Vicky Donor

I had been reading all these fab reviews of Vicky Donor and I was very curious. I actually thought it must have been funded by the Fertility doctors of India Association. With all its emphasis on sperm donors, I thought the message being rammed was a bit excessive. Felt as if Aamir Khan was promoting something.

The movie had some delightful characters, especially the mom and grand mom of the protagonist. Annu Kapoor showed once again how underutilized he is in Bollywood. The setting of the movie, the Lajpat Nagar vs CR Park was too good, although I do wish somebody finally shows that some culture other than the Punju prevails. It is sickening to see as if the only culture worth emulating is the loud Punju song and dance and the other ways of life are staid and boring and not worth practicing.

The movie also seemed to be celebrating the "male" all through. The lead had to be an "innocent divorcee". Hindi movies still cannot seem to get away from the virginal image of the heroine. For all the hero's seeming acceptance of the heroine as she is, the plot still had to be twisted to ensure compliance to all Hindi movie norms. The lead pair could only adopt a baby who was born from the protagonist's sperm. That seemed quite regressive especially when the views of the grandmother in the movie were so progressive. Also wish that the movie showed the natural progression in the interest that Annu Kapoor has for the protagonist's Mom.

As with so many movies, it seemed to be on the right track, before somebody in the interests of the commercial viability of the movie derailed the script. Still, despite the derailing, an interesting movie and maybe shows some respect for the audience's maturity.

Prasthanam

I have been wanting to write about Prasthanam for quite sometime. I was worried that my enthusiasm for the movie was coloring my perspective but I guess I do have to write. Although the movie released in 2010, I saw it only this year. My brother gave me a copy of the movie way back after the movie was released, but after seeing the first few minutes of the movie, I couldn't go farther, as I was not sure what my reaction would be. I finally saw the complete movie this year and it has been an absolute revelation!

Hamlet has been an inspiration to many, but this is a beautiful adaptation and I did not think Telugu film industry had the wherewithal to actually make a movie like this. Although the screenplay is significantly different from the original play, but the plot remains the same. It has however, been the characterization  of Loknath - step father of Hamlet that has stood out. In India unfortunately, the character that slays the so called villains and romances the girl is called the hero, but to me it was Loknath that was the hero of the movie. His motivations, aspirations, weaknesses, frailties around which the movie centered. It was also the war that was between unconditional love and love tinged by weakness. To me, Mitra, the character played by Sharwanad that was the supporting character. 

The director virtually takes us through the mental map of both Loknath and Mitra. Such powerful characterizations are so rare in Telugu movies. It could also be the power of Sai Kumar's performance that I am still raving about the Loknath character. The dialogues and the delivery are something so rarely seen in the recent past. I have also been watching some of the older Telugu movies like Thotukodallu and Mangalyabalam. I was struck by the relative ease of acting in those movies instead of a preponderance of heavy sighs and dramatic lines and exits although quite a few artistes in the star cast came from a theatrical background. Wonder when the regression in Telugu movies actually took place. 

Coming back to Prasthanam, the other think that struck me was the diction of Sai Kumar. I think we tend to confuse between dialects and diction. Recent heroes in Telugu movies just cannot speak the language properly. Their diction is terrible. It is almost as if they are doing a disservice to the very language and art form that is sustaining their millions and lifestyle.

The only place where the movie disappoints is in the placement of songs. These actually act as speed breakers in the movie. The songs by themselves are beautifully written and composed. But in the context of the movie all barring two - the title song and "Evado Vadu" are irrelevant to the movie. I like the song "Murali Lola" song very well. A beautiful rendition of a mythical tale and in a tradition that we seem to be forgetting. 

All in all a movie I would definitely recommend and would want to re-watch so that I can see all those nuances that I have missed previously.

Life at IIMC

Daffodils" (1804) – William Wordsworth

I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

Each day brings with it the indescribable joy of living, another day of peace and happiness, another day of seeing nature in some of her glory, another day of seeing the sun dance itself into my room, another day of smelling the raindrops, another day of seeing the reflections of the setting sun in the lake, another day of feeling the night breeze on my face. I cannot single out a moment or an incident here at IIM Calcutta, but each day is a kaleidoscope of warmth and emotions.

I was too lost in a competitive world trying to live others life, too worried about what would happen tomorrow to live today. It helps that I am in that phase of coursework where I am still not disappointed in my potential and my expectations. This is something I wonder how many people feel or see in the daily grind of quizzes, lectures, presentations and placements. I am not sure if I would continue to feel like this after five years (till which period I am definitely supposed to stay here), but at this moment, now, today, IIM Calcutta has given me back my joy in living.

