Jan 18 2007 - Risk

You can see, if you are a regular reader of this blog(which is very very very unlikely) that I have reused some earlier material!


OPM*
Presents – Risky Business


Wikipedia informs me that Risk is a concept that denotes a potential negative impact to an asset that may arise from some present or future event. In everyday usage, "risk" is often used synonymously with the probability of a loss. For example, the risk of rain versus how badly your suede shoes will stain.
Further risk could include, rain not affecting your suede shoes versus realization that your shoes are made of fake suede.

i.e. Risk = (probability of an event) x (losses per event)

Now these terribly technical terms will need some explanation.

An event is something that happens. This usually requires movement of some kind, which explains why many people opine that this lazy author is ‘not happening’.

Probability is much more confusing and is directly linked to Heisenberg's uncertainity principle, which postulates that Uncertainity cannot be accurately forecast.
Heisenberg was himself quite uncertain of the whole thing but he couldn't blame himself, as he had already proved that uncertainity was not predictable, unless it was. But one could never tell, for sure.
The ideas behind Probability and uncertainty, struck Heisenberg as he finished cooking an elegant meal for himself. This thought, though, enabled him to create prize winning science papers, while most of us tend to add salt when struck by the very same thought, " Something's missing “.

To put it simply, Probability and Risk are like Bollywood scripts. There is no telling where they could head. To understand the true poignance of this statement please watch Hindi movies where joyously happy families/mothers/elder siblings/fathers/benevolent maids etc realize that they have lost one or more little children at the Kumbh Mela (which, incidentally, was invented by Rajshree Productions as a film setting for losing kids/parents/lovers etc. The Kumbh Mela as such has no historical relevance and was initially created as a film set in the 1930's before it grew into popular legend and culture as a place where pious people performed rituals in the water and young voyeurous lechers checked out the women. It’s a good thing though and everyone goes home satisfied)

Our story starts as the lens moves through a dolly shot (based on the book; Ending Cloning, the day Dolly the sheep was Shot) of a garden in disrepair.

There are trees slouching to protect their space and plants doing badly in a corner as the camera pans to a close-up of our hero who is trembling, clutching a gun.

Run-deep is a Risk Analyst with a leading portfolio management firm.
But herein lies the twist. The Portfolio Management firm exclusively does business for terrorists, warlords, mafia, lawyers and the BCCI. Their market analysts have roam around with guns, to protect themselves from irate clients.

As the story progresses we begin to realize that the story arc is an uncompromising and honest look at an improbable world and shows the same commitment to realism and starkness as a Justice League or Swat Cat cartoon.



It turns out that Run-deep has run himself into deep trouble with a set of clients headed by Osama Bush (President of the international court of lenience for troublemakers) by investing in bad business ideas like the ten rupee diamond, Team India and the Bachchan-Rai engagement. To make things worse Run-deep is a paranoid literalist who mistakes Bull and Bear markets to be gladiatorial battlefields where market analysts fight fierce animals. This makes him very touchy and trigger-happy, especially around animals. PETA is hounding him for shooting at several squirrels, poisonous snakes, vicious dogs and Salman Kahn.


His bugbear, Osama Bush (played by Vinod Khanna) wears a beard to hide the pallor that affects people who have lived their lives manipulating and deceiving people over monstrously flawed ideas like God, Political honesty and nationalism.
As Run-deep has invested his dishonestly earned money in such risky assets, he is baying for his blood.
He kidnaps Run-deep’s girlfriend, Tanushree who is a dancer at a bar called Risque.

Will Run-deep take grave risks to save his girlfriend? Does Osama Bush risk the grave in Iraq and Afghanistan? Will you risk reading next weeks OPM?
Anyway, do remember what this movie preaches – Life mein Risk lena padta hai, which means - don't worry about the risk of rain in Pondicherry or wherever else you are going, but do pack an umbrella.


* Objects in the Preview Mirror may appear sillier than they are.
Disclaimer: Characters in the above story are not based on any characters in the film. Any resemblance or humour is pure luck.
**OPM appears in the Thursday edition of Bangalore BIAS and previews a Friday release

