The first set of talks just got over, and it was marvelous !

Starting off was Prof. Hans Rosling. If you haven’t heard of him, you should check out his previous Ted appearances here and here. He has an absolute novel way of presenting statistics — the fun way. He was his usual best today, and the gist of his talk — the average income in India will surpass the average income in the U.S. on 27th July 2048. Go figure.

The next speaker was Devdutt Patnaik, a mythologist, who has a mythological way of looking at everything — behaviours, businesses, mindsets and attitudes. Invoking the mythologies of many civilizations, the talk centered on why India is India.

Third was Mallika Sarabhai, my least favourite performance of the session. She is a genius, no doubt, but her blend of art and issues didn’t quite strike as seamless. I didn’t quite agree with some of her theories either. I hope she isn’t another Arundhati Roy in the making, but all that’s just my opinion.

Last was singer Usha Uthup, who gave a scintillating performance. That she sings in a million languages is no secret, but the way she put together her music for unity and peace, was awesome. If only this had come before the Nobel was announced.

Again, you watch the talks live here.

Meanwhile, I am doing some frantic sleep math to accommodate as many talks as I can.

I am a regular follower of Ted Talks — it is one of my favourite pastimes when I am idling. Ted is in India for the first time and the talks commence today. Indiatimes will be broadcasting the talks live here (the first set begins in about 5 mins.)

The entire schedule is here. I am most excited about Sivamani’s talk on the third day — the guy is rhythm personified. But every talk is usually special in some way, so I’ll try to catch as many as my timezone difference permits.

For more live updates, you can follow the Twitter channel #TedIndia, and for a more personal commentary, you can follow Amit Varma’s (a short-listed Ted Fellow) tweets.

P.S . : Do check out one of my favourite TED talks that I mentioned in this post : “Music and Passion“.

This is highly recommended for those interested in music, but even if you aren’t, you should give it a read. It should take about 10 minutes, but it is worth the time.

The New York Times has a piece on the working of the Pandora music engine, with a front-end website that promises to play ‘the music you like’. Pasting a snippet :

While his partners talked him out of that approach, Westergren maintains “a personal aversion” to collaborative filtering or anything like it. “It’s still a popularity contest,” he complains, meaning that for any song to get recommended on a socially driven site, it has to be somewhat known already, by your friends or by other consumers. Westergren is similarly unimpressed by hipster blogs or other theoretically grass-roots influencers of musical taste, for their tendency to turn on artists who commit the crime of being too popular; in his view that’s just snobbery, based on social jockeying that has nothing to do with music. In various conversations, he defended Coldplay and Rob Thomas, among others, as victims of cool-taste prejudice. (When I ran Bob Lefsetz’s dismissal of Pandora by him, he laughed it off, and transitioned to arguing that Journey is, actually, a great band.)

He likes to tell a story about a Pandora user who wrote in to complain that he started a station based on the music of Sarah McLachlan, and the service served up a Celine Dion song. “I wrote back and said, ‘Was the music just wrong?’ Because we sometimes have data errors,” he recounts. “He said, ‘Well, no, it was the right sort of thing — but it was Celine Dion.’ I said, ‘Well, was it the set, did it not flow in the set?’ He said, ‘No, it kind of worked — but it’s Celine Dion.’ We had a couple more back-and-forths, and finally his last e-mail to me was: ‘Oh, my God, I like Celine Dion.’ ”

I’m running short on time and high on laziness, so I’ll just paste my email response to the article as to what I thought of it :

It’s a fascinating read. I’d highly recommend it for everyone, and specifically for those interested in the semantics of music.

As I was reading it, I realized how true Westergren’s observations are. The thought of social influence in musical tastes unsettled me a bit. It made me think hard — do I like the music I like because I really like it ? Or it it some social factor ? Or my friends with whom I play music ? Or are they my friends because of our similar tastes ?

I don’t use Pandora regularly (I still carry around my hundred gigs of audio), but when I used it, I discovered some great tracks. Further, I was amazed how my stations quickly converged to Hindustani fusion, something I truly like, just as Pandora promised.

