Mouly Kumaraswamy » India

Politics as second innings

Mouly — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 04:16:59 +0000

Politics in India is a lucrative career for aging flim stars, cricketers and other celebrities. The latest to join the club of “I’m famous so I will join politics” is Mohmd. Azharuddin, e.x. Captain of the Indian cricket team. When asked the reason for joining politics, he said “he was swayed by the plight of the poor who struggle to get basic amenities like education and medical facilities”. This sounds like prepared text given to any celebrity joining the party. I’m not picking on the man or the party; but nevertheless I’m pained by this insincere attempts to make politics a cheap hunting ground.

On a related note Govinda a actor, cum part time Members of Parliament has the lowest attendance in the current 14th parliament. Apparently Mr. Govinda thinks dancing and romancing on screen is more important than discussing national issues in the parliament. This is ridiculous, for the amount of money spend on conducting the parliament, the MP salaries and what not – at the least these people should go to the Parliament. The CPM party has the best attendance. My respect for the communist has been growing steadily. To me the communists seem to the most disciplined of all the parties. I don’t agree with their political views but I certainly respect their ethics and public conduct.

“80% of success is just showing up” – Woody Allen

Google India – Internet Bus

Mouly — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:33:38 +0000

Today, many Indian online news sources carried stories about Google launching Internet Bus project in Tamil Nadu India. It was an outreach program to communicate the advantages of Internet to common man. None of the news stories had any links to the project page. After some digging, I found a link from bangaloreinc.com to the project home page here.

When I read – Internet Bus, I thought it would be like a First Mile Solution project – where a bus is used to provide Internet access to the remote regions of the country. That would have really cool. Compared to the First Mile project – the Internet Bus is just an advertising campaign. The project pages has some videos which I found boring but got the message across.

I hope more work is done in this direction to improve communication technologies in the remote regions of the country.

Slumdog Millionaire – Think Global Act Local

Mouly — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 04:57:31 +0000

Being an Indian, I have been asked many times what I thought about Slumdog Millionaire. I liked the movie – but it not Oscar material. It was a typical Bollywood story – with the escapism theme. The arbitrary switch from Hindi and English dialogs was frustrating. The cinematography was topnotch – it almost made me belive that life in slums in very colorful. Overall, I think the movie’s success is due to the fact that it was made for the global audience. An Indian director would have a different perspective on the story.

On the same lines of thought, there is a photographer I follow in Flickr. He is an European who spends lot of his time in Tamil Nadu, India. I find his photos absolutely stunning. I love my state, but I never thought it is so photogenic. I guess it is the difference of a perspective.

Bollywood Actor Network

Mouly — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:00:35 +0000

As a fun project, I’m working on the actors social network in Bollywood; in this network the nodes represent Bollywood actors and actresses, an edge connects actors who starred in a movie together. Hollywood actor networks have been studies for a long time. It would be interesting to compare Bollywood and Hollywood actors network, to find useful insights into Bollywood.

IMDB is obvious choice for getting this data. I was skeptical if it covered foreign film industry. After getting the database, I think it is very comprehensive. IMDB offers unix and windows programs to download and maintain the IMDB files locally. I found them a pain to install; I could not install it on my Ubuntu box. JMDB is a Java based program to import the IMDB files into a MySql database. It was easy to use; although it takes a few hours to import the whole database.

Some numbers from the dataset:

Number of Hindi movies: 8,119
Number of actors:15,954 (Male:10816, Female: 5138)
Number of actors who have acted in more than one movie: 5,365 (Male: 3516, Female: 1849)

The database includes both movies and TV. This may be a problem, since TV has larger cast and has different variables than movies.

2007 Bollywood Actor Movie Network

I generated the network for the year 2007. The whole network is too big for my computer. I need to figure out methods to visualize such large networks. The red nodes are movies, green nodes are actors.

I will be working on this network, trying to gain insights. I’m interested in identifying ‘star children’; whom I hypothize get a shortcut into the industry. Also I want to find the cliques or clans in the network. Watch this space.

Indian's Internet language preference

Mouly — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 16:25:09 +0000

In a recent submit, the CEO of Rediff.com a popular Indian Internet portal said that Indian Internet users don’t want content in their native language. His supporting evidence is Rediff provides email services in 11 languages, but only 1% of users use the non-english version. Indians learn English before completing higher education, he added.

His comments are not surprising. But I don’t think Rediff users’ language preference can’t be extended to all Indian Internet users. I hardly write in Tamil (my mother tongue) and I have never used Rediff’s services in non English languages. But I don’t think Rediff provides the best user experience; their UI and overall design needs lot of improvement. So Rediff users may be not using other languages for other reasons like bad interface.

India has 29 languages that are spoken by more than a million people (2001 Census). There is definitely a need for providing Internet service in Indian languages to reach a wider user base in the country. Indic Computing is a project to provide computing resources in Indian languages. There are other technology intitatives around Indian Languages.

Fighting terrorism online

Mouly — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:08:45 +0000

I was shocked at recent Mumbai terrorsit attacks. After the attack on the Indian Parliment, this has been biggest symbolic attack. Terrorism has become a sad reality in most parts of our country. According to The Institute for Conflict Management, 2765 lives were lost due to terriosm in 2006.The moral and economic toll on the nation due to terrorim are also huge.

Stopterrorism.in is a website recently launched, as a reaction to the recent Mumbai attacks. From what I can gather from the site, it seems to be a blog to have discussion on what Indian citizens can do on their part to prevent such attacks.

Elementary Education in India

Mouly — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:59:39 +0000

India has one third of the world’s children who are out of school. Historically India has been underspending on elementary education. After independence the government focused on technical education – resulting in institutions like IIT, IIM and IIS. It has been only in the recent years that the government has started foucssing on universalizing primary education.

Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) is the Indian govenrment’s program to universalize primary education by 2010. The program was launched after the 76th amendment to the consitution – making access to elementary education a fundamental right.

I don’t have data to back my claims here, but the government is not even close to fulfilling this mission. Less children are out of school than before, but the offical number are incorrect.