Lights, camera, ideation

Whoever said that visually imaginative people are meant for the television industry? Behold, the latest burst of pop fiction authors who churn out stories with very vivid in-built (or should we say in-written) screenplay that could break the record for weekend sales in any multiplex. All this after a previous book made it to the screens!

Let us look at three case studies to show how one movie transforms authors into screen play writers.

Exhibit A – Chetan Bhagat. After two of his books were adapted into movies (Hello and 3 idiots from One Night @ the Call Centre and Five Point Someone), he wrote his fourth book Two States. While Five Point Someone was about his life in IIT, Two States seems like a filmy sequel inspired by his own love story.

As if the personal touch weren’t enough, the book seems like it was written for a visual audience. The part where Krish barges in during Ananya’s placement interview to propose to her and also when Ananya very ironically saves the Punjabi marriage seems more like a climax sequence in a romantic comedy than a real story.

Exhibit B – Vikas Swarup. First of all, his book Q & A became a world phenomenon not under that name but as ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. Not only were captivating bits in the book left untouched, the screenplay also showed a part of India that we all knew and found tiresome. But everyone else seems to have just gotten over the snake-charmers-and-elephant-country image and woken up to the reality of India. In bookstores, however, the cover of the book has been revamped: the title changed to Slumdog Millionaire, with a picture of Jamal and Lattika on the cover.. What happened to Q & A with a small boy dressed in rags carrying a tea tray beneath it?

Following this, his second book ‘Six Suspects’ takes inspiration from controversial issues like the BMW case. While the story revolves around six people in different walks of life linked as suspects of a murder, the climax turns pretty unrealistic with exaggerated bollywood motives and a nasty shootout after which, in an agatha-christie manner, the plot is unveiled.

Exhibit C – The Bourne Series. The Bourne trilogy was declared the most successful trilogy of all time. If only it stayed a trilogy! To continue the adventures of Jason Bourne, Eric Van Lustbader, with permission from the Robert Ludlam franchise, brought the spy alive again. He has written three more books; The Bourne Legacy, The Bourne Sanction, The Bourne Betrayal and The Bourne Deception (which was released this year . Another book The Bourne Objective is in the making. According to the grapevine, they might soon be made into movies too, trying to weave the original magic again.

Only time will tell if it is indeed magic or just a set of illusionary tricks.

Now, if only I could make this post sound like a part of the ‘Scary movie’ series.

 

2009 upgraded

After some years in silence and hard work, writhing and moaning over its horribly-gone-wrong OS (operating system) Windows Vista, Microsoft last month retailed Windows 7 as its comeback OS.

At its demo at the Consumer Electronic Show at Las Vegas in January 2009, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the OS would address the basic premise of “simplicity, reliability and speed”. And if the initial flush of reviews from some of the most respected tech blogs – engadget, gizmondo and allthingsd – are anything to go by, then it  looks like all the hard work has paid off. In fact, Gizmondo proclaims Windows 7 as “solid, nimble and the prettiest Windows yet”.

According to some reports, Windows 7 had the longest running beta-testing in the history of OS. In the past, they have been let down by bugs at the time of retail release, and the critics have been severe as they always have been.

Windows Vista has been a story of Murphy’s Law or the humourous interpretation of it. Almost every thing did go wrong, and the average consumer still stuck with good old Windows XP, giving Vista and its promise of an OS of the 21st century the royal snub. Also, Mac users could not stop sniggering at Microsoft’s failed attempt at giving its desktop the uber-cool effect. But now reviews suggest that Microsoft may have corrected some of those flaws.

Close on the heels of Windows 7 release – now clearly seen as not an evolutionary upgrade but more a refinement of Windows Vista – two others have appeared. In early August, Apple launched Snow Leopard, an upgrade to the Mac’s OSX. Surprisingly Snow Leopard too seems to have faced reviews similar to Windows 7. It was not a game changer, but rather a decent upgrade with tweaks.