Jan 11 2007 - Guru

OPM*
Presents – Guru and crew


Our story starts in the little village of Idhar, where Gurukant (played by Abhishek) has been raised by very middle class parents.
Middle class in a village where one is rich if they have a radio. The village of Idhar (Hindi=>meaning ‘Over Here’) has been neglected by mainstream civilization. This is because, when travellers ask for directions to ‘Over Here’ people look at them strangely and say ‘over here is obviously right here’.
But young Gurukant has many dreams. His parents wake him up early and disturb his dreams just when he is getting to the best parts, though. (Parents everywhere are known to do this. This is usually achieved by switching off the ceiling fan or making loud noises over the announcement of something as ordinary as morning coffee)
Su-jata (played by Su-nehri from Dhoom 2) enters Gurukant’s life, while he is lying idly in his father’s fields dreaming vivid daydreams. Su-jata is singing songs in the rain, as that is the only entertainment available in little Idhar, especially as her parents don’t own a radio. She wakes Gurukant when she steps on him and this turns out to be a big step-up for both of them. Gurukant thinks he is still dreaming and proceeds to pinch himself and Su-jata silly to ensure he isn’t dreaming.
A World Famous-in-Idhar romance begins. Tabs are kept on Gurukant and Su-jata by armies of little children who are bunking school to get a taste of reality-television kind of time-pass. Once everyone else has discussed them as an item, the parents are informed and a marriage is in the offing. The astrologer is called in. This is the turning point of the tale and we will require a brief detour to put things into perspective.

Jyotish, a system of astrology, has been part of the Indian way of life for ages. Jyotish is the instructional element of the Rig Veda (the rigging was done at large scale and millions of rupees were lost by the public), and is referred to as the Eye of the Veda (inspiring the later day song, Eye of the Tiger which caused several Save the Tiger environmentalists to froth at the mouth), for its alleged ability to view both phenomenal reality and wisdom, but do nothing about either.
Many Indians believe, without good reason, that humans have fortune and misfortune in life because of karma (a fashionable word in spiritual western company). Jyotish attributes the downs in life to the influence of planets, and religious ceremonies are performed to mitigate bad karma. This was reason enough to inspire people to believe in other unbelievable things like the Aum Shrinkyo sect, Communism, Religion, the Pink Unicorn, the revolving teacup and George W. Bush.
Astrologers prescribe special stones (yes, expensive ones) or meditation techniques using mantras (hit item numbers from ancient times) to those facing difficult or unclear futures as predicted by Jyotish. This is always a good thing, especially for astrologers.

Some astrological terms:
Jaatak Shaastra (horoscopy)- Oh the horrors in your horoscope! Pay me quickly. (Started by the authors of fiction who wrote the Jataka tales)
Swar Shaastra- Your name sucks. Let me change it. Pay me quickly.
Ravi Shastri – The Indian team sucks. Cut their pay.

Back to our story then! The astrologer announces that Su-jata has a kujadosham and that the man she marries will suffer. (Kujadosham is brought on by the effect of Mars, which shows an aggressive nature. Astrology doesn’t like aggressive women, it seems and for a woman to be aggressive is a dosha or a fault!!)
After performing several yagnas Gurukant realizes that he will have to study astrology himself to figure out a way to get married.

He studies hard for a couple of weeks at the University in Benares, but gives up when he realizes that astrology can be made up as one goes along. He gets married and begins to use astrology to earn a living. After considering Gurucan, Gurukant drops the ‘kant’ and becomes Guru.

His fame spreads far and wide (but never near and narrow). His very words are taken literally causing a lot of confusion. Examples:
Guru: If you don’t dream you will be stuck to your village. (Many villagers migrate to cities and vice versa, while still others spend a lot of time ensuring there is no glue on their footwear)
Guru: I don’t want to walk. I want to run (many children run away from school, some men run away from work)
Guru: When you run fast, you raise a lot of dust (P.T. Usha loses the gold at the Olympics, as she is looking back to see the dust)
Guru: I wish I met Mallika Sherawat (So do the rest of us)

But a young reporter (played by Madhavan) realizes that astrology and Guru are ruining the country. He publishes an impassioned plea to see the light (no one is willing to look at the light as there is a solar eclipse on)

The reporter writes:
Do you believe that information in the far past can influence what we are doing now or in the recent past or in the immediate future?
Why do i ask? Consider these facts.
The Sun is eight light minutes away from the Earth, a distance of about 160 million kilometres, which rules out a taxi ride.
So if I were to look at you or Gisele Bundchen from the sun, I would see a picture of what you, or more interestingly, she was doing eight minutes earlier. Conversely, when you look up into the sky and see the sun, you are a getting a picture that is eight minutes old. Over galactic distances the speed of light becomes noticeable. The nearest star Alpha Centauri is 4 light years away. So when we see Alpha Centauri in the sky it is a 4-year-old picture. The universe has about a hundred billion galaxies the nearest of which is Andromeda. Andromeda is 4 million light years away. If someone in the galaxy of Andromeda were to cast his telescope on Earth he would look 4 million years into our past and maybe catch a few glimpses of the earliest flat-faced Neanderthals, with some luck, one of the attractive ones - A 4 million year old picture.
As we peer farther and farther in to space we are peering farther and farther into the past.
All those constellations are pictures from the past too. The actual configurations just now are totally different, because all the stars have moved and it is a completely changed night sky.
Thus, no astrologer can predict anything but the past, based on the stars they see in the sky. Guru especially.


