“A devoted Star Trek fan, Pausch was invited by film director J. J. Abrams to film a role in Star Trek. Abrams heard of Pausch’s condition and sent a personal e-mail inviting Pausch to the set. Pausch accepted and traveled to Los Angeles, California to shoot his scene. In addition to appearing in the film, he also has a line of dialogue at the beginning of the film (“Captain, we have visual.”) and donated the $217.06 paycheck to charity.”

Wikipedia, Randy Pausch

(If you don’t know who’s Randy Pausch, watch this.)

Playboy: If life is so purposeless, do you feel its worth living?

Kubrick: Yes, for those who manage somehow to cope with our mortality. The very meaninglessness of life forces a man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre (a keen enjoyment of living), their idealism – and their assumption of immortality.

As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But if he’s reasonably strong – and lucky – he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s élan (enthusiastic and assured vigour and liveliness).

Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining.

The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death – however mutable man may be able to make them – our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfilment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

Photo © Dmitri Kasterine

This video is brought to us by BriTANicK – Two Guys Wasting Their Degrees!

“BriTANicK screamed into existence in early 2008 when Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher decided that they didn’t want to use the knowledge and experience they garnered in college for anything but creating short stupid videos that would make them laugh.”

Just wanted to share this special discovery of mine with you guys. The only nag is that the whole play is divided into 12 parts due to YouTube’s 10 minute restriction. To make things easier I have collected all the parts in a playlist. See below.

Beckett On Film: Waiting for Godot

A friend forwarded a link to a video by David Fu, who uses Carl’s voice and images from movies, sets it all to music, to create a very inspiring short film. (Thanks Joe!) The video is sure to leave you misty-eyed – I can vouch for that!

The text of Carl’s speech:

The spacecraft was a long way from home.

I thought it would be a good idea, just after Saturn, to have them take one last glance homeward. From Saturn, the Earth would appear too small for Voyager to make out any detail. Our planet would be just a point of light, a lonely pixel hardly distinguishable from the other points of light Voyager would see: nearby planets, far off suns. But precisely because of the obscurity of our world thus revealed, such a picture might be worth having.

It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos—but no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance, and perhaps also our last for decades to come.

So, here they are: a mosaic of squares laid down on top of the planets in a background smattering of more distant stars. Because of the reflection of sunlight off the spacecraft, the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special significance to this small world; but it’s just an accident of geometry and optics. There is no sign of humans in this picture: not our reworking of the Earth’s surface; not our machines; not ourselves. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalisms is nowhere in evidence. We are too small. On the scale of worlds, humans are inconsequential: a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.

Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings; thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines; every hunter and forager; every hero and coward; every creator and destroyer of civilizations; every king and peasant, every young couple in love; every mother and father; hopeful child; inventor and explorer; every teacher of morals; every corrupt politician; every supreme leader; every superstar; every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings; how eager they are to kill one another; how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity—in all this vastness—there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the only home we’ve ever known.

The pale blue dot.

R.I.P.

Roger Ebert: The Essential Man by The Esquire.

Roger Ebert before

Roger Ebert now

—–

“Yes, ‘n’ how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?”

Last evening went to the screening of Burma VJ – a very well-made, taut and engrossing documentary which focuses on the undercover reporters in Burma working under great personal threat to bring the images of brutality in their country to the world, the backdrop being last year’s protests that started with the monks, on behalf of the people, and soon became a popular uprising. Though sometimes a subject as strong as this eclipses the film-making, the director Anders Østergaard adds his powerful story-telling technique that resonates with the story to give us an end-product that is touching as well as thrilling. You feel the anticipation and anxieties of the reporters in a very real sense – I had goose-bumps! And you are also saddened at the inevitable end which is best summarised in the words of the narrator, Joshua, one of the reporters himself, (though he is talking about the ‘88 uprising), “So many people died for nothing”.

