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Frankfurt Airport
Frankfurt is an amazing airport. It lies in the heart of the developed world, serves millions of passengers every year, and to say that it is bit disorganized at the moment might be a bit of an understatement.
I am not known to be a picky guy. I set a low bar on facilities, food, and the fact that Frankfurt has those amazing one person restrooms (an innovative concept for busy airports!) and atrociously long lines to get a cup of coffee are just not things that can bother me. In my humble origins and coming from a developing nation, I am used to such deficiencies in the infrastructure. (My hometown doesn’t even have an airport, and I haven’t lost sight of that.)
As I arrived from my Lufthansa flight from Amman, there was no gate available, so we were calmly dropped off in the middle of the taxiing area and required to walk down two flights of steps from the flight and a few hundred feet to a people mover. Good exercise for me, but a young woman with a roll on suitcase, and a toddler in hand, was a bit lost and couldn’t see where the people mover was (nor did I at first), and started walking towards the food truck. Dozens of other equipment trucks that are common at the airport are driving around, creating a potentially dangerous situation. Then the German police came and wanted to see their passports. Of course, nothing wrong in that, especially considering that the area was teeming with non-travelers, such as construction workers, etc, but also, I think, the passport police was oblivious to the fact that the woman never intended to be in the tarmac of a terminal with trucks speeding around when making her travel plans in the first place. Her 2 year old is running around obviously fascinated by those big trucks. Finally, we get on to the people mover. Perhaps it was that flight, or perhaps that is the norm, the people mover did not have enough seats for all the elderly and the people with little kids. So as it makes it journey around the terminal to the gate, going around taxis and gourmet food trucks and yield signs and police cars, people are falling over, kids are crying, and that sir, I must admit, has gone too far, even for me.
Once at the terminal, standing outside a long line at the restroom, travelers are commiserating about the unbelievable condition that the airport is in, and a calm level-headed traveler points out that the airport is doing a bit of renovation, and as he explained, he had just come from Addis Ababa, and there really are places that are comparable (or even worse!) in the confusion department. A bit of perspective always helps, and it did in this case too, but I am unsure about how the Frankfurt airport authorities feel about the comparison. In the restroom, I did come across an airport official looking for feedback, and perhaps that is the least I can do, to point it out to him.
A few years ago, I had written about the smoking problem in Frankfurt Airport, and the airport authorities have fixed it quite nicely. The rest rooms may be a one man show, but there are plenty of smoking areas, that can host at least 50 people each, and those smoking areas are closed facilities now.
There is always a root cause, and in this case, it may be that the root cause is that Frankfurt airport is too successful in selling its services to the airlines. Just as people (travelers) buy tickets from airlines, airlines buy their “tickets” (or gate slots) from airports. Just as sometimes airlines can “overbook” people, airports can “overbook” airlines. (In case of passenger overbookings, the airlines often try to buy out their voluntary participation in dropping off by offering a future travel voucher etc.) The “non-availability of gates”, while obviously a hassle to the travelers, can be done almost with impunity, because the airports don’t sell to travelers – they sell to airlines. Then again, I know little about how airlines and airports work, so I know I fool no one with this flimsy analysis.
Just in case, I thought it was just the flight from Amman that didn’t have a gate at the terminal, my next flight to Washington Dulles didn’t have one either, so you just go down four flights of metal stairs on to the tarmac, and then get on the people mover, and then board the airplane. Again, good exercise for me, but a lot of people had difficulty on the stairs, and for the first time perhaps, I felt a dose of jet bridge envy.
September 6th, 2011
Movie Review – “Midnight in Paris”
The movie that you don’t really want to like, but can’t really help it. From someone who doesn’t even like Paris that much, the constant reminders about the beauty of Paris are too burdensome to agree with, and too elegant to disagree with.
But personal prejudices not withstanding, for someone to go back in time, and meet the likes of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Hemingway, Dali, Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Degas, and Manet is fantastic. Literally.
Some excellent quotes:
“I never heard of Valium, what is it?”. “I guess you can call it the pill of the future.”
We both like Indian food. I mean not all Indian food. We both like Pita bread, I guess nan is what you call it now.
That’s very French. You guys are very much more evolved in that department. (On loving the wife and mistress at the same time.)
