Ant & the Elephant

Do you like mysteries? Is there a King Solomon or an Indiana Jones hiding inside you? Is your favourite book "Treasure Island"? Have you ever contemplated Sudoku over Sex? Did you like Nicholas Cage better in "National Treasure" than "Leaving Las Vegas"?

If you answered 'yes' to at least 3 of the questions above, pack your bags, book a Kingfisher Red and relocate to Bengaluru. This is your kinda place.

wanna know why?

Bengaluru is a book of mysteries waiting to be solved. Take her roads for example. Road names are the best kept secrets in this city. You could be at the junction of 4 major roads, but there might not be a single fuckin sign telling you which is which. Moments that bring out the Sherlock in you - in every walk or drive. Magical!

Or consider the traffic signs. What is, is never what it seems to be. Take this sign for example.

What do you think it is? No Turn? That may be the right answer from 100 mts away, but as you draw closer.....

Voila! Welcome to Neverland! Its a 'No Free Turn' sign. Subtext, My Dear Watsons!! Those finely painted white letters that are visible only when you are 2 feet from the sign!

If you think it is all about just magic tricks, think again. Bengaluru also respects history. You might find a million cities in India that are modeled on Paris and Rome - stupid white-ass licking wannabes! Why look outside for inspiration when you have so much history & tradition in our own country? Bengaluru is the one and only, patriotically inspired city of our times. It is modeled exactly after Harappa & Mohenjadaro. The most striking similarity is the drainage. Just like those twin cities, Bengaluru has adopted an approach of having open gutters running along roads, for miles together. Be it the airport road or the more populous church road. Even the unbearable stench will not deter the city from its single-minded goal of following history. Bravo!

Puzzles! Did I mention them? Oh they are wonderful. Take a traffic light for example. In normal cities, you will have road signs before you cross the signal, so you choose your route. What a nonsensically boring thought! But Bengaluru is different. The signs are on the other side of the signal and so small that by the time you are close enough to reading it, you have already crossed the signal, made your decision and committed yourself to a road. Just by this one bright idea, Bengaluru makes every single commute an eventful journey that you will never forget in one lifetime.

If that doesnt excite you, there is more. Did you know that there is only one road in India, where you have to drive on the right? I will let you in on a secret - It is right outside the Garuda mall. Keep your eyes open, o' traveller, coz there are no signs and you might miss it. And if you do and keep driving on the left, you might just get mowed down by a truck and you will miss all the magic! And that would be tragic!

Oh, I can go on for another 10 days, but I would'nt want to break the surprises to you. They are meant to be enjoyed in person. So travel, one and all!!! and make that journey of a lifetime.

How did it all start? Most people say that the city became a wonderland only after corporates invaded it in the last decade. I dont know about that. I just like to think of Bengaluru as this lucky ant that a huge elephant made love to. A love that continues to charm the Ant.

The magic of cinema

This is an excerpt (My most favorite part) from the book "Conversations - Walter Murch & the Art of Editing Film" by Michael Ondaatje - author of The English Patient. It is long & calls for TREMENDOUS patience, but trust me, it is totally worth it.

(FYI, Walter Murch is the first guy ever to have been credited for 'Sound Design' and he is the editor of films like Godfather - I, II & III, Apocalypse Now, THX 1138, English Patient, Talented Mr. Ripley, Conversations & Unbearable Lightness of Being).

Murch: There's a great game--I forget whether we've talked about it--Negative Twenty Questions?

Ondaatje: No, we haven't talked about it.

Murch: It was invented by John Wheeler, a quantum physicist who was a young graduate student of Niels Bohr's in the 1930s. Wheeler is the man who invented the term "black hole". He's an extremely articulate proponent of the best of twentieth-century physics. Still alive, and I believe still teaching, writing.

Anyway, he thought up a parlour game that reflects the way the world is constructed at a quantum level. It involves, say, four people: Michael, Anthony, Walter, and Aggie. From the point of view of one of those people, Michael, the game that's being played is the normal Twenty Questions--Ordinary Twenty Questions, I guess you'd call it. So Michael leaves the room, under the illusion that the other three players are going to look around and collectively decide on the chosen object to be guessed by him--say, the alarm clock. Michael expects that when they've made their decision they will ask him to come back in and try to guess the object in fewer than twenty questions.

Under normal circumstances, the game is a mixture of perspicacity and luck: No, it's not bigger than a breadbox. No, you can't eat it....Those kinds of things.

But in Wheeler's version of the game, when Michael leaves the room, the three remaining players don'tcommunicate with one another at all. Instead, each of them silently decides on an object. Then they call Michael back in.

So, there's a disparity between what Michael believes and what the underlying truth is: Nobody knows what anyone else is thinking. The game proceeds regardless, which is where the fun comes in.

Michael asks Walter: Is the object bigger than a breadbox? Walter--who has picked the alarm clock--says, No. Now, Anthony has chosen the sofa, which is bigger than a breadbox. And since Michael is going to ask him the next question, Anthony must quickly look around the room and come up with something else--a coffee cup!--which is smaller than a breadbox. So when Michael asks Anthony, If I emptied out my pockets could I put their contents in this object? Anthony says, Yes.

Now Aggie's choice may have been the small pumpkin carved for Halloween, which could also contain Michael's keys and coins, so when Michael says, Is it edible? Aggie says, Yes. That's a problem for Walter and Anthony, who have chosen inedible objects: they now have to change their selection to something edible, hollow, and smaller than a breadbox.

So a complex vortex of decision making is set up, a logical but unpredictable chain of ifs and thens. To end successfully, the game must produce, in fewer than twenty questions, an object that satisfies all of the logical requirements: smaller than a breadbox, edible, hollow, et cetera. Two things can happen: Success--this vortex can give birth to an answer that will seem to be inevitable in retrospect: Of course! It's the ----! And the game ends with Michael still believing he has just played Ordinary Twenty Questions. In fact, no one chose the ---- to start with, and Anthony, Walter, and Aggie have been sweating it out, doing these hidden mental gymnastics, always one step ahead of failure.
Which is the other possible result: Failure--the game can break down catastrophically. By question 15, let's say, the questions asked have generated logical requirements so complex that nothing in the room can satisfy them. And when Michael asks Anthony the sixteenth question, Anthony breaks down and has to confess that he doesn't know, and Michael is finally let in on the secret: The game was Negative Twenty Questions all along. Wheeler suggests that the nature of perception and reality, at the quantum level, and perhaps above, is somehow similar to this game.

When I read about this, it reminded me acutely of filmmaking. There is an agreed-upon game, which is the screenplay, but in the process of making the film, there are so many variables that everyone has a slightly different interpretation of the screenplay. The cameraman develops an opinion, then is told that Clark Gable has been cast in that part. He thinks, Gable? Huh, I didn't think it would be Gable. If it's Gable, I'm going to have to replan. Then the art director does something to the set, and the actor says, This is my apartment? All right, if this is my apartment, then I'm a slightly different person from who I thought I was: I will change my performance. The camera operator following him thinks, Why is he doing that? Oh, it's because... All right, I'll have to widen out because he's doing these unpredictable things. And then the editor does something unexpected with those images and this gives the director an idea about the script, so he changes a line. And so the costumer sees that and decides the actor can't wear dungarees. And so it goes, with everyone continuously modifying their preconceptions. A film can succeed in the end, spiralling in on itself to a final result that looks as if it has been predicted long in advance in every detail. But in fact it grew out of a mad scramble as everyone involved took advantage of all the various decisions everyone else had been making.

...and

And just like that, the film decides that it is time to get made. And I thought I had something to do with the 'when' and 'how' of it. Duh.