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Showing posts from December, 2008

War as a technological engine

Written circa January 2003 Wars for long have been thought to be as bad omen. And every time somebody mentions War, pictures of mass destruction hover in front of our eyes. But history tells us that wars have traditionally been the powerhouse of technological revolution. The recent most world war, that is the Second World War, is the most flamboyant example of the above fact. Robert B. Young at the Stanford research institute studied the span of time between the first commercial appearance of a new electrical appliance and at the time the industry manufacturing it reaches a peak production of the item. Young found that for a group appliances introduced in the United States before 1920, including the vacuum cleaner, the electric range and the refrigerator, the average Span between introduction and peak production was 34 years.  But for the group that appeared in 1939-59 period, including the electric frying pan, television and washer and dryer combination, the Span was only eight year

RNBDJ Results - Aditya: Fail, Anushka: Pass, SRK: Merit List, Team: Pass with Grace marks

Just glance through the songs of RNBDJ and you can get a reasonable whiff of what lays inside the movie. Many hailed SRK as lucky when Yash Raj movies gave him his big break in Dar and subsequent super-stardom in DDLJ. But this time round, I must say Yash Raj is lucky to have SRK on their side to end their failed year at a successful note. If RNBDJ has pulled crowds to multiplexes, it’s only because of SRK - whether it is his performance in this movie or his overall aura which keeps audiences glued to screens across the globe - but SRK definitely is the only good thing which happened to RNBDJ [ Most reviews also say so]. The story is not a believable one, especially because of the speed with which the plot setting is breezed through (the bus crash and subsequent marriage). While the script is good, the scriptingstyle is too clichéd (well is it the first time someone has created a song parodying old bollywood cinema?) I didn’t expect Aditya Chopra would copy so blatantly and not even

Future Shock

As I have said earlier , writing is an old hobby of mine, much older than this blog. So a couple of days back as I was cleaning my old documents I discovered texts which I wrote during my engineering days when I did not have a PC, leave alone having this blog space to publish them. I thought why not post them here on my blog now. I am starting with those which are already typed and ready (other which are handwritten will need more time). Here's the first write up in that series: Future shock [written circa 2002-2003 at Age-21] In his book Future Shock , Alvin Toffler talks to accelerated pace of change and describes how men/women, youth, children and even animals are being or will enter paroxysms or orgies of withdrawal from the society due to future shock. He paints a horrible, dangerous and frightening picture of the seemingly insane society of tomorrow. He goes on giving instances to prove that the rate of rate of change is on the unending increase and how biologically and psych