A highlight of the evening was a video conference with the director at the end of the screening. Amidst the inescapable inane questions from people out to prove their intellectual superiority, there were a few poignant moments. One was a Burmese man living in Singapore who got up to thank the director on behalf of his people. The moment attained greater significance upon personal reflection actually. Living in the comforts of Singapore, if I had to watch such brutality on familiar streets and avenues of my birthplace committed upon my own people, who were not as lucky as me to have escaped, I can very well imagine the sickness I would have felt at the bottom of my stomach. The other special moment was when the director, in answer to a question on how we could contribute, remarked that in a way we are already contributing by keeping the issue alive in the collective memory and conscience of the people of the world. Do not forget Burma and its people. Do not forget Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

(In a humorous aside, the MC last evening was something of a dud, and posed the most number of questions to the director and most of them of the pseudo-intellectual variety. During one of his questions, I forget which one, he started by saying “Living in a free country such as Denmark or Singapore…”. And the whole audience burst into spontaneous laughter! I have no idea why! Wink wink!)

—–

“Yes, ‘n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?”

Bomb blasts in Jakarta – one of my favourite cities in the world, if I ignore the legendary traffic jams of course!

JW Marriott – Just next to the hotel and part of the same complex, are the residential apartments Sailendra, which was the address of my boss and her partner, two of my favourite people in Jakarta.

Ritz Carlton – One of my best friends in Jakarta, an amazingly talented pianist, whose website I maintain, used to be a regular performer in the lounge bar there and I do not even remember the number of times I have relaxed to her music sitting in spacious, comfortable couches, after a particularly difficult day at work.

The familiarity of these places which were attacked today probably stirs up the mind in this manner, a mind which is otherwise numb to violence by now. In a similar manner as when Bombay trains were bombed – trains which I have taken home almost every evening for five years – or people were gunned down like cattle at Victoria Terminus – a station that has witnessed many sad farewells and warm welcomes, including a few where I was a player.

But the recurring images in my mind are that of the friendly, helpful and always-smiling Indonesians working at these places – a few of them probably the sole bread-earners of their families. So will the suicide bombers, martyrs in the cause of Islam, reach heaven while thrusting these families, fellow Muslims, to hell on earth? Will some Muslim friend of mine answer me that? Please…

Bali, Bombay, Jakarta, London, Madrid, New Delhi, New York – How many deaths will it take?

Picture courtesy The Jakarta Globe

—–

(The song and the lyrics…)

I loved Da Ali G Show. I loved Borat. And now I am waiting for Bruno! In Bruno, Cohen actually interviews a terrorist and, in his characteristic fashion, remarks,

“Your King Osama looks kind of like a dirty wizard or a homeless Santa!”

Below are a couple of videos – in one he is talking about the incident with David Letterman, where he says,

“It’s not that easy to find an actual terrorist. In fact, your government has been looking for one for about nine years!”

The other one is the actual scene from the movie. Enjoy!

A court in the Indian capital, Delhi, has ruled that homosexual intercourse between consenting adults is not a criminal act.

In an earlier post on an Indonesian rock musician’s theory on homosexuality, I had written how strange it is to hold on to such prejudices in this day and age when Science has already shown that there are possibly ‘biological explanations for sexual orientation across species — including humans’. This bold judgement coming from my ultra-conservative country is sure to do some justice to this much maligned group of our fellow human beings.

[UPDATE: Loved what Gautam Bhan says in Indian Express:

"This judgment should be seen by all of us, gay or straight, no matter what we think of sexuality and homosexuality, as a victory for a secular, democratic, constitutional and free India. We should all be proud."

]

The rumblings of protest from religious bodies have begun – my only prayer is that they do not grow loud enough to drown out the voice of rationality.

On a similar note, watch the movie Milk if you haven’t. It is the story of Harvey Milk, an American politician and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California. Sean Penn in the title role does a beautiful job in portraying such a sensitive character and rightfully earned a Best Actor Oscar for his performance.