Review of A R Rahman show in Atlantic city

A R Rahman takes his shows to a different level. You could tell that the attempt here was to create a cirque de soleil show with Rahman’s music in the background. If you have seen the Beatles Love show you will know what I mean. Gone are the days of S P sir, kavita madam, uditji. No Chitra. No Sukhwinder. Heck no Sivamani either (this was hardest for me to digest). All the notable people above have been replaced by good looking female singers, rappers, funky guitarists and drummers. And lots of dancers from around the world. Rahman now is part of the act – no more standing in the center with a couple of keyboards, he moved around the stage with the other dancers, wore dark glasses, and used a hand keyboard at times.

I think the show worked really hard to show Indian culture thru Rahman’s modern music. Rahman tries to be what Ravi Shankar was in the 60s and 70s.  This explains why the song selection featured such Rahman gems (sarcasm) as ring ring ringa, some reggae song I have never heard before, a song in English, Bombay theme, theme music from slumdog, and hope your breath – bade ghulam Ali Khan’s thumri yaad piya ki aaye. The only problem is that the audience was predominantly Indian.

The show started out with a song I have never heard before, followed by one of the best performances of the night – rang de basanti. The pace then gradually slowed down to a grinding halt in what was Indian classical section. IMHO the classical.section was verging on being a parody. Then the pace recovered through a religious section. Rahman sang khwaja mere khwaja – his best performance of the night. Dil se was next and finally the show ended with a high note with songs like humma humma and Jai Ho.

Musicians consisted of two drummers, one keyboardist, flute player, Couple of guitarists, dhol player, tabla player, a firang violinist  and a MAC hidden somewhere 🙂 none of these guys got a chance to show their act solo except the flute player and violinist. They were not introduced either.

I was hoping Rahman would play the piano taking a cue from what he did in Karan johar show. He did play the piano – once he started a classical like tune that followed with some good comping. Second time he played a couple of chords and then uncomfortably got up with his Mic and started walking and singing. I am not sure whether it is because he doesn’t have great piano chops or if he thinks most people would like to see Shammi Kapur style piano performance. I was pretty impressed by his harmonium skills though.

Sound engineering was terrible. They missed some sounds during solo dhol. Rahman’s alaap in Dil Se got chopped off. Once again his Bande Maataram alaap got chopped off. Some harmonium sounds got muted. The lead guitar mixing was awful. For a pricey show like this, these goof ups are unacceptable.

I loved the stage work. There was a transparent screen right in front of the stage for some 3-D type effect. They showed a kid biking to the sky (ET style) and A R Rahman running through his history (39 steps style) using this screen. This screen also showed some really emotional images of Gandhi and other freedom fighters while Hariharan sang “Bharat Humko Jaan se Pyaara Hai”.  There also was a screen in the back of the stage. The images shown on this screen had terrific vibrant colors and some great photography. Overall, I loved the art work here.

Overall Rahman put together a decent show. Was it paisa wasool? probably not. I wish the song selection was better and there were better singers.  But I can tell how much of hard work and thinking must have gone into the show. Now eagerly waiting for the SEL show in July 🙂

My thoughts on 2009 Filmfare awards

Watching a Bollywood award show now feels as if I am peeking into the Shaadi ceremony of some star. Bollywood stars and their betas, betis, bhanjas, bhanjis, potas and potis were everywhere. The show hosting was started by Yash Johar ka beta then followed by Aaamir ka bhanja and Rishi Kapur ka beta. Lady hosts were Prakash Padukone ki beti and Aparna Sen Ki beti. There were performances by Javed Akhtar ka Beta, Pankaj Kapur ka beta, Mukesh ka pota and Amitabh Bacchan ka beta. The next group of people were beauty pageant winners and models. Is there any hope for an actor in this Bollywood? Self-made individuals are now limited to  being musicians, singers, cinematographer, editors, writers and technicians – And the star sons are taking all the work these talented guys are doing  and making it look like their own. These guys make peanuts compared to the star sons. With all this going on, It was a such a great moment to see Om Puri come in and talk about his experience in Film Institute. And A R Rahman’s ever humble appearance.

