab. The lab manager was one smart guy. He would let the new users listen to the cds that he had collected over time. After a few months he would induce the users, who are old now, to buy new CDs and donate to the lab for common use. Nothing wrong with that, but he was dealing with a new beast here. So I would borrow the CDs from him and play the music in the computer I was using. I liked the music of Kishore Kumar and one song stuck on me. The song was 'Oh Mere Dil ke Chain'(can't translate to english without making it look funny, so I will refrain) from the movie Mere Jeevan Saathi.

Mere Jeevan Saathi (1972) - O Mere Dil Ke Chain by Kishore Kumar.

I didn't know much Hindi then, nor do I do now but I think I am better. I still get mixed with the gender of objects. I think it was the easy lyrics and repetitive nature of the title verse that made it sticky. I would repeat the song over and over again. It appears that song went viral and everyone who was coming to the lab was either playing the song on CD or were humming it when coming to and going out of the lab. Virus effects the person most likely to be exposed. In the case of the 'Dil Ke Chain' virus our poor lab manager was most exposed to it. He got bit by the Dil Ke Chain bug and he would listen to the song on his way home until one day disaster struck. He met with an accident while going home from work. Apparently he was trying to repeat the song on his CD player and got distracted fell off his bike. He broke his arm and had it in a sling. After a week of absence he returned to the lab taking rides from my fellow students as he was unable to ride his two wheeler scooter anymore. He forbade me from playing songs in the lab from that time onwards.

Having been forbidden from playing songs at school, I tuned myself to listening music at home. There used to be a small music store(more of a shack) at the end of the street. They would record songs of your choice onto to 60mins tape cassette. I made myself a list of 12 songs onto an old cassette we had at home. Of all the 12 songs the most I played was this song 'Chappa Chappa' (no idea what that means) from the movie Maachis by Gulzar.

Maachis (1996) - Chappa Chappa, Sung by Hariharan and Suresh Wadkar, Composed by Vishal Bharadwaj, Lyrics by Gulzar

Again I hardly understood half of the lyrics(I dont even now) as most of the verses are in language I don't understand. I don't know if it is Punjabi or Kashmiri, because I know that only few lines of the song are in Hindi. But the catchy Chappa Chappa caught with me and I repeated that song for a long time. It was only time before I irritated someone and it was my Mom this time. One day she took the cassette out and said 'Chappa Chappa ani enni sarlu ra Chetta pata' or something like that. From there it was a slippery slope for my chappa song and it slipped out of my brain.

During the third year of my engineering, I went to Bangalore with a bunch of my friends for an exam. One of my classmates was into English movies a lot. It was the time when Pierce Brosnon was being introduced as the new James Bond and the movie was Golden Eye. On the day after the exam, I borrowed the cassette from my friend and was listening to the soundtrack from Golden Eye. I was most impressed with the title track.
James Bond - Goldeneye Opening Theme

I couldn't get the lyrics of most English songs those days. But this song was different. I could get the verses very well and repeated that song to death. Imagine me singing 'See the reflections in the water' doing the husky female voice over. Apparently I had hummed the song aloud and awoke my classmate who was also sharing the room then. He lamented to me as to why I would sing the same song and not change it. I did not get the golden eye but my classmate did get a red eye. He slept all along the return journey in the train.

Fast forward couple more years to the year 1999. It was the first semester of my graduate studies at WVU. Internet was growing fast and all sorts of services were being provided for free but the search engines were pathetic. Anyone remember askjeeves.com or altavista.com? Google did not make it big yet. So finding stuff on the internet was not as easy as it is today. During those days, I don't know why but I could not recollect a song from the movie Antham(translation - the end). I had asked that to a friend who was also a new graduate student at WVU and was my neighbor then. He could not recollect the song immediately. Few weeks later my friend came to me and told me that he had been looking for that song for several weeks on the internet and that he had found a site where I could listen to the song. That site is Raaga and I visit the site whenever I look for Indian music. The song is titled 'Nee navvu cheppindi naku'(translation - Your smile told) - a slow romantic melody.
Antham(1990) - Nee Navvu Cheppindi Naatho by S.P.Balasubramayam, Lyrics: Siri Vennela Sitarama Sastry and Composed by R.D.Burman

I thanked my friend and that song stuck on me for a long time that semester. My friend though switched to LSU a semester later. I didn't expect the distraction that I passed on to him would have such impact on my friend. Well it might not have been the reason, but it makes for a good story and I am sticking to it. At least he went to a better football team.

