Sex and the City

Technorati Tags: ’sex’,cinema,people watching

This blog has seen very little activity of late, and I’m reliably assured by numerous well wishers that this has been no great loss to the cultural capital of our generation. This is of course, precisely the encouragement one needs to write once more. Its the same sort of self destructive creative impulse as has driven the birth of modern day cinematic masterpieces such as Ram Gopal Verma Ki Aag.

Obligatory self deprecating cynicism having been completed, there is a story to tell. A couple of days ago I found myself sitting in the midst of a quite charming movie theatre, all the necessary creature comforts at hand – comfortable seat, popcorn, something to drink. To the proverbial fly on the wall, all would have seemed well – unless that is, said fly happened to look into my eyes, where she might have spied a look of quiet desperation. The sort of despair that comes when resignation has set in, but the pain has not yet numbed and memories of happier times still remain fresh and clear. A glance up at the huge screen would have explained much of this suffering. Just about then, the charming Sarah Jessica Parker was dancing out of a closet, clad in a frilly little white dress that looked like something a ten year old would flatly refuse to wear to a friend’s birthday party. And watching the lovely Carrie, her three other eternally youthful friends. Like a sort of ghastly schoolgirl house party being held 40 years too late. The truly ironic part of course was that they all loved the dress, which for a movie obsessed with fashion would seem to be rather a gigantic mistake to make.

But the unique experience of watching Sex and the City from a male perspective has been documented elsewhere. Read Anthony Lane in the New Yorker for instance. And to be honest, I was never going to get it, something only reinforced by the fact that I had been trying desperately to watch Kung-Fu Panda instead (and it must be said, it takes a special kind of genius to make a movie about a kung-fu master who’s also a panda bear, weighing hundreds of pounds, living in ancient china, serving noodle soup for a living and with a duck for a father). If you love the panda bear, I guess you can hardly complain about the realism of a 50 year old female character who is apparently still irresistibly attractive to male super-models half her age. Of course once you’ve gone and watched it you can either shut up and avoid being teased mercilessly. Or you can choose to reclaim the night so to speak, and write about it instead.

Going to see Sex and the City was fascinating though, more for the folks filing in with me. There seemed to be primarily two kinds of people watching. There were the groups of girls, hunting in packs of three or four, all excitedly dissecting season six of the TV series. Then there were the women who had dragged alongside squirming men to watch with them – boyfriends or just an unfortunate and available surrogate (as I was). I believe there is a school of thought that holds that there is an exquisite pleasure to be gained from watching that movie with a cringing male companion or two. Anyhow, it was interesting to observe that all the men sported identical expressions – a sort of shifty, ‘I’m not really here and I hope I don’t see anyone I know’ look. And afterwards, in conversation with their female friends, all the usual suspects. Feigned interest, over-compensating rants, grudging admissions to not having completely died in there, and a heartfelt concern for the the retrogressive portrayals of the fabulous four. Incredible how many critics and male viewers alike (see Lane again) would have apparently loved the movie had it only been about a different flavour of liberated woman. In much the same way as all of democrat America is now busily convincing itself that really, the reason Hillary Clinton did not win was not that she was a woman, but simply that she was the wrong sort of woman.

Snippets

Cry softly little one. Pick up your coat, brush your hair back, smooth the faintly crumpled blue dress you’re wearing. Run your hands over the dressing table (careful now, don’t touch that vodka). Find some lipstick…not too bright, remember to look classy…the pale pink should do. Now the eyebrows, liner, gray-blue contacts, time to wipe those tears. Those are nice shoes, capping elegant black-stockinged legs. One small silver handbag, and the proverbial icing on the proverbial cake – a tiny gold watch. Why, you look beautiful again angel.

The evening light streaming over Alcatraz came to rest finally on the slick muscled black body of a particularly large sea-lion. The bay, as dictated by the conventions of language and wordplay, was liquid gold under the setting sun. They stood on the wooden pier, two Indian boys, unsure and excited at the same time, looking around and looking lost. One gazed longingly at the crepes being tossed a few metres away (early days yet, soon they will think in feet). And then at the right hand column on the menu board propped up against the wall – 5 dollars. Too many, far too many. In a new world, numbers and money are confusing things and the crepes were too expensive, yet laptops so cheap. Two years later the three hundred dollar New Year’s party in Vegas will become well worth it. For now though the food was dismissed without a second glance, and the two walked on.