The lack of any special effects was also noticeable. So was “Manikchand Gutka’s” sponsorship (thanks).

One especially touching moment for me was when Sukhwinder said “Please give me an opportunity to perform”. To this, this obnoxious asshole Yash Johar ka beta said “Even I wants to perform”. This is just so offending..I don’t know who gave him a chance to be the host of the show. Sukhwinder is one of the best performers our country has..just check out his videos in Youtube. His singing is unparelleled; his shows are a powerhouse of great music and singing. I think the show would be a lot better with performance form Sukwinder than all the babes dancing in mini-skirts to pre-recorded house tunes.

Live performance not cool for A R Rahman

Please don’t get me wrong – I am very proud of Rehman’s Oscar wins and really love his songs. But A R Rehman as a performer – sorry I think he should stop. Rehman is an incredibly talented composer, but I think he is at his best in his studio with his keyboards and software sequencers. Notice his performance in Jay Leno – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rdN77SJ8_4. He is just standing there with a keyboard (probably a Korg Oasys), if you look at his hands he is really not doing much – he is probably triggering some pre-recorded arpeggios and sequences. Typically a keyboardist sits in such a way that the keyboard is almost orthogonal to the stage, so that the camera can capture the performer’s finger in action. Rehman’s keyboard is almost positioned to strategically hide his fingers. Then there are 2 people behind with huge blue colored drums. And then there are a couple of guys in the right corner with a guitar and maybe banjo. They start by playing a boring tune and humming to it for a few minutes and then suddenly Rehman gives up whatever he was doing and jumps into Jai Ho mode. Now c’mon there is no way the assortment of instruments there can produce the sound that comes out! Of course, by this time a dance troupe jumps on stage to distract and hide the lip-syncing that follows. Rehman surely was singing, but mostly he was crooning “Jai Ho” to a pre-recorded track, but  the hook of the track which is played everywhere  – high pitched Jai Ho with heavy echo effect remains just that – pre recorded track. His performance in Oscar’s was no different.

Although lip syncing and dancing to pre-recorded stuff is a norm in India and noone really seems to care. But in the west, people have different expectations from a live performance. It is an opportunity for fans to see their favorite songs played by live musicians in action – not live dancers in action dancing to the CD played on powerful speakers. Remember Ashlee Simpson fiasco in SNL? The oscar nomination does open opportunites for Rahman, but really I think he should stay off  live performances and focus on his composing chops.

Rahman, Gulzar and Pokutty win Oscar

Kudos to Slumdog Millionaire for making such a wonderful movie and bringing in such accolades for some of the best Indian talent. Somehow the media all around forgot to mention Gulzar as one of the winners and I think Rahman should have mentioned him too (but he was probably too nervous and forgot). Congratulations!

Lip syncing in Sa Re Ga Ma Pa finals

The finals of Sa Re Ga Ma Pa had a grand venue and lot of stars. Arranging it in front of Gateway of India was a really great idea and so was paying tributes to the soldiers and commandoes. This part was all great.

But a program that proclaims itself as “Sangeet ka viswayuddh” and boasts of the singing talent it nurtures; a program that is supposed to be all about music; a program where they repeatedly kept talking about “Mehnat” and challenge to terrorism, I just couldn’t imagine why on  earth everyone (except Shankar Mahadevan)  chickened out and went for lip syncing. It is very disappointing..this is supposed to be the music event and fucking everyone lip synced. OK I could tolerate the fact that they kept using “tracks” instead of real musicians for the most of the final episodes, but lip syncing? This is horrible..I feel duped. Lip syncing is cheating and no respectable singer ever does this. This show should be having some live musicians (and they do have some really good musicians)  jamming the hell out and thumping incredible power into the audience and venue. Instead they had pre-recorded tracks with some lousy dancing with it.  I really respect Shankar Mahadevan for not folllowing others in this disgraceful  venture. This is abysmal – I am not watching this stupid program again.

