Variety is the spice of life

Thani Oruvan - After a long time a movie that impressed. Director of the movie is well known for his penchant for remaking telugu hits in tamil. This being his first ever original script and the kind of reception for it must be encouraging for him. Supposedly four years in making, it goes on to prove that be it Holly Bolly or Tolly, whatever be the wood, the script is always the king.  The movie has a slightly different plot. The hero and villain are no way linked like other movies. They dont have a vengeance angle, family feud or any other previously seen story lines where their paths meet. The honest cop of a hero "selects" a villain of his match by implicitly using 80:20 principle. By negating the core evil he would address 80% of the problems and remaining 20 can be addressed on priority. He prepares charts and burns midnight oil, literally, to track the villain with slight similarities to Gajini movie. The villain is not your every movie, sickle weilding paan chewin...

Read an article last week that a factory in China has totally replaced their manpower with robots. While it was a 1:10 replacement ratio between manual workers and robots, the productivity increased in indirect proportion. The news was right out of a Hollywood sci-fi movie. It was just a footnote on the local newspaper, yet its significance couldn't be lost for the burgeoning human populace. Whenever robots replacing manual workers concept is thrown is, predominantly its the auto industry which comes into focus. For they are always R&D heavy and any "cutting" new technology makes it appearance on their work floor before visiting anywhere else. How far has technology caught up in other domains? Nowadays, sitting in one continent and remotely performing surgery on a patient are becoming a regular feature. Will robots give doctor a run for their medical money? Will the patients prefer a human face gauging their illness and providing a scribbled note for prescr...

I have always wanted to learn multiple foreign languages with Japanese, Spanish, French and German taking the top slots as favourites. Somehow i could never think of the local Indian languages be it southern or those spoken up above the Vindhyas as foreign, even though they are as alien. Jai ho to the concept of linguistic divide and diversified unity. When i think back as to the reason why, the first thing that comes to mind is the pride and respect that one can command by knowing so many languages. Being the lazybones that i am, i couldn't drag myself beyond a few classes i had enrolled, for i realized my want was much more than learning a few syllables here and there and a know-how to pass a casual comment now and then. A cousin of mine managed to make a career out of her linguistic skills and is now a successful editor for many a Japanese text. I never had such inhibitions as well. To me learning a language is a much more complicated task. Languages are not just a...