Idle musings

We continue to be in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. India experienced lockdowns with some relaxations in the time interval between 24-Mar-2020 and 31-May-2020. It seemed unbelievable that a country could be shut down for this duration, but all of us have lived through it. In the lockdown, a close friend suggested that I should write a blog post about the experience. I did think about writing about how our lives have changed, but since I was unduly optimistic, I thought that normalcy would return in three months or so ! I thought I could write looking back at the previous three months or so ! How wrong I was ! It has been now more than seven months since the first lockdown was announced and even now, the country is dealing with the pandemic, which slowly appears to be heading towards a semblance of control. The festival season is in progress now. I sincerely hope that there is no upward spike or second wave after this season. I see that people have become lax in using the mask in

Being a lazy person, my Sunday afternoon nap is almost a sacred ritual for me !  https://fewidlethoughts.blogspot.com/2018/01/two-good-movies.html?m=1  is one instance when a movie affected my nap ! The movie was Satyajit Ray's "Apur Sansar". On Sunday, 05-Apr-2020, another instance occured when I missed my afternoon nap: on that day, my wife and I watched "Parasite", the Korean movie which was awarded the "Best Picture" Academy Award for 2019. We started streaming it at around 2:30 p.m. The next time I turned my neck to check the time in the clock behind me was more than an hour later, well past my usual nap time ! "Do you want to take a break?", I asked my wife. "No, let us watch the movie.", was her reply. So, we watched the movie at a stretch ! The movie is superb ! It deserves the "Best Picture" award. The story is as follows: A young adult Ki-woo who stays in a basement in the poorer section of Seoul gets a job as a

On Sunday, 01-Mar-2020, my wife did a round of spring cleaning in our room. One of the many items that we discarded were several files. These files contained hundreds of newspaper article cuttings, which I had cut from newspapers like "The Times of India" (ToI) and The Hindu. The rest of this blog post is me looking back at my forgotten hobby of collecting newspaper articles. I collected these articles from 1986 to around 2007. I had organised these articles into various categories like: Science, Engineering and Technology: From '86 itself, I have been fascinated by advances in science and technology. Future gazing also interests me. The very first news article in my collection numbered as "1" shows how medicine would be in 2000. The article was written in 1986. Some of the predictions are prescient : telemedicine and advances in genetics are hot topics even now, in 2020 ! I stopped numbering of my articles after some time. The tender notice i

Since the last few weeks, I have heard a new ringtone around me. I commute in the bus to work. I heard the ringtone here as well. It is from the Kannada movie "Avane ShrimanNarayana" (ASN). Most of my Kannada speaking bus mates praised the movie. My wife's brother watched the movie on the first day and recommended it too. It was on 18-Jan-2020 that eleven of us watched ASN. This blog post contains my impressions on ASN. The trailer of ASN is available at https://youtu.be/Dj-HNEZ59Z4 . It shows that the  creators classify ASN as "Southern Odd Fiction". The trailer credits the hero of the movie Rakshit Shetty and "the seven odds" as the writers of the movie. Clearly, the movie is a collaborative effort. The story is as follows: a drama troupe hides a treasure while they are staging plays in a fictional town called Amaravati. The leader of a group of bandits Rama Rama finds them as they are fleeing and kills some of them. The rest mingle in the tow