Rahman wins Golden Globe

Several years ago when I saw Satyajit Ray getting an Oscar in his deathbed, it was a really proud moment. Today Rahman has done it again! Great job Rahman. He is surely one of the best composers India has produced, but I’d also say that he has been incredibly blessed and lucky to have success come his way. Starting from R D Burman Filmfare award in 1995 to Roja to Golden Globe in 2009, he has probably has had one of the most succesful streaks in the history of Indian Cinema. Almost all the movies he scored music for have been superhits. His musicals have run in Broadway, putting him in the same league as Elton John, Billy Joel and ABBA. Working from a Studio in Chennai, he has created wonders! It is really heartwarming to see such modest person with such modest background make it to the top. I wish him success for Oscars and lot more such awards.

Microsoft should buy Lenovo

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Back in the 80s Microsoft did something that made it the largest software company ever: licensing it’s OS to hardware vendors. Apple lost a huge opportunity by keeping it’s OS proprietary; IBM lost opportunity of a lifetime by outsourcing the OS for IBM-PC to Microsoft and letting them license it to others. Both of these will go down in historically as some of the biggest mistakes in computer industry.

But times have changed now. Back in those days software was not understood very well and the market for computer software was still nascent. In a way Microsoft was the first pure software company. The open source revolution hadn’t started yet. Today software is everywhere. Twenty year olds sitting in their dorm are able to roll out millions of lines of complicated software with a price tag of zero. It takes days to write code that used to take months and years earlier, thanks to the thousands of open source tools and libraries.

Today it is hard to remain competitive as a pure software or hardware company. The next generation of winning products will be sophisticated software finely tuned to run on compelling devices. Take the example of Mac and iPhone – Apple’s competitiveness lies in having the ability to squeeze the best out of it’s software and hardware because it has the luxury to control both. Why did Vista fail? Among other things, it failed because of lack of proper communication between Microsoft and the OEMs. Well intentioned features like Aero and Pre-fetch couldn’t perform well on weak hardware. Google G-Phone failed to impress for the same reason. To add to this most OEMs add a whole bunch of crapware in their bundle, making the PC experience more cluttered than it needs to be. While Apple is gaining market share every day, companies like Dell are losing ground. XBOX, PlayStation, WII, Tivo, Blackberry are more examples of products with great hardware/software interplay.

I think Microsoft should buy Lenovo, the makers of Thinkpad. Microsoft then can create a special version of Windows to run great on powerful hardware. Every component in these computers can be handpicked to perform best with the OS. OS components can be tuned to squeeze the best out of hardware. I think this is the only way Microsoft can get the ooh factor back in it’s OS. Microsoft can then demand a huge margin on these machine just like apple does.

So what should other OEMs do – well they either step up and try to compete with the Microsoft machines or continue to sell cheap crappy boxes. But I have a much better idea for them – create a superb Linux distro to work very well with their hardware. This is what apple did: OSX is a fork of BSD Unix. Smarter OEMs should force their device suppliers to create efficient drivers for Linux and then combine that with a already solid Kernel, GNOME, Compiz effects and Cairo applets, OO Office, Rythmbox, Audacity, Rosegarden and whole bunch of other multimedia tools, and it won’t be too difficult to outsmart OSX in their own game. By putting their resources on these open source projects, OEMs will be able to collectively give back to the Linux community. Now the rules of the game will be to produce the best distro.

I am not sure how it will work out at the end, but if the above happens the consumers will get to choose from a much better mix of competing products from different manufacturers.

Review of Unforgettable show in Atlantic City

I went to the Atlantic city unforgettable show last weekend. Having been to a couple of such shows before, we knew the show won’t start till 9:30. So while the insanely huge crowd was trying to push it’s way into the hall, we enjoyed the open air nice blues gospel music in front of the hall. We got in without any blockages at about 10 min before 9:30.

