Iron Man is based on a comic book series, another one that I haven’t read. The movie is about a playboy weapons’ manufacturer who is captured by militants and about how his life changes because of that incident.

It was a reasonably-fun movie, good in parts, pretty awesome in others, and not so good in others. If you’re a science fiction/gadgets geek you’ll enjoy the eye candy on offer. No, not that kind of eye candy. The movie starts with an AC-DC song and ends with a Black Sabbath song–nice touches especially in a theatre with a good sound system.

If you want to read a more detailed review, go read Roger Ebert’s review. He’s pretty good you know.

The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) is a German movie that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2006. The movie is set in East Germany, a few years before the fall of the Berlin wall.

A writer Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), a famous actress, are put under the scanner by the East German secret police, the Stasi. This is done on the behest of a party leader, who is infatuated with Christa-Maria, and wants to find something to use against the writer.

The agent assigned to the case Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) bugs the apartment and sets up a listening post. As he starts listening, he is drawn into the lives the writer and his girlfriend are leading. The pressure on Wiesler and his boss to find incriminating evidence and the risks taken by the writer lead to a turn of events that is dramatic and gripping.

The movies script keeps you on the edge, creating a nervous tension that makes you wonder what will happen next. Writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck does brilliantly to provide an almost surreal and dream-like feel to the movie. All the actors portrayed their roles beautifully though the star of the movie for me was Ulrich Mühe who played Gerd Wiesler. His demeanour and almost cold, unfeeling-like portrayal was superbly done.

The Lives of Others is a movie about the choices we make in our lives and the consequences of those choices. It is a superb movie that you should not miss.

Choose from the following options. Is Boca Grande:

a) a coffee place
b) an ice-cream place
c) a restaurant
d) all the above and more?

The correct answer is (d) and you do not win anything. You do get to read the rest of the piece.

We went to Boca Grande without any idea of the kind of food that the place serves. When we entered, there were chairs outside and there was a section inside as well. Having investigated the place, we decided to sit inside partaking of the cool unnatural air-conditioned air. There were comfortable looking chairs hugging the wall, with low tables that would’ve made eating difficult, so we went for the regular chair-table instead.

The chair sloped backwards and was uncomfortable, which is not how you want to be when you’re eating a meal. There was a nice flat-screen TV mounted on a wall with an IPL cricket match playing. Music was piped through the speakers drowning out any other noise. There were also some games and a couple of comics–one table was seriously playing jenga, clattering blocks on the glass-top table. Another couple was cozying up, clearly not interested in playing games.

The menu, one piece (w)only, was a series of loose, cardboard with different options. Your basic meal groups like soups, salads, main course, pizza, ice-cream, juice and coffee, and desserts. (Remember the answer to the question at the beginning?)

We decided to go with the soup and then go for an entree. I chose the chicken broccoli something soup and my mystery partner (MP) decided to get a little risque and went with the tomato and basil soup. I thought my soup was okay but MP she liked hers.

The entree for me was stuffed chicken breast with BG’s chef’s special sauce. MP went with the cottage cheese lasagna. My entree was a disaster: the chicken was overcooked and dry, the chef’s special sauce had ketchup in it, which was a big turnoff, and was garnished with peas. The mashed potatoes were okay. MP thought her dish was okay.

After we finished dinner we wondered whether to eat dessert at another place or to try the ice-cream at BG. We went with the latter and the ice-cream was not bad all things considered.

Now to the service. The waiters seemed to be floating around but we couldn’t get their attention when we wanted something. We’ll put that down to the place being relatively new. They also forgot to serve us the breadsticks, which would’ve been really nice at the beginning when we were hungry. The tables were close to each other and the music drowned out any chance of a conversation. Did I mention the uncomfortable chairs? To be fair, one person, who was the owner or the manager, took our ice-cream order and seemed to know what he was doing.

The good thing about BG is that the food is quite reasonably prized for Bangalore’s standards. Also, the place seems like it would attract a youngish crowd though there were one or two ancient couples, i.e. in their 30s.

When we finally got our bill, we had the dreaded “service charge” on the list. When we asked what the service charge was, the waiter first told us that it was the tip, and then came back a minute later to say that it included a tip but it also included VAT and phantom charges tax. I just made that last one up. Then, he said to us, “You guys here for the first time? How did you like it?”

“Fine.” (Read my body language.)

