I’ve always liked the idea of using a desktop client to post to my blog. (Somehow, Google never managed to sell me on the browser-as-an-OS idea.)

Now that I have a laptop with Windows 7 on it, I’ve decided to give Windows Live Writer a test-drive. Here goes nothing.

I guess I have a thing for movies with plots based on fantasy or magic. It never hurts to add some action scenes and a princess or two, either.

That’s a round-about way of saying I watched Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in the theater today.

Movies based on video games gener­ally tend to miss expec­ta­tions, but happily, I have never played the video game that this movie is based on. If you haven’t either, then here’s the gist: a magic dagger turns back time and uses some magic sand to fuel its time-circuits (okay, I was just kidding about the time-circuits). You can figure out the rest.

Here’s the impor­tant thing to note about movies that involve time-travel: no matter what happens, you can’t take it at face value because sooner or later some bloke will come along and undo all of it. And when the only thing stopping you is some lame threat involving sand-storms across the world, no one really gives a second thought to changing time as they please. Now if someone had said the entire space-time fabric would come unrav­elled causing the Universe to implode, that would have made them sit up and pay attention…

In case you were wondering, the hero’s uncle — the King’s brother — is the bad guy. And in case you don’t want to read the spoilers, skip the previous sentence. With that out of the way, here are the top four reasons why he’s the bad guy:

1. He is the prince’s uncle. Uncles seldom end up on the good side.
2. The prince claims that he is the only one he can trust. Er…yeah, right.
3. He has a pointy beard.
4. He has a name like “Nizam”.

Moving on, there’s the question of how long the movie really lasted, after all of the time-travel, I mean. Here’s what happens: the Persian army camps outside the city, attacks at dawn, after which the prince accuses the uncle of treachery. In a bizarre reaction, the uncle gives himself away by attacking the prince (why?) and gets himself killed in the resulting scuffle. The prince gets the girl. The end.

Finally, the action sequences seemed a little far-fetched, but enter­taining. Now if you weren’t satis­fied with this movie, there’s always the sequel. Any movie that has a colon in it and sounds like “X: blah blah” has a sequel coming in the near future.

Pick up ten random blogs on the Internet and at least one of them is sure to have an apolo­getic note from the author explaining why there have been fewer than usual updates recently.

Gather some statis­tics and add a punch­line, and I’m sure this will be a great xkcd strip.…

Argh! The last post on my blog was ages ago.

I guess the hardest part is writing something — there’s a certain inertia associ­ated with it, like starting a conver­sa­tion. It gets easier after that, but if you stay silent for too long, breaking the ice becomes that much more awkward.

But don’t worry, I’m still here.

They say there’s a pot of gold at the end of each rainbow. But sometimes, when you’re staring at a pot of gold, you should leave it aside to go look for the rainbow instead. Sometimes, the rainbow is worth a great deal more.

I replaced my camera batteries this morning, looked through the view-finder and found the auto-focus all blurry. It took me several moments of panic to realize I wasn’t wearing glasses or contacts… (202 charac­ters, damn you, Twitter!)

Happi­ness comes in small doses, like the whiff of perfume that wafts on the breeze for a second, hovers under the tip of your nose, and then dances away merrily in a tanta­lizing swirl.

Sometimes it appears in the form of books, not the ones that you read, but the ones that you could, as you stand in the library, walk around tall shelves, pick up a book or two and watch its pages flutter through your fingers. A mixture of infor­ma­tion, thoughts and ideas that is so potent as to make one dizzy with sheer delight. Crisp pages filled with hours, days and months of somebody’s work, crystal­ized into little bits of paper.

I walked into the library last weekend, after many many months. It was good to be back.

[Click on the image above to view the full album.]

I remember reading Zen and the Art of Motor­cycle Mainte­nance by Robert Pirsig a while ago and reflecting on the nature of Quality as described by the author. Although the ideas described by Pirsig in his medita­tive narra­tive weren’t exactly novel, he did paint a layer of clarity over the things we see in day-to-day life, like a lens that magni­fies some parts of a specimen and brings to the fore an aspect that simply wasn’t noticed before, even as it stared us in the face.

But today, I was travel­ling around the streets of Mumbai, and it got me thinking about what sets nations apart from each other, especially the tenuous distinc­tion between the devel­oping and the devel­oped nations. The distinc­tion most certainly isn’t techno­log­ical — from consumer products to manufac­turing techniques, India has every­thing it needs to be on par with any other nation. In the cases where it doesn’t, there is a penalty of economic cost — we simply have to pay a little extra to get the same benefits. Alter­na­tively, the distinc­tion could be economic, but that expla­na­tion doesn’t fit either. While there are plenty of people in India below the poverty-line, there are plenty of rich people as well. But being rich doesn’t make life any easier in India, unless you are so rich that you can liter­ally pay someone to live your life for you.

To take a simple example, imagine that you need to get a new passport, and it takes several hours and several visits to the passport office to overcome bureau­cratic hurdles and get the job done. There are no missing pieces that prevent this system from functioning equally well in devel­oping as well as devel­oped nations. Except that you would expect this system to work better in a devel­oped nation, gener­ally speaking.

Or to consider another example, if it takes forty-five minutes to commute one mile in suburban Mumbai simply because the traffic is terrible (because traffic rules are not spelt out properly and seldom followed), whom do you blame? If that commute is impor­tant to you, it doesn’t matter how rich you are, such comforts cannot be easily bought. Again, the traffic is not terrible because of poverty, or lack of educa­tion, or limited access to technology.

What is missing is something that can be very accurately, if vaguely, described by the term Quality. Look around and you will see people not willing to make an effort to put in their best work, doing a shoddy job simply because everyone else does. They are surrounded by others who accept this situa­tion and get on with their lives as if it didn’t matter. The accep­tance breeds indif­fer­ence, completing the circle.

In many ways, this idea is scarier than the naïve assump­tion that gener­ating more indus­trial and agricul­tural output will magically trans­form the country into the ideal we cherish in our dreams. It is the people themselves who need to change in some hitherto undefined fashion; simply demanding more resources, more technology or more money does not help in this regard.

Somewhere along the way, we started writing down numbers in spread­sheets and ledgers, and lost track of what is really impor­tant to us.