In case you are wondering who is responsible for the daily exploitations that go on in India’s large underground porn film biz, it is morons like these. Holy? Films? Get a grip.

The public doesn’t want vulgar films. Have you ever heard of a morcha taken out because the CBFC has cut scenes?

No, the public are too busy ignoring you wholesale, Mr Trivedi, and attending morning shows in Delhi (and quite a few other places, I imagine). They are busy renting out VCDs resulting from shoots like these. There must be a demand for these somewhere, hmm?

There are two ways that a government can react to things that are popular but taboo (marijuana, alcohol, porn — it doesn’t matter): wipe it out in its entirety, or legalize and regulate it. We’ve tried the ‘wipe out’ model with drugs and prohibition, and we know how well those worked. At least with tobacco, there is regulation and an income stream to the national exchequer. But yes, this is India, we don’t talk about sex, we reached a population of 1e9+ through binary fission; and censors who propose (sacrilege!) a “no cuts only classification” policy are hounded out of office. Dumb!

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Indiatimes chat with Aishwarya:

Ritika: Whose thought was ‘Ish’ in Devdas?
Aishwarya Rai: Definitely Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s because it is a very endearing term in Bengali. So we all found it very charming and we even continued with it long after the film (shooting) was over.

Hmm. Was a little too endearing for my taste — seems like the director liked the sound of the word and got carried away with it :-). ‘Ish’ in Bengali roughly translates to ‘tsk tsk’ in English, with deeper connotations of regret, or in a humorous situation, humour.

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Saw Devdas on Sunday. This is probably the seventh or eighth of a long line of adaptations of one of India’s most enduring tragic heroes, and the first ‘musical’ to boot. Bottom line: this doesn’t come close to either the 1936 Sehgal or the 1955 Dilip Kumar version. That said, it has a number of things going for it, and I’d say watch the movie if you can. Quick notes:

• Eye Candy. Strongest point of the film. Gorgeous sets; art director Nitin Desai will safely take a Filmfare award home.
• The background score was promising but disappointed, it started well but was too monotonous, and was a bit too loud and overbearing in parts.
• Not-so-good group dancing. Somebody should have picked the extras with greater care; the dances of quite a few wouldn’t have been out of place in a typical Bollywood jhatka number.
• Madhuri was good. Have to say that even though I’m not a Madhuri fan.
• Ash tried, and was good in parts. But dancing is not her forte — yet.
• Shahrukh — good in parts. But he has to lose his mannerisms before the actor comes out of the star persona. As a SRK fan, I was disappointed.
• Atrocious Bengali. After spending crores on the sets, you’d think they could hire one diction tutor. Or at least excise all the Bengali lines out of the script. I know Bengali and this one point basically ruined the film for me.
• The original novel on which this is based has a great deal on life and politics of 19th/late 20th century Bengal. The film glossed over most of that. Read the novel (or a translation) — it’s good.
• For a musical, the music was strangely .. forgettable. Nothing worth coming out of the theater with. In fact, the dance remained in my memory for longer.
• Kiron Kher gets a thumbs up for her role as Paro’s mum. Smita Jayekar as Devdas’ get a thumbs down — ‘thakurains’ are made of sterner stuff, or should be. In fact, Ash as the newly wed thakurain looked more convincing than she.

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ToI: From the reclusive Simi Garewal to the garrulous Urmila Matondkar, everyone wants to see Devdas — and wants to see it now. Ditto here.

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The eminently readable (though now seven-of-nine-less :-() Joshua Allen on Cringely’s doomsday article on Palladium:

We don’t know what Microsoft is planning, and we don’t know whether they can pull it off, and we don’t know for sure if it is a conspiracy. But at least we know that it is called Palladium, and it is probably bad for the fish.

Incidentally, seeing that he thinks that El Reg’s coverage "has substance", I wonder what he’d think of this article from them — the first phrase that springs to mind on reading this is "foaming-at-the-mouth".

