Idle musings

    Of late, I find myself enjoying movies from the '70s and earlier decades on streaming services.  In this phase, I watched Satyajit Ray movies, an underrated black and white Hollywood movie called "The night of the hunter" and an Italian movie, "The hand of God". I find now that "The night of the hunter" is regarded as a precursor to horror movies of a later age. It is a good thriller.     This blog post is on three other movies though, one of which is a Kannada movie that my wife and I watched in a multiplex near us.     The first movie I want to write about is "Judgement at Nuremberg". I stumbled upon this movie unexpectedly on a streaming service. For an English movie, it is  a long one lasting around three hours. It is based on the Nuremberg trials, which is discussed at https://www.britannica.com/event/Nurnberg-trials and https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/judwarcr.asp#general . The brutality of Nazism is brought out in the latter link.

Recently, my wife and I visited Kolkata to take a break. We went to Shantiniketan and the Sunderban mangrove forest as well. I have been mulling over writing one of my long blog posts or using a few pictures and long captions to describe the trip. Today (05-Dec-2023), I decided that the second option is better. So here are some photographs without people and disproportionately long text to go with them as captions!  Notes: I have avoided mentioning names. The photographs are NOT in chronological order.   This sunset in the Sunderbans was a highlight of the trip. The sun and the clouds toyed with us on the horizon. Sometimes, slivers of the sun appeared, a milder shade of orange, sometimes the clouds covered it, obscuring its brilliance partially. The effect of the light on the water was superb. My photographic skills and my smartphone do not do justice to the actual light and hues of gold, pink and orange that we saw in the other pictures that I took. There is something spiritual abou

    On work, I visited the Netherlands (or Holland) for a week in the beginning of September 2023. It was exciting to meet colleagues whom I had only met on video calls. I had a couple of days during the weekend when I visited Amsterdam and the city of Maastricht. The rest of this blog post describes some of my experience and memories from those days. NOTE: As always, I have avoided mentioning names of hotels and people.     An observation about me from my wife is: "You are the only person capable of getting lost near home!" On a Sunday morning in the city of Eindhoven, I proved her observation to be correct! This time, I will blame technology to some extent: on my smartphone, I typed in the station that I was supposed to go to. However, the app took the first location by default, an area near the station but NOT the station itself. I happily followed its directions thinking how smart I am! It took me a few minutes to realise that I was not near the train station!     As I fo

The credit goes to my wife's brother for introducing me to the Kannada movie 'Daredevil Musthafa'. He told me that the movie was crowd funded. It made me interested, but not interested enough to buy tickets for the movie. NOTE: I will avoid names of people in this blog post. A couple of weeks later I called upon another relative. This is a person who is very knowledgeable about both Kannada literature and also Kannada movies. While talking, the topic went to movies based on books. We talked of Puttanna Kanagal, Nagara Haavu, Sharapanjara and other movies. The conversation veered to Kannada authors. My relative spoke of the literary giant Kuvempu and his equally talented son Dr. Poornachandra Tejaswi. "There is a movie called 'Daredevil Musthaf'a released based on Dr. Tejaswi's characters and stories. It is his fans who produced the movie. For the first time, there is a poster of an author in a movie theatre instead of the posters of film stars. This can hap

    There are very few movies filmed like a documentary that are worth watching twice. "Gandhada Gudi - Journey of a True Hero", a Kannada movie by Amoghavarsha on Karnataka's wildlife featuring actor and superstar Dr. Puneeth Rajkumar is one such movie. When I saw that the movie is released on the streaming service Amazon Prime Video, I was excited. I wanted all of us at home to watch it. We began watching the movie together, my wife, my mother and I. For the next 90 minutes or so, all of us were engrossed in the movie. The photography, the music, the places and the people captivated us. At the end of it, I was left with mixed feelings: on one hand, we have lost a talented actor who retained his simplicity until his untimely demise; on the other hand, the places and the visuals in the movie made me feel refreshed and energised. A couple of days later, my wife's brother visited us. I told him about the movie - and again all of us at home watched it with him and his fa

    On work, I had an opportunity to visit Israel from 07-Jan-2023 to 15-Jan-2023. My impressions about Israel, Haifa and Jerusalem follow.     The voyage began with a meeting between a colleague and I in Bengaluru airport. The crowd was something that surprised both of us. The check in counter and the security check both took quite a long time. The queue was long in immigration also, but it moved quickly.     In Abu Dhabi, I met a friend and three of his colleagues, who came from Pune, taking the flight to Abu Dhabi from Mumbai. One of them had visited Haifa, the city where we were all headed. Haifa is a coastal city with a lot of history as indicated in https://www.britannica.com/place/Haifa . The journey from Tel Aviv airport to Haifa took about 90 minutes. We could see banana plants cultivated under plastic covers (seemingly) on the drive. Some of the places evoked names of Israeli people: I saw a board indicating Netanya. I can imagine that the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Neta