The show started with a countdown with a loud thump at each number which grew louder till Ritesh Deshmukh appeared on stage. He went on with some of his popular numbers like Cash and Hey Babby. His dancing was OK, but he looked pretty tired. Shiamak Dawar’s troupe was dancing very well, though the steps were pretty predictable. Ritesh definitely got the crowd stirred up and wanting for more. He then blurted a few words about Priety and set the stage for her.

Instead of a live compere, they were using some pre-recorded deep manly voice speaking about the stars while their filmy clips were playing on the three large TVs placed one in the center and one each on the two sides. Well, this voice sounded like some national geographic documentary and at times even like Darth Vader. It was very monotonous, went on and on at times and the overall feel was like a Award show rather than a live show.

The stage as I said had a square LCD screen in the center and then 4 vertical long LCD panels covering the height of the stage on each side. All graphics effect started from the center LCD screen and went all the way out the the LCD panels giving a nice techno look. At the center of the hall there were some lighting from the ceiling that looked like a bunch of flash lights strung together and they went on and off once in a while lazily and somewhat randomly.

Well, back to the stars, Priety Zinta came with a bang and danced to her popular numbers, some notable numbers were from Dil Se and Where’s the party tonight. The crowd started up warmly but then got pretty hooked up towards the end of her performance. She looked better and did much better than what I was expecting. It was really nice of her to mention her uncle and aunty who were in the show. She then rambled some words about Abhishek and set the stage from him. Then that boring recorded voice went on and added more blah blah blah.

There was a silence and then there was some crowd movement in the back center area. My mother panicked and thought there was a short circuit. But after a while the unexpected happened. Abhishekh Bachan emerged from there like a god emerging out of the clouds, the lazy center lights located him and made him look even more godly. He was wearing some silver stuff to add to the spectacle. The crowd went berserk. He then proceeded to the stage. It was apparent that he didn’t rehearse well, and his dance was to put it mildly sloppy. The girls still went crazy at his mere presence. He then commanded the crowd to stand up and the crowd did. Then I guess he did the number from Dus.

Abhishek introduced Aishwarya and she came in and mumbled something about how great the crowd is etc. For some reason the crowd was least responsive to her. Maybe because her cheeks looked a bit chubby and she appears to have put some weight around her waist. I think the crowd was somewhat shocked, expecting to see the Aish they have adored in magazines and movies. She danced to some numbers that I can’t remember – I think there was one song from Devdas. Her dancing was OK.

Aish then started building momentum for the next appearance and everyone thought it will be Madhuri. But it turned out to be Jaya Bacchan. Jaya Bacchan read from a paper about some preserve energy stuff. A good half an hour of the show was dedicated for the same.

After this Vishal Shekhar took on the stage with live orchestra and started crooning their hit songs one after another. Vishal kept criss-crossing the stage like a hurt tiger and Shekhar kept jumping as if he is preparing for a skipping competition. I have to give this to the guys, after the dance troupe – they showed more energy than any other stars on the show. Unfortunately, their voice sounded out of tune and they sounded like a bunch of drunk folks doing Karaoke. The overall acoustics was poor and in the back it was all sounding like a big howl. Don’t know if it was the sound mixing, but I think the orchestra was fake and they were singing on pre-recorded tracks.

Vishal Shekhar gave away for the one and only Amitabh Bachan, but not before the invisible voice went on and on about his greatness. Anyways what followed, according to me were the best moments of the show. He started by singing RD Burman number “Jahan teri yeh nazar” from Kalia. Amitabh commands immense star power – he didn’t have to ask but the crowd stood up and did bhagwan dada moves with him. His voice sounded very much in “sur” and definitely better than Vishal and Shekhar, but of course none can get the Kishore Kumar feel to this song. He then sang another Pancham number “Dekha Na Hai Re”, the crowd remained standing. He then sang “Are diwanon” from Don and “Rang Barse”, and one other number I can’t remember. He ended his spell with a bizarre Rhumba piece where he kept on doing “ooh”, “aah” on Rhumba beats played by the band (it sounded real this time). It was a bad experiment I think, and by this time the crowd had cooled off and took their seats.

