chakravyuha

Exponential average workbookPlease review the attached Excel workbook. Have I calculated the exponential moving averages correctly?

It’s remarkable how Indian cinema has re-treaded the guy-loves-girl/guy-loses-girl/guy-to-parents-disapproval-followed-by-parents coming around formula for, well, since when they started making films. Bomarillu, from the Telugu film industry, was a colossal hit last year and it too retreads the same formula. You can judge how well a movie did in India (and this is especially true for Telugu films) by how long it takes for them to get released on DVD in the US. For Bomarillu it was a very very long time indeed. After finally watching the movie on DVD (it released recently), it’s easy to understand how it did so well.

One of the reasons is how the relationship between Siddhu (Siddharth, last seen in his wonderful turn as an insolent son in the Amir Khan’s ‘Rang De Basanti’) and his father (Prakash Raj) is portrayed. The father is a domineering man. He is the head of a joint family of eigth, is a successful businessman and has pretty much hijacked the decision making process of the entire family. Siddhu resents this very much and this leads to a spectacular showdown towards the end of the film, where all his resentment comes tumbling out. This scene is why I particularly liked the film. It’s very dramatic but it is treated carefully and neither character loses balance. There is no ear-splitting music. There is crying and everyone in the family is emotional but even then the proceeding are never absurdly dramatic and logic never leaves the room.

The other reason is the character of Haasini (Genelia D’Souza) who plays a “happy-go-lucky” girl. The way Genelia D’Souza plays Haasini as a trusting, twittering, chattering, cutesy girl almost makes you feel that’s she’s off her rocker in the beginning. All that changes in the second half after a series of events leads her to land in Siddhu’s (the guy of the guy-loves-girl story) house to live for seven days. She’s pretty much the same but something has changed and by the time the film reaches the end you see that she’s not exactly off-kilter. She really is happy-go-lucky and there’s nothing really wrong with her. She’s an anomaly in the modern world. A trusting person ready to place faith in any person who talks nicely to her. Whether such people exist or not depends entirely on how jaded your world-view is and how cynically you view the rest. The ‘innocent’ girl is a common staple of Indian cinema, but the way Genelia plays the character, it comes off rather heartwarming in the end and that’s what you will remember.

Sure enough, Bomarillu has all the masala-movie ingredients. A coterie of comic friends for our hero, the heroine’s father (a doting, decent drunkard and a minor player in the proceedings) and song-and-dance routines. However, in the end the movie makes you feel good. It’s well made, is not loud, very funny in parts and Haasini’s character and the father-son relationship are well played out. Boy loves girl and the father disapproves but what’s refreshing is the the way the father comes around with things never going over the top.

I’m a little late to the wake and cannot add anything more than already has been said but Kurt Vonnegut, an author I really like, is dead. So I’ll join the chorus and say ‘So it Goes’.

I have created a tutorial for the vOICe. A lot of people were having trouble with the understanding of soundscapes and a lot of them were starting with extremely complex images. I walk the reader through certain basic soundscapes and help them become familiar with how to interpret them.

Download the tutorial file by following this link. The name of the file is voicetut.zip.

This tutorial is a work in progress.

In the zip archive, there is an HTML file and a word file. You can open which ever file you like. They contain the same content.

Note:
in the Microsoft Word file, you may find a few embedded sound clips. I’d initially started by using embedded sounds in a word document but realized that this approach was not scalable. The HTML file however contains no such embedded clips.

Update I: The tutorial file is not accessible in the post yet. I am working on fixing that.

Update II: The tutorial file can now be downloaded from here.

Røyksopp – What Else Is There from The Understanding
Karin Dreijer’s vocals and this video make it a stand-out.

Røyksopp – Because It’s There from The Understanding

Røyksopp – Melody A.M (Album)
Yup. I’m endorsing a whole album here. It’s that good. It also has the song Remind Me which was made famous by one of the Geico Cavemen commercials. The cavemen concept, incidentally, got a life of it’s own. More about that here.

The Knife – Marble House from Silent Shout
and as we were talking about Karin Dreijer earlier, this happens to be her own group.

Modest Mouse – Fire It Up from We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank

Modest Mouse – Gravity Rides Everything from The Moon and Antartica

Red Hot Chili Peppers – Snow (Hey Oh) from Stadium Arcadium

Probably the best song from this album.

INXS – Afterglow

Queens of the Stone Age – No One Knows (U.N.K.L.E remix)
This turbo-charged adrenaline rush of a remix (of an already decent song) is perfect background music in the latest Jason Bourne movie trailer.

and now for a segue into some old classics,
Stevie Ray Vaughan – Voodoo Child (Slight Return)

Jefferson Airplane – Embryonic Journey from Surrealistic Pillow

Jefferson Airplane – White Rabbit from Surrealistic Pillow
Probably one of the trippiest song ever made!