Mathematical Games had other indirect impacts on me. Sometimes he had guest columnists, two of them have remained with me through the years: Raymond Smullyan and Douglas Hofstadter. Raymond Smullyan’s columns led me later to read his books starting with What is the Name of this Book, where he used mathematical and logical puzzles as a starting point to talking about and proving Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. For a young teenager, this was heady stuff. Douglas Hofstadter renamed the column Metamagical Themas, and used them as a starting point to explore the themes of recursion, logic and eventually Artificial Intelligence. Between the three of them they were part of the life experiences that trained me so I could get into the Maths Olympiad, and also prepared me for my eventual career in computers. Under slightly different circumstances I would have ended up entirely with a life in mathematics.

Martin Gardner died yesterday. Thanks Martin, and most of all, thanks Appa.

Those of us born in India and of a certain age (mostly in our 30s) have good reason to look sympathetically at the younger generation. They might have 100 channels on the TV, they might have opportunities that we might not have had, they might have a lot more of a lot more than we ever could, but there are some sporting memories they will never have. India beating the West Indies in the Prudential World Cup in 1983 marked the start of India’s dominance of world cricket. India’s victory in the mini-world cup in Australia in 1985 (Ravi Shastri – man of the series and an Audi to boot!) continue that trend. Of course with these warm memories, we also have the traumatic one: Javed Miandad hitting Chetan Sharma for a six off a full-toss last ball when Pakistan needed four to win in Sharjah. Those of us of a certain age haven’t really recovered from that either. We can all remember where we were when those events occurred, what we were doing and the joy or crushing sorrow that followed each of them.

But besides these, two other memories stand out. And having arrived at a riper age, I am now able to appreciate those memories and sporting efforts much more than I did in my callow youth.

It was 1987, summer was approaching, and I’m not entirely sure how I managed to watch so much sporting action in that week of March, final exams must have been in a week or so, but yet I did and I’m quite thankful for that.

The Indian tennis team in those days comprised Vijay Amritraj and Ramesh Krishnan. Vijay was 34 or 35, his glory days were well past, but the Davis Cup always seemed to bring out the best in him. He was a natural on grass and could serve and volley with the best of them. This was around the time that tennis was transitioning away from the Borg/Connors style of play to the current style that was introduced by Becker, Edberg and the rest. Ramesh was always a curious anachronism, his serves so soft, his volleys silken smooth, his baseline play all touch no power. One imagined Rod Laver playing that way, but a player in the age of colour television? But there they were, Vijay and Ramesh waging battle against younger, more powerful, and higher ranked players in a sport that seemed not have room for them any more.

India was playing the Davis Cup quarterfinal against Argentina (in New Delhi perhaps?), and at the end of 2 days of play, Vijay had won the opening game, Ramesh had lost his to Martin Jaite, Argentina had won the doubles, and Vijay was now playing the return singles match against Jaite.

Simultaneously, India was playing Pakistan in a cricket test match in Bangalore. This was going to Sunil Gavaskar’s last test match, at 37 years old and many cricket records deep, Gavaskar was finally going to call it a day. The Bangalore pitch was a disgrace. Mostly loose dirt and cracks, the ball was unpredictable from day one. Pakistan was skittled out on day one for a pitiful score (116) and it wasn’t clear which way the match would go. Would India manage to pull it off or would the pitch truly wreak havoc getting worse from day one to day four? On day two, India managed 145, Vengsarkar managing a 50 in the process. Pakistan came back in, and set India a target of 221.