The theme of the movie, is of course, as old as time itself. Fantasies about the 18th century were written in the 19th, and about the 19th in the 20th. There is no starting point about the fantasies and there is no ending point. Be it a subtle fantasy like the Steppenwolf or in your face fantasies like the Metamorphoses or modern day classics like the Groundhog Day or Back to the Future, the fantastic idea is the one that of imagining for the sake of imagining, and thus slowly peeling away all the layers of the redundancies and be left with what is the core, the true self.
Some more excellent quotes:
That Paris exists and anyone chooses to live anywhere else is a mystery to me.
–Adriana
Pablo is the greater artist, but Matisse is the greater painter.”
I met and fell in love with an American writer by the name of Jill Pender. He brought me earings and we made love.”
– Adriana.
This is the time we live in. Everything moves so fast and life is noisy and complicated.”
– Adriana, in 1920
In fantasy as in reality, the past lives in the future and the future lives in the past. And the present? Well, that is all over the place. We continue to look into the past, and also the future to decide the course of action in our present, even if a Hemingway crystal ball is not always available to tell us about obvious things that we may be missing.
If it reminds you of Groundhog Day when Gil gives Adriana a pair of earrings, you should remind yourself that “fantasy” is not just a genre, when it comes to art. As Adriana finds her way back to the Belle Epoque, the golden age of Paris, the realization that is building up slowly hits us all that no generation is great until the next generation can come and analyze it and elevate it to the highest pedestal possible. It takes a while for all the interpretations of Mona Lisa can be drawn out that make Mona Lisa what it is. Da Vinci couldn’t have done it all by himself. He needed the help of future generations to view ML from all different angles and define in the universe what it really stands for.
Perhaps in the future, we will look back at some artists today like Spielberg or Tom Hanks or Zubin Mehta, and elevate them to some new statuses. As Adriana puts it, “Present is a little unsatisfying, because life is a little unsatisfying.”
The movie has amazing soundtrack, which despite the monotony of the genre doesn’t get tiring, due to the variety within the genre.
Thankfully, the movie ends with no further clarification of the message. Gil walks away into the rain (when Paris is at it’s prettiest) with Gabrielle. Are they walking away into the future? Or, are they walking away into the present?
June 16th, 2011
Movie Review: The Adjustment Bureau
“In a Nutshell”® rating: 6/10.
Excellent Movie Quote:
If you google for just Elise, you get more than 357,000 hits. And none of them is about you.
Adjustment Bureau is the non-machine version of the Matrix. The premise is that everything is controlled, and there is a clean hierarchy, and structured, and the top person is called the “chairman” who is actually a distributed person, and can be different for different people. At this point, it just feels that the script writers ran out of creative juices. Oh well.
Overall, the movie is OK. Barely good enough to be seen in the plane. Probably, the directors and the script writers need to realize that it is not sufficient that the movie or the book have a nice conclusion at the end (which Adjustment Bureau does indeed have). It is also important that the main premise be compelling. To open doors using a bowler hat and have those doors open (literally!) in many different places, and then to end with conclusion that free will is important is a bit of a non sequitur.
February 2nd, 2011
Movie Review: We Are Family (2010)
“In a Nutshell”® rating: 9/10.
“We Are Family” is an official remake of the Stepmom (1998). In fact, it is an almost word by word copy, and that is not a bad thing, since Stepmom was a fairly decent movie.
[Digression: I am for copying all good things and translating all good works of art into all possible media outlets and languages – so much so that I often fantasize translating the Essential Works of Pablo Neruda into Hindi. Other than the minor problem of me not having any background in literature or poetry, there are 3 other problems with that fantasy: (i) I am conversational, not fluent, in Spanish. (ii) I am conversational, not fluent, in Hindi; and (iii) I have never translated anything before.]
[Oh well, that is not my only fantasy that isn’t coming true.]
Ok, back to Stepmom. The essential line of Stepmom is when Julia Roberts says: “My fear is that they (the kids) will miss you at every important moment in life”, to which Sarandon replies, “And mine is that they won’t.” When you include a movie’s ten second précis in the local adaptation as well, at that point, you have done a VERY good job of copying all relevant details.
Ok, back to We are Family. All performances are very good. Kajol as usual gives a tour d’force. But thankfully, she doesn’t dominate the movie. Kareena is weak at times, but for most part, she does it quite well. The parts where she is weak (in acting) is where the character is in control, since that is not what the script is implying. Arjun Rampal handles the presence of superstars Kajol and Kareena very well, and comes across as a major acting force. Child artists give commendable performances. The boy’s expression of fear and subdue when approaching the mother’s deathbed is priceless. How does an emotionally aware child approach a dying or a dead mother?
