Sale Away

As perhaps Mae West would say - I’ve been thin and I’ve been fat, and believe me, thin is better.

Except, of course, on Boxing Day: the beginning of the Christmas season sales.

Because if you are size small, you share your dimensions with the shopping locusts of London – the slim, small and highly fashion conscious South East Asians. Even before the sun breaks through the inky skies, they have already attacked all the chain stores giving the best bargains and ferreted away all size smalls in all colours, textures, hues and cuts.

And all that is left are the trampled remains of a colourful sale that is not of much use to size Smalls like me anymore.

Google Enterprise: The Final Frontier

Guess what greeted us inside the Highbury & Islington tube stop: a gigantic advertisement of Google’s latest outing – Google Chrome, the company's home-built internet browser.

Oh the irony of it! That Google, who earns nearly 99 per cent of its profits by creating new platforms for people to advertise, is resorting to traditional advertising itself.

To me, the advertisement marked the final chapter in Google’s life as a lean, highly-independent, cutting-edge enterprise still redolent with the memories of two geeky Phd students who created a powerful search engine in their friend’s garage in sunny California just over a decade ago.

Since then, Google would go where no man had gone before – well, most of the time anyway. The Google Search Engine, Google Earth, You Tube, Orkut: they were all first of their kinds in their fields (even where they were not created by Google itself). If it wasn't a pioneering venture, it was not of enough interest to Google. Hence, it never needed to advertise because it would start out as the market leader. Others hoped to capitalise through their association to Google.

But web browsers have been done by others, and done fairly successfully. Google Chrome can, at the best, offer more of the same.

So I am left wondering, is it the beginning of the end?

***
Check out BBC's tech correspondents report on the best technologies of 2009. Seems like Mark Ward is on my camp, and Rory Cellan Jones on the opposite. (Though where did Jones hear that Google has already unveiled its operating system? It has unveiled its decision to develop one, but hasn't launched the operating system yet. And it is not called Chrome, it is called Google Chrome OS. As as tech correspondent, I would have expected him to not confuse the two.)

Indian Visa strikes back

On Wednesday, the BBC carried a report on how the Indian government has tightened its visa rules for foreigners, causing incredible inconvenience to British and American tourists. The trouble was apparently regarding whether a foreigner who left India while living-out his long term visa could or could not re-enter India within two months.

The British Business Secretary Lord Mandelson was riled enough to state to the Press Trust of India: "I can understand the motive for the new visa arrangements but we have to be careful not to make, create general restrictions."

Mandelson's retort came on the day I got my paltry six-days, single entry Schengen visa.

I had applied for one-year multiple entry visa to continental Europe the week before so that Sid and I could organise our travel plans through the year. However, the visa officer turned around and said that she will only grant me a single entry visa. Why? Because I don’t have job.

Me: My Australian husband has a full-time job?

Visa officer: Yes.

Me: I have residencies to the UK and Australia on the basis of our marriage?

Visa Officer: Yes.

Me: I have had residencies to Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands in the past, and have never flouted visa regulations?

Visa Officer: Yes.

Me: You have all our bank account statements?

Visa Officer: Yes.

Me: So?

Visa Officer: Sorry, you don’t have a job, you are Indian, and we can’t grant you a multiple entry visa.
Does the Austrian embassy actually think that I will risk becoming an illegal alien in a Schengen country when I am a perfectly legal alien in the UK (with the choice of being one in Australia)?

I don’t think so. It is just an occasion of visa arrangements making, creating general restrictions.

I wonder what Mandelson’s views would be on that.

***
 Incidentally, in August I called up the immigration office in the UK for a clarification regarding my UK residency. The electronic voice informed me that the office was too busy to attend any calls all through August and September, and if I had any doubts about my visa status could I please leave the country. How’s that for general restrictions?

Actors in their new avatar

While watching Avatar, I was time and again reminded of the 1952 musical comedy Singin’ in the Rain starring Gene Kelly. No, no, no. There is absolutely no similarity between the plotlines. But in a way, Kelly’s musical portended what Avatar could mean for actors in the coming decades.

Singin’ in the Rain was a goofy portrayal of how the transition from silent films to talkies befuddled movie actors. Never having been trained in voice-modulation, the shift to talkies required them to adopt a whole new mind-set and attitude towards acting. Some sank, some stayed afloat. And a whole new breed of actors came into being.

What will the success of Avatar -- where most of the action takes place in a bioluminescent coral-reef-like world entirely created out fantastic 3D animation -- mean for actors used to performing their craft in the what-you-see-is-what-you-get world we inhabit?

The New Yorker gave a riveting account of how the actors in the Na'vi world (the alien world in this case) acted out their parts. Talking about Zoe Saldana in particular, the actress who played the Na'vi heroine in the film, it explained that she essentially acted her part in an empty industrial-like space surrounded by other actors wearing black unitards covered with reflective white dots. Their movements were captured by several surveillance cameras on the ceiling which positioned their performance inside the Na'vi world digital set. Saldana wore a head set with a tiny camera floating inches from her face, capturing the minute details of her facial expressions: "the movements of her facial muscles, the contractions of her pupils, the interaction of her teeth, lips, and tongue." The data uploaded by all these cameras were fed into computers which translated the actors movements onto their digital characters, and positioned these images onto the digital set design - and it is this image that Cameron saw on his screen in real time.

So Saldana was not merely providing the voice for her animated character. She acted it out. It was her facial expressions and body movements that we watched, albeit after conversion via digital technology into her animated avatar (excuse the pun). However, her acting skills required her to anticipate not just the non-existent set around her, but also what we would eventually see of her in her 9-ft tall, inky blue, luminescent-dotted alien character. Can all our current actors cope with it?

I should say no. It is obvious from the fact that Sigourney Weaver looked awkward and slightly stupid in her Na’vi character, particularly when compared to her real-life version.

If Avatar changes the audience expectations of films as everyone is predicting, and makes CGI (computer graphic image that is essentially a translation of the actor’s body movements) a norm – we are looking at a major sink-or-swim moment for Hollywood actors.

Incidentally, none of the reviews of the film I came across commented on the acting in Avatar.