Some notes on Kahaani

Perhaps the best decision I made was to watch Kahaani from bwcinema.com rather than in the cinema hall.  Or perhaps it was the worst since the visual quality of the streaming video was abysmal.  Perhaps, in the cinema hall, the improved visual quality as well as the audience participation would have made the movie seem better than it was.  As it stands, the movie is incredible - and by that I mean not remotely credible (apologies to David Edelstein). 

Kahaani is what I call a by-the-books thriller with a twist in the tail.  And perhaps if you don't read the said books (spy thrillers, murder mysteries, espionage tales), the juxtaposition of a thriller plot, a demonstrably grubby (and sometimes colorful!) middle-class Indian setting, and a bonafide star like Vidya Balan would be something unique and that may perhaps explain why Kahaani has received such rave reviews.  It isn't a bad film, by any means.  But it isn't particularly good either. 

It's main problem, from my perspective, is that its thriller credentials are extremely thin.  Granted, all thrillers are, to some extent, ridiculous, with events that stretch one's imagination.  But Kahaani's plot is so by-the-books, so conventional, that it never works: the movie skips from one point to the next and there is no texture to these events; random people are identified by random strangers who presumably saw them years ago.  To reveal more than this would be to spoil the story for others.

Vidya Balan is an elegant and wonderfully restrained actress but even she can't do much with the material (she's made to deliver some cringe-worthy lines to the young actors).  The worst of the lot is the movie's sudden plunge into moral theatrics -- "collateral damage" says the callous Agent Khan from the Intelligence Bureau about the sacrifice of civilians for national security and the way he says it is so preposterous that you wonder why the movie even had to go there -- but it does, to its detriment.

As for the final plot twist, it is like the rest of the movie -- by the books, and not remotely credible. 

[For an example of a movie that follows a fairly standard mystery thriller plot, but does it elegantly, with detailed attention to the milieu it creates, see Navdeep Singh's vastly superior Manorama Six Feet Under.]

Links for the Week [March 18-25 2012]

My new years resolution this year was that I would write a blog-post every week.  Something meaty, something substantial, blah blah, you get the idea.  Alas, that hasn't happened.  So I've decided I'm going to cheat.  I'm going to post at the end of every week, the articles that I read and found interesting.  This will probably involve me posting stuff straight from my Tumblr page - but oh well, that's life.  So, without further ado, here are some interesting reads:

• William Saletan reviews Jonathan Haidt's latest book "The Righteous Mind."  I am ambivalent about Haidt:on the one hand, I find his views on reason convincing, but I am not too happy with the way he "naturalizes" his ideas by grounding them into the structure of the human brain.  

• The sociologist of knowledge, Donald MacKenzie gave a talk here at MIT about high-frequency trading and what it might mean for sociologists who are trying to understand the nature of prices in the economy as an aspect of social organization.  So I was naturally intrigued by this Wall Street Journal  piece which talks about the IPO of a trading firm that fizzled because of the wide fluctuations in price (a consequence of high-frequency trading).  (H/T: Kevin Drum).  

• The India Ink blog at the NYT ran a fascinating series on the problems faced by the National Archives in New Delhi.  The whole series is worth reading in full: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. 

• We read Alfred Chandler's magisterial "The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business" for class last week.  And Aaron Swartz (yes, that guy) has a really nice summary of the book that I found very useful.   

• Finally, have you heard of Pinterest?  I hadn't - not until last week, that is, when I read this piece.  (Yes, it's another social bookmarking site, except that it collects bookmarked images and is often used by its users to curate different kinds of commercial products.)  The most interesting part is Pinterest's business model:

  Unlike other social networks, which waited years to monetize through advertising, Pinterest has taken a different route. They’re monetizing already by taking a cut on sales that pins on their site help generate. They partnered with a firm called SkimLinks, which automatically scans through every link posted on the site to see if it goes to a retail site with an affiliate program. If it finds that kind of link, it secretly adds an affiliate code that ensures Pinterest will make some cash from sales that derive from that link. It’s a clever game, particularly given the site’s users’ retail focus, but Pinterest probably should have disclosed the practice more openly.

Gosford Park and Downton Abbey: The social vs. the psychological

I enjoyed the first season of Masterpiece's show Downton Abbey very much, and like many people, sat down to see the first episode of the second season last Sunday.  The new episode wasn't bad at all, although it felt like the writers crammed down a lot of points today to set the stage for what I assume will be the "real" developments that follow. But this seems as good a time as any to remark on the show's strengths and weaknesses.


Julian Fellowes, the creator of Abbey, wrote Robert Altman's Gosford Park and I remember watching that movie alone in my dorm room, a bad pirated print with bad sound (the overlapping Altman-style dialogue didn't help matters).    The murder mystery at its center was interesting and kept me watching, yet there were these surreal things that didn't quite gel: the wet, rainy opening sequence, with the picture of the wet maid keeping an umbrella over her mistress was one.  What was the movie's point, I wondered.



And then, it all came together in a kind of moment that movies should strive for.  [SPOILER ALERT].  The lady's maid played by the wonderful Kelly Macdonald has discovered that it's not the brooding valet (Clive Owen, the first time I've ever watched this charismatic actor) who's murdered the aristocratic owner of Gosford Park, even though, he is, in fact, owner's illegitimate son.  Rather, it's the valet's supposedly long-dead mother, the housekeeper of Gosford Park, Mrs. Wilson (played by Helen Mirren) who never knew of his existence until very recently.  And she did it because she knew her son, who isn't even aware that she is his mother, wanted to murder his father.  She's also angry because she was assured that the son she would give up would be adopted by a family and have a good life; instead he was actually given away to an orphanage.  She kills her employer to protect her son.  It's his life that matters, Mrs. Wilson says, concise and matter-of-fact. But what about your life, the maid asks.  In a line that can seem didactic on repeated viewings, but resonates like whip-lash when you hear it for the first time, Mrs Wilson replies: I am the perfect servant.  I have no life. 

