Life and other weird things

I remember a few incidents when I was completely bowled over by technology that I witnessed first hand.

The first time when modern technology truly silenced me was when I first saw an ATM machine give out money. It was sometime around 1994 when two HSBC ATMs were installed near the Orange County at Dickenson Road in Bangalore. I remember very clearly the astonishment I felt when my uncle punched in some numbers at the machine and the contraption spat out a few hundred rupee notes.

Some other instances when I was stunned by technology include :
- the first time I saw personalized TV screen for flight passengers(1996)
- the first time I saw trains stop in front of doors in underground stations and align themselves perfectly with the marked 'door zones' (1996)
- The first time I booked a train ticket online (2003)
- The first time I saw a cellphone display the names of places where I was passing through using the 'cell info' option (2002)
- The time I used the cell phone to buy an item from a vending machine (nearly shit myself when it worked - 2006)
- The time when I realized that the fare machines (EZ-Link) in Singapore buses were all controlled by GPS (2007)

And these are just the incidents that are on top of my mind. It happens a lot these days.

Today it sort of 'blew my mind' to see a somewhat unusual technology at work here in Singapore.

I have always lived in places far from the LRT systems in Singapore, and thus had never used the system before, except for one very short ride.

The LRT, or Light Rapid Transit, is a public transport system that is designed to get people from the bigger MRT (Mass Rapid transit) train stations closer to their public housing. They are small driver less vehicles that wind their way about through HDB blocks on elevated lines, dropping people off at important junctions. Today, I traveled by LRT to Bukit Panjang.

On the way from Chua Chu Kang to Bukit Panjang, I noticed the glass windows of the LRT suddenly go opaque at times. One moment I can see the city outside, and the next minute it's like someone pulled the blinds on me. And it's not like all the windows in the train behaved this way at the same times. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what on earth was going on.

Later this evening during a conversation, I learned what this was about. Since the LRT system passes too close to HDB dwelling, the buildings have sensors on them to let the trains know they have come too close and will now be passing near people's windows. The LRT windows have some kind of LCD sandwiched between their double sheet panes which change state to become opaque for the time the vehicle is between residential blocks, to protect the residents' privacy !

What a wonderful use of technology ! What an absolute thrill to actually see it !

Unfortunately the next time I see this happening, it will just be another one of those things I pass by. Writing it down will hopefully help me remember that it takes brains and fantastic creativity to come up with a design solution such as this.

Triple disasters do happen.

The day started off with two disasters, each worse than the last, in the form of two quizzes at college. Within moments of laying eyes on the question papers, I felt my mind drawing blinds on itself and quietly going into a semi hibernation mode.

To try and end the day on a happy note, plans were made to head out of campus to catch the latest Aamir Khan thriller - Ghajini. In retrospect, this was a plan roughly equal in its folly quotient to Mamata Banerjee's "plan" to get political mileage by holding the Nano hostage. In other words, Ghajini was the third disaster of the day.

There are quite a few words to describe Ghajini, and none more appropriate than the old Anglo Saxon adjective - 'Horrible'.

How a person like Aamir Khan with his acting and production prowess could agree to be part of this unadultrated mass of tripe is beyond my understanding.

Cut to the chase. Sanjay Singhania(Khan) is a man who runs an uber-successful telecom company in his spare time. What he during the rest of his waking hours is not clearly shown in the movie, but there are suggestions to indicate that he suffers from a form of mania involving an obsession of carving his body into an incredible mass of muscle, making him look more like a renaissance statue than a human being. A completely random set of coincidences and chocolaty circumstances result in Mr Eight Pack Dollar Millionaire falling in love with a melodramatic twit played by Asin (in her first, and hopefully last, Bollywood role).

The more observant among you will notice that the movie did not really make the impression on me that the producers desired.

Moving on. Another set of random incidents ensure that the aforementioned twit heroine ends up on the wrong end of a knife wielded by a tribe of villains, all of whom seemed to have escaped from The Hospital for the Steroid Enhanced. The leader of this bunch of bulges is a man who speaks in rural snarls, and who has 'badass' written all over him in each scene. This man is of interest to us, since it is he who lends his name to this....err.....film. After dispatching Singhania's girlfriend to the afterlife, the arch villain, Ghajini decides to use Singhania's head for a golf ball. The man had barely begun to get into the mood after teeing off with the Singhania skull using a rather rusted rod, when Singhania decides to take control of the plot and promptly gets 'Short Term Memory Loss', wherein he is unable to remember events for longer than 15 minutes.

Not that any of this matters, for director Murugadoss does not seem to have heard that little thing called 'logic' which helps movie plots along.

To make a molehill out of a veritable mountain, Sanjay goes out to take revenge on the reprehensible Ghajini for paying golf with his fiancees and his own heads.

The flowchart of the movie 'plot' can be summarized as :
Sanjay is beaten up by Ghajini -> Sanjay get short term memory loss-> Sanjay takes revenge on Ghajini despite his condition.
Murugadoss takes upwards of 3 hours to articulate this, what with asinine songs liberally inserted into the screenplay, and hamming heroines whose acting prowess made the hemispheres of my brain clang against each other in frustration.

The thing that completely got my goat in the film was the STML affected hero go into complete pyrotechnic mode at regular intervals, with no identifiable reason. Eek.

I tried hard to think of ONE redeeming feature of Ghajini. Unfortunately, other than the few seconds of joy in realizing that the movie had ended, every moment spent watching this bundle of cinemanure was spent in stress and agony. Stress on realizing how much better the evening could have been, and agony on watching one of my favorite stars walk deeper and deeper into a morass of bad scriptwriting. The music was average, and the camerawork - shoddy at best. Acting was not really noticed in this venture, so comments about it are irrelevant.

Well, that was the long review of Ghajini.

The short review is - 'Watch it at your own peril.'

Time has lost it's conventional meaning.

I'm back in Singapore, this time as a student. And this time, the regular menu of 'things to do' do not include taking off to Pulau Ubin, or hanging out in Bugis Junction, or walking through the sultry forest of Bukit Timah.

This time, it's to live in a blur of space-time, where day and night exist simultaneously, where a wasted minute can seem like an hour, and a pleasant hour can go by like a minute.

I always knew it was going to be like this, but living through a two year MBA course crammed into 11 months is showing itself to be a challenge. The light dawned rather brightly on me today when I realized that I had sat through a 2 week course in Accounting and have rather credibly covered the amount of study material an undergraduate student would study in half a year. I never thought I would see myself do that. A single block of time wasted sets one back by a mile.

The overall MBA experience has been educational so far, if not entirely satisfactory. Some genuinely new things have been learned. Some genuinely capable people have been met.

What's lacking so far is people to have a serious conversation with.

I hope at times that the obscene amount of money invested in this course pays off - if not by getting me a plum job, by at least making me a more rounded human being.