This list consists of some formulaic movies and some that are innovative. I am working on the list and hope to build it over time. Some of my most cherished Indian movies require a contextual knowledge. The best of Tamil movies involves a play of words that cannot be captured by subtitles – and in any case the subtitles of most movies leaves us wanting. So, each time a friend asks me what’s a good movie to watch, I am left dumbstruck. I’ve finally decided to put together a list on which I can receive some help – and some […]
Vivek Srinivasan
The last few years have seen some dazzling movies that have boldly departed from the mainstream. A movie historian in Tamil Nadu once said (perhaps Randor Guy) that most movies in the language (and I am sure in Hindi as well) revolved around 8 basic plots. These new movies have a bold new plot – but that’s not all. Many of these have given up a formulaic approach of making commercial movies in India (atleast in Hindi and Tamil): a little glamour, some songs, some dancing, some comedy (even if it’s totally unrelated), a macho hero, sexy heroine, fights (called […]
Moving beyond the formula: Bold new Indian movies
Shwaas IMDB Year: 2004 Director: Sandeep Sawant Category: Drama Rating: 5 out of 5 This is a simple movie by a debutant director. An old man is confronted by the necessity to tell his 6 year old grand child that he will loose his vision after an operation. The director, who is a seasoned theatre person, made this every day drama in real life into a touching story. It is one of those rare movies without a villian. Every person in the story is positively represented – all brought together by a boy suffering from cancer. Sandeep Sawant, the director, […]
Shwaas: Dazzling Marathi movie of a grandfather’s dilemma
Many talks and interviews with well known people are now available online. I’ve put together a series of them that I have specially enjoyed. To see the rest, click here. This conference held at the Princeton has many interesting speakers including Amartya Sen and Douglass North. The session is called “From the Coffee House to the World Bank – Institutions and Development”. Like most conferences there are interesting moments and long dull moments as well. What I “enjoyed” most was listening to the questions in the conference. The webcast of the conference is available here. Other talks in Princeton are […]
Webcast of conference on institutions and development
Many talks and interviews with well known people are now available online. I’ve put together a series of them that I have specially enjoyed. To see the rest, click here. The argument that Sen makes is complex and I will not attempt to recap them here. But as a pointer, I’ll just mention that this talk is based on his book “Identities and Violence”. Sen questions the notion of Clash of civilisation by Samuel Huntington from different dimensions. He questions if any group of people can be neatly identified as a “civilization”, if animosity has to be the basis of […]
Amartya Sen’s critique of Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of civilisations”
Many talks and interviews with well known people are now available online. I’ve put together a series of them that I have specially enjoyed. To see the rest, click here Justice Henderson started as a sports person and with some mentoring graduated in Law. As he was finishing school he had an interesting offer to work in the Kennedy administration on civil rights issues. The interview interlaces Justice Henderson’s biography with the tumultuous years of civil rights activism in USA. The path he took – African American sports person who finally went on to become a Judge in a US […]
Interesting interview on civil rights with African-American Judge – Justice ...
Many talks and interviews with well known people are now available online. I’ve put together a series of them that I have specially enjoyed. To see the rest, click here This is an interview by Harry Kreisler taken in 1983 with Linus Pauling who got two Nobel Prizes, once for chemistry and the second time for peace. The interview is a reflection of the context in which Linus Pauling got into peace activism in the United States. The opinions of Pauling were slightly uncommon to me, atleast from a peace activist. He for example would talk of the importance of […]
The peace movement in historical perspective with Linus Pauling – ...
Many talks and interviews with well known people are now available online. I’ve put together a series of them that I have specially enjoyed. To see the rest, click here Amartya Sen, in my opinion, is the economist who has probed the limits of economics as a discipline. In this interview he talks of nature of theorising, especially in economics, and makes many interesting observations. The interesting feature of Sen’s analysis is that he rarely dismisses the philosophical basis of the discipline. Instead he brings out the limitations involved and the need to bring in greater diversity to the informational […]
Webcast of interview with Amartya Sen: Reflections on theory in ...