Josh is bang-on when he says that there are too many separate issues here, and some of them get hopelessly muddled when mixed up. What’s more interesting about his little write-up is the points he didn’t raise:

Fair Use. Most early DRM systems were basically dressed-up copy protection systems, and sucky copy-protection systems too: DeCSS, Cactus. Most of these infringe badly on fair use (right to backup, use on various devices, right to quote excerpts, etc) To be fair, MS’s DRM (in WMP and MSReader) is far better, and I’ll hold judgment on Palladium until I actually see a working Palladium device.

User Expectation. This is the kicker. The software industry discovered in the 80s that users prefer unshackled products. (Sidebar: These days, Microsoft has gone back to Activation for two of its products that have achieved 85%+ penetration so the company no longer has to care a hoot about what users think. And if you think that sounds cynical, you should ask yourself why Activation isn’t included with every copy of VS.Net, or better still, SQL Server Enterprise Edition)

The recording industry will gradually, grudgingly discover that today’s teenagers are, if anything, less tolerant of shackleware than the previous generation was of nagware 20 years ago. If DRM is to work at all, it will have to be far more sophisticated than today’s systems — and someone will then break it anyway.

Update: Mitch Wagner counters by saying litigation is in fact better than innovation when it comes to DRM. Microsoft should know — the BSA operates a multibillion dollar industry this way.

A year or two ago I came to agree with Bruce Schneier’s conclusion that Digital Rights Management is simply unenforceable. It’s like the perpetual motion machine or travelling faster than the speed of light, it simply cannot be done. Whatever technology the developers come up with to guard content, some bright hacker will be able to break, and once broken, the hack can be distributed in software instantaneously over the Web. If all else fails, you can simply put a microphone next to your speakers and make an analog recording of the DRM-protected music, digitize that recording, and pirate THAT.

The way to guard digital rights is not to build Rube Goldberg software and hardware contraptions that punish legal consumers while failing to stop copyright infringers; the way to do it is go after copyright infringers in court. "Better Living Through Software" is precisely wrong here; Litigation is better than innovation when it comes to copyright.

Josh further says: Lack of good, ubiquitous DRM is the only thing holding us back from some really cool advances and cites a really poor example — ebooks. I say poor because, speaking as someone with a largish book collection, ebooks leave me cold.

I really wonder what the good examples would be. Can’t think of any. Maybe a pay-per-use Word that would charge .5c a spell-check? Oh wait, that’d only be cool for MS’ bottom line

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Cringely on Palladium:

Palladium will give Bill Gates a piece of every transaction of any type while at the same time marginalizing the work of any competitor who doesn’t choose to be Palladium-compliant. So much for Linux and Open Source, but it goes even further than that. So much for Apple and the Macintosh. It’s a militarized network architecture only Dick Cheney could love.

I don’t buy into this doomsday scenario for a couple of reasons:

One: The PC market is large, and has enormous inertia. It’s not as easy to get people to upgrade as it was, say, in 1996.
Two: especially after the Hailstorm fiasco, MS knows its ability to push through even a de-facto standard is at an all-time low.

Essentially, industry trust (amusing since there’s a great deal of talk on their part about Trustworthy Computing^(tm) these days) in Microsoft is at such an all-time low that it’ll be a wonder if it can cooperate and work with partners outside its own walled garden (Dell+Intel+NVidia…) in a couple of years. Sure, we have Allchin talking about Microsoft’s new `transparency’ policy, but the doesn’t-play-well-with-others image will have to go before grand, ship-100-million-to-start schemes like Palladium take off. And this is something that Microsoft will have to realize: they can’t do it alone anymore. Sure, they shipped millions of copies of DOS and Windows. But that was at a time when no one else would look at the PC market. It isn’t clear to me that they can pull it off again — with Intel/AMD or without.

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Very good example of very bad reporting. The tone is hysterical and the claims ridiculous. I can take the reporter to any street in any Indian city he cares to name and show him people who feel that Pakistan ought to be fed to the sharks, even if we lose one or two cities in the bargain. This does not make it the collective wish of the people of India.

