Looking back

An approaching new year brings about reminiscences invariably. My blogging has fallen by the wayside for quite a while now, but in the spirit of looking back I did a quick pass through old posts today. Some I remembered, some I had forgotten, quite a few seem embarrassing now, but a minority brought the odd chuckle (which I noted). Here are some of them.

Books

नाटकवाल्याचे प्रयोग 

अपूर्वाई 

दाद 

Dark Eden

Strange beauty

Theories of everything

Movies

Hindi Medium

Matru ki bijli ka mandola 

Love story 2050 

End of year posts

2013

2012

Attempts at humor

अवधाने 

Ek sawaal

Attempt at thought

The sliding winodw 

Hindi Medium

Hindi Medium is a five star movie. I highly recommend it. While it has many strengths and not any obvious weaknesses I can think of, my favorite part is the end. Often, movies which are talking about some social problem choose either (a) Everything, everyone changes and the problem goes away, or (b) Nothing changes. This one tries a different tack, (c) One person chooses to be different. 'Improve yourself, that is all you can do do improve the world', like Wittgenstein said. That I liked best.

Seveneves

I came across a short review of Seveneves on GatesNotes a few days ago, and picked it up quickly on my next Crossword trip. I had read Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson earlier, and had read about 2/5th of System of the world, but then this third part of the Baroque cycle had proved too baroque for me. Nothing of this sort happened with this one, and I found much that is delightful. First of all, this novel belongs in the best traditions of SF, containing a lot of actual science. There are pages upon pages on Orbital maneuvers for example. Same is true (to a lesser extent) about epigenetics, heterozygosity and robot swarms. The characters feel real (they use Python to program their robots and parse logfiles after all). And the book manages to be consistently readable, through all of its Eight hundred and sixty six pages (OK, parts of Part III are a little flat, but that is really little). I came back to SF after a while, and reading this book felt like a breath of fresh air. I certainly see myself returning to it.

P.S. While searching for the link above, I found a longer (and frankly better) review on GatesNotes. Do read it.