Slumdog Millionaire: The Movie and the Book

I had the pleasure of watching the movie on a flight from Dhaka to Bahrain. I had just been inside three separate slums in Dhaka and have seen slums or shantytowns in many places, such as Kolkata, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Manila, Jakarta, Soweto and Cape Town. I have also been to Mumbai’s Dharavi, where much of the movie takes place.

I don’t watch many movies, but Slumdog Millionaire was well worth the time. When I got home I ordered the book. It was written by Vikas Swarup and was originally published under the name Q and A. The book was as different from the movie as the difference in titles.

Only the broadest outline of movie’s story resembles the book. Jamel is not Jamel, he is Ram and he has no brother. His love, Latika appears in the book but is not his love. She appears for the first time in the 11th of 12 chapters. The program is not Who Wants to be a Millionaire, but is rather Who Will win a Billion?. The top prize is not 20 million rupees, it is rather 1 billion rupees ($20 million).

There are the murders, but none of them resemble those in the book. Finally, there is some consistency in geography. Mumbai is the scene of most action in both, Agra appears, but Delhi, which is important in the book does not appear in the movie.

Finally, in the greatest inconsistency of all, Jamel/Ram is not a lifelong slum dweller. He actually lives in lower middle class housing, above that of the shantytowns. He does spend part of his time, however, in Dharavi.

However, there is much to be gained from reading the book. It provides another, almost completely different perspective on urban living in India. Both the movie and the book are highly recommended.

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Note: Dharavi is often called the world's largest slum, with 1,000,000 people in approximately one square mile (2.5 square kilometers). However, I believe that another area, to the north of Dharavi, bordering on the east side of Mumbai International Airport is larger. This “airport east slum” covers about twice as much land area as Dharavi and may have 2,000,000 residents. For more information see Rental Car Tour of Mumbai.

Google Chrome: A Step in the Right Direction (Review)

I was happy to be one of the first to download Google Chrome, a new web browser, within minutes of its being made available on the internet. Somehow, Unlike, Microsoft, Google has managed to bring products to the market that are generally well tested and I have been pleased to use G-Mail and Google Earth, almost without any difficulty, from the beginning. That is not to say that their products are without difficulties. There are design problems with G-Mail, for example, but these are not program bugs, but rather software architecture issues --- I would have designed them differently.

This, of course, is much unlike Microsoft, whose products I find so infuriating that I even briefly switched to Apple, in an expensive failed experiment.

My haste in downloading Google Chrome was due to an associate's bad experience with the latest version of Firefox, which I had intended to download, but had not pressed all of the necessary buttons. He had, and lost hours because of design glitches. This put me in the market for an alternative not only to Internet Explorer, but also Firefox.

Google Chrome is generally an improvement on the other browsers. It has a clean look and more of the page is available for web page display. Some of the features are a bit unusual (as in the case of G-Mail), but the program passed my one-half hour test --- I must be up and running pretty well with any software within 30 minutes or it is removed from the registry. Google Chrome seems to be faster than Firefox and its display of tabs is more attractive and user friendly.

The import of bookmarks from Firefox was not completely successful, but the 5 percent that was missed I will add as it becomes necessary.

There are two problems, neither of which is sufficient to require a return to Firefox or, God Forbid to Internet Explorer:

URL’s do not show on downloaded PDF documents. This is a problem, because I often send links to these documents and have to go to a previous page to find the link. This may just be a setting problem I have not yet figured out, but it is annoying.

The greatest annoyance, however, makes me fear that a strain of Gate’s Disease has struck Google. The one program that Google Chrome does not work well with is G-Mail, its own mail program. It routinely hangs up and when it does not is very slow, unlike other operations with Google Chrome. How Microsoftian can you get than to not be able to handle your own programs. I recall the previous version of XL (2003) rarely closed without crashing on a Windows system. The G-Mail problem is akin to that. Again, however, the problem is not great enough to justify a return to Firefox. I, however, do keep Firefox open only for the purpose of using G-Mail (that explains how serious the problem is).

All in all, however, Google Chrome is a significant step forward, despite being a “beta.” One can only hope that someone from the Chrome product will have coffee with someone from the G-Mail product and there will be “peace in the valley” again.