In the meantime, things were getting exciting at the tennis game. Vijay was playing Martin Jaite in the reverse singles game. Vijay was 35 years old, playing a 21 year old Jaite and getting beaten up. Down two sets to one, we were at set-point and match-point in the fourth set. The match had gone badly, Vijay was probably looking at going down badly and India was on the verge of getting kicked out of the Davis Cup for the year. Again. Jaite served for the match and the tie, Vijay returned serve, Jaite returned beautifully. The game was on the line, the Davis Cup tie was on the line. At this juncture, Vijay played the sweetest drop volley in the history of the game. What a shot to play at this juncture! The visual from that shot is burned into my sports-memory. Vijay plays the drop shot, Jaite rushes to the net, but can’t make it in time, match-point is lost. Jaite fell to pieces after that point as Vijay went from strength to strength. As an adrenalin-fueled Vijay recovered, fist-pumping his victories, the Indian supporters went crazy in the stands. At the end of it all, five sets later, Vijay had just handed Jaite the thrashing of his life. A match where Jaite had tasted victory had now ended with India having a fighting chance in the last match of the tie. Ramesh Krishnan went on to win that match as well, India won through, then played Israel in the quarter finals, won against Australia (including Wimbledon-winner Pat Cash) in the semi-finals and went on to the finals. The finals were against Sweden. In Sweden. In December. Sweden at the time featured Mats Wilander and Anders Jarryd, both unstoppable on clay. Of course they played on clay. India didn’t have a chance. But the memory of that unbelievable display by a 35-year old player stays with me. As I get older, I realize what it really meant for a 35-year old to play at the level that he did. As I think about it today, I still get the goosebumps.

In Bangalore, India was in chasing 221 on the fourth innings of a disastrous pitch. Nothing would go right for India. Losing to Pakistan was unthinkable but India was falling apart. In Gavaskar’s last test match yet. But Gavaskar, 37 years old, was not about to go away so easily. I remember sitting at home and watching him inch his way towards his century. At the other end, the batsmen wouldn’t stay long enough to give him company. As the wickets fell, the situation got more dire. Gavaskar was our last hope. At 96, if Gavaskar could manage to hang on for a century and then some, India would be home safe, Gavaskar would have one final century in his last game, and Bangalore would be happy. But even Gavaskar was no match for that treacherous pitch. All innings-long the ball had been obscured by the great mounds of dust kicked up every time the ball bounced or any other action took place. Even the great one would succumb to this treachery, and he did at 96. Four short of a century, and a victory that India could just about taste. But once Gavaskar was gone, so too were all hopes of a victory. The Indian tail was wrapped up shortly thereafter, 16 runs short of glory.

And thus over a weekend and a bit, a young adolescent watched some great sporting action that would stay with him for a lifetime. As I’ve grown older I’ve come to appreciate a lot more what that must have meant for Amritraj and Gavaskar and also what it must have taken out of them to put in the physical and mental effort that they did. It didn’t matter that India had won just one of the two ties at stake, what I had witnessed was some of the finest sporting action to which I would ever be privy.

The ashram is a huge swath of land in San Ramon covering many hills, valleys, lakes, and what appear to be moderate-sized farms. We visited on a Saturday, the only weekend during Amma’s two weekend-Bay Area visit that she would be meeting with the public. “Giving darshan,” as we Indians say.

The main action is centered around an auditorium, a  middling barn-like structure built on the side of a hill. The area around the ashram had been converted into make-shift parking lots, each with a jarring title: the Kailash lot, the Rishikesh lot and so on.

The Punyam Trail to the Parking Lot

The Kailash lot is connected to the auditorium via the Punyam trail that cuts across the intervening hill. No word on whether those who take the longer scenic route to the auditorium are missing out on the short cut to salvation.

As you walk to the event, you are surrounded by cars whose owners proclaim both their love for the mother as well as their extreme liberalism (2-heart-Amma license plates cheek by jowl with bumper stickers sloganeering for Peace) You also find that you are surrounded by a wide variety of Indians, some non-Indian Asians, and a large number of Caucasians dressed in white kurtas, salwars, and donning beads and necklaces. It is then that you realize that this combination of Indian and white is only seen in one other type of event in the Bay Area: classic rock concerts. Those who have been will recognize this readily: if you went to a Roger Waters or Mark Knopfler or Jethro Tull concert in the Bay Area in the nineties you would have come upon a curious demographic mix, old baby boomer Americans with tie dyes, pony tails and young twenty-something Indians raised on a steady diet of  classic rock. Replace the older hippies with a younger version, and you have the demographic mix of the “mother” events. As you approach the auditorium, you realize that the similarity to a rock concert is not entirely incidental, the business model seems to be almost entirely copied. There is one vital difference: the main event, the meeting (and embrace!) with the “mother” is free. But this event is surrounded by commercial merchandising that will take your breath away. To start with, just as the Stones go on tour with the prominent “lick” logo, so does the “mother.” She comes complete with a swooshy logo that would make Nike proud, as well as a slogan for the North American leg of her tour (Embracing the World, natch). Everything is on sale with a high markup. Books, tapes, CDs, holy water, holy ash, holy sandal wood, holy incense, holy puja material, holy everything, all duly blessed. Pictures and paintings of doubtful artistic value but incalculable blessing value. Food of doubtful nutritional and even less culinary value. But the one that had me gasping for air was the table with the offerings to the mother. Devotees like to take offerings to the mother when they gain darshan. Towards this, they can buy at this table a small box of Hershey’s kisses for $4 or a large bag of the same candy for $7. This is chutzpah that would make Donald Trump proud. Buy the items at Costco for a cheap $1-$2, sell them to a devotee at around 4x the price and then, follow me carefully here, get it right back from the devotee as an offering.