Many talks and interviews with well known people are now available online. I’ve put together a series of them that I have specially enjoyed. To see the rest, click here In this interview with Harry Kreisler Noam Chomsky traces his works starting from his childhood experiences. The talk is for one hour approximately and could be heard on a light day. This is a part of “Conversations with history” series anchored by Harry Kreisler of UC Berkeley. There have been many other interesting interviews by him, some of which are indexed in this website. Other talks in this series A […]
Webcast of Noam Chomsky interview on Activism, Anarchism and Power
I was looking for a video cutter that could help me make suitable clips for presentations. Finally, I found Virtual Dub, an AVI editor that delivered. Virtual Deb is open source and totally free. It enables me to read a variety of files, including dll files that I was struggling with and make small clips from a longer video file. I can save the clips as avi or wav file, and both are readable by windows media player – which is crucial if we wish to use these clips in power point presentations. I had to struggle with the options […]
Open-source video cutter for presentations
Music, Space and Place: Popular Music and Cultural Identity Rating: 3 out of 5 Editor: Sheila Whiteley, Andy Bennett, Stan Hawkins Year: 2004 Category: Music, Anthropology, Culture Publisher: Ashgate Publishing The book collects an assortment of articles under three broad heads: (1) music, space and place (2) rap and hip hop – community and cultural identity and (3) musical production and the politics of desire. The introductory chapter is fairly detailed and gives and good outline of all the chapters in the book. It also includes a quick theoretical outline. The first section, which is oriented mostly about issues of […]
Music, Space and Place – A brief description
Death without weeping: The violence of everyday life in Brazil Rating: 4 out of 5 Author: Nancy Schepper-Huges Year: 1992 Category: Anthropology, hunger, violence, poverty Publisher: University of California Press Death without weeping is an ethnographic study of a town in North-Eastern Brazil. The theme of the book is hunger, child deaths and ‘every day violence’ in Brazil. The work is situated in a town she calls ‘Bom Jesus da mata’ in Pernambuco district of N.E. Brazil. The author visited the place first as a volunteer in 1964, and continued her association with the town ever since. After her training […]
Nancy Schepper-Huges’ graphic portrayal of hunger and violance in Brazil
My publications on Tamil Nadu's public services, right to food and other issues.
List of publications
Google scholar and specialized bibliography services like Econlit and JSTOR seem to have different strengths and should be used in different ways I started using Google Scholar with a vengeance when it started. It has an ease that other providers do not: there is no need to log in, there is no need for subscription and it seems to pull out articles that other service providers just did not. In no time, Google Scholar also started providing links to my citation manager – Refworks. But soon I started realising various limitations of Google Scholar. Here’s a brief assessment of the […]
Comparing Google Scholar and specialised bibliographic search engines
This bibliography covers most of the recent and classic works in institutional economics. I’ve included some reviews in the book review section. My other bibliographies can be seen under the bibliography category. Abraham, Anita, and Jean-Philippe Platteau. 2004. Participatory development: Where culture creeps in. In . Acemoglu, Daron. 2005. Politics and economics in weak and strong states. Journal of Monetary Economics 52, (7) (October): 1199-1226. Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. 2006. Economic origins of dictatorship and democracy. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press. Alston, Lee J., Thráinn Eggertsson, and Douglass Cecil North. 1996. Empirical studies in institutional change. […]
Bibliography of Institutional Economics (downloadable)
I had written a note about using wordnet lexical database that could be used in content analysis. I just stumbled on a lexical database in Hindi. I am yet to try it, but am excited that such a tool is available in an Indian language, specially when I am planing a media study with a friend.
Wordnet lexical database in Hindi
A tool to generate conceptually related set of words for content analysis Wordnet is a lexical database maintained by Princeton university. It is described as: “WordNet® is a large lexical database of English, developed under the direction of George A. Miller. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser” When we with to do autocoding with NVivo or other qualitative research (or content analysis) software, […]
Using Wordnet lexical database with content analysis software
NVivo Rating: 4 out of 5 I started using NVivo – a qualitative research and content analysis software – last year when I worked on a content analysis project. NVivo’s purposes are simple – it allows us to assemble different documents (including pictures) and code them. The codes can be arranged in a hierarchy or individually. While most coding is manual, some of it can be automated (see below). The best part of NVivo is that it allows us to review contents carrying a particular code with ease. For example, I was looking at newspaper articles on contracting and wanted […]
NVivo: Useful content analysis tool
It has snowed a lot in Syracuse last night, and the forecast is that it will snow a lot more. My walk to the school was fun like never before – loads and loads of snow all around, submerged cars (no sadism here – but it was just incredible to see it all), and an entirely new look and feel to the whole city/town/village (not sure what Syracuse is). On top of all this fun, they’ve advanced the women’s basket ball game and have announced that there will be no entry fees! Having done my masters in Economics, I know […]
Snow is beautiful & I hope no one in Syracuse ...
I used to go to the library to listen to this talk earlier – till I discovered it in You Tube. A link is provided below to this great speech. Text of the talk Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity. But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic […]