Chak De!

This movie is doing the rounds, a lot of them(rounds) in fact, and raking in the moolah. Went to watch it, did not like it as much as everyone thought everyone else would (or should). After being told this and that (mostly derogatory this' and thats) about my taste and outlook, well, no qualms or issues. But this was really it, the last straw. Obviously, raving and ranting about it in an email to the editor won't do much good, so thought i'll do the same here.

There are probably things one can appreciate in this movie, though none of them appeared to my cinematically retarded mind. But one thing you cannot say is that the movie is original. Anyone who watches Hollywood will have seen scores of such films with baseball or basketball or football (American ishtyle), in all kinds of movies: drama, comedy, tragedy, horror, any combination of the above. Some of the passages in that horrendous piece of feminist (If one can call it that) rhetoric are worth quoting:

None of these is a Hindi Film cliche. They are all
individuals ....

Excellent. The girl who tries to seduce the coach to get her a prominent position in the team, one who tries to prove a point to her boyfriend by scoring a copious amount of goals against the best defences in the world (which are completely bamboozled by her wizardry with the stick, leaving her usually in a one on one situation with the goalie), a girl who gives up her self prestige for a higher cause, none of these are cliches, because they are not portrayed by cliched men, but women! And wonder of wonders, they are all individuals! And all the time I was thinking they were parts of some giant amoeba out to take over the world! The only characters that are developed (however little) in the movie are that of SRK, Chandigarh based hot-babe, the goalie. Naik, to some extent maybe, but the rest are there just to fill up the team. How one can call 'all of these' as 'individuals' is left to the reader's imagination to fill up. Just to take the gender point of view further, why a man lead a women's team ? Are there no competent women to coach, even in the fantasy world of Bollywood ?

As to the question if a Hindi film can alter deep rooted prejudices, the answer lies .... applause richocheting through cinema halls ..... Beating the daylights out of men who whistle.

Right. Hooliganism, if practiced by women is called empowerment. God knows where the author learnt about freedom or empowerment, it definitely was not from Gandhi. I may not know the problems a Delhi woman faces, but it can be debated as to whether beating up eve-teasers is going to solve anything. And people applauding loudly is a sign of alteration of deep rooted prejudices. People applauded with greater gusto during the screening of Rang De Basanti, but (un?)fortunately, our youth did not take the matter of governance into their own hands. Wonder why.

And the cliche smashing scenes roll on: woman risks marriage .... girl ... won't stop playing hockey ... cricketer boyfriend .. player offers herself coach .. realizes ... without self respect will only go so far and no further...

Won't even try to comment about this. The author has seen quite a lot of movies for somone who realizes that all movies are mere cliched, male chauvinist portrayals.

The women sweat not in kitchens ....like ... Barjatya films .. dance bars and steam baths to appease voyeurs.. but on hockey field. They are asexual creatures though not dispassionate. They play unselfconsciously ....

Asexual ? biologically, this means these ladies are quite like bacterium. Another instance of social sciences borrowing metaphors from the natural ones, thus making them devoid of meaning and ambiguous. If it means that they do not look smouldering sexually on the screen, I don't see why this is such a great deal. The author's gripe about sexuality expressed on the screen 'from a male view' must elaborate on what a 'male view' is and what expression of sexuality from a 'female view' is. Maybe then the poor directors will stop making such raunchy flicks and try to appeal to a larger demographic. About the unselfconsciousness part, well, even item numbers portray the actresses as quite unselfconscious. The author seems more conscious about their unselfconsciousness than the players themselves. Ask a sportswoman in whatever sport, she would not consider herself to be an 'asexual being' playing 'unselfconsciously'. She is just playing, for the love of playing. The psychological embellishments add no substance to the argument.

And so on and so forth ... The director seems to be a decent man trying to make a honest buck by showing people what they want to see, and reading feminist victories in cinema after 60 years of oppression by the 'male view' seems to be going too far.

What is freedom ?

Statutory Warning: Content that follows may be unsuitable for science, math, engineering majors, and similar juveniles.

Was reading (yet!) another book, this one is named Political Ideas in the Romantic Age by Isaiah Berlin. Halfway through, and there is definitely no way I will review this book, being far too philosophical in content. So, thought I'll just write a few words about the central theme of the book, or rather set of lectures compiled into a book.

Berlin was a professional philosopher and became interested in politics (like most people in his time, living through two world wars). The idea that Berlin explores is that any work of a (wo)man is only understood fully with reference to the context of the time that (s)he lived in. Hence, he explores the history of the political ideas of the most turbulent times in recent European history in terms of conflicting views, opinions and philosophies, the 18th and 19th centuries. He does not delve into deep analysis of each and every philosopher (Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Helvetius, Bentham, Adam Smith, Rousseau ......), rather, he tries to capture the spirit of the age, or as is popularly known, the zeitgeist.

For Berlin, the central question of political philosophy is "Why should one man obey another ?" and from here flows the logical successors : "What is more important, obedience to the State or personal liberty ?"; "Can a person be subservient and still claim to be free?" . Taking this as the starting point, the solutions proposed by various stalwarts of the Enlightenment and beyond are explored, will not go into the details, as promised.

