Are we taking our Marathi baana (pride) too far? a few weeks ago I reluctantly accompanied my friend who is a native of Kanpur to the MSRTC (ST) bus depot. He wanted to reserve a ticket for Nashik. Before I go further, I want to clarify that my friend is an educated MBA and a computer Engineer from a reputed institute and not the typical Paraprantiya (outsider) that one would associate with North Indians. Anyway, with his credentials in mind I didn’t know what the fuss was about and why was he asking me to come along? shouldn’t it be easy for any commoner to negotiate from the time-table, pay the exact fare and get his reservation done?! I realised how wrong I was in my logic.
The Dark Knight (2008)
My early memory of a Batman movie had been pink-green-yellow lights, the Gothic comic book sequences and I remember Arnold playing Mr. Freeze in the 1997 movie called Batman & Robin (with George Clooney portraying the superhero – eek!). Since Christopher Nolan has taken over as the director of the new movies he’s moved away from the stereotypical depiction of Batman as just a comic book hero to a more stylised contemporary setting. The Dark Knight is the sequel to Nolan’s 2005 Batman Begins and is made in the mold of a complete action crime thriller. Christian Bale reprises the role of the fictional DC Comics character.
The Revival of SurfUnion
I was in a discussion with a friend last weekend at her swank new office. Suddenly we came across a point in social networking and SurfUnion popped up in my mind. If I ever come out with an autobiography there’s sure going to be a chapter dedicated to SurfUnion — a designers forum of which I was a proud member and an architect. Unfortunately the founding of SurfUnion is more interesting and worth discussing than the way we managed it.
In late 2003, five of my close buddies had wanted to do something worthwhile. We were at best designers with creative skills but worked out of home; some of them like me on a paltry sum. On the night of October 2nd, we launched a ‘designers only’ forum hiring some space on Buttclencher’s server. We decided to call it ‘SurfUnion’ or a group of surfing designers. The name took the imagination of all the admins as we liked to call ourselves and later we were joined by many. One of them was a geeky guy nicknamed Bane and was located in Colombo. Five of us – myself, Kreativea (Aadesh), Buttclencher (Raunaq), RanTen (Ranajit Tendolkar) and FlashKid (Isaac) operated from Mumbai. Thus we had a majority stake in the decision making process while LimeIce (Gursimran) located in Delhi and Ryche (Fahd) in Kolkata completed the admin lineup. The fabulous tagline of ‘We put the Desi in Design’ was suggested by Ryche in one of our online sessions. During our tenure, we arranged competitions and meetups that helped bring varied talents face-to-face.
Breathing Fresh AIR
AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is Adobe’s cross-operating system runtime environment that allows developers to leverage the current technologies like Flash, AJAX, Flex, HTML and JavaScript, and enable the deployment of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to the desktop. Prior to it’s release AIR was codenamed Apollo.
Applications developed using AIR provide a delightful way of presenting live data and one does not need to be connected to the internet all the time. From the visual standpoint, AIR technology offers the power to change the interface design thus bringing a coherence between function and looks. This also greatly enhances the UX of the product and supplements any deficiencies in the original structure. It seems unlikely that the increasing reach of AIR would make the internet browser applications redundant since a majority of the internet population still relies on the software for surfing pages. However as a reminder, the developers and designers must begin earnestly to move towards web standards and help to bring about a consistency in the way content and design is demonstrated online. Till such time get addicted to AIR like me.
Strangers In Love
A short story that I wrote over the weekend. It’s a work of fiction and bears no resemblance to anyone or any incident.
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He meets her on the Internet and very unusually they fall in “love” with each other after a brief chat session. Two “lovers” from diverse cultures and city are brought together by fate and technology. In truth by technology but the two strongly believed it was fate. They exchanged their cell numbers so they could share their happiness and sorrow. This meant endless hours of naughty “love” chirping and philosophical discussions 24/7. A special “happy” ring-tone was set especially for her so he could single her call out from the various others on his cell-phone. When verbal communication was unable to express itself satisfactorily, they would turn instantly to messaging. Wherever they went, their feelings followed just like that through the never-ending tender vocabulary. Tragically she was committed to someone and he was fully aware about it. Yet he believed there was the hand of god that drew them closer to each other everyday and each night. He was full of hope and positive and she thought there was nothing that could separate them. Despite her background she promised to be with him forever.