They’ll do, look pretty clueless. Hopefully not dead cheap though. Worth a shot at any rate. Fuck this, its not like I can wait forever anyway. Tired, really exhausted. Can’t even smile properly, it hurts my lips. Maybe its a sign.

The lady in blue walked up to the taller one, who was dressed in standard attire blue jeans, t-shirt and a black leather jacket. White running shoes and a walmart backpack completed the picture. ‘Excuse me’. She smiled politely but her eyes looked worried, the slim fingers of one hand clenched into a nervous fist. ‘I was wondering if you might be able to help me?’. ‘I’ve run out of gas on my way back from work and desperately need to fill some more. Thing is, I seem to have left my wallet in my office desk and…’. Her voice tailed off. ‘Umm do you think you guys could help out? Please…’ Those blue eyes opened wider, pleading. She looked beautiful, rich, in trouble. Very Hollywood.

A few minutes later, the boys were ten dollars poorer (a pair of exquisite nutella crepes, to put things in perspective). The blonde in blue was smiling gratefully and walking away, slipping quickly into the crowd. The dying sun gleamed off the silver bag, a goldfish slipping into the laughing crowd. The two students looked at each other faintly embarrassed, but filled with the warm fuzzy feeling that accompanies doing a certified ‘good deed’. Soul food for months really, to be savoured in those night-time moments before exams and research presentations when you wonder whether God loves you.

Walking to the tram station they saw her again, talking to a Chinese girl, who looked genuinely sympathetic. ‘My car…’ they heard, in that oddly lilting accent. Money changed hands. And again the blonde-blue-silver princess walking away quickly, throwing herself into a run down Ford, turning into a somewhat seedy alley. There’s really not much to say at these moments. The two exchanged a couple of quick exchanged glances, some ‘do you think’ awkward laughter. Then, because to skip this step is virtually impossible for most Indians, there was a bit of philosophizing about things that actually matter. And it is true – in the larger scheme of things, actually in pretty much any scheme of things – ten dollars is no big deal. There will be pick-pockets and muggings and completely useless used cars to come. There will be dapper Turkish salesmen selling eighty dollar felt hats and ascribing to them a glorious Anatolian heritage. Even so, some incidents remain oddly hard to forget, romanticized and polished with time, still faintly mortifying and yet not wholly unpleasant.

Kane dynamics

This post is going to put a bunch of people off, but I was reminded of it when discussing something with my room-mate (and realizing how much I’d forgotten). Once upon a time I used to be an engineering student before going over to the dark side (save the world, burn less carbon). So…in memory of kinematics and dynamics, here’s what seemed to me to be a quite fascinating demonstration of the importance of variable selection in solving a dynamics problem. Note that this problem is theoretically quite uninteresting, completely understood, and utterly insoluble if you don’t make the right choices.

Consider the spacecraft in the figure with an attached robot arm, used perhaps to hurl hapless fools into the nether regions of frigid space. If the ship is stationary, external forces and torques are balanced and you have nine degrees of freedom corresponding to the three rigid parts of the arm with the spacecraft just sitting there. In order to figure out what torques (and thrusts) the driving motors should generate you need to write the differential equations governing motion. Some of these come from geometry (half to be precise) – thats the kinematics bit. The rest come from dynamics. 18 equations in total. The key is in how you write them.

Using Newtons Laws about the centre of mass is a complete mess, and you wouldn’t really try that. What might be worth trying is to use a Lagrangian formulation, using motion variables and their derivatives. Lagrange’s method has us define position variables as a set of angles. Three for the orientation of 1 in N, 2 for the twin motors at B (rotations about by and then a rotation of 2 about bz), 1 rotation about cz and finally three for the ball and socket joint connecting the grasper E to the arm. Thats 9 if you count, and well – bear with me!