‘I don’t understand why you buy eggs for seven cents apiece in Malta and sell them for five cents’
‘I do it to make a profit’
‘But how can you make a profit? You lose two cents an egg.’
‘But I make a profit of three and a quarter cents an egg by selling them for four and a quarter cents an egg to the people in Malta I buy them for seven cents an egg. Of course, I don’t make a profit. The syndicate makes the profit. And everybody has a share.’
Yossarian felt he was beginning to understand. ‘And the people you sell the eggs to at four and a quarter cents apiece make a profit of two and three quarter cents apiece when they sell them back to you at seven cents apiece. Is that right? Why don’t you sell the eggs directly to you to eliminate the people you buy them from?’
‘Because I’m the people I buy them from’, Milo explained.

– Joseph Heller, Catch-22

At least Milo would be proud.

Once you’re past the curious demographics, the branding and the commercialism you finally find the groupies. You can’t have a rock concert without them, and the same goes for a  darshan. There they are, overcome by the mere sight of the lovely lady, alternately rapturous and stunned into speechless wonderment. I was put in mind of this one time that I ran into Vijay Amritraj at the Leela in Bangalore and my jaw dropped to the floor as I stood there and reminisced about his game-changing performance at the Davis Cup against Martin Jaite. I found myself strangely immobile, overcome by the dueling emotions of wanting to fall on my knees and kiss his ring and simultaneously unable to do anything lest this heavenly apparition suddenly disappear. I’ve never  been much for the divine souls myself, but I must imagine the feeling on encountering the amma is somewhat similar.

All told, I suppose the most egregious aspect of the experience was encountering such a blatantly capitalistic enterprise cloaked in so much anti-materialistic spiritualism. In a sense, it is a matter of  some not insubstantial aspiration and achievement that a mere girl from the fishing villages of Kerala has ascended to the head of a huge multi-million (billion?) dollar enterprise, and who am I to fault her for her enterprise and gumption if this is how she chose to get there. On the other hand, it leaves one with the realisation that perhaps nothing is really sacred any more, not even the sacred. That takes getting used to, when I get there, perhaps I’ll have true zen.

Superficially, it is a movie about one Rancho a smart student at ICE, India’s best engineering college, and his two friends who are less smart but at the same premier engineering college, trying to get through their four years as best as they can while at the same time having fun. It is supposedly a jolly ride through college, nostalgic scenes about hostels and dorm rooms abound, but it is also a vain attempt to take the education system to task for taking some of our best people and turning them into something they would never have wanted to be.

Spoilers after the jump!

It is hard to find many redeeming qualities in the movie. It starts with the premise of the movie. This movie is one of the following:

• Slapstick comedy in an Indian college: In which case, give me a couple hours of slapstick and send me home happy. Enough with the preaching, stop with the aimless tear-jerking, and why have the romantic side-story that adds nothing to the movie?
• A critique of the Indian education system: In which case, why is it that the two characters in the movie who are contending for “success” (and find it in different ways) are actually products of that system? It’s not as if they went outside the system to find success. It’s not as if the system failed them and they rose despite the system.
• An exhortation to follow your passion: Really? In India? How many people in India have that luxury? One of the main characters in the movie comes from a family that is so dirt poor they have to be depicted in ironic black and white. And yet, the sole hope of the family, their son studying at India’s top engineering school is exhorted to drop this engineering shit and follow his dream. I mean, What The Fuck? Really? Really? He should follow his stupid dream to do whatever it is he wants to do instead of helping his family get out of the poverty rut they are in by studying well and getting an engineering degree and getting himself a good job?