Then came Madhuri and she looked absolutely gorgeous – as beautiful as ever. She danced to the original tracks of ek do tin, dhak dhak, choli ke peeche. The soundtracks of these songs sounded a bit unprepared for the high decibel large hall environment and frankly sounded very dated. Madhuri’s presence and dance more than compensated for this. The song of “Aaja Nachle” was a welcome break from the 90s tracks. The crowd was not as excited to see Madhuri as I thought they will.

The show went downhill from here. I think by now they had increased the volume and I could hear it cracking up. What followed was a “tribute to amitabh” with song and dance by each member of the team. More old songs were played at top volume.

Vishal and Shekhar reappeared and then went on with some of their recent tracks form Bachna Ai Haseeno and Om Shanti Om. Once again their singing was atrocious, the live orchestra (if at all it was live) was cacophonous, and the mixing was utterly mindless. These two guys single-handedly butchered what was left of the rest of the show. I feel bad for them because they seemed to show a lot of energy, sweating and all, and Vishal was even barking at the audience to standup. I also feel bad for the guys in front seats because I think some of them probably went deaf. I think I would have liked this part if I were badly drunk.

Then there was a section on each region of India with Priety finally dancing to “Bhumro” – I just love this song and she did well. Aish and Madhuri danced to Dola re Dola – by now the high volume was becoming unbearable. Then ritesh danced to “dekha jo tujhe yaar” – so called Marathi music which is actually stolen from some Arabic number by who else – Pritam Ji. By the end of this section, I couldn’t take the sound anymore and had to prepare to run off to protect myself and my family. I was also worried about the traffic. Amitabh Bachan reappeared after the boring recorded voice again grumbled his praises for 15 minutes. This time he did some film dialogs. I got the hell out of there when he was doing Silsila.

Overall, I think I enjoyed the first half of the show. Like Hindi movies, this show also needs some editing – 2.5 hrs will be optimal. It also desperately needs a good sound engineer. Just blasting the speakers with pre recorded music is not the kind of live show I was looking for. Only thing that looked live was the dance troupe and Vishal and Shekhar and to a lesser extent Madhuri.

Everybody else were just banking on their presence. These guys are not performing artists and it clearly shows – you go there to just see them. If you went there to see them perform, you will be disappointed. Vishal Shekhar were a complete letdown. Only live music that sounded good was the couple of songs that Amitabh did.

I had spent 30 bucks to see a Indian Ocean show last year and watched them lot closer in a lot smaller auditorium. And boy did they do good – their show was far memorable than this “Unforgettable” show! The only bollywood show I am waiting for now is a Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy show – hope they make it.

Bring on Applet 2.0

Remember the good old days of Web 1.0? There was no Myspace, Blogspot or Wikipedia at that time, but there was Angelfire, Geocities and a large number of student pages in university websites hosting tons of information. They were the ones who made Internet what it is today. Each “webmaster” as they were called those days would display his or her best creative work. It was a world of mostly static web-pages with animated gifs, cheesy backgrounds and low resolution images with liberal use of “Under Construction” banners. Then came Java.

When Java arrived, the term Java and Applet seemed interchangeable and for some time it seemed Java was only meant for creating cool applets to be hosted in browser, pretty much where Flex/Flash is today. In fact applet is what made Java a household name to begin with. Very soon a number of interesting applets sprouted up, adding the right amount of dynamism to the colorful websites. There were a number of scientific applets demonstrating algorithms, evolution, etc. Then there were chat applets popularized by the so called “portals”. Then there were applets with scrolling news (kind of like mashups of today’s world) and applets to do some special jazzy graphics effects on images. At one point Applets were everywhere. I don’t know when it really started, but over the years applet started phasing out from the web and actually many developers now consider them a no-no for web-pages. So what happened? How did applet lose it’s lustre?