So, what about the social issues? Without taking a stance on divorce, the movie’s message to the kids is that they are loved. In some cases they are loved by someone who is their parents’ partner. More people that can love the children, more perspectives and guidance they can get. That is important. Thanks to the director for conveying the message of Stepmom to the letter. One question though – movie setting was Australia, not India. Is Bollywood ready to talk about this in India, happening to Indian people, but not show happening this to Indian people in India? Will Bollywood need a second adaptation, such as “Hum Family Hain” that will be a copy of “We Are Family” set in India?
Where does this movie suck? All dialogues are canned. Some look natural, some don’t. In situations filled with drama, no one stutters a single time. No one has a false start. No one has a start and then gets lost in words. No one is caught speechless. No one tries to say something and checks themselves. Surreal. A whopping C+ to dialog writes. No one in the movie except the teenager girl says something that they regret. Actually, let us make that C+ a D.
Songs. The songs are nothing to criticize or write home about. I wouldn’t change the channel if any of them came on the radio, but I won’t be springing for its LP.
Overall. The overall rating is positive. In a nutshell rating: “9/10”.
December 13th, 2010
3 Selected Quotes from “The Alchemist”
As a book that has sold alzillion copies, has been translated into so many languages, and has been read by so many people, The Alchemist needs no formal review. Instead, here are 3 quotes from the book, that are phenomenal. While no replacement for reading the book, the quotes do convey what I as a reader took away from the book.
Quote 1: Part I, Page 39 of paperback version.
I’m going to become bitter and distrustful of people because one person betrayed me. I’m going to hate those who have found their treasure because I never found mine. And I’m going to hold on to what little I have, because I’m too insignificant to conquer the world.
These are Santiago’s feelings right after being robbed of all his belongings. The three fears that Santiago has are quite distinct: (i) fear of becoming apprehensive of strangers, (ii) fear of hatred of successful people, (iii) fear of becoming petty and miserly.
Readers identify with different aspects of the protagonist, and this fear is the aspect that I identify with the most. I certainly hope that small or big setbacks will not set me back in this sense. Whether this is the ideal or my current self may be irrelevant.
Quote 2: Part II, Page 64.
The hills of Andalusia were only two hours away, but there was an entire desert between him and the Pyramids. Yet the boy felt that there was another way to regard this situation: he was actually two hours closer to his treasure … the fact that the two hours had stretched into an entire year didn’t matter.
What could be more literary way of articulating the economic theory of sunk cost? In the preface, Coelho mentions 4 major obstacles in realizing your destiny: (i) the notion of impossibility, (ii) the shackles of love, (iii) fear of defeats and (iv) the fear of success. By the time we overcome some of these obstacles, we can think – Oh, but we have already lost too much time. Or, we can think: this is where we are, now what?
Quote 3: Part II, Page 68.
But he was able to understand one thing: making a decision was only the beginning of things. When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.
Each decision is the starting point of a new journey – a fork in the definition of a new parallel universe – a realization of our potential. Whether we realize our potential positively or negatively is subject to interpr
etation. Similarly, decisions themselves are rarely right or wrong – mostly it is just our interpretation of the result of the decision that was taken, and our estimate of the road not taken. How can we compare a road taken, with all its rewards and its pitfalls that we experienced concretely, with a road that we never took and of which cannot reasonably guess rewards and travails? Yet, we do it all the time.
And how about the indecisive ones amongst us? It is uncommon sense that not making a decision is akin to making a passive decision of maintaining status quo. This is true in a corporate sense as well – decision making is a key distinguishing reason for companies performing average, and companies performing well.
November 1st, 2010
Wrapping Text around Images for Better Publishing
Just had to review someone’s draft writeup. Was surprised to figure out that the basics of publishing, such as image and text alignment and wrapping are not that common, and perhaps the question should text wrap around images is not universally well accepted. Ended up putting together this small write up, hopefully it helps anyone who is struggling with the question of how to do this, even if it does not try to convince anyone if they should do this.
Attaching this as PDF, so the formatting differences are easier to observe: Wrapping Text around Images for Better Publishing.
September 10th, 2010
Book (non) Review – The Alchemist
That anything remains to be said about “The Alchemist” is highly debatable. That anything remains to be said by me is touching upon ridiculous, since I am pretty much the last person to read the book that has sold over 300 million copies. I am sure there are people who have not read this book yet, but let us not talk about the 3 year olds, people who only communicate using whistling language, beautiful spice girls married to football stars and US vice presidential candidates right now.