So much for the ill-thought premise, what of the story? See the first half of the story deals with the characters and their time spent at ICE. The second half suddenly turns into a story of filling the pieces of the puzzle in a whodunit-style impersonation caper. Mostly, the story is supposed to be about Rancho, a super-smart guy who is at engineering school but believes that an education has to be less about teaching students book-knowledge and more about teaching them to I’m-really-not-sure-what. Unfortunately, this is never really explored, perhaps it is that an education should teach students to think for themselves, perhaps it is to be good engineers, perhaps it is to have fun and not waste those important years of their lives, I’m not sure, because while we’re told what the system should not be, we’re rarely told what it should be. We get a glimpse of what it could be like: little Buddhist monk kids creating their own biomass power generator mounted on a cheap bicycle, that might be it, I’m not sure. Our whip-smart hero is accompanied by his two best friends who are apparent misfits in the world of engineering and would rather be doing something else, but here they are. The obligatory nerd who focuses on studies and hard work at the expense of all else and has no life or spirit of fun is the butt of many jokes because he, well, he works hard at whatever he does, and as we all know that defeats the point of college. The nerd (Chatur Ramalingam, if you wondered how creative the writers were), shows up in the movie as having eventually immigrated to the States, earned millions of dollars, and is now found owning a Lamborghini and other such crass symbols of extreme wealth, but none of this counts as success because, I kid you not, he is prone to silent farts. At the risk of repeating myself, WTF?

Now the thing is: most good stories need their main characters to have an arc. The Ramayana? Arc! Mahabharata? Arc! Shakespeare: Oh so arcy! Sholay? Arc! Godfather? Citizen Kane? R.K. Narayan? Vikram Seth? Salman Rushdie? This is not to claim that you can’t tell a good story without the arc. But you have to be an exceptionally good story teller to pull it off. The conventional way is usually safest, stick an arc in there, and it’ll work out. Look for the arc here: Exceptionally brilliant, whip-smart guy comes to college, buddies up with 2 other “idiots” to have a gala time at school, while there teaches the school authorities a little something about the education system, the nerd about not being so nerdy, and his friends about chasing their dreams, then leaves for the Himalayas to invent stuff. Um! Let’s try variations:

• Whip-smart but lazy guy comes to college, discovers that competition abounds, yet insists on having fun. Through four years of college, and initially failing at the college thing, he learns the value of hard work while teaching the rest of the establishment the value of a real education and having fun at the same time.
• Super smart, talented guy comes to college but finds that college kills more minds than it nurtures. Fails to come to grips with the rat-race, but works to overcome the institutional lethargy and resistance to change, finally succeeding at showing them what really matters
• Super smart, talented guy comes to college only to find that he and others like him do not have conventional smarts, but are really good at seeing the world through creative eyes. With the help of a benevolent teacher, they rewrite what it means to succeed at college, and at the end come together with their conventionally smart contemporaries to create things of amazing beauty.

None of this presupposes a medium. This could fit into a comedy, an uplifting-feel-good story, a coming of age story, anything at all depending on how it is told. (That last plot I wrote up is from one Taare Zameen Par, Aamir Khan might remember it) But the arc is what keeps the viewer’s attention. When a smart guy comes to college, decries the education system, but nevertheless tops the exams every year of college, graduates at the top of his class, and goes on to invent 400 things over the course of the next 10 years, all the while being this unconventional guy who thinks outside the box, what exactly grabs you? Why do we care what happens in the next act, when we know nothing will change?

Speaking of Rancho, did he really have to be super-smart? Would it have killed the movie if he was an outside-the-box thinker, fun to be with but couldn’t succeed in a conventional education system? At least that makes the character relatable to a mass audience. Take the four main characters: boy from a poor family who is in India’s best college because that’s his family’s way out of poverty yet on arrival there he finds that he’s not really sure what he wants to do; boy from middle class family whose parents want him to go to engineering school but who himself would rather be a photographer; boy from another middle class family who is super-nerdy, socially ill-equipped yet driven to “succeed” in the “conventional way” by studying hard, mugging his books, and making lots of money; lucky boy who could solve 10th-grade math problems at the age of 10, thus taken under the wing of a rich industrialist who pays for the boy’s education, needs no textbooks to tell him what to do, able to create things at a moment’s notice, and eventual holder of 400 patents. Now, which of these is a relatable main character for a story that decries the Indian education system? Or a relatable character to encourage people to chase their dreams? Or a relatable character, period! And guess which one is the main character of this movie. Even Superman had a bumbling alter-ego. Our hero Rancho brooks no imperfections.