Will Madhavan’s article kick up dust even though he is not running? To find out, watch this melancholy tale with a Dahlian twist. (Not Dahlia the flower, Dahl the author)



* Objects in the Preview Mirror may appear sillier than they are.
Disclaimer: Characters in the above story are not based on any characters in the film. Any resemblance or humour is pure luck.
**OPM appears in the Thursday edition of Bangalore BIAS and previews a Friday release

Coming soon..

Have been busy experiencing fatherhood. Will put up all OPM articles Jan through April one of these day!
Hope the 2 or 3 people who visit this desolation are doing well.

Cheers!

Jan 4 2007 - StormBreaker

OPM*
Presents – Storm in my Baby Bottle



The columnist who writes this column is, thankfully, on vacation. Since he is one of those adults, who likes giving young people a chance he let me do this week's preview. He tells me that it makes him feel good, but I think he is just taking time off to buy his wonderful wife some unimaginative presents for her birthday.

Anyway I’m only one year old, so I'm starting really young. Before I turned one recently, I’m guessing I was zero. I have many names. Mama calls me booboo and Cutchupie and Arun depending on the time of day. I have noticed that she calls me Arun when i do stuff I am not supposed to do, so I’m guessing that is a bad word.
After some consideration I’ve realized that I must either be Cutchupie or Booboo. You can call me whatever you like as long as you don’t call me Arun.

This week’s release is a movie called ‘Storm Breaker’ which, I’m guessing, is about someone very like me when I’m breaking toys. Somebody in the movie is definitely breaking storms, though I don’t know what a storm is. Mama says I’ll have to look up the dictionary to find out about storms. Problem is, I don’t know what dictionary means so I don’t know where to start looking. On another note, it is my Mama’s birthday today and I wish her a very happy birthday though I can’t buy her anything, as no one will pay me to break toys or damage nappies, and those are the only things I know to do very well.

To preview ‘Storm Breaker’ I’ll really need to know what all these complicated words like complicated mean. Also, young children like me don't see the world the same way as adults (it helps that our idea of war is GI Joe, while happiness is a stash of chocolate). We usually see things from a lower angle, have difficulty seeing things as a whole, and concentrate only on parts of things - usually the parts we're looking at. So I’m going to sit in a time machine and grow up to write the rest of the preview. (This is easy for us toddlers as we can imagine almost anything. Why!? I once imagined that everyone on earth had become nice, even George Bush! )
Whoosh! (That’s the sound a time machine should make. ‘Swish!’ will also do)

Well, that does it then! I’m 29 years old in the year 2035 and I can do that preview (though not technically as the movie released 28 years ago), without using words like ‘like’, ‘guess’, ‘very’ and ‘so’ so many times.
Presenting then, for your special relish, plump English words stewed and stuffed in the right quantities to add that garnish of silly stupidity to your life: The Storm Breaker Preview

Based on the 1st in the series of books by Anthony Horowitz, Storm Breaker starring Ewan McGregor, Mickey Rourke, Andy Serkis of LOTR ‘Gollum’ fame and that fantastic author/actor Stephen Fry, is the story of young Alex Rider who doesn’t even own a bicycle.
He spends his time thinking up bad humour (much like the author of this column) based on the Matrix movies:

Ex:
The One. Neo. NEO is anagram of The One.I, Alex, will be the new anagrammatic superhero, ENO.
As Eno I will surf the gastroenterical tracts dispelling Agent Acidity and company to oblivion. I will guard the gateways to the intestinal Zion; fight tooth, nail and Smithy etc etc

OR: Other Matrix fantasies gone wrong like -

I will not be The One.
I will be more than that.
I will be The Two.
Buy one get one free.

But when his uncle Ian Rider dies mysteriously while watching an Indian Television channel on board a new airline called the Storm Breaker, Alex is drawn into a terrific ride which shows him unveiling secrets unknown to humanity in ancient 2007. He discovers the great secret of the airline industry and of flight in general. The revelation unfolds, as he reads a painfully slow book called “ Atlas Shrugged and said ‘So what?’ ”, that “flight” of any form on Planet Earth is a great myth.
Birds do not fly.They stay stationary in the air. It is the earth Spinning which causes the illusion that they are flying. The whole flapping of wings routine is to ward off insects, mostly flies.
Consequently, it is also revealed that all the airline industry has ever done is build anti gravity aircraft, which can stay stationary in air and use the Earths’ spin to cause the illusion of having travelled. All delays are caused due to storms as the pilot, whose only job is to ensure that the plane faces the right direction as the earth spins, can’t see which direction to turn the plane. Storm Breakers are a new kind of plane that can see through storms while beating gravity. The problems arise when Storm-Breaker’s promoters decide to reveal the truth about flight to the general public and there is a cry of outrage from the publishers of important journals like the Superman Comic.

