Avatar’s Critique of Human Society

Avatar has been touted as a success for being incredibly sophisticated in its use of computer graphics and editing methods to create a realistic, believable, 3D universe that blends seamlessly with actual footage. While it is undeniable that Avatar sets a precedent for realistic computer graphics in cinema like many other Hollywood movies before it, the reason for Avatar’s box office success and acclaim is not entirely because of its use of computer graphics. Avatar is a familiar story which combines themes important to our world and the problems of today, that are woven together in a way that appeals to a wide audience and that highlights the flaws and depravity so prevalent in the aggressive, militarized industrialized human society today.

The scientific background of the the Avatar universe is an obvious extrapolation of modern crises in industrialized mining and mineral extraction operations, which seek to exploit a region’s resources without maintaining ecological balance. Avatar’s setting is a planet a few light years away from the earth, where a mineral extraction exercise is being aided by future human society’s technological and military might. The environment is not convincingly and otherworldly futuristic, but a mere rehash of existing technology and visualization, which it seems has not changed much in a hundred and fifty years time. The humans and the technology of Cameron’s Pandora, set in 2154 seem reasonably contemporary, and in fact, so contemporary technologically, that I’d be happy if we were to push that date forward by another fifty years. The use of a solar sail for propulsion (as shown in the beginning of the movie) begs the question of whether humans in the future have an energy crisis at all – and while the movie is silent on exactly what the uses  of “unobtanium” are, it is clear that the mineral extraction project here is a small cog in the larger military-industrial complex of future human society and that it doesn’t have an intimate understanding of how self-organizing biological systems are characterized by a sort of harmony between their different parts, although Grace Augustine is working on just this.

Grace Augustine (played by Sigourney Weaver) runs the Avatar project to assimilate humans into the society of the Na’vi, a race of indigenous, intelligent species on the planet Pandora, the fictitious planet which is the setting of the movie. She runs a school where humans interact with the Na’vi through their “avatars” – a genetic blend of Na’vi and human species created by hard science and wired to the brains of their genetically similar humans. The humans who contributed their DNA to create the avatar are then able to experience the world from within their avatars when integrated to the equipment that makes this technology possible. The idea is eerily similar to the concept of internet avatars – aliases one assumes online in order to experience the internet and provide experiences to others also using their avatars. The concept of Second Life, a social networking platform, is fundamentally similar to the concept of the avatar as envisaged by Cameron, except the characters we run in Second Life are virtual versions of ourselves or what we wish to see ourselves as. Tsu’te, one of the Na’vi tribe’s warriors in the movie, remarks that the avatar of the lead character Jake Sully, is “a demon within a fake body”, which is not far from the truth, although ironically, this fabulous, “fake” world that Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) experiences, seems more real to him than his own. Jake Sully’s crippled human body is in stark contrast to his agility in a Na’vi body. Jake Sully’s existence in Pandora as an avatar is a real, visceral existence, where he is better enabled than in his crippled human body, and his emotional experiences with Neyteri, the female protagonist of the story and the Na’vi clan’s future seer, are as real and visceral as one can get.

The movie presents two stereotypes, which are surprisingly concrete and deep inasmuch as their realism – one of these is Parker Selfridge, the main administrator of the Avatar and the mineral extraction program company, the RDA. He is a bureaucrat who has to make difficult decisions that allow a limited budget to be used for accomplishing his objectives of mining minerals and ensuring the success of the Avatar program. He is portrayed as a manager with no focus on things other than those of immediate importance, the manager stereotype. He comes across as this guy who doesn’t know better because he doesn’t have to learn any more – an unfortunate product of a materialistic society that rejects most substantial ethics in favour of profit and all possibility in favour of power. The second stereotype that the movie offers is Colonel Miles Quatrich, the hardened Chief of Security who epitomizes the phrase “military intelligence” in its form as an oxymoron and as a dangerous, capricious manifestation of the worst form of military belligerence. With little or no respect for benevolent alien (or human) life, but blessed with bravado and a hard-as-steel attitude, he is a reasonably believable antagonist – except for the fact that you’d wonder if such antagonists would exist in the time period – apparently human social evolution has stood still for James Cameron – or at the very least, he chose a character that was necessary to tell his story. To be sure, Colonel Quatrich represents an older generation of heroes in American cinema and a veritable hero in medieval British books, where the legendary, all conquering warrior led crusades without regard for indigenous cultures. Now that the world has changed, or rather, because the West has changed, Cameron pits him against the conservationists and the scientists – the heroes of our day. Perhaps this shift in American popular culture over the last twenty years or so, is itself best portrayed by Avatar than other recent movies.