After many such haunting songs and a decade later we reach to the end of 2009 where I am stuck with my current sticky song. It is an old song from the movie Tezaab in which Madhuri Dixit rose to stardom with the song Ek Do Teen. The song I got stuck with is a different one. It is a slow crooner by Nitin Mukesh titled 'So gaya yeh jahan'(Transaltion - the world is asleep).
Tezaab(1988) - So gaya yeh jahan by Nitin Mukesh and Lyrics by Javed Akhtar

I dont know how and why I looked up this song but I had listened to it for a day or so. I managed to pass it on to my wife. It has been about a month since I played the song online and it still hasn't left my home. I am thinking, yes the world is asleep and so should this song, but it hasn't yet.

While Nitin Mukesh soul is doing rounds in my home, I decided to look up on what makes these songs stick. Almost everyone goes through this song stickiness. It is as if some songs get stuck in the haunted chambers of our brains. Not surprisingly research has been done on such songs. They call such song an earworm - a very creepy name. They say that some songs on repeatedly listening to them creates, what these researchers call, a 'cognitive itch'. It is like a regular itch and one way to sooth yourself is to 'scratch the itch' by listening again to the song or humming it. This creates a feedback loop - repetition creates the itch, scratching by humming or listening the song soothes the itch and on and one again. Here are some links for more information on it.

Why do songs get stuck in my head?
Songs That Cause The Brain To 'Itch': UC Professor Investigating Why Certain Tunes Get Stuck In Our Heads
Songs Stick in Everyone's Head
Researcher confirms existence of 'earworms' / 98% of people have had songs stuck in their head

The more simple the song and easy to repeat the more is the likelyhood of the song being stuck. So even mediocre songs can get stuck like Billy Ray Cryus' only known hit Achy Breaky Heart. He is now known as a father of a famous teenage star Miley Cyrus than for his musical career.
Billie ray cyrus & miley cyrus - achy breaky heart , get ready , get set , Don't go


But so much for the research, nobody knows how to get rid of them. But luckily it is not a serious affliction. Most of us get out of them one way or the other. So I end this post with a tribute to all such songs and to their makers - 'Can't get you out of my head' by Kylie Minogue.

Kylie Minogue - Can't Get You Out Of My Head

My Recession Signal

Way back in April of 2009 I posted a piece about the economic conditions at that time and how I came up with my own signal. I wanted to revisit that signal and see if it is giving any indications of the current time. Here below you can see the same image I took at that time.

April 2009

As we can see, the cold container was packed with all sorts of items. I revisited our signal in September 2009. You can see that from the image below.

September 2009

As you can see things appeared to have improved but not by much. So I decided that it was too preposterous to call an end of recession at that time.So three-four months later I took the picture again. Here is the image of the same refrigerator.

January 2010
Voila!! Santa Claus must have rained in a lot of gifts during 2009 holiday season time. Looks like people are spending more outside on food. So here it is, our recession indicator is showing that the Recession is over.

But as anyone can tell, this is not an exact science. It only indicates the situation at my work place, because the uncertainty that we(my colleagues and myself at work) went through in mid 2009(there were some layoffs and re-org) is over and people at my work place are more comfortable. We are seeing more relaxed spending habits when it comes to eating lunch. There is no way I can say the same situation exists across the city, leave alone across the country. Also I did not record the time when I took the pictures. It is important because, the image can tell a different story based on when it was taken, like post-lunch and pre-lunch. Pre-lunch can tell we are in recession and post-lunch can tell we are out of recession and all this signal switch in just one day and few hours.

So far I have based my views on visual observations. For an index to have any meaningful value, these observations have to be quantified. Quantification of this signal to make up an index opens a slew of problems. Like what and how do you quantify? Do you take the number of items? This has many problems like one day the items can mostly be beverages and the number of items will be lot more than a day when lunch bags are more. Should we consider the volume occupied? It poses a very huge problem of measuring the volume of items occupied. The best measure is to find how many people are bringing their lunch to work from home. But this involves conducting a survey of the people working. On and on we can go with the shortcomings!

If the above mentioned trivial shortcomings of making the index a scientific quantifiable value are cleared, this signal does have some wings. Just like Case-Shiller Home Price Index became popular during the recent/current recession, similarly my own index based on my recessional signal will become popular. I will get to be on TV and write books about it. hmmm....

My holiday season resolution - so easy a cave man can do it.