China to the G-8?

It would seem reasonable for the G-8 to be expanded to include the world's second largest national economy - China.

Moreover, it would be useful to extend the invitation before China itself becomes the "G-1," by virtue of its explosive growth.

Windows XP Machines Still Being Sold

For anyone resistant to converting to “Windows Vista” from “Windows XP,” there is still an alternative. Dell continues to sell new computers, desktops and laptops, loaded with Windows XP (www.dell.com). Reportedly, some other manufacturers are doing the same. The Dell prices are competitive with prices at major retailers, where only Windows Vista loaded machines are for sale.

There are also reports that “downgrades” to Windows XP can be obtained for some Windows Vista machines, however the process as described on the internet may not be as simple as some might like.

There are two good reasons for postponing the switch from Windows XP to Windows Vista.

1. There are continuing complaints about Vista. They are so intense that competitor Apple has run television advertisements about Vista.

2. Many older programs will simply not work on Windows Vista. In the longer run, people using such programs will need to migrate to the new operating systems (or to alternatives, such as Linux or Apple). However, the new 2007 Microsoft Office product, which features Word, Power Point and Excel runs on both Windows XP and Windows Vista, so that additional time can be taken to adjust to the emerging Windows environment without having to make a complete break with Windows XP and the many years of PC compatibility that Microsoft appears to value so little.

A final, less compelling reason for resisting the change is to “vote” against Microsoft’s recurrent practice of unveiling new operating systems “before their time.” Planned or forced obsolescence is in no-one’s best interests except that of a firm seeking to maximize its revenues by undermining the interests of its customers. This is why, in the longer run, Microsoft, will face market share losses that are likely to be swift and significant, if serious competition ever emerges. So far, Apple is not even a threat (regrettably).

Thus, this is no advertisement for Apple, to which I attempted to switch a few years ago in an expensive experiment. One afternoon about a month after switching, I realized that I was more productive on a French language keyboard (with its extra letters, requirements to hold down more than one key for some letters and default special character set rather than numbers on the top row) than on an Apple US-English keyboard. That realization resulted in the Apple being boxed up within minutes (as soon as I could copy the nwere files to my older PC), and I have never looked back. My sister in Alaska, who had long wanted an Apple, was well pleased.

College Football: A Championship of the Willing?

Diverting for a moment to popular culture….

This has been a particularly frustrating season for US college football fans, except for followers of LSU or Ohio State. The current Bowl Championship Series (BCS) pits two teams, selected by votes and computers out of more than 100, to play in the national championship game. Even more than in previous years, there has been wide agreement that a number of deserving teams were left out.

The problem, of course, is that any selection of two teams out of the three to five or ten that are most deserving is unnecessarily subjective. But no year has been worse than this. A Chicago WBBM news radio station commentary put it something like this. USC (University of Southern California) and Georgia were eliminated by a formula. In a proper playoff system they would have had to be beaten on the field, which WBBM opined, would not have happened. Comforting words for a USC fan (and Georgia fans as well).

WBBM went on to criticize the disingenuous argument that a playoff would make it impossible for athletes to conduct their studies, noting that the college basketball games continue throughout the period and that much of the time that playoffs would be held is already university vacation time.

Half of the problem is the very conference that USC plays in. The Pacific-10, with its co-conspirator the Big-10 oppose any playoff system because of its potential to diminish the importance of the Rose Bowl, where the two conferences have played one-another since long before there was a two-point touchdown conversion. The horse is out of the barn, however, The Rose Bowl has already been diminished and this year saw television ratings drop 20 percent from last year. This year’s USC-Illinois match up is generally considered to have been a joke, with Illinois being greatly improved, but far below the caliber that would make a Rose Bowl viable.

Before the BCS, USC would have played Ohio State, which was losing for the second time in a row in the national championship game against LSU. Again, the Rose Bowl as it was known in 1949 or 1999 is a thing of the past.

It may be time for a college football championship of the willing. The rest of college football should proceed with a genuine bowl playoff system and let the Pacific-10 and Big-10 sit on the sidelines and play in their once great but diminished Rose Bowl to smaller and smaller television audiences.