The central talking point of the presently read 100-odd pages are two words : does and should. The question is not why does a man obey, but rather, why should a man obey. The first question can be answered by empirical data, the second question is far more difficult to answer. If someone can write 250+ pages showing how people confused does and should, or even took does and should to be identical, it no doubt will not be easy reading :D

On a more earthly level, the questions posed are quite interesting even to the non-professional (and hence more creative) philosophers, which consists of most of the humans on this planet. What does it mean to be free ? Why should we bow down before a King or a Prime Minister ? Can duty toward a State be consistent with the idea of personal freedom ? Does being free necessarily imply that you are happy ? Take the case of Singapore. Quite a wealthy state, but absolutely no freedom. Take the case of some Sub-Saharan nomadic tribe : not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but as much freedom as the breadth of the Sahara (barring visa restrictions ;). What relation exists between money and freedom ? Does one increase proportionally with the other ? Or upto a certain limit ? Can we say Anil Ambani is more free than a naked wandering Jain monk ? If yes, why ? If no, why ? Can there be singular answers to such questions ?

Yup, the spectrum over which we can analyse is huge and very interesting. Most of these will at the end turn out to be subjective issues. But are there objective metrics which we can use, if not to answer all questions, atleast to serve as indicators ? Can social policy be formulated with regard to such parameters ? How easy or difficult will it be to empirically measure these parameters to ascertain the progress of an implemented policy ? What can be considered as a viable endpoint in development programmes which involve such parameters ? Most of the questions in this paragraph were raised in class today by Ashok Rao, and most of this semester will go into trying to answer such things, if possible.

The approach to development lies in these questions, one intuitively feels. One can approach development from the pseudo(or quasi?)-scientific outlook of the social sciences like economics or sociology, or from the (more pseudo?) philosophical/empirical basis delineated above, in a highly nebulous form. This course is turning out to be fun :D

LED lighting : when rather than if !

For the past few months, I have been looking at alternate lighting using LEDs. These devices show tremendous promise with regard to power saving, ease of use, and durability. So, thought would write a post for spread of info and concretizing my own readings.

LEDs, especially white LEDs are coming in big time into the market, and you can see them in all sizes and shapes in small flashlights and mobiles phones instead of flash bulbs. The biggest volume market right now is for low wattage(less power consuming) LEDs and Chinese goods are simply flooding the market. However, there is a silent background revolution happening, led by Philips, Cree, Nichia and Seoul Semiconductor. There is also an Indian company in the fray, based in Hyderabad. These and many other companies are trying to bring out high power LEDs which have direct applications in home and architectural lighting. These are rated in the range 1 Watt to 5 Watt. In contrast, the LEDs are found in your phones and flashlights are in the in the 200 milliWatt or less range, around one-fifth of the big guys.

These light sources are among the most efficient light sources available today, with efficiencies comparable with Compact Flourescent Lamps(CFL). However, most CFLs do not add the power consumed by a choke present on every lamp, and hence are usually less efficient than claimed. The unit of brightness is called lumen, and both LEDs and CFLs have an efficiency of around 50 lumen/Watt. In contrast, normal incandescent bulbs have an efficiency of 15 lumen/Watt! This implies you can replace a 100 Watt bulb with a 30 Watt CFL or LED and not perceive a difference in brightness. However, the light emitted by normal bulbs is more pleasing to the eye when compared to the other two. Therefore, you can see amber coloured CFLs and LEDs, neither of which have made a big dent in the market as of now, but promise to.

If CFLs are as good as LEDs, then why the whole fuss of typing out a whole post on them ? LEDs have many advantages, despite the fact that those in the market are only as efficient as CFLs.

• Prototype LEDs are available in labs of the above mentioned companies which are as efficient as 100 lumen/watt. However, most of these are sub 1 Watt category as of now. With all companies scrambling to outdo each other, this situation is likely to be rectified very soon.
• LEDs are solid state lighting devices, which means that they have no moving, breakable parts unlike either CFLs or bulbs. This means they can be used in more extreme places and applications.
• They are made from established manufacturing methods which make all our computer chips so cheap, which means at large volumes, the cost of lighting will be negligible. (Note: companies might keep cost high initially to recover cost. But once the Chinese get their hands on the technology, it should come down :) Evidence is available in the cost at which you get cheap LED based chinese goods. )
• These lights can be dimmed to suitable requirements, which is not an option on the CFLs. Bulbs can do this, but they do not even figure in the discussion.
• For spot lighting applications, where the light is required in only a particular area (street lights), LEDs are more suitable than the conventional tubelights (Sodium vapor lamps are not considered, since they are the most efficient lighting solutions with efficiencies of 150 lumen/Watt, but they are high voltage lights, and not used everywhere.) since they have a small angle beyond which the light output is almost zero. This means that all the light is focused onto a small area, unlike tubelights which radiate light every which way, which is essentially a waste of light.
• These run on DC current, which means that they can run off batteries in areas which do not have access to grid power. With suitable circuits, they can even run on AC current. These are cheap circuits and do not require as much circus work as running CFLs on DC, which require another kind of light itself.
• The (claimed) lifetime of LED lights is around 10,000 hours, which works out to be close to 10 years of operation. In comparison, CFLs have an average lifetime of 5-7 years, and forget about bulbs.
• The size of CFLs increases significantly with wattage increase, not so with LEDs.

My own tests with Kwality India's 1 Watt LEDs have been very promising. From a technical perspective, these babies require constant current rather than constant voltage, (which is what all our wall sockets and adaptors provide) but this issue has been solved as well, in a cheap way without resorting to expensive LED driver chips. There is a loss in efficiency, but not enough to give anyone sleepless nights. 4 LEDs and a driver circuit drawing a total power of around 5 watts gives enough light to illuminate a 40ft x 10ft area with reasonable amount of light, comparable to a 40 watt tubelight. These tests were subjective, but we can be sure that tests with a light meter won't be too far off as well. These lights will eventually find their way into streetlights in Timbaktu. Hopefully, very soon, will write about it when it happens.
So, why does not anyone as yet have LED lights in their house ? Packaging, lack of awareness, high prices (low volume :( ) all have contributed to this. Hopefully, this will change soon.