So now Lagrange’s formulation leads to these angles and their derivatives as the position and motion variables. The kinematic equations in this case are trivial since they merely state that motion variables are defined as derivatives of position variables. The shortest dynamic equation is all of 300kms long in 11 point font. Modern dynamics (Kane dynamics) uses an alternative set of position and motion variables generated using a set of guidelines, and of the form of affine functions of positions and angles, and velocities and angular velocities respectively. Follow the right method and you get equations a few lines long, with the longest being a few pages.

The difference between a 300km long equation and a couple of lines is quite simply the difference between saying you can solve a Newtonian dynamics problem, and saying you understand the principle. Figuring out ways to come up with efficient formulations is less than a couple of decades old. Writing F=ma dates back to the 17th century.

Poetree

There is this fascinating movement that seems to have sprung up in the coffee places and bars of Delhi, in the last few months. Its this variegated group of poets who form a reading group / spoken word collective that goes by the name of (yes I know), ‘Poetree’. A friend of mine frequents these gatherings, and apparently there are now over a hundred amateur poets who attend semi-regularly to read out stuff. There are, I am informed, three groups who are particularly well represented. There are the retired civil servants and professionals, who write about lost childhood loves and often touching vignettes from lives that have spanned many experiences and many decades. There is the kurta-kajal crowd who write about waiting, water, Valium, wordplay and, naturally, coffee table love. Finally there are those who just listen. Rumour has it there is even the odd poetry groupie.

Thus with nothing better to do, I went along with S to one of these things, hoping to be amongst the silent listeners (no not the poetry groupies). Alas it turned out that we were in the midst of a particularly lean period, with a tiny handful of people in attendance thanks to a combination of post New Years hangovers, a marriage season in full swing and freezing cold weather. All of which meant we were forced to be active participants.

And so S read out bits from a poetry book and was told by an admiring 50 year old gentleman that her voice sounded like condensed milk. I kid you not. That line is so ridiculously cheesy I’ve resolved to use it to make fun of people every opportunity I get. Meanwhile I was forced to go up on stage and had to quickly improvise. So here’s what I came up with – a somewhat honest assessment of the superficiality of all the poetry I’ve written (and pretty much as bad). In an ode to engineering geekiness, I’m commenting this a la MATLAB.

%Since this was truly impromptu, how better than to begin by ripping off that masterwork, ‘Aphorisms’, that Mallesh and I put together.

I scribble aphorisms on napkins,

Stories of roses in long black hair.

In search of a dyadic cadence,

And a word that rhymes with orange.

%Next we kill time by paying homage to the organizer of the whole thing (an admittedly good poet), who before reading some of his work

%had gravely informed us that “poetry is the resonance between throat and ear” (an analogy I found well meaning, but somewhat

%unfortunate in that any sentence with throat and ear in it instantly brings to my mind images of white coats and a stethoscope).

Downstairs the roar of laughter with alcohol

Yet I stand here, listening to you tell me,

That poetry is the resonance between throat and ear.

Wondering what I could give you,

To lighten this rather sombre atmosphere.

%Finally we decide to address the rest of the poem to a randomly chosen attractive girl in the audience, since that is de rigeur in

% these situations. One needs a muse and all that, especially when its clear that another few seconds of free verse are needed and

%your brain long since walked away in disgust.

And so, like so many poets do

I hold the night air in the palm of my hand,

Pluck the starlight from your eyes,

And shape from them – pretty phrases, elegant words.

And I send those your way,

Empty and beautiful

And whisper to you,

‘There is meaning here, if you only knew where to look’

It went down better than I expected, helped enormously by muted lighting, an increasingly well primed audience, a nice mike, what Stephen Colbert would call ‘gravitas’ in delivery, and an utter lack of other bakras on the night. Smart alecky cynicism aside, its nice that things like this are happening in Delhi – makes the city a bit more vibrant.

PS: On a completely unrelated note, it is with the greatest of pleasure that I note that Sachin Tendulkar has been awarded the Padma Vibhushan. It is with some shock that I learn that Pranab Mukherjee has decided that he deserves the same honour.