Suppose all your friends went to the National Museum of Natural History, and saw this beautiful Hope Diamond and came back and told you all about it. But for years you didn’t go there, until more of your friends went and saw it and told you about it. And then your aunts and uncles and everyone else saw it and told you about it. And then finally your FedEx delivery guy told you about it. And then you went and saw the Hope Diamond. Who would you write the review for?
 “The Hope Diamond” – Click here to buy now [Picture courtesy Ken Lund] |
September 6th, 2010
Romanov Bride (Robert Alexander): A review
Just finished “The Romanov Bride“, which I really liked. The book is written from two voices that alternate by chapters: the female voice of Ella, the eponymous princess and Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna; and the male voice of Pavel, a peasant who moves from the countryside to St. Petersburg and becomes a revolutionary.
Ella was born a princess, grand daughter of Queen Victoria and while the chapter opens by saying that she was not raised in a life of luxury as the duchy was not a rich one, that appears to be just a simple relativism at play. But when diphtheria struck her family, killing her younger sister and her mother, then her words of not living a life of luxury have more impact. When she is twenty years old, Ella is married to the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia and becomes Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna of Russia. As the strikes and demands for political reforms grew stronger in Russia, the Grand Duke Sergei, who is the Governor General of Moscow, became very unpopular, and is ultimately killed by a terrorist bomb inside Kremlin at the hands of revolutionary Kalyayev. At the time of this tragedy, Ella chooses to start her hospital and ultimately becomes a nun at a convent that is established by the Tsar in an imperial decree. She sells off all her personal riches and jewels to support her mission and the chosen path of religion and spirituality. As the country deteriorates into mayhem and revolution, she rises in her spiritual endeavors, and is able to love everyone and everything, and is able to serve those in need.
Pavel’s story generally flows in quite a different direction. After her wife and unborn child are killed in a bloody Sunday when the peasants wanted to give a petition to the Tsar, Pavel is consumed with the fire of revenge, and this fire slowly corrodes his conscience until he finally becomes a shell of a man who no longer recognizes himself or his purpose in the revolution.
One of the fascinating elements of this story is to discern what is fact and what is fiction. The princess’ background, the grand duke and the politics is of course all factual, so is Sergei’s murder by Kalyayev. Even the episode in which Grand Duke escapes when a revolutionary hesitates upon seeing him in company of his wife and two children is factual. All that said, the very existence of the narrator Pavel may be fictional, as a human face of the peasants. His persona is an exaggerated version of the well accepted premise that the peasants rose in arms to the revolution, without realizing that the violent revolution and communism was very unlikely to improve their lives. The exaggeration in case of Pavel of course is that he himself is killed by communists for speaking out against his superior, an act very similar to the one that killed his beloved wife Shoura.
The book begins and ends in a Russian gulag near the white sea, where Pavel is awaiting his death sentence and in a way joins the lives of the two narrators in terms of the finality of death and the judgment that awaits them. From Pavel’s own perspective, he has lived a life of sin, while the grand duchess has lived a saintly life. He owes her a confession, but while she is gone, a priest “Father Vladimir” listens to his confession.
Overall, excellent book, and especially for people such as myself who were not so familiar with the Russian history during the 1905-1917 years, this book is very interesting. Highly recommended.
August 30th, 2010
“Decalcify Coffee Machine”
Everyday when I walk into the office, I usually start the coffee machine and go through its ablutions and other rituals of starting up. Machine Rinse – check! Empty Grounds – check! Fill water tank – check! FYI, the machine that we have is the fancy Jura-Capresso 13421
).
However, today, it threw such a curve ball – “Decalcify Coffee Machine”, that I might actually have to read the manual. This reflects some of the changes in customer support that we have experienced in the last one decade or so. The first big change is that when you buy a product, you are usually provided a CD, or at least a hyperlink to the support documentation on the web. Secondly, the products usually come with a big note: “Please do not return this product to the store! Call this 800 number.” Obviously, the return costs are so high (in term of logistics, brand reputation, charge backs etc), that it is much easier for the product manufacturer to first give the user an option to rectify a problem by calling the customer service. In some cases, they will send you a replacement free of charge, and it is still better for them rather than you returning the product to Target or Amazon.