I’ve worked a bit with music signal processing from a machine learning perspective. I’ve seen that plenty of simple musical metrics still can’t be computed algorithmically, so subjective and emotional ones are out of question. There are so many abstract attributes that need human aid to identify, and Westergren got it spot on when he relied on humans and not algorithms to identify them.
(here’s a list of the around 400 attributes that are marked by the Music Genome Project : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Music_Genome_Project_attributes)

The article is going to haunt me for quite some time whenever I listen to music

Do read the entire piece.

Link via Prashant K.

The dates of the annual Sawai Gandharva Music festival in Pune have been announced – 7th to 10th Jan.

I am super kicked since there is a non-zero possibility of making to it. The entire schedule and list of performers is awaited, but I don’t think that matters greatly to anyone. For any Hindustani music listener, it is an absolute must experience.

Maestros playing, cheap tickets, great food, erudite listeners, the cold of winter, the warmth of blankets, the long hours of music from afternoon to late night, the Puneri crowd .. overwhelming nostalgia. You have to see it to believe it.

I leave you with one of the most memorable performances I witnessed at Sawai – Govinda Damodara Madhaveti by Pt. Jasraj (that isn’t a live recording, but the next best thing).

Link via Rohit W.

Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind, a top Muslim body recently declared that Vande Mataram was un-Islamic :

Jamait-e-Ulema Hind or the JEU on Tuesday issued a fatwa against singing national song ‘Vande Mataram’. According to a resolution, Muslims should not sing ‘Vande Mataram’ as its reciting is against the Islam.

The resolution, which was passed at the Deoband national convention meet, says that Muslims should not sing ‘Vande Mataram’ as some verses of the patriotic song are against the tenets of Islam. The JEU leader said that the some of the line in the song is against Islam.

When I read this, I knew this was headed to be something special. You guessed it right, I immediately went to the corresponding Rediff article to read the comments.

With over 550 comments in less than a day, this is marvelous. Here’s the link. I can safely say the rest of your day has been taken away from you.

Oh yes .. the issue.

I would disagree with it if they forced someone to not sing Vande Mataram. Likewise, I would also disagree with anyone who forces them to sing Vande Mataram. I personally wouldn’t have an issue with anyone as long as they did not force their opinion on others.

I don’t think an A.R. Rahman is going to stop singing Vande Mataram at his concerts after this fatwa.

And the clerics would agree with me that he’s a fine Muslim. So there.

In a heartening development, the Government of India is taking steps for the quashing of cases piled up against artist M.F. Hussain and facilitate his quick return :

To put an end to the litigations against renowned painter M F Husain and ensure his early return to the country, the Centre is contemplating to approach the Supreme Court for expeditious disposal of all cases arising out of his controversial paintings.

This should count as a minor victory for freedom of speech and expression, after repeated miserable defeats lately.

I’ve had countless arguments with friends about his controversial paintings. I believe that folks who don’t understand art shouldn’t be allowed to judge it. Heck, they shoudn’t even see paintings if they don’t have the intellect and eye to appreciate art.

But instead of repeating the same arguments, I’ll present an anecdote (without revealing details) :

A good friend of mine, an artist, enrolled in a program related to art recently. They had a class on philosophy and art where they underwent a drill to rid their mind of pre-conceived notions about self-consciousness and open up their minds to freer thoughts. As a purely voluntary exercise, they had to stay in a room together for an hour .. naked. Strangely, every one in the class volunteered – guys and girls. The quickest ones to volunteer had a fine arts background, the slowest belonged to professional backgrounds.

True story.

Now if you think that is completely WTF, you shouldn’t be debating about anything even remotely connected to art .. ever.

My 2 cents.

This weekend I was part of two traditions here :

1. Halloween : I am not too big on celebrations of any kind, but I was in Santa Cruz this Saturday evening and we decided to visit the downtown Halloween celebration. We had a few funny wigs, but that’s all — no elaborate full-body costumes.

Halloween is probably the closest it gets in the U.S. to the Ganpati celebrations of Pune. Age, color, social status no bar, everyone is one the streets making a complete fool of themselves while having the time of their life. It was fascinating to be a part of it. From babies that could barely walk, aged people who could barely walk, to handicapped people in wheelchairs (some were in a wheelchair as a part of their costume) everyone was in their costume. I hear elaborate planning goes into the Halloween costumes, as we saw some superbly creative ones. So creative that I cannot mention them here !