On the other hand, the military establishment which rules Pakistan now does hate India — with a passion that only two humiliating defeats (1947 and 1971, which led to Pakistan’s partition) can bring about. After the Sep 11 bombings, there was a lot of talk in the western media about how many Arabs hate western civilisation and all that it represents. Without getting into the merits of that, I’ll simply say that something very similar is going on here: India’s very existence as a multicultural, polyethnic nation is a slap on the face of the two nation theory Pakistan was created on. There is a lot of very similar hate out there directed at us. And these rather pathetic hate filled creatures have nukes. And diplomatic passports. And travel around with titles like President.

How do you deal with a country like that?

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USS Clueless: This isn’t a Clone War, it’s a Clown War.

How good would the Jedi be at defending themselves against cluster bombs? If you forget the gee-whiz CGI and analyze the abilities of the weapons themselves, the infantry turn out to be using weapons with approximately the same capabilities as the American M1 Garand, the standard infantry rifle used by the US Army in World War II. Their aircraft are approximately equivalent to Korean war fighters armed with medium caliber cannon.

Nobody in that galaxy a long time ago and far away seems to have invented bombs or missiles! (We’ve seen them used once; to attack the first Death Star.) Their aircraft strafe; the weapons on their walkers are little better. Their infantry use human-wave tactics. The US military of 2002 would make short work of them. If one of their aircraft tried to take on ours, it’d take an AMRAAM up the snoot long before reaching gunnery range. Apache gunships would destroy their walkers. Then heavy bombers would slaughter their men on the ground with area-effect weapons. How good would the Jedi be at defending themselves against an FAE with�a light saber?

And the clones, the clones; why did the bad guys even bother with them? It’s not like there’s ever been any difficulty coming up with cannon fodder.

I guess the answer Lucas would have to that is: he never intended to make something along the lines of a realistic war movie. The real malaise is a little deeper, I think. See the opening sequences of Gladiator and LOTR:FOTR, the Mahabharata telesoap telecast on Indian networks, Attack of the Clones… all show epic battles, but the basic setting is the same: battlefields full of jostling soldiers, blood and mayhem all around.

On the other hand, the rules of war have changed. The last major war fought that way would be WWII, with a similar pattern followed in (among others) Korea, India/Pakistan and India/China — and Vietnam. Today, the attitude — perhaps shaped by the huge losses in Vietnam — is (and rightly so): put men on the ground, but don’t turn them into cannon fodder. Hence the entire paraphernalia of cluster bombing, surgical strikes, media management, the whole nine yards. The entire paradigm of war changed in the last 10 years or so — starting with the Gulf War in 1991 and the Afghan Conflict now. And while it is undoubtedly better for all actually involved, it makes for pretty tepid storytelling. Can you imagine the battle on Ice Planet Hoth in ESB reduced to a series of tactical sorties? No? Well, I wouldn’t count on the battlefields disappearing from storybooks and movie theatres just yet.

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Hollywood movies finally releasing nearly on time in India: Look at these release dates: Spider-Man: May 24, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones: June 7, ET: May 31, Men in Black II: August, Minority Report: August. All of them screened in India within weeks of their US premieres, which is much better than the humongously stupid 4 months I had to wait for LOTR:FOTR.

I think I have a happy summer ahead of me. All of these movies ought to be pretty watchable.

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There’s an old article on BusinessWorld on the Indian recording industry’s plans for digital music. What’s interesting is that in the two years since the article was written, most of the schemes came to nothing, and T-Series and Indiatimes are the only vendors today (with T-Series being the only one shipping actual CDs of MP3s). Indians love MP3s, since they are good value over CDs (which are getting cheaper too, but are still in the Rs 350-500 range). And slow cable/DSL penetration ensures that downloads remain a very minor problem to most producers — downloading MP3s over dialup doesn’t make sense when local calls are not free. Also, Indian music producers get hit by piracy (not the digital kind, but the real bricks-and-mortar kind) anyway, so I think they will be realistic enough to admit that RIAA-style hard lines won’t work here. Thankfully, the T-Series and Indiatimes examples seem to indicate the the Indian recording industry sees an opportunity, and not a threat, in digital music.

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