42 Quirks

The first meeting is always special – and she knew the drill by now.

First, look for a sucker. Identifying them wasn’t such a huge deal. All she had to do was look for the ones with the glazed eyes, a foolish smile & a lost expression on their faces. Okay, so the foolish smile was a red herring – I was just checking if you were paying attention.

Second, position self. If the sucker had been already primed, the position was automatically decided – somewhere in the area swept by the corner of the eye, but well away from the blind spot. Obviously, if you want to get noticed, what’s the use of settling in the blind spot, eh?

Third, call-out, but do NOT make it too obvious. A sly glimpse, a sneak peek, a quick glance – barely visible but enough to get noticed. Making your presence felt was what was important. Once this step was complete, the rest of it was a cakewalk, all downhill, easy as pie – you get the drift…

Sometimes, there would be a fourth step, too – nudge. More often than not, this step came into play only if the sucker was engrossed in something else, or had too many things on their mind, or – as it had happened in some in some extreme cases – had A.D.D.

Only the patient ones stayed back for step four. Tonight, she did not count herself among the patient ones.
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11 deaths. 50+ injured. A city traumatised.

Yes, the blast was a cowardly act.
Yes, it only spilled innocent blood.
Yes, the perpetrators were inhuman.
Yes, they *could* have been interecepted.
Yes, there are a zillion ways things could have been different.

But they aren’t. So live with it.
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(Pic Credit: “I dream of liberty” by snickwas@Flickr)
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Can a Hindi Film win an Oscar?

No. I am not talking about the Foreign Language category. I am talking about the Best Film category – the category in which Slumdog Millionaire won the Oscar Award this year.

How? Read on till the end.

The Eligibility criteria for a film to be nominated for the Oscars are clearly laid out on this page. A first glance at the page reveals something very interesting.

Nowhere does it mention that the film has to be in the English language!

In fact, Paragraph 8 clearly states:
“Motion pictures from all countries shall be eligible for the annual awards listed in Rule One Paragraph 3, as long as they satisfy the requirements of the other applicable rules, and contain English-language subtitles if released in a foreign language.”

That’s not all! There’s more!

Paragraph 2 of Rule 2 might cause a few problems actually. Condensed down to the basics it means:

“A film, that runs for more than 40 minutes, is eligible for an entry to the Oscar Nominations as long as it runs in a commercial theater in the Los Angeles county for at least seven days and is properly advertised before-hand.”

So what’s stopping us?

Rule 3, more or less. :)

The essence of Rule 3 is that, the Los Angeles run must happen between the 1st of January to the 31st of December in a specific year and no other theatrical runs are allowed – competitive or otherwise. And this is where it gets kinda complicated. Here’s Paragraph 3 of Rule 3, verbatim:

A picture first theatrically exhibited outside the U.S. prior to the Los Angeles qualifying run shall be eligible for submission provided the prior exhibition takes place in a commercial motion picture theater after January 1, 2007, with the following further conditions:

Kinda confusing, isn’t it? But, this is what I make of it in the Indian context. Correct me if I am wrong:

If a full-length Indian feature film, (properly subtitled) were to theatrically release in India this year, and next year, release exclusively in the Los Angeles County (after proper advertisement and marketing) on a commercial theater run for a period of at least 7 days and no other theatrical engagement for the total period of 90 days, then the film qualifies for an entry to the Oscars!

So, technically, if an Indian film made in 2009 – say Dev.D – were to release exclusively in the Los Angeles county this year – ensuring that no other theatrical runs happen anywhere else during that exhibition period – Dev.D could, might, possibly, maybe, qualify to win an Oscar!

With big bucks like Warner Brothers, Walt Disney, etc entering the Indian market, has the American Dream suddenly become achievable? ;)

Anybody know what’s special about today?

Yeah, a Wednesday, but not just any wednesday, Today also happens to be the International Quirkyalone Day!

Erm, ohh, and yes, also St. Valentine’s day…

Sasha Cagen the author of “Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics” conceptualised a personality type termed a Quirkyalone. In Sasha’s words:

Quirkyalones are people who resist the tyranny of coupledom. Oddly enough, we quirkyalones also tend to be romantics.

Odd, eh? Well, read on, there’s more!!

Quirkyalones (QAs, henceforth) are not anti-love or anti dating, they are basically normal people who ‘resist the tyranny of coupledom.’ A QA generally enjoys solitude and sometimes even craves it. But that does NOT mean a QA is a loner. In fact, its just the opposite. Having spent so much time in social company, QAs need time to ingest, introspect and recharge for the next round of interactions.

