AB's Blog

This review was originally written by me as a part of the course Perspectives on World Cinema, by Prof. Mazhar Kamran of IDC, IITB.  Battleship Potemkin (1925) (Sergei Eisenstein) Battleship Potemkin is a dramatised account of a mutiny on a warship and its aftermath, set in the tumultuous early twentieth-century revolutionary Russia. While set on the surface as a civil unrest drama, the film can easily be envisioned as a larger commentary on class divide and a product of the ideas prevalent in its time. For me, as a viewer, it was a pleasantly surprising experience to be so wholly engaged with a century-old, silent film, made by and for a totally different audience. The fact that I resonated with the film seems to indicate a sense of spatial and temporal universality of the appeal of the film. Eisenstein established himself, surely, as a pioneer of the dramatic genre of cinema with this endeavour. Well-structured, with the distinctly set five acts, and well-paced, which causes ...

Half a century has gone past since François Truffaut lamented the lack of originality in the works of the regular crop of French directors, in the sense that they failed to seize the projects with complete creative control, and accused them of churning out trite cinema borne out of transliterating novels and plays for the screen. Writing for the great French cinema magazine, Cahiers Du Cinema, Truffaut's seminal article A Certain Tendency of French Cinema is credited widely for formally introducing the Auteur Theory. The  auteur , which is French for "author", refers to a director who exercises an all-encompassing creative control over the production of a film, to the degree where she might be considered the author of the film. While Truffaut championed the cause and was a foremost auteur of the highest regard, he wasn't the first, and certainly not the last. The likes of  Eisentein, Ozu, Kurosawa and Hitchcock were auteurs before the term was even invented. The past ...

The blistering pace of societal development and advancement has set the tone for some key changes in two fundamental aspects of human society – electrification and mobility. With a growing consensus among the general public for moving to more climate-conscious alternatives, helped by government incentives and spearheaded by the scientific community, we are seeing transformative changes in power conversion technologies and a shift towards electric-vehicle-based mobility. While increasing efficiency lies at the heart of all invention, the motivation for achieving it has shifted from a purely scientific endeavor to a real-world requirement. Power converters are at the heart of the grid. Conventionally, owing to the macroscopic and robust nature of the system, a frantic Moore’s Law scale miniaturizing rush never plagued power devices, allowing instead a focus on materials research – without an irreplaceable CMOS-style architecture centred around Silicon, newer and better materials can be ...

This list contains places I visited that were either: 1. The birthplace of a food item or a product; 2. Incredibly popular for a particular dish; 3. Is an iconic food institution; 4. Home to an industry FMCG giant All of these are more or less top notch places. Like literally 10/10 must-haves. There might be places that are a shell of their former glory, but I'll be gracious enough to indicate. DEVANGERE  | KARNATAKA | INDIA Shri Guru Kottureshwara Butter Dosa Hotel Devangere, Karnataka, India What: Devangere-style Butter (Benne) Dosa  My Take: There are a lot of great dosas in the world. Crispy, thin, foldy, long, soft, masala, Mysore Masala, Rava, and on and on and on. And while that may be good, you are entitled to have your preferences - stop right there. The best type of dosa is the Devangere-style Benne Dosa. Why? There's no compromise. You get insane flavour. You get BOTH crispy and soft textures (mind already blown) in the same dosa. And oh the buttery goodness of tha...

Legend: Songs I like from the respective albums are mentioned. If I really like them, a single star is appended. If it is one of the songs I absolutely love, three stars are appended. These are, of course, my emotional response to these songs, and thus a very personal and subjective rating. Two stars are mostly used to distinguish a song from the other two ratings, and is obviously something I deem somewhere in the middle of "really like" and "absolutely adore". Этажи ( Etazhi) (2018) by Molchat Doma ( Молчат Дома) Songs I love from the album: Танцевать ( T ancevat )  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ Судно (Борис Рижий) (Sudno (Boris Ryzhy))  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ Тоска ( Toska )   ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ Клетка ( Kletka )   ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ Волны ( Volny )  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ Notes : Etazhi is undoubtedly the best album produced by Molchat Doma. Molchat Doma, a modern Belarusian band, is one of my favourite bands of all time. I had the privilege and opportunity to catch their live set during the EXIT festival in Novi Sad, Serbia, in 2022. W...

This stub entry serves the dual purpose of documenting a phase of obsession in my life with NYT's Connections word game, and at the same time, memorializing a trio of college mates with whom I discussed the puzzle every day for almost an entire semester. If they read this, they know who they are. Cheers, A and S! In the recent past, my imagination has been gripped by the New York Times' viral sensation word game, Connections. It has become an affliction of sorts of mine to daily break my head over this puzzle; although the varying difficulty also causes you to feel a different genre of annoyance, succinctly expressed by the thought "Why was this too easy today?" accompanied by a momentary feeling of emptiness, because mentally you plan to allocate a certain amount of time to the thrill of solving the puzzle, and you then can't help but feel short-changed when the lack of complexity leads to a zippy solution. You won, but you feel lost. At the peak of my obsession ...