A common feature of all animals on Pandora is a cache of neuronal connectors that emanate from their heads, that pass through their plaits or their extra appendages and that are available to them to establish a physical connection with animals in the world around them. The trees are also similarly interconnected, as an experiment by Grace Augustine and Norm Spellman (Joel David Moore) indicates. The animals of Pandora were, to me, one of the most fascinating aspects of the movie. The Palulukan (or Thanator, named for Thanatos, the Greek God of Death) is one of the most awe-inspiring creations of the visual artists who created Pandora. Resembling a tiger, a jaguar and a cheetah, it is nothing short of regal in its aggressive bearing. The huge, hammerhead equipped rhinoceros is a delight to behold, as it crunches the exosketons and powered combat suits used by human soldiers. This creature is especially satisfying to watch when it charges on the human contingent that attack the “Tree of Souls” later in the movie. Less satisfying is the equine, six legged horse called the Pa’li. If there’s one animal I loved best in the movie, it would be the Ikran or the Banshee – a sort of Pterodactyl combined with an Entomopter, a four-winged beast capable of incredible feats of aerobatic prowess, actively aggressive and decidedly shrill in its cry. There’s something to be said for the impressive, large, red Ikran called the Great Leonopteryx, that Jake Sully pilots towards the end – and it has a fitting and impressive moniker given by the Na’vi – Toruk, The Last Shadow.

Cameron draws on the legends and ideas present in a lot of world mythologies to create the world of the Na’vi. There are unmistakable strains of Hindu beliefs right through the movie – the concept of Ewah – inspired from the concept of Devi or Brahman in Indian philosophy; aspects of the language of the Na’vi that indicate social harmony, the indoctrination rituals of the Na’vi which resemble the puberty rituals of certain African tribes, the use of totems and face paint as in Africa and Native America, the use of the bow and the arrow as in Indian myth and legend – such as the story of Rama’s prowess in archery. There are also less obvious parallels that exist between our contemporary world and Pandora. The Na’vi’s belief in the Tree of Souls, their ability to store memories in it and their ability to leverage it’s collective intelligence are all representations of how an interconnected network such as the internet could potentially evolve as we provide it more direct methods of interacting with the human world. Phenomena that currently fascinate scientists – such as self-organizing systems and synchronization in networks are illustrative of how networks can manifest intelligence in ways we have not imagined before – Avatar gives Cameron’s version of how such ethereal possibilities may exist on ordinary and even primitive-seeming worlds far away.

The military-industrial complex has been responsible for a lot of human technological advancement in the past hundred or so years, but is faced with problems of ecological integration. The disadvantages of the way we do science and the way our scientific advancement is tied to our society’s military prowess are highlighted – that we have to destroy and establish our own society and methods somewhere, rather than integrate into an existing society or culture. A case in point is how India has handled syncretism and integration and the stark contrasts with the Portuguese and Spanish conquistadors who destroyed indigenous civilizations in “Latin” America ( now attributed more to their filthiness and infestation with pathogens than to their military prowess). Avatar is probably the only movie made in Hollywood where humans are pitted as an aggressive race and who conquer other races. This is probably somewhat true, as well – humans seem to be more competitive than harmonious, if our own environment and other species living in them are anything to go by.

Does Avatar carry a message? Avatar comes at a time when the Copenhagen summit called on to discuss climate change issues failed spectacularly. It comes at a time when indigenous cultures are being wiped out by globalization and when fast environmental degradation is leading to a loss of biological habitat for many species that may not make it through the next few decades. Our dispirited militarization and industrial callousness has messed with the balance of life and environment that sustains us all, and we often do this without full knowledge of what we deal with. The militarism is not necessarily a good thing either, and despite being a very connected world, more than ever before, there’s hostility in our world on a large scale. In conclusion, Avatar is a must-watch, not merely because of the great movie-going experience and the stunning imagery, but also because it carries a message for each of us.

