Would you like to Subscribe?

Harini dressed up a bare bear for a charity. I believe the bears are given back to poor orphan kids as gifts from Santa. I got their snaps before she was sent on her way to a new home.

I just unsubscribed Sun TV willfully without much grief that I am dropping the only Tamil channel I had access to. Of late, Sun’s programming has been awful and their attitude turning arrogant. I will certainly miss a couple of good series, but in a modern democratic society where every consumer purchase denotes a vote of support, I don’t think I support them anymore.

That saves some bucks, so we are trying the new Dish package from Voom. Their lineup isn’t that great, but I am looking forward to a few months of trial on variety HD programming.

We had the chance (after all my classes and mid-term tests, I found a bit of time) to watch “Napoleon Dynamite” this past weekend. Off the bat, you have to have grown up (or at least know a lot about) in the middle-America to appreciate the content of the movie. If I hadn’t read anything about the movie, I would called it a waste of time and the crew as Idiots. But then thats like saying people in India still ride on elephants and horses to school and work : sheer Ignorance. Thankfully, I educated myself before watching the movie and I can say now that it was funny, original and creative.

If a 007 flick or a Bourne Identity can be fast, upbeat and thrilling then thats the type of such movies and the characters that play in it. Napolean Dynamite (official site) takes an exact opposite stance given the context of the movie and its characters. Let me borrow the word “The movie is deadpan” from a lot of reviews I had read about this movie. When time, emotions, and music (very minimal) is taken away from the medium, what you get is a raw form of art. You have to be able to understand and experience it before we could appreciate it. I have only begun to comprehend the originality of such movies. If you go by the definition of “Hollywood”, this is not even close. But by the definition of “real story telling as an art form”, bet you got a winner in this. Napolean Dynamite has garnered a cult classic status and no kiddish achievement for young 24 year old writer/director couple.

If Acting is all about emotions, then how would you describe and act characters with almost no emotions? Isn’t silence is a form of music? And to be able to use silence intelligently is not an easy thing. Much in the same lines, To “act” without emotions but only depth of character and conviction is indeed challenging : Jon Heder‘s and most of the crew’s performance is easily a breakthrough.

Harini has started collecting her animation and graphic design works at another blog at blogspot. Its got everything that she created from the day 1 of her basic animation/illustration classes. Its fascinating to see a budding eArtists in the making. Moving on to advanced classes this winter, we can expect some more cool stuff to come our way.

My favourite so far is this cute restless caterpillar which never stopped for a moment of rest!

The weather in this part of the world has been sporadic with windy days, stormy showers, ice cold nights and occasional sun, if at all we are lucky. As I hear from my kith and kin in South India, the weather there has also been less merciful. With relentless flooding and rain in the past few weeks, I can imagine how hard life would be in India. As I had once lamented, the Gods are only getting angrier day after day as the continuous natural disasters (including the unwarranted tornado today in Indianapolis) only stand to prove my suspicion.

Strangely, I saw on Sun TV the other day that India has fully developed in strange ways that the camera crew of cable media arrives at disaster spots much much quicker and ahead of time than the police and other forms of help! What a pity that the directors of the cable television take pride in showing live, dead bodies being pulled all around from the Andhra trains crash wrecks. In the name of freedom and consumer eyeprints (a.k.a market-share capitalism), some of India’s cable channels seem to be losing common sense.