Some people in this world are very very talented. The rest of us just have to work hard at whatever we do. That’s just the way things work. No prizes for guessing the film’s opinion of hard work or people who work hard. It’s important to follow your passion. Even if you’re dirt poor, don’t bother with the working-hard stuff. Indeed one of the episodes in the movie deals with the poor guy going off to hang with the nerd because he wants to work hard for his family’s sake. What does our main man Rancho do? He extracts the guy from there because working hard is so lame and over-rated. Let’s party instead. And oh yeah, I’ll kick your ass when finals come around. And get this, apparently that’s what Lata Mangeshkar and Sachin Tendulkar did, follow their passion and not work hard at what their dad picked for them. Leave aside for the moment that Mangeshkar started her singing career because after her father’s death there was no other way to earn money, that very few of us are as talented as Mangeshkar, are we really about to argue that Mangeshkar spends all her time partying and just shows up at the studio to record and score one hit after another?

One of the recurring themes in 3 Idiots is a praise for slacker morals. We are told that the morals of the people working in the system are suspect. Why, the nerd slips porn magazines under the doors of his dorm-mates the night before the exam to guarantee himself top grade. In similar fashion, other insiders reveal their dubious morals also, presumably this is how we are forced to act by our corrupt education system. Which is all well until the main characters start making some ethically dubious choices also. Then it’s either all fun and games, and who but the most uptight among us could be against fun and games, or it’s vital for the characters to work the system which is all well also. It is thus that Rancho humiliates the nerd and also how our man Rancho justifies stealing the questions to the final exam.

My final quibble with the movie has to do with the awful story-telling style. Almost all of the movie is told in flashback. Not that there is anything wrong with that, in the hands of a skilful story teller that could be an asset, in the hands of the film makers in this case it’s a liability. The way they tell it robs it of all dramatic tension, most of the time we already know how things will work out, and in a 2.5+ hour movie that can get quickly get tiring.

There is still a movie to be made about the fun to be had in college. There is still a movie to be made about India’s woeful education system, and at the Blandings Media Empire, we’ve written before about how the system screws over the very people it is meant to serve, however 3 Idiots is neither of those movies. What it is instead is a poorly made movie, low on creativity, slapped together with very little forethought for what the real outcome should be, mediocre in every respect and eventually resting for its laurels on how much money it can make from the rate of admission, promising one thing delivering quite nothing at all, in so doing able to generate huge returns for its promoters. Resembling thus the very education system it seeks to pillory, it only makes sense that it evokes such strong feelings of nostalgia among its audience.

The “avatar” in the movie refers to a trance-like state that humans enter when they are asked to “drive” laboratory-made specimens of Pandora’s native people. When they enter this trance, their avatar wakes up and “lives” in the “outside world,” when the avatar goes to sleep, the humans wake up out of the trance and live in the “real world” inside the lab. Pandora is a beautiful world full of lush greenery, wonderful animals, pretty blue people, and plants and trees that are all connected to each other via their roots. It is a wonderfully imagined world in which one can lose oneself, one imagines repeated watchings of the movie would reveal new rich detail that one had previously missed, the effort that went into the design of this world is obvious. The viewer is easily lost in this beauty, almost trance-like one might say, until he hears a clunker of a line and is jarred back into the harsh reality of an especially poorly written Hollywood blockbuster.

We recommend that this movie be watched in Imax 3-D, preferably with the sound turned off. As a spectacle this movie has no peers. It reminded us of the first time we watched Toy Story, or the Matrix, or even, Terminator 2, each of those times we left the movie theater feeling as if we had just participated in a very moving experience, but even those movies are not a scratch on Avatar’s beauty. With a less obvious plot and better writing, Avatar could have made our list of greatest movies of the decade, as it is, it makes the grade of movies that must be watched, but once only.