Further Reading:

• New York Times’ Review of Avatar
• Avatar is both Awesome and Disappointing

Twitter’s Future and Recent Trends

I enjoy using the microblogging site Twitter. I think Twitter is a great idea – it is essentially short messaging for the web, combined with a social networking framework and user mentions and tags (hashtags). As someone who didn’t think much about the basic idea of Twitter when it started out, I am truly impressed now, having used it. I think that it represents the best of social media and networking all in one package. I think that Twitter has been successful precisely because of its 140 character limit. This has spurred a new business in URL shortening websites such as bit.ly and has spurred a bunch of other sites that work as aggregators of opinions presented on Twitter hashtags. The user experience on Twitter’s web based basic interface leaves much to be desired, but Tweetdeck is probably the best thing to have happened to desktop and mobile based Twitter so far. The interface of Tweetdeck makes it really simple to subscribe (follow) other users, retweet someone’s tweet while retaining the ability to add to someone’s tweet when posting, and keep a track of your searches and the trends that you’re interested in, all in one slick interface.

I think that Twitter has a bright future, because of the sprightly growth of its already huge user base. People who never used the internet for communicating before are now turning to Twitter because microblogging is easier than conventional blogging and because the emphasis is on sharing links, games and fun, rather than the lengthy posts that we see on sites such as this one. Twitter seems to be able to reflect trends in the news accurately, although, given its large user base this is not surprising. Having said that, it seems to make sharing ideas really simple.

Perhaps the greatest boon of having a Twitter account is to come in contact with the people that represent the rock stars of the Twitter universe who are also celebrities on the internet or in real life. Of course, this is not to indicate that these rock stars are definitely more interesting than others. In fact, I have found tons of microbloggers on Twitter that are definitely more interesting than celebrities. A key thing is perhaps the humour they exude and how they can remain people rather than celebrities. There are tons of examples of popular people who have taken to Twitter who have maintained their human side, chatting around and joking like most people do, although the majority of celebrity Twitter users either merely push their agendas silently or fall prey to what has come to be referred to as a royalty check, at least by one Twitter user. Chetan Bhagat faced criticism and ridicule on Twitter recently when he threatened to block a fellow user with who he was having a discussion on the subject of book piracy. Admittedly the subject of piracy that he wanted to discuss is something the online community would consider discussing, although his methods and demeanor irked many users, and the inevitable followed – the #chetanblocks tag on Twitter still receives a few hundred tweets everyday from all quarters, despite it being a few days old. Chetan even tried to set the record straight, by what could be considered internet arm-twisting: it has been suggested that he tried to undermine the incident by editing his own Wikipedia page.

Recently, Shashi Tharoor became popular on Twitter for all the wrong reasons when he posted an infamous tweet during the Congress government’s failed “austerity drive“.  Currently, Tiger Woods’ recent fall from his high perch as golf superstar to a media TRP cow for the allegations against him of adultery and philandery coming from several quarters in the US have been reflected on Twitter tags as well. The sordid tale has been played out and has contributed to negative publicity against him. Perhaps the media moguls and celebrities have lost more than they have gained overall by having a Twitter account, which is ironic, because Twitter allows one to reach out to one’s fans if one is a celebrity – and the reality is precisely this, that celebrities too are ordinary people like the rest of us – and Twitter seems to enable this point of view more than any other web based communication tool, presently. While Barack Obama’s internet-based campaign on Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and similar social media sites was hugely successful in its felicity in obtaining volunteers around the US for his elections, his ratings have fallen recently, partly because of expectations that he tuned that he wasn’t able to fulfill, and partly because of his recent undeserved reception of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Bhopal Gas Tragedy and the Indian government’s long history of inaction in the aftermath of this tragic industrial disaster has been something that has succeeded in getting a lot of support from Twitter users, enabling people who didn’t know about the incident to become aware of it worldwide, and putting DOW Chemical Corporation in the unenviable spotlight for their role in and attitude towards the incident. Other trends that have populated Twitter timelines of many users on a day to day basis include the Liberhan commission’s recent flawed report on the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition that most people don’t really care about. Who can forget the ongoing Telengana agitation? This too is getting its share of publicity and heated debate on Twitter. The more important Copenhagen summit on Climate Change (which was fortunately cancelled today) received much attention from Twitter users as well.