Who killed Applet 1.0?

Microsoft

By keeping on bundling an antiquated version of JVM with Internet Explorer. This version wouldn’t run any applet developed with latest java version – no swing, no collections. This is a big handicap for developers. If Microsoft had stopped shipping it’s JVM, more people would have downloaded the latest Sun plug-ins, thus keeping their browser’s up-to-date. Look at Flash, how come most people have the latest version?

Sun

The one thing Sun should have tried in it’s ever popular battles with Microsoft should have been to stop them from shipping that JVM, instead they fought for the opposite which IMO was really stupid. Sun also didn’t make much attempt in tying up with Dell and other PC manufacturers to bundle the latest Sun Java plug-in. Meanwhile, Sun’s focus shifted from Applets to enterprise server side computing – EJB, JMS, and what not. I think the plug-ins were not very well thought out and particularly didn’t handle first time install in a user friendly manner. Not to mention the huge size of the install, breaking backward compatibility and popping up meaningless error messages. In an environment where many desktop apps are moving to web and Google Docs, Maps YouTube, and Meebo are catching up like wild fire, Sun is going to regret it. Flash and AJAX are miles ahead in user adoption (not technology). Also the security folks in Sun went overboard and introduced self-defeating sandbox rules and crazy messages like “Warning Applet Window” and all other assorted security messages that do nothing but scare the users more than mortgage refinance and on-line casino pop-up ads.

Developers

Developers didn’t make it any easier by writing apps that started breaking with newer JVMs, and not taking the time to fix the apps. Also many of these apps were not smart enough to guide the users to install the plug-in when it was not pre-installed in the browser.

System Administrators

Believe it or not, many companies still mandate the use of Microsoft JVM in IE and make it impossible for employees to use a plug-in. This makes it difficult for developers to create applets unless they are keen on writing there own Table and Tree component in AWT ;-).

Applet 2.0

Ok, what has happened has happened. As a developer of Java and Swing apps, I know that it is probably the richest development platform available. You can do anything in Java – there’s an API for everything. Java is open source; there are awesome open source IDEs like Eclipse and Netbeans (which is great for Wysiwyg GUI design); thousands of open source utilities are written in Java; Java has a huge developer base. So why not leverage all this and build on it rather than reinventing the wheel with Flex and AJAX. Once you get over the gloss of Flex, you will realize that except for the XML layout, it doesn’t make life any simpler than Swing. And AJAX is really pushing the limits of a scripting language that was put together for simple scripting needs.

So what can be done? To help us get started, Sun JDK 1.6 plugin is significantly better than previous ones and thanks god Microsoft has decided to phase out it’s JVM. Also more people now use broadband thus significantly minimize the bandwidth issues with applet downloads. A few things that comes to my mind (feel free to add):

1. Create a Applet 2.0 showcase

I am going to keep updating this page with links to cool new applets. If you find one or have developed one, let me know. The more cooler applets we create, the more incentives there will be for people to download the plug-in. Also developers can gain more confidence in the viability of applets by looking at the cool pages. The Sun page is good, but IMO overtly downplays the power of applets.

2. Request to sun

Can we compile our code to a single file of some sort (like swf) instead listing out all the jars. This is a good start. Also please carry on the good work you have been doing lately with the plug-in. Please work with the PC and browser makers to always bundle the latest-plugins and have a means for automatic updates. Make swing prettier out of the box, and please remove the unnecessary messages like “Warning Applet Window”. Also let’s have XUL and please don’t hype up something like Java FX that any developer can see through and know that it is no silver bullet. Guys you have your Silverlight/Flash in Applets, so just build on that.

I do sincerely hope that when desktop like applications are getting more and more prominent in web, the technology that started it all doesn’t fall behind for no good reason. Heck, Java had a JMF video player back in 1997. So why is it that everyone is going ga ga over the Flash player that Youtube and others use? So c’mon people, let’s bring on the Applet 2.0 revolution.