Does Alex manage to solve the mystery of his uncle’s death on board the Storm Breaker? Does he find out which daily soap on Indian TV killed him? Will Anti-Gravity Man comics beat Superman sales to pulp?
Watch!

* Objects in the Preview Mirror may appear sillier than they are.
Disclaimer: Characters in the above story are not based on any characters in the film. Any resemblance or humour is pure luck.
**OPM appears in the Thursday edition of Bangalore BIAS and previews a Friday release

Dec 28 2006 - Misc.

OPM*
Presents – Message in the Cans



Ever since the birth of cinema, Great Film Directors have provided us insights and visions that have affected language, culture and the human condition in progressive ways. Some examples are listed below:
Stanley Kyon-Brick who questioned the usage of bricks in construction, opened people’s eyes to paper homes. The Japanese, in a rare instance of precognition, have been building paper homes for centuries, which in turn protect them during earthquakes. Earthquakes occur due to movements in the Earth’s tectonic plates, which to humanity are as obscure as the innards of a washing machine or the actions of the left footed stillbat (virendrus sehwagum). It has been debated (by very boring geologists with no social life) that the tectonic plates of the earth could be called something else. All of them know that their argument has devolved into a semantic debate, but no one wants to put an end to the endless stream of conferences and conference calls that serve as a platform for free lunches.
Woody Allen gave the world the practise of saying ‘knock on wood’ which can mean different things in different circumstances, for example: if one were buried alive in a casket versus if one were a carpenter. He also gave us the All American term for teenagers falling awake: ‘woody’.
Ingmar Bergman gave us a delightful Swedish name.
Alfred Hitchcock, of course, cannot be discussed here, as this is a family paper.

It can be argued that lesser-than-great and much-lesser-than-great directors can teach us valuable lessons about Life, The Universe and Obesity too. (To get into a debate on the veracity of this statement, please find some boring geologists)
I will illustrate by giving you a sneak peek into three movies that release this week:


Kudiyon ka hai Zamaana is a fantasy, set in a world where hormonal impulses of the sexes are reversed because of a freak accident involving George Bush and some nuclear weapons. This is a world of wide and expansive heterosexual zones where women scout for men in the evenings. A world which enables women hunting in packs of two and three, looking for innocent men and boys to pick up for the evening. Oh Israel! (Forgive me that burst of emotion!)
Rekha, Vasundhara, Kim and Mahima are four friends living in a world that has been recently altered. They come to terms with their surging basic instincts (albeit, later than Sharon Stone) and have just begun revelling in checking out men at the workplace, in restaurants, hardware shops and traffic lights. They are though, very upset as men, who’ve been hormonally altered too, are now playing hard to get.
Suddenly everything in the world changes as Wars are called off and Sport on television takes a TRP nosedive. Greeting card companies have to alter their entire range, as do manufacturers of most other goods since women aren’t interested in shopping for long hours anymore.
Economies are completely shattered due to these changes, before marketing managers around the world figure out that all they need to do is target men in their advertising. Soon men are well informed about bargains on shoes, cosmetics and handbags and drag their spouses out on Sundays to these monstrous ‘Big Sale’ events across assorted malls around the world. The mini-trouser and the backless shirt are invented and there is a big hue and cry over the Big Bee exposing in his next movie. Men take a sudden shine for Italian cuisine, except in Italy where Japanese food is the flavour of the month. Pornography finally becomes an equal opportunity employer and male porn stars have affairs with famous women politicians like Condoleeza Rice. Three million cases of husband beating are reported in Haryana and Punjab.
What happens to the four friends? Will they fight monogamy? Will they manage to catch a few beers during the weekend? The movie helps us examine gender issues and finally decide that monogamy is a sin.

I See You: Arjun Rampal, a great pal of a guy called Ram (very popular in the Ayodhya area), is a doctor who specializes in the Intensive Care Unit or the I.C.U. The rest of the plot is pretty inconsequential the movie only serves to remind us that some models shouldn’t try acting.

I leave you with the poetic message that the third release of the week, Anwar, preaches:
An-war, is bad grammar for One war,
And one war is going just too far,
Like the film itself,
And Santa’s twelve elves,
I’d like to tell you boys,
To order some naughty toys,
And make love, not war.


Happy Holidays!



* Objects in the Preview Mirror may appear sillier than they are.
Disclaimer: Characters in the above story are not based on any characters in the film. Any resemblance or humour is pure luck.
**OPM appears in the Thursday edition of Bangalore BIAS and previews a Friday release