Earlier today, I stumbled upon Kris’s blog while going through some blog posts related to music. I heard two songs by Kris and am amazed at the kind of talent we have around here. Listen to A World Full of Lies and Hope it’s over.

Have a rocking weekend ya’ll!

[ This post is the second of a two-part post that tries to explain how Clara (from the movie Thoovaanathumpikal by Padmarajan) stands out as one of the most powerful woman characters of Malayalam cinema. The first part is here. ]

[Continued from here]

Clara begins to give shock treatments to Jayakrishnan’s ego from the night they first make love. She tells him that she already knew that Jayakrishnan was not whom he pretended to be. Perhaps it did not matter to her whether ‘He’ is a Jayakrishnan or a Punnoose as she is all prepared to see more of such faces in her life to come. But she is amused by Jayakrishnan’s honesty in love when he proposes to her. She could easily say “yes” to him, but she doesn’t say that. Here she leaves it for us to guess. Is it because she thought that it could be just a result of their physical union? Or is it because she thought that she wouldn’t fit into Jayakrishnan’s world, considering his social and family status? Or is it because she was ambitious and did not want to end up with the role of a mistress at that time? It could be either one of these or all. We don’t know.

Clara leaves the place in silence, in the next morning when Jayakrishnan is not around. She doesn’t want to stay even after Jayakrishnan says that his proposal was not prompted by previous night’s boozing and he is serious about it. We see a shattered Jayakrishnan standing in the empty hotel room after he realizes that Clara has left. He just lost the first woman he ever loved, had sex with, whom he wanted to make his partner for life. At this moment, Clara becomes the most complex and over-powering character of the film than Jayakrishnan.

After some days, Jayakrishnan receives a telegram message from Clara. There is rain in the backdrop which reminds him of Clara. The message says that Clara is coming to town and would like to meet him. By this time Jayakrishnan had fallen in love with another woman – Radha – who is a modern and educated girl. Even though his love for Radha has grown stronger, nothing can stop Jayakrishnan from meeting Clara. So he meets her in the railway station in an early morning, they take a walk around the town and spends a night together. Clara is a little sentimental this time.

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[ I am a great admirer of writer-scriptwriter-director Padmarajan's movies like any other Malayali. After watching his movie Thoovaanathumpikal, I was fascinated by it's leading lady character Clara. This post is the first of a two-part post that tries to explain how Clara stands out as one of the most powerful woman characters of Malayalam cinema ]

Padmarajan is a director who has given some of the best on-screen characters of Malayalam cinema. Female characters have important roles to play in his films but not at the cost of side-lining the male characters; just like any other typical commercial movies of our times. However, there are a couple of movies in which he portrayed some of the most powerful women characters of Malayalam cinema. And I think Clara, the prostitute from the movie Thoovaanathumpikal, stands out from the rest and is one of the most powerful women characters of Malayalam cinema to the date.

Thoovaanathumpikal (meaning Butterflies in the Spraying Rain) is a much talked about film of Padmarajan where the praises have gone to actor Mohan Lal for his portrayal of Jayakrishnan, a man with complex characteristics (and Mohan Lal has done his job perfectly well). But very little has been written about it’s women characters – Radha (played by Parvathi) and Clara (played by Sumalatha) – but they are proof of Padmarajan’s craftsmanship.

Padmarajan’s Clara is not a typical woman character usually portrayed in Malayalam cinema (or Indian cinema). Clara is not a shy village girl who would surrender herself in love before a man and then would spend her entire life in grief if she was cheated. Here Clara is an exact opposite to the female lead of Padmarajan’s another movie, Novemberinte Nashtam. The leading girl of Novemberinte Nashtam is a happy-go-lucky girl who falls in love with a man who uses her only for the physical pleasure and leaves her in a mental shock which in turn makes her a murderer. But Clara is very practical and ambitious. She chooses the way of prostitution to save herself from her step mother, but she does not want to end up with a pimp who would extract money out of her. She even manages to get Jayakrishnan, the male protagonist, like a firefly to the light, but she doesn’t want to be the reason for his misery. In Thoovaanathumpikal, Clara does not appear throughout the movie but it is she who drives the whole story.

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An article in gearlog.com says that Microsoft’s new technology SideSight could be a hard competition for Apple’s touch screen devices.

SideSight removes “touch” from the device and makes it a function of the paper, tabletop, or even the air that’s next to the device. What does this mean? According to Microsoft, it opens up the possibility for “touch” functions to be built into tiny devices that don’t actually need a touchscreen.

“Despite the flexibility of touchscreens, using such an input mode carries a number of tradeoffs,” the paper’s authors wrote. “For many mobile devices, e.g. wristwatches and music players, a touchscreen can be impractical because there simply isn’t enough screen real estate.”[...]

So what can you actually do with SideSight? Quite a bit, as it turns out. By twisting one’s hands appropriately on either side of the phone, objects could be rotated in place. Pages could be panned and scrolled by moving a hand up and down, and Microsoft also proved that text could be entered and edited on the main screen through a stylus while the other hand scrolled the page — a movement that would be akin to the motions a user’s hands would make if he or she were writing on a sheet of paper.