Holiday season is the worst time of the year for me. No, I am not a cynic, scrooge like person who hates holidays and the merriment that goes around in the society. But it is that part of year where I indulge myself in freeloading myself with junk. The fact that these junkies are right there in front of you and that they are free only makes it that much easier. If they are not in the work kitchen, they appear in the form of the multiple holiday lunch/dinner invitations you get to attend as part of work and social invitations. I don't mind an occasional indulgence, but these multiple indulgence opportunities are packed so close to one another within a short period of time of about six to seven weeks, that I end up causing increased burden on my scale. This burden on my scale causes guilt that takes the next six, seven months or even longer life style changes to lose those pounds off. I managed to lose those pounds off so far but they have long term repercussions, like increase in cholesterol etc and slowing metabolism with age only increases the difficulty of losing them.

This holiday season I decided to stay away from junk food. But junk food is a very generic term. I have become a fan of checklists recently. The checklist bug bit me via Atul Gawande's article in New Yorker titled well - The Checklist. So I made a checklist of items to make my resolution concrete and this list is as follows.
1. Cookies
2. Brownies
3. Fudges
4. Donuts
5. Muffins
6. Chocolates
7. Cakes
8. Candies
9. Dressings on Salads
10.Pop Corn

For a sweet toothed weak willed human like me, the list appeared like I was David going against Goliath. Having made up my mind I carried the list safely in my pocket where ever I went lest I forget what was on the list that I was to not eat. Mind you that this list was only meant for work and social gatherings, and not for food at home though I gave strict instructions to my wife to not bake any cakes or pies during this period. While I had defined the list so clearly, the other parameter that needed definition was the duration itself. The period was to start from 11/23/2009 to 1/10/2010. The begin date is a Monday on the week of the Thanksgiving holiday and the end date is my own arbitrary date as when the holidays goodies will stop showing up at work by the fairy from the sugar land. That's a total of 49 days and I was confident I could hold my resolve.

I prepared myself for the battle that was to come with Goliath(s).
Week One: Goliath did not show up. I win this round.
Week Two: Looks like Goliath is hiding. He is coming anytime soon. May be next week. Two down and Five to go.
Week Three: Time of reckoning. The event was a department lunch. There were many of the items on the list that I made up earlier, but in far fewer forms compared to last year. I stayed away from all the distractions that appeared on the lunch table. A colleague of mine came over to talk to me and said that she made the lemon seven-up cake that I liked. During a previous team lunch, I had really liked the cake. If I like something I go overboard with the compliments. So she said she thought about making some cookies, but remembered how much I and others had liked the Lemon Seven-Up cake and decided to bake the cake instead. Now I could say no. I took a piece of the delicious cake, partly due to my weakness for this cake and partly due to my desire to be nice.
Week Four: After my broken resolve during Week Four, I decided to change the rules a little bit. I took the baseball analogy 'Three strikes and you are out' - I allowed myself three infringements during this period. I had already committed an infringement during Week four and I have two more left. But surprisingly nothing else showed up during this week. There were no more lunch events at work and no goodies from vendors either. Last year I had about four lunch invitations that I attended by the end of the holiday season. This year so far just one.
Week Five: Nothing this week. Just two more to go now.
Week Six: After five weeks long unnecessary wait, there appeared in the kitchen a tiny green tin box with even tinier butter cookies. Since I had given myself three infringements and knowing by now that there are only two weeks to go, I treated myself to two cookies. I later found out that those were home made cookies by another colleague of mine. They were tasty and were loaded with butter. This led to a bet during a conversation with another colleague who was also trying to stay from junk to lose weight. I said that two of them together will not be more than 80 calories, and my colleague argued that they were would be about 180 calories as they were butter cookies. We went scientific over it. We found that the paper plate weighed 0.15 ounce and the plate with 4 cookies weighed 1.14 oz, so the net weight of cookies came to around 0.96 oz. My Fitness Pal tells me that 1 oz of butter cookies is 132 calories. So that's 132 calories for 4 cookies and simple math tells that's 66 calories for 2 cookies. Now I am clearly delusional over holiday season sugar deprivation.
Week Seven: Week seven has just begun and I am sure it will be another downer with no fight in sight. With one more infringement allowed, I am quite confident that I can sail through this week with having to use my third life line.

It is clear that the economy has a direct relation on reduced holiday spending by companies and individuals. Though the stock market has been showing signs of improvement for some time, companies more so than individuals are holding on their purse strings tight. It is about time I revisit my recession indicator. Hopefully 2010 will be better off and will give me a better fight that 2009. So far my scale has not moved far to the right and I am happy about it. If things go well, I might carry this resolution into the next holiday season.

Happy New Year to you all.