Geek of All Trades

Geek's Indian movie list - part I

Update:  Please visit GOAT's new Filmi Geek blog - www.filmigeek.net

Since I've started watching Indian films in earnest, I've seen a number of films, good and bad, that I've wanted to write about here on GOAT.  I've done full reviews of a few (see the Geek of Movies category for those), but they are time-consuming and I fell quickly behind.  But GOAT readers and others have asked me for recommendations, and even though I am a relative neophyte, I want to supply at least a quick-and-dirty guide to what I've seen.  So during my vacation in between jobs, I wrote up very brief descriptions of every film I could think of.  I'll post updates to the list occasionally, and I'll still try to do full reviews of the films that inspire them.  For now, please enjoy Geek's complete Indian movie list.

My fifteen minutes

This is bizarre.  I've never been the subject of a press release before.

Renewing and reconnecting

At the alumnae website of my beloved alma mater, Bryn Mawr College, a new networking service recently launched.  "Athena's Web" allows alums to post pictures and profiles describing their lives and interests, as well as search for and contact other alums in the database. 

(It also has a blog feed feature, so this post is somewhat self-referential - some folks reading this post are likely to have got here through a link from Athena's Web.  So - to you fellow Mawrtyrs out there - welcome to Geek of All Trades!  Leave a comment if you feel like it, so I know who you are.)

As a result of Athena's Web, I have been able to renew contact with a wide range of dear friends with whom I'd drifted out of touch over the years.  I'm a terrible correspondent - I don't even handle holiday cards with any regularity - so it's tragically easy for me to lose people.  Athena's Web is a godsend because it makes those people so easy to find and, one hopes, easier to keep.  And it's been great for my ego.  A Mawrtyr whom I have admired ever since I first met her when I was in high school wrote to tell me that reading GOAT reminded her why I was one of the most interesting people she knew.  Go figure!

The network has also allowed the discovery of some interesting parallel tracks among friends I haven't talked to for years.  There was one Mawrtyr who was a close friend in college and an even closer friend immediately afterwards when we both lived in Boston - before she moved to the other side of the country and I lost her.  She found me on Athena's Web and emailed to say that reading my profile was like reading her own - she's also currently delighting in Indian films and Bollywood songs.  (Another alum I'd never met - she'd graduated maybe ten years before me - emailed me her list of favorite Indian art films and asked for mine.)  Another great friend with whom I'd listened to music in college emailed to say that she loved my collection of Afro-pop. 

I still look back at my time at Bryn Mawr as a kind of golden age of my life.  Though I made a lot of stupid mistakes in college that I regret, I still was happier and freer there than perhaps ever since. I was certainly more confident - I believed I could do anything.  I loved myself.  And never have I been surrounded by such a density of fascinating, smart women.  Reconnecting now, during a somewhat turbulent and melancholy time in my life, with the people from that time has been a sustained delight.   

Capturing grammar in a grammar

Should a teaching-grammar of a language be prescriptive or descriptive?

Hindi lacks a verb corresponding to the English "to have," and uses a postpositional construction to signify possession.  Several of the grammars I have used while studying Hindi advise that in the expression of possession, Hindi makes a distinction between alienable possession of chattels (objects, servants, etc.) on the one hand, and on the other hand inalienable possession of relatives, real estate, parts of the body, etc.  According to my grammars (chiefly R.S. McGregor's An Outline of HIndi Grammar; the others, I suspect, rely on McGregor as their source), the first category, possession of chattels, is signifiied by the postposition "ke paas" following the possessor:

राम के पास बहुत खिलौने हैं |  raam ke paas bahut khilaune hai.n |  Ram has lots of toys.  (lit. "Near Raam there are lots of toys")

By contrast, according to McGregor, the other category is expressed by the postposition "kaa" (or inflected forms "kii and ke") following the possessor, without adding "paas":

राम के दो भाई हैं |  raam ke do bhaaii hai.n |  Ram has two brothers.  (lit. "Two brothers are Ram's")

This distinction came up recently in two separate on-line conversations with native speakers of Hindi, and each time the native speakers said that they did not make this distinction.  One said without reservation that he would use "ke paas," rather than "kaa," for real estate - he corrected me when I used the construction given in McGregor.  Another native speaker said he thought the two forms were interchangeable and carried no alienability distinction.

So a leading grammar of Hindi presents a distinction that, in my experience thus far, native speakers do not make.  I suppose that when this happens - in any grammar of any language, not just Hindi - it reflects some of the inherent difficulties in pinning down in written form the rules of a spoken language.  It may also betray a note of prescriptivism in the mind of the grammar's author. 

Satrapi muses on rioting and football

Today's New York Times includes a short piece by Marjane Satrapi that covers a lot of ground, meditating on her own misanthropy, what it's like to direct an animated feature, and how soccer can save France.  Unfortunately the on-line version of the piece is only available to paid subscribers through the Times' new "Times Select" program. 

Last year, I wrote about Marjane Satrapi here. 

The way I wish I could write

I wish I could write like this.  In this week's New Yorker, Anthony Lane reviews the new Pride & Prejudice adaptation.  (Note the ampersand - Pride & Prejudice, not Pride and Prejudice.  The folks over at Language Log have a few things to say about that.)

Lane's review takes the clever and convoluted approach of imagining what Jane Austen's characters would think of the new film.  He writes:

What would Mr. Bennett make of the film?  He would be left wondering, I suspect, why God gave him only two eyebrows to raise.