If you think this thing is a one-off occurence, think again. This is a movement that has spawned an entire breed of Quirkyalones, and what do you know, it will be four years strong this year. The IQD (International Quirkyalone Day) has been celebrated with much fan-fare across different parts of the world.

Head over to Quirkyalone, for more details. Some of you might even want to try this quiz:

How Quirkyalone are you?

Here’s what I got:

Your score was 117. Very quirkyalone:
Relatives may give you quizzical looks, and so may friends, but you know in your heart of hearts that you are following your inner voice. Though you may not be romancing a single person, you are romancing the world. Celebrate your freedom on National Quirkyalone Day, February 14th!

w00t!! I am lovin’ it!! [:D]

Do let me know how yours turns out. Post your score in the comments section. Happy Quirkyalone Day!!

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RSS feeds have dramatically changed the way we consume content online. Over the course of time, I have come to subscribe to 90+ feeds of which I manage to read about 20 of them completely.

If there’s one debate that keeps raging across the blogosphere, off and on, it has to be about RSS feeds. Even now, I hear occasional raves and rants about how partial text feeds are irritating and nonsensical, and all that.

What if (this may be a very silly what-if) the choice were left to the user?

What if I as a reader could decide whether I wanted a Partial-Text, Full-Text or Headlines only feed for a given site?

For instance, I’d prefer to have a Headline-only feed for heavy output websites like Slashdot and ZDNet while I’d prefer a full-text feed for sporadically updating sites, like friend blogs.

Alternatively, this can be achieved from the client-side itself, i.e. within the RSS reader. To me, it makes sense to open the feed in three stages:

Headlines >> Partial Text (Excerpt*) >> Full Text

In either of the cases, the publisher must provide a full-text feed.

Of the few readers that I have tried and tested, Google Reader comes close, offering Expanded and Reading views. Combined with keyboard shortcuts, these make for an amazing experience.

At the end of the day, reading RSS feeds is nothing but consuming content, and right now, there are only so many ways to do it.

I have a sneaky suspicion, things will be different soon.

(*caveat: I would define an excerpt as a paragraph or two, having a total of about 5-7 lines at least)

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How many times have you had people sending you invitational eMails saying, “Try this cool site I found!” or “This is an amazing site!” or “You’ll absolutely love this one!” or lines to that effect?

Too many, I suspect.

Web 2.0 and the concept of User Generated Content has had the world in a tizzy for quite a while now. Innovative ideas and domain name registrations seem to go hand in hand. The people riding the waves of the Internet never had it so good. New services are introduced every day and competition is building up before you can say, “Watch out!”

As the Internet grows, as the flood of ideas increases, so will the number of identities. The number of services we use though, will continue to remain the same, maybe a few additions here and there.

Why? Because we are all loyalists to the core. We all have a list of our favorite sites that we visit regularly and we rarely visit the competition. There are innumerable excuses for this loyalty ranging from the old ‘comfort zone’, to the very latest ‘swanky look’, and the geeky ‘amazing feature-set.’

Truth is, we cannot handle multiple identities.

Having multiple identities is similar to owning two or more cell-phones. The greater the number of phones, the greater the interruption. Each cell-phone contributes an identity (in the vaguest sense of the word). Each eMail address is an identity that we have created for ourself on the WWW. Each profile on a social network is an identity that we maintain.

The number of eMails in your inbox is a fair indicator of the number of identities you have on the Web. And those of us, who are actively tracking the development of the collaborative Web, must have emails running into hundreds.

One idea would be to have a single secure identity that will cater to logins all across the internet. If such an idea were ever to gather support, it would have some interesting implications:

Naturally, this would imply a unique database to cater to all our identities across the web. But who should get the right to create and maintain such a database? The huge set of meta-data that would result would be a statistician’s dream come true! The flip-side of this is obviously the large ‘corporations’ that would give a few arms and legs (or even take a few) to get a crack at this data. (Ok, so I am a li’l partial to scientific research…)

What could be better than acquiring this data?

Having the data on your own servers! MyOpenID, Windows LiveID, Google Account Authentication, are a few names in this context. This probably explains why there is an intense competition between the Big Three and a few other key players.

If this sounds fairly Orwellian and reminds you of “1984” and Big Brother, you are probably right. :o)

The virtual world we live in, closely resembles the Orwellian 1984. Recent cases (Digg v/s Netscape, for instance) indicate as much. Search Engines indexing our content have the power to convey them to the faceless ‘Thought police.’ We have rich-sounding names like User Generated Content and Long Tail. And we have a faceless Big Brother who ‘purportedly’ keeps everything in check.

Makes you wonder: was Orwell right all along?

Technorati Tags: identity, web, orwell, 1984

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