I like a lot of movies that were Best Picture Oscar winners. Gandhi, Amadeus, Chariots of Fire, Gladiator, American Beauty... I can go on. This year's best picture winner in my opinion was a terrible movie. I think the basic plot shouldn't have holes for a picture to be great. Acting, directing, cinematography, can only go so far. No Country for Old Men had a weak plot.
<--------Spoiler Warning-----> The first half of the movie is slightly interesting. The protagonist and the villain are both trying to pot a million dollars neither own. One of them is poor and good, the other is devil incarnate, randomly killing people for no good reason. And guess who finally stays alive and free? Tommy Lee Jones plays a cop with an undecipherable Texas accent. In fact a Texan friend complained that he couldn't figure out what was being said in many parts.
In comparison some of the other nominees were much better. Juno, for instance was a simple funny movie, again with great acting and major names. Among my favorite movies this year was Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis". It is the story of an Iranian girl growing up during the Iranian Revolution in the form of graphic novel. Simply brilliant. It makes a big statement, about the proletariat, how some people use "opiate of the masses" to create a repressive society.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
I want to become a scientist!
As a school-going kid I used to love science with all my heart. There were a few things which contributed to my love for the field. Television was one of them. I loved watching a series called Horizon, which used to show on BBC World every week. One of the first episodes I watched was called "Molecules with Sunglasses". It was the story of how Harry Kroto and Richard Smalley discovered a new isotope of Carbon called C60.(Both won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1996 for this discovery.) Apart from graphite and diamond, carbon has an allotrope made up of 60 atoms. One of the stories on this episode discussed how they discovered the shape of the new molecule. The two scientists spent a lot of time wondering what the molecule might look like, and finally realized that it consisted of a pentagon surrounded by a hexagon on each side. After talking to a few more people they realized that this was exactly how a football is made... a black leather pentagon surrounded by 6 white leather hexagons.
Soon I became a Horizon regular. One of my favourite episodes was converted into a book, "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out". It was an interview with Richard Feynman. I've added a link to the same here:
School allowed me to develop my interest in science even further. Loyola had a fabulous library and all students were allowed to borrow one non-fiction and one fiction book every week. Non-fiction used to be simple for me. I borrowed all sorts of books about science. Relativity, Quantum Physics, biographies of Galileo, Einstein, Newton.... Fiction I only read books about Sherlock Holmes. During one of the lunch reference sessions, I remember trying to read the Principia Mathematica, although I didn't understand anything at all.
Then in class 8 I was selected to spend a summer at IUCAA in Pune, the Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. I wrote a student paper about the sun and it's energy generation and learnt about nuclear fusion. I loved the life of a scientist at IUCAA and loved going there everyday on my bicycle riding through the University. Everything was so clean and organized and well-designed. The lawns in the center of the institute were impressive. There were statues of Einstein, Newton and Aryabhatta I think. The highlight of the lawns was an apple tree, believed to be a direct descendant of the Apple tree under which Newton sat before discovering gravity. One of the lawns was a fractal, with an equilateral triangle being split into more equilateral triangles. There was also a Foucault's pendulum in one of the corridors. I could almost imagine getting older there.
The Exploratory was another favourite for me. It was started by two former physics professors at the University of Pune I think. Professor VG Bhide and Professor Desai I remember very distinctly. We played with a lot of things at this science lab, from7400 series ICs, to vedic mathematics... and from electrolytes to experiments with applied mechanics. And come summer, the Exploratory summer camp consisted of numerous scientists giving one hour talks about their work in layperson terms. Lovely! The best time of my life!