The bird song in the mornings and in the evenings reminds me of all those moments that I could not capture in the past, all the moments that I definitely want to be indelibly imprinted in my memory to carry with me “in vacant or in pensive mood”. I hope the night lights of the lake will stay with me and give me the fortitude to live with myself for the coming five, six years that I am on campus and for the years to come.

Article that I wrote on IT Services contracts

The Indian growth story has attracted significant attention to a certain extent due to the IT sector growth sector. While earlier, this sector signified the IT services and to a small extent the hardware sector, it now also encompasses the IT enabled services as well. The IT sector growth story is too well-publicized to be recounted here. The growth of the sector has been inextricably coupled with that of the globalization and outsourcing stories. While, the modest beginnings for this sector might have been wage differentials and currency arbitrage, this sector has now matured and competition with other geographies too intense and has evolved into value based and transaction based pricing.

The outsourcing story can be understood as one that started from cost savings, grew into cost and services efficiencies, translated into value added services and is now possibly stabilizing at trusted partnership with the service vendor involved in a limited manner in strategic decision making.

For their part, Indian IT services organizations have also finally started to look beyond their self-constrained boundaries. Their strategy for growth is not limited to just expanding industry verticals that they could serve, it is also to expand service offerings and improve cross-selling opportunities especially with the BPO and KPO services. The recent acquisition by industry leaders like Cognizant of UBS’ Indian captive unit is a case in point. More organizations are looking at increasing their footprint across the entire business process of their customer rather than just focus on a single function (viz., IT).

The evolution of the role of the Indian IT organization also necessitates a change in the way they position themselves with their partner organization and a key ingredient of this is pricing. As an outsourced partner that supports non-critical IT applications, the traditional “Time & Material” contracts served the purpose of everybody. For the client, they could justify the onboarding of an outsourced partner in terms of reduction in rates vis-à-vis an employee or a local contractor. Further, T&M contracts carry low operational risks. Information resides with the client. The client controls all resources. Success or failure of the vendor depends on their recruitment and employee retention capabilities. Initially, the client insisted on all activities being conducted at client premises. As an understanding of the vendor organization and capabilities increased, more and more work started getting transitioned offshore albeit under the T&M contracts.

With time and evolution of trust, the client started to outsource and offshore more of the design work. This also led the client to demand efficiencies from the vendor partner including those to the IT value chain. While premium could be commanded in wage rates for designers, value of the vendor partner was not getting positioned with the customers. An added dimension to the outsourcing policy of the IT organization of clients was the failure of IT projects. In many a cases, the clients wanted the vendor to share the risk of the project. However, vendor organizations were reluctant to do so due to lack of control. This in turn crystallized the fixed price contracts where the vendor would share the risks of the IT projects and correspondingly the rewards. There were many variants to the fixed price contracts – T&M contracts with penalty and rewards based on balanced scorecards and fixed capacity contracts with rewards and penalty being a few examples.

While fixed price contracts positioned Indian IT vendors as reliable and skilled, there is now a need for a different pricing mechanism that could leverage the fact that the same vendor is present in different parts of the business process chain. The vendor could be doing application support – voice, production ticket handling, and installations etc., application maintenance – enhancements, production support, application development, and analytics – report generation and analysis. The vendor needs a flexible pricing mechanism that could leverage its presence across the business process chain. The pricing should also reflect the ability of the vendor to shares the risks and rewards of the IT organization.

One proposal that is gaining currency is transaction based pricing. This would be another form of bundling. The application development in itself could be a fixed price contract, but once the warranty period is over, the transaction based pricing could kick in. As per this pricing mechanism, the IT vendor would receive a fixed price per transaction that occurs through the application being maintained/supported. The analytics could be priced per report produced/analyzed. This is akin to royalties of musicians or authors with all its attended complications of defining, tracking and sharing of information on transactions. This pricing mechanism has an in built control where any development bugs or potential production issues are the responsibility of the IT vendor and provides a strong incentive to the vendor to ensure a quality product from the development stage itself.

This kind of a pricing mechanism would also require a sea change in the vendor organizations’ structure and processes. Currently the BPO, IT services and KPO organizations are separate entities. Further, internal systems need to be enhanced to track billing and project costs.