It was not the best experience but apparently we were mistaken. The next day, the food decided to cause what can only be termed as “havoc” with our bodies. For me it was a two-day festival and since we hadn’t eaten out anywhere else, I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to what happened.

It sure was no grand(e) experience.

Really Pretty Woman (RPW, a.k.a. Katherine Heigl) goes to a bar with her married sister and gets drunk. RPW picks up GNG (Geeky Not-so-handsome Guy, a.k.a. Seth Rogen) and proceeds to, in what could be described as every GNG’s fantasy, sleep with him. In the drunken love-making, they don’t use “protection” and RPW gets knocked up. How they deal with the big change in their lives is the focus of the rest of the movie.

If you like movies like Along Came Polly, Wedding Crashers, etc. you probably will like Knocked Up. The humour is kinda low-brow, which seems to be quite popular now-a-days. There are moments that are really funny without being crass but they’re fleeting at best. The premise of the movie was interesting but the end product fails to deliver.

It’ll be interesting to watch Juno now. Yes, I’ve not watched Juno yet, but I intend to within the next millenium.

The security deposit in Bangalore for renting an apartment/house is 10-months’ rent. This is primarily to insure the owner against damage to the property, non-payment of rent, etc. In Paying Guest (PG) accommodation, you can get away with a two-month or three-month deposit, but for renting a place, you pay the full price.

I get that you need a security deposit; what I don’t get is why the amount has to be so high. Consider a person paying a rent of Rs. 8000 for living in a two-bedroom place. Security deposit is Rs. 80,000, which is definitely not a small amount to cough up. Why 10 months and not 5 or even 3? I don’t know. Market forces maybe?

Also, consider the scenario where the owner puts this amount (Rs. 80000) in a Fixed Deposit (9% interest) for a year. The interest that the owner would pocket would be Rs. 7200, essentially a month’s rent. This interest is not returned to the renter when the person leaves the apartment, so that’s money he or she will never see. Okay, let’s write that off.

Let’s look at security deposits for other services. You pay something for your mobile phone connection, your gas connection, your telephone connection, etc., but none are in the range of the amount you pay for renting a house. That’s because the magic number in house rentals is 10; 10 times the monthly rent.

I have no idea of the security deposits in most other cities but I do know that in Hyderabad it was 3-months’ rent till recently. Huge gap huh?

What do you think of the security deposit situation?

If you own a printer, you’ll know how expensive it is to buy new print cartridges. There are refilling centres which will refill cartridges for you but they sometimes use inferior quality ink and can either ruin the cartridge or worse the printer.

Enter Cartridge World, an international franchisee chain that specialises in the printing business.

I went to get a printer cartridge refilled, one that wasn’t working well and they refilled it. I tested the cartridge and it worked fine. The guy at the Koramangala franchise was really nice and went that extra half-mile that makes a difference to you as a customer.

Cartridge World gives a one-month guarantee on their refilled cartridges and they’ll even pick up and drop off the cartridges from wherever you are, for free.

Of course, the benefits of refilling the ink instead of buying a new cartridge is that you also do some good for the environment. That’s good enough for me.

From an article in The Journal News titled Immigrant’s life in ‘wonderland’ turns tragic (by Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy):

At 2:30 p.m. April 3, 27-year-old Ganesh Santhanakrishnan of Ossining drove a rental car to the middle of the Tappan Zee Bridge, activated the hazard lights, calmly walked up to the railing and plunged to his death in the Hudson River.

It was the end of a journey to America that was full of promise.

Armed with a freshly minted engineering degree from a prestigious college in India, Santhanakrishnan arrived at the University of Pittsburgh in the fall of 2002 to pursue graduate degrees in computer science.

“To my son, America was a wonderland, a dreamland, where scholars are rewarded for their work, and he wanted to fulfill his ambition to receive a doctorate and make a career for himself,” his inconsolable mother, Radha Santhanakrishnan, cried over the phone from Chennai, India. “But none of that came true for him.”

The sad part of the whole thing was that he was admitted to a mental health unit and then released. His family too knew that he was struggling but they couldn’t help him.

“We tried to convince him to go back to India, but he didn’t want to hear it,” said his cousin, 35-year-old Balaraman Venkataraman of East Brunswick, N.J. “He was afraid that, if he went back, he may not be able to come back again. My mother offered him money, which he didn’t accept. He was determined to find a job here and become successful.”