Later, after describing for the reader some examples of the film's melomdramatic tone, Lane conlcudes that

[w]hat has happened is perfectly clear:  Jane Austen has been Brontëfied.

A view into Brookline's past

The town in which I live, Brookline, Massachusetts, is celebrating its 300th birthday this month.  In honor of that celebration, it has offered on its website a collection of postcards spanning the last century or more.  The postcards come "from the private collections of Tim Sullivan, Town Printer, and Jean Stringham, Town Photographer."

The postcards offer a tantalizing, Romantic vision of Brookline's past.  Bustled ladies and bowlered gentlemen saunter down shady boulevards, unharassed by the insistent choke of automobiles that seems to define modern American life.

For those of you who know the neighborhood, that above is the building where "Paper Source" and "Pier 1" are now located.  If you are standing in that spot today, the new Mariott hotel that opened about three years ago is in front of you to the right.  You are just a couple of blocks from my house.

That's the top of the hill I live on, Corey Hill - Summit Avenue.  What was once Corey Hill Hospital is now - of course - condos.

Check out the rest of the postcards here. 

A time for change

I am a patent lawyer.  My practice is mostly patent litigation, though I also do some work in what's called "patent prosecution," which is the process of preparing patent applications for inventors and negotiating with the patent office to get patents issued.  I have always avoided talking too specifically about my work here.  It's a bit of a loss to GOAT, because I have a lot of ideas about patent law that I sometimes want to write about.  The trouble is that those ideas often arise from issues that I've considered in the course of client work, and I don't feel right about tipping those issues on a public website, even in a distanced, abstract way.  It's not that difficult to connect this website with my professional profile, and I do not want even indirectly to give opposing counsel a tool for guessing at our legal theories, or by criticizing aspects of patent law to hand them ammunition for attacking the doctrines on which we rely. 

I bring up my work today, though, because there is news about it.  At the end of this week, I will be leaving the law firm at which I have worked since I finished law school more than three years ago. 

In some ways this is a big change for me.  The firm I am leaving is a general practice firm with some 250 lawyers.  My new firm is a 20-lawyer intellectual property boutique.  On average I'll probably be working in smaller teams, and I'll probably have more responsibility.  But the cases too will be smaller, and so budget considerations may result in some cases in less freedom to explore my own ideas.  And it remains to be seen whether I'll enjoy those differences.  Over all, I felt mostly that I needed a change.  My mind and my soul were beginning to stagnate, and when the opportunity for this change arose, after much soul-searching - over a month of hard, anxious thinking and talking - I finally decided to take the leap. 

So, over the next couple of months I'll be learning a new practice, new colleagues, a new commute.  I'm feeling hopeful, but also a little sad at leaving behind the many things that were good about my old firm - many comfortable relationships, interesting clients, a few friends.  I'm content, though, with this opportunity to gather data about a different kind of legal practice, and maybe come a step closer, at 33, to figuring out what I want to be when I grow up.

Business method patents before the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court has granted certiorari in another patent case.  This time, the Court (minus new Chief Justice John Roberts, who recused himself) will be hearing Laboratory Corporation of America v. Metabolite Laboratories, in which the Federal Circuit held valid and infringed a claim directed to a medical assay.

The Supreme Court limited its grant of certiorari to the third question presented in the petition, which reads as follows:

Whether a method patent setting forth an indefinite, undescribed, and non-enabling step directing a party simply to "correlat[e]" test results can validly claim a monopoly over a basic scientific relationship used in medical treatment such that any doctor necessarily infringes the patent merely by thinking about the relationship after looking at a test result.

I don't have much experience writing questions for cert petitions, but this question as framed just seems, well, stupid and uninteresting.  Presumably the issue that petitioner wants before the court is drawing the line between patentable methods on the one hand, and mere algorithms or scientific facts on the other.  It is true that business method patents often tread close to this line, and there are probably significant reasons to reconsider the boundaries of patentability with respect to them.  But this question does not seem to get to that issue.  If the claim is "indefinite," as the question presumes, it is invalid.  If it is not enabled, it is also invalid.  Under these circumstances, where the detailed and largely uncontroversial bodies of case law governing claim definiteness and enablement can be brought to bear on the validity of the patent, there is no need for any court, Supreme or otherwise, to reach the deep, difficult questions of the patentability of algorithms and business methods. 

One surmises that the Supreme Court has understood the true nature of the question, and will reframe it with the correct premises:  Presuming the claim is sufficiently definite and adequately enabled, is it nevertheless invalid for being directed to unpatentable subject matter?

Civil war is anything but - Earth and Hotel Rwanda

 

Here in the United States, it has been 140 years since the country was last torn by civil war.  Our civil war cost over half a million lives, tore families apart, and left cities in ruins, but no one alive today remembers it first-hand. 

In other parts of the world, of course, the wounds of civil war are fresher, and the demons that can turn a nation against itself reside closer to the surface of memory.  These conflicts kill millions and displace millions more, and the scale of their destruction is difficult for me, as a modern American, to grasp.  At the points where vast political violence touches individual lives, though, compelling stories are created, and in the hands of careful storytellers the experience of civil war can become horribly, movingly accessible.  Two films I saw recently each brought into sharp focus the way that the eruption of bloodshed can tear apart ordinary, comfortable lives.