This poem is written by my daughter and her friends. I really like it.
Seasons of Life
As time ticks by, the days progress
So crisp and fresh, the autumn breeze
Twirls around or sprints in gusts
Through the shifting trees
The leaves, the leaves, they once were lithe
Now they flutter to the ground
Brittle and stiff, the leaves have transformed
Without making a sound
The warm days of summer are past
Though autumn is also a scene of beauty
Yet because nothing lasts and everything changes
The days are edged with melancholy
As time ticks by, the days progress
One by one, the leaves fall down
The branches grow bare and the landscape clears out
Until white snow is all that can be found
Today history was made in Cricket. Indian cricket legend Sachin Tendular became the world’s fisrt cricketer to score 200 hundred runs in a one day international when he made exactly 200 (not out) against South Africa at Gwalior in a 50 over match.
Tendulkar underlined his sensational class with a double century in Gwalior
This is is his 46th century (100 runs) in ODIs to go with his 47 centuries in test cricket. That is 93 in total. He has scored 10 of those 93 centuires in the last 12 months in just 34 innings! He scored a century in each of his last 4 test matches. Will he reach 100 centuries this year itself? May be not, but it is mind boggling to me that he seems to be playing his best in his 20th year of playing international cricket.
We all can learn a lot from him about dedication and single minded focus over a long period of time.
Cricketers around the world poured in with praise on this feat.
We watched the new Hindi release 3 Idiots this evening. This movie has gathered a lot of buzz and several of my friends recommended it. It was based on Chetan Bhagat’s novel ‘Five point someone - what not to do at IIT’. Since I went to school at IIT I could relate to some of the scenes and chareacters in the movie.
All in all it was an enjoyable movie with a nice story and good theme. But it did not blow me away. It was a bit too cheesy in some parts for my taste and 30 to 45 mins too long. It is bound to happen when the director also edits the movie. Directors tend to fall in love with the scenes they shoot so have a hard time cutting them out. The movie packed a bit too much Bollywood formula. The core story was good and different enough that it should have veered away from regular Bollywood shtick. I feel it had much more potential but underachieved.
Everyone knows bollywood movies are very different from hollywood movies. They are pigeoned holed by the westerners as muscials with over dramatic story telling and acting.
Actually there is another major difference. Bollywood and other Indian movies have an interval. You may think that this is not such a big deal but it is. Every movie script has a beat structure. Beats are the critical points at which the story takes a turn. Most hollywood movies follow a particular beat structure. If you go to UCLA to study script writing they make you an expert at this type of hollywood beat structure. They follow a three act structure where in the first act establishes the main characters and the goal of the protoganist and the antagonist who makes it difficult for the protaganist to achieve the goal. The second act has the protaognist failing miserably to achieve the goal and looks down and out. The third act will have climax where the protaganist will beat the odds and the protagoanist to achieve the goal in a dramatic fashion. A typical hollywood script is 100 to 120 pages long. Each page yields one minute of movie so a typical hollywood film is 100 to 120 min in duration.
Now let’s look at bollywood. They have an interval at the middle of the movie. So they follow a totally different beat structrure. It is almost like two smaller movies with two climaxes one before the interval and one before the end of the movie. You add 5 or 6 songs to that and you get 3 hour long movies. So bollywood has developed its own beat structure to tell stories which is very differnt from hollywood and why it is very diffcult for the westerners to identify with them. It is not just the song and dance numbers.