To add to that, I forgot the memory card for my camera, so you could say ‘I was a photographer’. Since I don’t fancy Halloween costumes, maybe I should celebrate it in the southern states next year. If someone asked, ‘What are you ?’, I could just say, ‘I’m an Indian’, and they’d stare in awe.

I must add that being on the streets is way better then attending the Halloween party thrown by some desi dudes, or any party for that matter.

2. Daylight saving – Every first Sunday of November, the clock goes back an hour. Daylight saving is switched off from November to March around here.

Now to the point, I don’t understand the point of switching off daylight saving. As they are lobbying in a few states, I’d like to be on a year-round daylight saving. It is depressing when it starts getting dark at 4.30 p.m. Since most businesses run until after 5, I don’t see the point of switching off daylight saving. No one would mind dawn at 7, methinks.

I haven’t read of any quantitative research proving the benefits of switching it off, but I won’t be surprised if it was a frustrated Ph.D. student who hacked the dataset to come up with some path-breaking results. As they say, if you can’t prove it, you hack it.

It was worse when I was studying. I’m not a day-person and prefer to work at nights. There was a time during a heavy winter quarter that I didn’t see daylight for a week — I was asleep when the sun rose, and the sun was gone when I awoke.

Stupid daylight saving.

On that note, daylight saving used to be switched off in October until recently. Two senators advocated moving it to November to allow children to go trick-or-treating in more daylight. True story.

This is silly. A school in West Bengal suspended 750 students because they were taking private tuition.

It gets sillier – the tuitions were being conducted by the school teachers themselves !

If anyone, the teachers need to be punished. It is obvious they impart better teaching in their private coaching sessions when they’ve been hired to do the same job at the school.

On a generic note, the notion of discouraging coaching classes which institutions often adopt is a classic attitude of crushing competition. They are afraid of competition and thus, a free market. I am of the view that if a student finds the need to attend private coaching classes, the fault lies entirely with the faculty, so the student must be exempted from attending the same classes in school. Further, faculty salaries must be scaled based on attendance. This will keep them on their toes and they’ll have an incentive to perform better.

In the current setting, a college professor has no reason whatsoever to take any effort to improve. Unlike U.S. universities where students’ feedback is a mandatory ritual, Indian colleges seldom seek feedback, and almost never act on it.

These are simple things to implement, and go a long way in bettering the system.

The colleges themselves stand to gain from this, but who’s listening ?

Next up in the series “Stuff the government does that it shouldn’t be doing” :

Watching any kind of television .. really.

The Information and Broadcasting Ministry on Thursday issued a notice to Colors television channel for showing a district magistrate in a bad light in its tele-serial Na Aana Iss Des Lado, rated the third most watched TV serial in cable homes in India last week.

It is strange that, lately, all notices from the I&B ministry are for Colors. To its credit, it seems the channel has kept them hooked.

The cause of the notice follows :

“In the serial (Lado) the district magistrate has not only been shown as corrupt and a womaniser, but his lust for women defies any logic. In fact, in one of the episodes, women are paraded before him on his request. The magistrate, who is apparently shown on an official visit to investigate a case of female foeticide has also been shown to indulge in blackmail. The entire characterization appears to be a grotesque caricature of a district administrator,”

This is such a frivolous notice besides infringing upon freedom of expression. I call for the I&B ministry to write all scripts henceforth — they know enough about the nuances of script-writing and this will keep them occupied.

I’m a huge fan of South Park. I think they maintain a fine balance between mindless fun-poking and social commentary, and I usually tend to agree with them on their take on issues. Family Guy doesn’t hold a candle to South Park. Incidentally, I’ve enjoyed the first few episodes of the Family Guy spin-off, The Cleveland Show. For one, it has better writing.

A big reason why I love South Park is the side-character Butters who, according to the show’s creators, ‘embodies permanent innocence’. Butters is hands-down the most adorable character .. ever. Among his other traits, is his signature song that he sings when alone, doing chores or even when scared. The lines go :

Loo loo loo, I’ve got some apples
Loo loo loo, you’ve got some too…

And ends with either:

Loo loo loo, let’s get together
I know what we can do loo loo

or:

Loo loo loo, let’s make some applesauce
Take off your clothes and loo loo loo.

Here are the respective videos :