All in all, if you’re not on Twitter yet, I’d recommend it to you, for the variety of users and content on it, for the tons of opinion and information posted on it by users on current issues and because it can be tons of fun if you have some spare time on your hands!

Paa

I’ve wanted to blog about a lot of things I’ve been up to recently such as publishing papers and contemplating a book and reading several books, including Ashok Banker’s Ramayana series and a bunch of mathematical experiments with the binomial distribution applied to nonlinear dynamics. I haven’t found the time for blogging about these things because of what keeps me occupied the rest of the time – work.

I made time today to blog about Paa – the new R Balakrishnan movie starring the Bachchan father-son duo and Vidya Balan. I saw the movie today and liked it immensely. Most of a movie’s impact is in the story, in its writing, and I think R Balki has written the script well, if not perfectly. The performances by both Amitabh and Abhishek Bachchan are great and they’ve pulled off the role reversal very well indeed. Vidya does adequately well, if only a bit too schmaltzy in places. (Did I mention that she looked ravishing?) Paresh Raval is a comic genius but doesn’t fit into this movie too well – he neither plays the politician dad convincingly, nor is his humour used effectively. Amitabh really steals the show with his performance as a 12 year old with Progeria, a genetic disorder that causes accelerated aging, enough to rob a child’s youth and reduce life-expectancy to between ten and twenty years. Amitabh’s acting is excellent, although his juxtaposition with actual kids of his age makes him seem a tad out of place – and I don’t know how people couldn’ t find his make up hideous – but having said that, I find his performance praiseworthy.

A notable feature of the screenplay of this film is how the story is conveyed in breeze-through snippets – not because this is new, but because it is used effectively. Groups of these snippets are used to tell stories in parallel to the main narrative, but the director doesn’t take away from the narrative and confuse the audience in the process. Balki seems to respect the intelligence of his audience, and this is to be lauded. I have seen far too many Bollywood movies that are an insult to intelligence, these are like watching someone beating a dead horse (set to Punjabi music, of course, and throw in gaudy costumes).

Amitabh has managed to convey the infectious enthusiasm of a more-than-twelve-year-old and a sort of blunt, precocious manner – the scenes with the school kids are hilarious as are the moments between father and son spent at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The movie is endearing for its ability to showcase people who have made decisions with compassion – Vidya’s decision to have her baby out of wedlock, and her decsion to care for her child despite its condition are somewhat moving. The couple’s coming together because of their child is incredible but feels like poetic justice, except when it gets cheesy at the end with the couple performing a saptapadhi around the ailing child. Overall, I loved the true-to-life and frank feel of the movie although aspects of it were unconvincing – such as Amol’s complete incorruptibility and his dad’s pliability – and these are so perhaps because of my coloured perceptions of how politicians should be. Having said that, the media-bashing scenes in the movie are vindictive and more importantly, satisfying. A word about the soundtrack – I found an old Ilayaraja number in a Malayalam movie recycled into a song on this movie – anyone care to educate me on the track? I’ve heard it being performed by Balabhaskar (a well known violinist) too.

All in all, Paa is a good watch, worth my money and better than most recent Bollywood movies.

Why Google Wave Fails to Impress

I just got my Google Wave invite, and this being one of the most sought-after things in recent weeks, I am beginning to wonder if Wave is just more hype than utility. I have several reasons to not like Wave, and I’ve listed some of my reasons below:

• First and foremost, it introduces another activity that one has to do, without actually replacing anything. It doesn’t do email, it doesn’t do instant messaging too well and it isn’t exactly a blogging platform. It is social media, but in most cases, isn’t too useful to share stuff. It provides another choice and works into the paradox of choice we all have with internet applications these days.
• The fact that you make changes others can see in real time actually decreases useful time spent on it. Rather than improve the user experience, I actually felt irritated by it.
• The interface is horrible. Having to click “done” after each message makes IMing a pain. Again, the real time web idea just doesn’t work for me – it doesn’t actually get anything done.
• None of the functionality is obvious. You can’t actually share a video, song or file right away – you have to “create a wave” first. So the interface doesn’t focus on what you want to do, but instead expects you to think in terms of waves. In Google Talk, which is a well developed application, we had tons of functionality built in in later stages like voice chat and videos that would play right in the chat window. Wave does not have that ease of use to it.