The transaction pricing mechanism is a radical departure from the current client-vendor relationship. It pre-supposes a strong degree of trust between the two organizations. This pricing mechanism also needs the client to be innovative and risk taking. This increases the operational risk of the organization. The client and vendor would have to evolve risk mitigation techniques beyond the traditional variants of disaster management and redundancy maintenance. Governance mechanisms including knowledge management where knowledge is still maintained and retained with the client need to be evolved.

Evolution of technology and business models would also bring with itself new challenges to the outsourcing client-vendor relationship. Pricing mechanisms are but one-way to control the relationship. Intelligent changes to the pricing mechanisms would help both the client and vendor organizations to bring in efficiencies within their organizations. It also has the potential to bring in innovations not just within their relationship but also change the IT services landscape.

100% Love

Saw 100% Love a few weeks back. Obviously, a bad print and some scenes deleted. I did not have too many expectations. Director Sukumar's movies leave me feeling discontented. It feels as if I am on the cusp of some discovery but when I reach the destination the ending is just not what I hoped it would be.

I had liked Jagadam to a certain extent. It was a story of a young boy on the verge of manhood. To some extent like Marlon Brando's Wild One. It had so much promise, but the story never went beyond platitudes. It does not help that Telugu movie industry is dominated by "Stars" who have to perpetuate the star dynasty and their "Viraasat" than a love for art or issues or a medium. And Sukumar never goes beyond these "Stars" in his cast.

Thats the reason I was determined not to see too much in the movie 100% Love. I was pleasantly surprised by the movie to a certain degree. The whole issue of ego in a relationship and gender bias in India, the role of the woman despite so called "progress" that we have made in women's empowerment does get highlighted to a certain extent. However, the need for a commercial closure ruins everything. One cannot forget that the ticket cost is finally paid by the male in the house and "Taming of the Shrew" is a very popular play.

Still, I would say Sukumar has done a better job of portraying relationships in 100% Love whether Hindi or Telugu film industry and far more mature than running around in Switzerland or Punjab. I just hope to see an edgier movie from Sukumar and not just the Arya-2 version (Thank God!).

Orange

I am on a roll tonight. 3 blogs in a day or in the space of a few hours. Looks overwhelmingly that I do not want to study tonight!

Well, I saw Orange a few days back and a slightly abridged version. Somebody played around with some of the scenes. My take still on the movie...

I loved the way Bhaskar (the director) was so brutally honest in an otherwise ostrich like industry. In a time where the standard plot is Love Story+Factionalist Angle, he actually dared to make a pure love story with very little action. These action sequences were anyway included to pander to the Megastar fans.

This also brings me to one of my rants. Such a beautiful story line killed by the commercial elements, fans of the Megastar and of course the Megastar himself.

A guy is underwhelmed by a nagging and suspicious girlfriend. Poisons the guy's outlook towards relationships. He starts believing that love is temporary. The movie does a good job so far. It falters when the director starts looking for the Happy Ever After Closure.

I have a few doubts which I seek to clarify myself in the absence of adequate responses from the director. Why is the movie set in Sydney? For the Opera House backdrop? So that the heroine could wear outfits that no middle class male in India would even fantasize of? Or did the hero/producer never go to Australia and wanted to have a look around?

There was one scene where the hero shows the heroine a lion in a jungle or lets say the CGI version of it. Firstly, if ever, one tried to scream at a lion or come out of the car when the lion is standing on the bonnet of the car, I suspect, I would see the remains of the people saved by the lion for the hyenas. Also, are there lions in Australia? For real? In the jungle? Not in the zoo?

Loved the fact that Mr.Brahmanadam read MBs in the movie. Just could not figure out what Srinivasa Avasarla was doing in the movie? He did not even do an item number.

Final thoughts, do you think it is feasible that your passion for a person remains unchanged with time? I am not sure. I think possibly respect and affection might remain unchanged. Instead of highlighting similar points, the director gets scared and we are treated to a scene where the hero realises the error of his ways. For how long are we going to live in the sarson ka khets of DDLJ?

My Life?

A year back I had written with some intensity about my decision to give up a job and pursue a PhD. I am still not sure if I have all the answers in my life. I am still not sure if am doing the right thing and for the right reasons. But having decided on something, I want to give it the best shot that I can...

Have things changed in the last one year? I guess not. The need for approval still remains - exacerbated by the fact that I am a student and am continuously getting evaluated whether I like it or not.

What I can definitely say for sure is that I am getting waylaid by the same malaises that attack most students namely facebook and you tube. Need to find some way of getting my life back on track. Aaagh!