Many people have written quite eloquently about the obvious anti-imperialist white-guilt message of the movie. We have but one thing to add. Not all societies plundered by the white man were like the native Americans. That is all.

Sita Sings the Blues is available for high quality download on a Creative Commons license on the film maker’s website. In a world of poor-quality torrents downloaded by eager yet thrifty flat-screen-TV-owning movie buffs, that alone would qualify it for a dekko. Of all the characters in the Ramayana, Sita cuts the most tragic figure. She loves deeply and is married to God-incarnate, the most just and pious man as well as one of the greatest archers in the history of the universe, and yet she is always forsaken by Rama, until she finally takes matters into her own hands and leaves him (and the Earth) forever. This movie is dedicated to telling Sita’s story, as a universal story of womanhood. The movie is animated by Nina Paley who inserts her own story in parallel, one of having her heart broken by a man who leaves her for good when he gets a job in India. The animation is of varying quality, sometimes it is represented by Mughal-era and other ancient Indian paintings speaking the lines of Rama, Sita and so on, sometimes in crude drawings of a South Park like quality, and at other times by an impossibly curvy Sita and equally impossibly muscular Rama doing their Bollywood-inspired movie singing to the backing blues-vocals of Annette Hanshaw. But at all times the animation works. All along, the story of Sita (and Rama and the rest of the Ramayana cast) is told by apparently India-born youth trying to recollect as best as they can the story of the Ramayana, interspersed with musings on a childhood story by adults as they try to mine hidden-depths and back-stories of an ill-remembered epic. A certain irreverence pervades the movie, but it never descends to crude parody or atheistic preaching. Mostly it sounds like the story of the Ramayana as would be discussed by Indian youth today when they are sure their parents are out of earshot. The movie comes with an incredibly beautiful soundtrack. Almost all the songs are by Annette Hanshaw whose turn of the early-20th-century songs seem to have been written precisely for use in this movie. One of those that are not by her, the Rama-praising song sung by Lava and Kusha is comedic genius. We hummed it for days afterward.

For those of us of a certain age, the Channel-V promotions featuring Quick Gun Murugan hold a special place in our hearts. The 30-second parodies of Westerns, Rajnikanth, and south Indians in general made in the service of our MTV variant captured perfectly the adolescent zeitgeist of early 90s India. We were very excited when Quick Gun the movie was released and finally got a chance to watch it recently. The film delivers on every count: as a rich parody of Tamil and other South Indian films, as a parody of Westerns and most of all as a way to lose yourself for an hour and a half in well written and almost always well executed comedy. Dr Rajendra Prasad is brilliant as Quick Gun Murugan, he even manages to parody himself very effectively. Both Sita and Quick Gun are well-timed reminders that one does not need a lot of money to make a great movie just good writing, good acting, and a lot of imagination.

There’s a Walgreen just off Fair Oaks. The location looks a little dubious, why would there be a Walgreen just off the main road, but maybe it covers an entire block. I haven’t ever seen a Walgreen at the location indicated, but maybe I haven’t been paying attention. So off I go to this location, and of course there is no Walgreen at this place. Quite annoying, to say the least. I assume that perhaps Google Maps is confused and get on with the rest of my life. On a whim, I pull up Google on my iPhone the next day and search for pharmacies in sunnyvale, and I find that Google search on the iPhone also thinks there’s a pharmacy at that location. Only it’s a Longs. And here’s what’s really cool about this. The address says El Camino Real, but the location on the map says Fair Oaks and just north of Maude. WTF? Seriously, WTF?

First they gave the prize to the guy who lost to G.W. Bush. Now they’re giving it to the guy who succeeded him. Next year, give it to W’s parents and Jeb and they will have made their point abundantly clear. Talk about your soft bigotry of low expectations.

What, did the world suddenly run out of polio-eliminating and poverty-alleviating organizations?

As my friend Ravi says, they should have given Obama the Literature Prize instead, for the artful and innovative use of language to try and create world peace.

Muslims around the world are rejoicing, and he even gave his likeness to a Quran give-away promotion. He’s obviously planning on starting with converting us multiple-God believing Hindus before he charms his way across America. Found on Airport Road in Bangalore:

Obama's Secret Muslim Handshake