Overall, I am quite disappointed that this much-hyped application turned out to be another experiment without much to add to the already crowded internet.

Violent Trends in Indian Society

Yesterday’s attacks in Mumbai on the IBN television channel’s offices are just another incident in a long string of events that have marked dissonance breeding within our society. Two of India’s greatest threats from within are the regional and factious tendencies bursting forth from the society. The regionalism is a result of more than sixty years of regional and linguistic politics, and the factious tendencies of groups like the Maharashtra Navanirman Sena is a result of many decades of unequal opportunity, which is at odds with the promises of the language- and region-oriented politics. For the most part, regional parties have asserted their support to a certain group of people – and although the entire society has not been monolithic in most cases, they have garnered popular support over the decades. Their promises of equity, prosperity and other the hollow ideals that  most political parties follow have rarely been fulfilled, as they have had little chance to make these things happen – often stretching beyond their means to make these promises during the election campaigns and regularly failing to deliver on the promises, and instead actively encouraging lumpen elements and rowdies to run the show by acting against the opposition. This trend is visible across the spectrum – Telengana, Northern Karnataka and what are now Jharkhand, Chattisgarh and Uttaranchal are all examples of regional politics, as is the elevation of Delhi to statehood or the lobbying behind Mumbai to attain statehood.

The regionalism is one aspect of what’s wrong with India’s politics that leads to violence. Apart from the Maoist problem, factionism is another contributor to violent tendencies in society today. Factionism is encouraged in cosmopolitan society that have a response to a perceived injustice meted out to them by the progress of history or by a primary political party that they have to contend with. Because of Mumbai’s exponential growth over the decades, immigrants to it from all over India have made successful inroads into its society. A lot of Maharashtrians, public figures included, criticize the ascendancy in Mumbai as well as the previous governments in their inability to improve opportunities for local Maharashtrians – and the premise of secular, non-factious politics, as is perpetrated by the leading political party in India, is used as an excuse to actively promote favoritism in the government. This tends to anger the bulk of the population – as it did in all previous cases including the eminent case of 1933 Germany – and tends to push them towards radicalism to get what they perceive they have been denied.

The Maoist problem is something Indians in eastern India are fast getting used to. What surprises me is that there is actually a public debate on whether they are terrorists – as if an apple by another name is not an apple – and that trial by media seems to be an overriding theme here. The bulk of the visibility the international community has about the Maoist problem is limited to the English media in India, which tends to not cover the east of India as much as the metros, Delhi and Mumbai and the developed states down south. A case in point is how Headlines Today covered a small flash flood in Delhi with much sensationalism (presumably because they’re based out of Delhi) but how their coverage of the floods in Bihar and the recent floods in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh isn’t comprehensive at all. As far as the English media are concerned, most of these areas don’t even come under the scanner – the three hundred and fifty million people in Uttar Pradesh are reduced to one political interaction or two between Mayawati and some of her rivals or how much she spent on statues of herself (showing her holding a petite ladies handbag). The millions of people down south are reduced some some Chief Minister’s remark about someone or something.

The media is, in general, complicit in the sensationalism we associate with little events that sweep the nation, rather than issues of national importance. The austerity drive that the Congress so shamelessly professed even as their profligate ministers had five star residences and traveled on state tours on choppers, spending crores of rupees in the process is a case in point. The issue was raised to national importance, even as humble, ordinary folks that form the majority of our citizens have no option other than to be austere in their lifestyle. And in the middle of it all, Congress politicians actually came out to say things like “jingoism has its uses and benefits”. This is not only audacious, but it is bordering on unacceptable. When yesterday’s media was attacked by goons, one has to wonder whether the Shiva Sena – the group that’s considered behind these attacks – was pandering to the ordinary people who vote for them in the elections. They have ample reason to think that the deprived people who vote for them will see what they do positively.

It is worth examining who we characterize as goons and who we don’t. Although this could be the subject of a length debate, atrocious politicians who have criminalised the fray have been utterly ignored while people who genuinely stand up for something have often been given little credence. Then there are those who pretend to be the latter although they are the former. I think a healthy debate into the growing violence in our society should consider these aspects and also make a thorough assessment of the reasons rather for this violence rather than merely distilling the anger one feels for having witnessed or experienced the violence.