Posts from — October 2006

Priyadarshini Mattoo’s rapist/murderer, Santosh K Singh, has been sentenced to death.

Now that Delhi HC has passed this judgment, let the debate on the appropriateness of the death penalty, begin once again.That debate was polluting the debate shouting match on the issue of clemency to Afzal Guru.

Personally, I feel that the “rarest of rare” circumstances, under which death penalty is awarded, should actually be rarest of rare. They are becoming just a bit too regular or commonplace for my liking these days. But I would be wary of any attempts to define what circumstances qualify to be called “rarest of rare”.

In the end, it looked much more exciting than it actually was! Agarkar’s late burst could do little to reverse the dwindling fortunes of an Indian team that just did not seem motivated enough to win. The match was, in fact, lost earlier in the day when the Indian batsmen failed to put a high price on their wickets, gifting them away by committing some embarrassingly basic errors! And these errors were compounded later in the day by some inaccurate fast bowling (12 wides!!). The only lot from the Indian side that came away unscathed were the spinners who kept the Indian hopes alive all along. Now the Indians go into a do-or-die encounter against Australia on Sunday… on a Mohali pitch that offers pace and bounce!

Continue reading at One-Day Mataram.

A round-up of a few interesting links I’ve encountered recently…

Here’s a collection of some highly creative Ads from the world over. My favourite is the steaming coffee-cup manhole cover! And there’s one ad from Mumbai too!!

How do you like your food? Not like this, I bet! ;-)

Scientists are one step closer to creating a working Invisibility Cloak. It’s a pity, however, that this attempt is to achieve invisibility from radar, and not in the visible spectrum. But I remember an article about ‘invisibility’ techniques that appeared in ‘Wired’ around three years ago. Do read it… it’s quite fascinating! Here’s the link.

Have you ever seen an 8.6 Gigapixel image? that’s right… 8.6 Gigapixels!! Here it is… ‘probably’ the biggest digital image in the world!! Be patient while the webpage loads up though!

And to round up today’s list of links… here’s George W. Bush admitting on television that he uses “the Google”!!

I haven’t yet had the chance to catch Farhan Akhtar’s indulgent remake of ‘Don’, but the reviews from professional critics as well as the feedback from friends and acquaintances has been anything but enthusiastic.

And the reason for that has been the inevitable comparison with the original, that a remake evokes! Nostalgia invariably plays a huge role in such comparisons and that tilts the balance, fairly or unfairly, in the favour of the original. I am not saying that the original ‘Don’ wasn’t any good. Far from it! I thought the Amitabh-starrer was an awesome entertainer… and a representative of the kind of movies in vogue during those years. However, it was anything but a classic!!… something that this review explains in much better words. Chandra Barot’s ‘Don’ was technically quite shoddy. What kept it from sliding away as ‘just another Amitabh movie’ was Amitabh’s bandwidth as an actor. Based on Shah Rukh Khan’s body of work, I am not convinced he has the same bandwidth!

As I read review after review flaying Farhan Akhtar, almost chastising him for attempting a remake, I can feel a certain fanboy anger on the part of these reviewers who seem to have convinced themselves that the original ‘Don’ was a sacred cow that could not be touched! For God’s sake, comment on the quality of the movie! … not on the way it apes or deviates from the original! I concede that some amount of comparison will be inevitable, but the review should not end up being one huge comparison!!

Microsoft has released Internet Explorer (IE) 7 earlier today. It has features like tabbed browsing, RSS feeds, integrated search box and “improved security features”… things that Firefox users have been almost taking for granted for a long time now. So I dunno what’s the fuss about.

Moreover, I read somewhere that the IE 7 downloads are linked to Geniune Windows validation. Also, ‘genuine Windows’ users have to ensure that they have the supported versions of Windows before they can download and install IE7. So in effect, Microsoft is putting a premium on IE7 by restricting its availability. That’s quite inexplicable given that Microsoft has already learnt the futility of initiating a browser war… not that IE7 seems to have the juice to initiate one, in any case!

And Microsoft’s claims of IE7’s “improved security features” will be severely tested in the coming days. Reports of the first vulnerability found in IE7 are already out!