Though Venkataraman acknowledged his cousin seemed depressed, he said he wasn’t alarmed.

Did he ask him to see a doctor?

“No. How can you ask a normal person to do that? He was a state rank holder in school,” Venkataraman said. “He was having a hard time with his job search, and we thought he would feel better when he found one.” (emphasis mine)

It’s a telling quote and probably underlines the attitude that a lot of people in India have about mental health.

Maybe Santhanakrishnan would not have been saved in spite of seeing a mental health professional, but there’s no doubt that his chances of surviving would’ve increased greatly.

When people start seeing mental health as a health issue like diabetes or high blood pressure, then people will get the help they need. If not, we’ll see tragedies like these happening over and over.

That would be the greatest tragedy of all.

Jeremy Laurance writes in an article titled It’s a boy! The science of gender selection (for the Independent):

So it all comes down to the banana. The yellow fruit with the phallic shape – appropriate in this context – is the best dietary aid for intending mothers wanting a boy, according to research published yesterday.

In what they claim is the first scientific evidence that diet influences infant gender, researchers at the Universities of Exeter and Oxford have found that women who consume more calories around the time of conception, and, in particular, eat more bananas, are more likely to have sons. At the same time, those who skip breakfast (and breakfast seems to be key) are more likely to have daughters.

However, the researchers reported that:

In the study, 56 per cent of women with a high-calorie intake had boys compared with 45 per cent with a low calorie intake. As a means to balance your family, this is only a marginal improvement on the 50:50 chance offered by nature.

Go read the article for more details. In other news, India is facing a banana shortage.

A few weeks ago, Outlook India had a cover story about English-teaching centres that are sprouting faster than pimples on a teenage boy’s face. You didn’t need to read the story to have noticed the number of ads that promise to teach English in two days or a week or two weeks. They’re everywhere and they promise to take over the world. Something like that.

If anyone is promising to teach you English in two days or a week, they’d better have some super-duper alien technology available to them. Because, their methods of teaching, however brilliant, won’t make you a native English speaker anytime soon. Will you learn some English? Absolutely, there’s no denying that. (Exhibit A: Kapil Dev and Rapidex English speaking course, no disrespect intended.) There’s also no denying that you will not be able to start conversing in English if you’re not someone who is comfortable in the language.

It takes a while to learn a language, any language. If you are gifted or just plain language-smart, then you may take much less time than us ordinary peoples, but for most people it just takes time. If learning English were (was?) so easy, then each and every one of us would remember not to split infinitives. (Like there’s anything called a “split infinitive”.)

So how do you learn English? By reading a lot, by listening to others speak, by watching TV shows or movies, by speaking, and by writing. Of course, all this takes time, which quite frankly is a bit of a pain, if you’re into shortcuts.

Because English-speaking candidates are sorely needed in jobs in the IT/etc. sector, it’s tough for qualified, non-English speakers to get those jobs. Even for students who study in non-English-medium schools, the learning curve when they enter English-medium institutions is steep. Imagine being in a place where everyone understands the language and you don’t and you have to learn the language and subjects in that language. Not exactly a peace of cake.

The way to go would be to introduce English in schools (everywhere, not just in the cities), when kids are young, so that they can pick up the language. At least they’ll have a platform to build on for the future. English isn’t our language but we’ve adopted it and it’s one of the reasons that India’s IT sector prospered. For a huge section of people, however, English remains a door-closer, not a door-opener.

It’s time we change that.

In anticipation of Earth Day (April 22nd), DeviceVM, a company that makes a fast-booting operating system called Splashtop, is aiming to:

raise awareness about how much energy is wasted by computers and other consumer electronics that are left on or in standby mode.

Would you believe leaving your computer on at night generates 51 lbs of CO2 emissions each month? Or that worldwide we could save entire power-plants worth of energy just by switching off our computers each night?

DeviceVM has teamed up with CarbonRally.com to challenge people to make this simple change to help reduce their carbon footprint, and we want as many people to know about it as possible. DeviceVM thinks that technology and the environment should go hand in hand, and we think this is an easy way for everyone to make a difference.

Go to Accept the challenge to get more information.

I am not sure that people leave computers on at home but I used to notice that some did at work. People would leave their computers on when they left for the day, sometimes only for the reason that shutting down would mean that they had to reboot the next day and open their applications, etc. Not a good enough reason to waste all that energy. Get a faster computer or go get a coffee or something.

And, accept the challenge too.