Lots of stuff happening in the past few days. No, real work though.
I saw Nagesh Kukunoor's Dor. Nice film. I believe Kukunoor is making the mistake of being creative in Bollywood, that might be an expensive mistake. So much so that people will have to keep talking about his work years later, while he pretty much nothing out of it while it matters. How wonderful. So Dor is a creative hindi movie, as far as conventional hindi movies go.
I found the storytelling weak and/or cliched in parts - had it not been for this, it would have been a fairly top class movie, maybe among my all time favorite hindi movies - this also means that it would have surely done worse at the box office. With these flaws added in it stops being a truly great film and instead becomes a nice film - certainly worth watching. The main characters all play their parts really well - especially Gul Panag and Ayesha Takia.
This weekend I got to listen to IU's philharmonic orchestra play Beethoven's 5th. Wow! The piece has a completely different power and energy when you hear it live. I was blown away. I was also much impressed by the attention to detail and the sheer wonderful complexity of something like a philharmonic orchestra. Lovely.
This isn't IU, but everything else matches.
On the music scene, this weekend, I also got listen to Bob Dylan. Live. No kidding. Dylan was playing at IU (for some reason). I had not known about this and it was hardly advertised. One of my students in my Operating Systems class mentioned it to me in passing. He is Iranian and we were talking about Firdaus and Khayyam when he mentions Dylan. The concert itself was a bit of a let down. We didn't get great seats, though they were rather good. IU's audio systems were a let down and so most of the time I couldn't catch the lyrics. This is also partly due to Dylan - if you think he sounded rough and raspy back in the day, you should listen to him now. Despite all this it was, in some sense, soul satisfying to see the man in person and listen to him sing, I doubted if I would ever really get a chance to, considering that he maynot be singing for a whole lot longer.
Here are some lovely videos from Dylan's early days, when he still used to "sing". These days most of his songs, even his present renditions of his classics have degenerated into a sort of chant, sometimes short coughed up statements with background music. But well, the magic of Dylan will always be just that, magic.
Tambourine Man, 1964:
Blowing in the Wind, 1963:
The Times they are a Changin, 1965:
More on the music front IU's opera series had Carlisle Floyd's Susannah this weekend. This was a far more moving presentation that IU's attempt at Rigolleto, from last month. As before the stage setup and costumes were excellent. For Susannah, they had several layers of translucent curtains covering the stage. When each scene starts the actors stand perfectly still giving the illusion that one is looking at a life size painting. The lights slowly brighten and the screen lift bringing the scene to life gradually and then the actors start to move. It was brilliant. The singing and performance, for the most part, was also very good. I would certainly recommend watching it - its playing again next weekend.
Moving on from the music scene, last week there was talk by the famous logician and philosopher Saul Kripke. IU is getting a new president, Michael McRobbie, and Kripke's talk was one of the many functions related to the Presidential Inauguration events. President McRobbie, I am told, is also a logician of some renown and hence, Saul Kripke was speaking at IU.
I personally don't know much about Kripke's work except for the "Kripke Semantics" for intuitionistic logic. This (I like to believe) I understand, pretty much everything else starts to go downhill, especial all the modal stuff. My brief encounters with some of the related areas leads me to conclude that most of my own thinking is oriented more towards constructive mathematics than to classical mathematics. This was the official description of the talk.
Saul Kripke, distinguished professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, will deliver Indiana University’s inaugural Presidential Lecture in Alumni Hall of the Indiana Memorial Union. He intends to speak on “The Collapse of the Hilbert Program,” a philosophically significant topic with a technical result. Kripke received the Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy in 2001 and is considered by some to be the world’s greatest living philosopher and logician.
Needless to say I didn't get much out of it. I think I understood what was said broadly, but didnt get any of the details. It was however rather nice to see Kripke himself. His talk started out with some details that I felt I understood and somewhere 5 mins in into it, it took a nose down dive and I had no idea of what he was saying. I remember trying to recollect details about the arithmetic heirarchy and Pi^0_2 systems and such. I felt this was pretty much the state for most of the audience. Disturbingly though, my advisor was with me and he seemed to be understand a lot of the details..
I remember this one point towards the end of the talk - in the front row sat one of the senior professors of the department, an emeritus, and very well known logician. Kripke was saying something was completely baffling to my intelligence and it seemed like the elderly professor was nodding. At this point, Kripke asks the professor, calling him by his first name (they knew each other), "Hey *, Are you nodding because you are understanding?" and he replies "oh, No". It was hard to suppress laughter. Enough said.
Today there was a talk at IU by Professor Neta Bahcall, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Astrophysics at Princeton University. Fascinating stuff, I haven't been to a good physics talk in ages. She was talking about "The Dark Side of the Universe". The discussion today was largely about "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" in the universe, the reasoning behind their existence and such. Makes me wish that I had never switch to CS and had stayed with physics somehow.
This is a two-part lecture. The session on Thu will talk about the history of the universe in some approximate detail. Prof Bahcall's presence at IU is part of what we call the Patten lecture series. they get eminent speakers to come and talk about a variety of topics. Last year one the speakers was Amartya Sen who talked about the notion of identity.
Today I finally received my copy of "The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib", my second book on Ghalib's works. The first was Chirag-e-Dair which I picked up at Mumbai airport the last time I was flying out of India. Needless to say Ghalib is fascinating. He had me laughing and chuckling at his chutzpah in minutes. This is a rather good quality English translation and contains verse in Devanagiri (Hindi) and Urdu script.
In paradise, as we know, God showed Adam the door.
When I have been shown your door, I feel a shame deeper than his.
-- Ghalib (as translated by Sunil Dutta)
Fall has come to Bloomington and rows of trees shine golden, orange and fiery red. Such beauty before the waste of winter. I have been enjoying taking pictures.
There is more, I am too tired to write.
I haven't been getting much *real* work done, though I have been thinking about things. The other day, my advisor mentioned to me the importance of "doing the boring work", the context of writing this paper that I have been delaying for a while now. For over a year or so, I have been walking around with one or two publishable pieces of work and been not doing very much about it. He is very patient man, far more that I would have been in his place. I fear that I should do some "boring" work one of these days, or be disowned or something like this. :)
(Dear Microsoft Live Team, why does "Windows Live Writer" get slower with each new release? I will have to refuse to upgrade if this is a mandatory new feature each time. Please take out the Thread.Sleep()s.)