At a minimum, an eight team playoff should be established. WBBM suggested that a 16-team playoff would be feasible. However, care needs to be taken not to follow the example of college basketball, where my impression is that all teams are included in the playoffs, plus a smattering of high school teams. That’s why I stopped following college basketball some years ago. It would be useful to limit any playoff to conference championships. There is no logic in allowing a national champion to be crowned that was incapable of winning its own conference.

The Pacific-10 and Big-10 are not likely to be left out in the cold too long. They would soon find it preferable to be a part of the solution rather than trying to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

IBM-Lotus Symphony: A Real Loser

At the outset, let me say that I, more than anyone, want to be freed from the tyrrany of Microsoft.

I have been frustrated with their operating systems and programs to the point of actually buying a top of the line Apple a few years ago. That experiment ended a couple of months later when, having returned from my yearly assignment in Paris, I determined that I was more productive on a French keyboard. That’s not Apple’s fault. It’s just that the conversion simply was not worth the pain. My sister, who had long wanted an Apple, was quite pleased to take it off my hands.

I have continued to use the latest version of Lotus 123, which despite its 7-year age remains far superior to Microsoft’s juvenile “XL” product.

So it was with great satisfaction that I learned there was an alternative. Within minutes of finding out that IBM-Lotus Symphony was free on the web, I was downloading. I wasn’t even bothered that it took the better part of 30 hours and 8 attempts to get a copy that would work.

It took a fraction of that time to determine that this product is a loser, unless one returns to the information technology crib and pretends that there was no reality before it.

The following tests were more than enough to find better use for the precious space it would have consumed on my hard disk.

1. The word processing program imports only the simplest Word files. Virtually none of my tested files of more than a few pages could be loaded by Symphony. The limit appears to be somewhere below 20K (yes, that is a “K”). It was possible to “paste” longer files into a Symphony file, but it was then impossible to save them. Moreover, Symphony was generally unable to save into Word format and even failed sometimes to save into its own “odp” format.

2. The spreadsheet program suffers from the same deficiencies and more. Only the simplest files from “XL” can be loaded into Symphony. Any more complicated brings an error message. Perhaps the ultimate insult was that this Lotus spreadsheet does not even support Lotus 123 files.

3. The presentation program rounds out a perfect score of zero. Again, only the simplest Powerpoint files can be loaded onto Symphony. It appears to be impossible to copy a slide from Powerpoint to Symphony.

Granted, I am a very heavy user, with files that can easily run to 100 or more megabytes. There was no point in trying out any of those.

So the simple advice is this. If you are more than 12 years old and have had a computer for more than a week, IBM-Lotus Symphony is probably a mistake.

That is really too bad. I’d gladly pay for an office suite that lived up to its claims.

Comments to: demographia2@earthlink.net

Say Good-Bye to Your Father's Buick (The Olds Is Already Gone)

Bringing Home a Good Lesson Learned in China

An interesting article.

Dont doubt that Buick and Pontiac will go the way of Oldsmobile and close, while Chevrolet sinks further into selling a morass of poorly designed larger cars and nondescript small ones that can't compete with Suburu and Hyandai, much less Honda and Toyota. Impalas and Malibus that are a shadow of their former selves... forgettable Cobalts and Avelopes, or something like that?

That leaves us Cadillac and Saturn, which pretty well cover the American market as it has deteriorated for the American manufacturers. Of course, Cadillac is really no longer a luxury brand (in the ilk of BMW, Mercedes or Lexus), but it qualifies as a decent Olds. Saturn provides a moderate quality small car for those who, for whatever reason, are still willing to give American manufacturers a chance, even after all of their customer abuse.

I realized that there wasn't the slightest hope that the American manufacturers would ever recover when GM started its "Mr. Goodwrench" ads just a few years ago. Mr. Goodwrench? Why would I want to know an auto mechanic? My Japanese cars dont know auto mechanics. I recall my father's generation, many of whom really did have a relationship with car mechanics. The Japanese, for all of their problems, showed us that this was an unnecessary addiction. Thank God, an increasingly large share of the market no longer has the patience for such foolishness.

Count me out.