(Link via email from Nikhil Nair)

Bruce Schneier writes in Wired magazine about the habits of terrorits. An interesting read.

Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity. He theorizes that people join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community, much like the reason inner-city youths join gangs in the United States.

The evidence supports this. Individual terrorists often have no prior involvement with a group’s political agenda, and often join multiple terrorist groups with incompatible platforms. Individuals who join terrorist groups are frequently not oppressed in any way, and often can’t describe the political goals of their organizations. People who join terrorist groups most often have friends or relatives who are members of the group, and the great majority of terrorist are socially isolated: unmarried young men or widowed women who weren’t working prior to joining. These things are true for members of terrorist groups as diverse as the IRA and al-Qaida.

For example, several of the 9/11 hijackers planned to fight in Chechnya, but they didn’t have the right paperwork so they attacked America instead. The mujahedeen had no idea whom they would attack after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, so they sat around until they came up with a new enemy: America. Pakistani terrorists regularly defect to another terrorist group with a totally different political platform. Many new al-Qaida members say, unconvincingly, that they decided to become a jihadist after reading an extreme, anti-American blog, or after converting to Islam, sometimes just a few weeks before. These people know little about politics or Islam, and they frankly don’t even seem to care much about learning more. The blogs they turn to don’t have a lot of substance in these areas, even though more informative blogs do exist. [The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists - Wired]

(Link via email from Nikhil Nair)

There has been a hue and cry in many blogs from Kerala about the sad state of Malayalam cinema. It is a fact that the mainstream movies being released these days are mostly junk and rejected by the audience. But is the state of Malayalam cinema too bad to cry that we are losing the hard-earned status of the best of Indian cinema? Or are we seeing only one side of the coin?

It is true that we do not have a Bharathan or Padmarajan these days who used to bridge the gap between art films and commercial films. But we should also check our attitude towards good films. How many of us who are now furious about the lack of talent in Malayalam cinema have seen Karutha Pakshikal by director Kamal? Kamal himself was so sad about the situation and remember it had one of the two super stars of the Malayalam cinema, Mammootty, in the lead role. There were lots of people complaining about scriptwriter-director Ranjith and the superhuman characters he made for superstars. But when he made a wonderful film such as Kaiyoppu, the Malayalee audience turned their back to the film (remember it had such a star cast with Mammootty and Khushbu). These movies were released primarily because there are KSFDC theatres or else it would have gone from theatres in the first week itself. Adayalangal, which has won several state awards this year, was gone from the KSFDC theatre in the first week itself (director M G Sasi had tough time finding distributors for the film) and director Jayaraj is now looking for help to release his latest film Gulmohar.

This, I say, is the sad state of Malayalam cinema. That we crib so much about the lack of good films but turns a blind eye towards them when they are released. That the film makers are not being able to release their films because there is no interest from theatre owners or distributors. That we never move from our armchairs at least to buy one ticket to see the movie and help the team who worked hard to make the film happen.

Tail piece: The maximum number of films selected for Indian Panorama this year is from Malayalam cinema which includes, Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Oru Pennum Randu Aanum, KP Kumaran’s Akashagopuram, TV Chandran’s Vilapangalkum Appuram, Priyanandanan’s Pulijanmam, MG Shasi’s Adayalangal, M Mohanan’s Kathaparayumbol and Jayaraj’s Gulmohar.

(Image courtesy: Rediff)

Here is an amazing video of a group of students from the Ethnomusicology department of Wesleyan University performing Karnatik music. This was said to have performed during the Navaratri festival. These students train under Adjunct Instructor Balu and Artist in Residence David Nelson. (Thanks to Vidyu for sharing)

Here is a song after a month-long hiatus. I sang this with Srividya Kasturi. This song, En Mel Vizhundha, is a lesser known song from the Tamil movie May Maadham but it is so beautiful with the voices of Chitra and Jayachandran.

Song: En Mel Vizhundha
Movie: May Maadham
Music: A R Rahman
Original singers: K S Chitra & P Jayachandran
Cover by: Srividya Kasturi & Joseph Thomas

Download MP3 of this song

En Mel Vizhundha | Music Upload

Wouldn’t you love, respect and worship a kind of woman like Veronica Guerin? If you haven’t seen the movie based on her life (which has the lovely Cate Blanchet as Ms. Guiren), you should. I’ve been watching it today for the nth time. Now check out this beautiful song which I heard first in this movie. This song, is called The Fields of Athenry, is an Irish folk ballad set during the Great Irish Famine (1845-1850) about a fictional man from near Athenry in County Galway who has been sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay, Australia, for stealing food for his starving family. The song is sung in the movie Veronica Guerin, by Brian O’Donnell, then aged 11, a street singer in Dublin.

(Image credit: www.independent.ie)

Here is a new music blogger who needs your feedback on her songs. Visit Nandita’s music blog and let her know your comments.