More recently the ‘Linux for Humans’ Ubuntu has come out with its Karmic Koala release. In terms of number of users around the world, it would be unfair to tag the open source OS against the likes of the proprietary Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. But the Linux user groups believe they are contenders nevertheless. A review on Guardian Online’s Tech Blog in fact faces off Ubuntu KK vs Windows 7, offering some good insights.

A question like which is the better OS of the three is very simplistic and unfair at the same time. Users of Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac and Linux all belong to a cult of their own and are vehemently defend their OS. A self-proclaimed cyber cynic, in fact, proclaims Ubuntu as the better OS on Computerworld.com.

But if we can draw a conclusion it can be this: Windows has been the dominant desktop for the average user. It would be hard to ignore what it does, despite not liking some of its shove-down-the-consumer’s-throat behaviour; The Apple Mac has been the Rolls Royce class; whilst Ubuntu, like most Linux OS, is the on-the-outside contender.

Oh, did you know that Ubuntu can run even on a fossil of a PC? Look at the minimum specs. Now compare that with the minimum specs for Windows 7.  You wont be able to play Warcraft on Linux but it pretty much does everything else at a much lower cost of computing than the Windows PC or the Mac. Now if only that made perfect sense…

Windows 7 Media Center

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more about “Windows 7 Media Center“, posted with vodpod

Shobha de

Blogger beings

Blogs have revolutionised the publishing industry like never before. Aspiring authors no longer need to wait for a publisher to see the light in their writing, before their works sees the light of the day. Powerful blogging services – such as Blogger and WordPress – offer that platform to them for free.

With more blogs cropping up by the second, the platform for aspiring writers is very much out there. In fact, the most outstanding feature of blogs is that they allow anyone to publish their work without having to wait for a publisher’s approval. This in turn has led to a trend where aspiring writers set up blogs to amass an audience and to see if they can make it big; if they can, they turn authors as well.

When journalist Amit Varma started his blog India Uncut (www.indiauncut.com) in 2004, he did it with the intention of accumulating a set of followers and honing his fiction writing skills. This, he felt, would help him when he wanted to publish a book. The blog was just a tool but little did he realize that he would go on to become one of the country’s most-read bloggers.

“I’ve always wanted to write. Journalism and blogging just came along. But I have to admit, they improved my writing to a great extent,” he admits.

His book ‘My friend Sancho’, which was released in May this year iin a major marketing blitz by the publishers Hatchette India.

A similar story rests in the life of twenty–something Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, whose blog ‘The compulsive confessor’ (http://thecompulsiveconfessor.blogspot.com) has received international fame. Meenakshi, who wrote under the pseudonym eM, captivated her audiences with stories of the life of an anonymous twenty-something-single-girl-in-a-cosmopolitan-city.

The risque blog writer first disclosed her identity in an interview to the UK newspaper Telegraph. In 2008, she published her first novel ‘You are here,’ leveraging her popularity as an already prominent blogger.

There is yet another story of a blogger whose blog is popular as it tickles one’s funny bone. Jamshed Velayuda Rajan, 33, vice-president of ibibo.com has been blogging for seven years on Ouchmytoe (www.ouchmytoe.com) and has been rated by many blog ranking sites like indiblogger as India’s Funniest Blogger. Though he writes a personal blog, with experiences from his life ‘The 2 ifs W(if)e and L(if)e’, he has an international reader base. He plans to publish his blog as a book soon.

And then, there are authors who have taken to blogging to maintain their fan base. Prominent among them is writer Shobhaa De (http://shobhaade.blogspot.com), who writes her opinions on various issues including politics.

Whether it is bloggers using blogs to become authors or authors reminding people that they are still around, blog as a medium seems to have become not just a way to express oneself as it was originally intended to be but has made celebrities out of ordinary people with other jobs. It has also helped bridge the gap between a celebrity and their fans without intruding on their privacy.

Hello world!

A blog on Indian Authors and technology… two completely different subjects yet linked by technology