In those two lines, the film distills itself to its essence.  The life of a servant under the aristocracy is about being invisible.  Fellowes and Altman had made a murder mystery that's not actually about the usual psychological motives for murder at all.  While we are teased with all the usual motives for murder - love, hate, anger, money - it turns out that this is a murder driven by hate for a certain kind of social arrangement.  [SPOILER ENDS]


Downton Abbey is almost the complete opposite of Gosford Park, almost as if Fellowes wanted to make amends for having created a biting critique of aristocracy. The aristocrats here are almost the embodiment of saintliness.  While they are, of course, used to a life of privilege and to being waited upon hand and foot, they are also unfailingly courteous to, and extremely fair to their servants.  The servants, in turn, are all suitably grateful: there is little griping about class here.

When I saw Downton Abbey for the second time, I noticed things I really hadn't the first time, when I was too engrossed in the plot to notice.  The first is that literally every "downstairs" character (except for the unscrupulous Thomas and cunning O'Brien, on whom more later) is "good."  Good, meaning that they're all hardworking, unfailingly fair,  industrious, and nice within the boundaries of reason.  The butler Carson is a bit ridiculous --  think The Remains of the Day - but he's self-aware and beyond his occasional pomposity, he's still a good guy.  They're all in stark contrast to O'Brien and Thomas who are positively Machiavellian in their dealings (not to mention that they're the only two to smoke cigarettes while they plot everyone else's downfall). 

This, I suppose, is the equivalent of political correctness in the show.  Since the show is not a critique of class, but rather an old-fashioned melodrama (heartbreaks, mild intrigue, passion, love), it won't do to have servants who are embittered for social reasons.  The bad servants clearly need a psychological reason for their badness and indeed, it is supplied for Thomas: his repressed homosexuality has led to an internalized homophobia (the cook refers to him as "damaged," a surprisingly charitable, and therefore anachronistic, assessment for those times).  I suspect that in subsequent seasons we will see why O'Brien is the way she is (the show is already starting to redeem her character in certain ways, notice her sympathy to the new valet who has shell-shock).

Which is why the "upstairs" characters are far more interesting.  Since their motivations can be seen to be free of class (after all, if you're upper class, class doesn't really exist for you.  And besides, since these guys are all good aristocrats, they're free of any taint of snobbery as well), they are allowed to be far more psychologically complex: they all have a touch of meanness and hardness that's not straightforwardly evil (like Thomas and O Brien).  My favorite was the Lady Mary Crawley, who comes across as impossibly hard and brittle in the first episode, wondering if she has to wear black when her fiance dies -- but somehow comes to have the richest inner life of all the characters in subsequent episodes.  Her motivations range from jealousy (that her cousin Matthew has become the son that her father longed for) to a certain striving for something she isn't quite sure about which is why she hesitates to marry him.  Her motivations for all her actions are never quite clear-cut (even the scene where she tells Matthew she likes him comes after she sees Matthew becoming more interested in her sister, Sybil).  She can also be incredibly vicious: the Edith-Mary relationship is probably the most daring thing that the makers of Abbey have ever portrayed.

All in all, the artistic choices of film-makers are constrained by what their film is about. Since Gosford Park was explicitly about class, the downstairs characters were far more interesting: their motives were an irresolvable mix of the social and the psychological.  The upstairs characters, on the other hand, were expectedly shallow (the fantastic British actors notwithstanding) -- which was, in a sense, the point.

Downton Abbey, because it tries to neutralize class differences, is almost forced to make its downstairs characters sympathetic (and when not, to give them clear psychological motivations for being the way they are).  It has no such problems with its upstairs characters, who can all be seen as "good" socially because they don't exploit their employees.  Which therefore makes possible ambiguous and indelible characters upstairs characters like Mary Crawley with her on-again, off-again romantic relationship with Matthew Crawley as well as her venomous attitude towards her sister Edith.  I am curious to see what journey the writers take Mary Crawley on next.

Social Construction as Conservatism

The release of Corey Robin's book "The Reactionary Mind" and some of the high-profile unfavorable reviews it elicited has led to a backlash in the blogosphere. 

Mark Lilla's dismissal of the book is on first principles.  He argues that the core principle that unites all the different strains of self-identified conservatives -- and therefore the key difference between liberals and conservatives -- is not, pace Robin, their stance on the progress of the underprivileged, but rather, their stance on human nature.  For conservatives, says Lilla, society comes before individuals: it shapes human nature and constitutes individuals.  Therefore conservatives are loath to tinker with tradition: a slow change in traditions is preferable to the vast upheaval of revolution.  Liberals, on the other hand, do not hold tradition in the high esteem that conservatives do.  They are therefore far more eager to dismantle social structures if they think these structures are impeding human freedom and potential.  For liberals, Lilla argues, individuals come first, society, a distant second.

This is not new, of course and this is a great illustration of what separates, say, Edmund Burke from John Stuart Mill.  But then, after positing this as the main principle distinguishing conservatives from liberals, Lilla goes on to say:

Americans’ assumptions about human nature are basically liberal today. We take it for granted that we are born free, that we constitute society, it doesn’t constitute us, and that together we legitimately govern ourselves. Most intellectuals who call themselves conservatives today accept as self-evident the truths enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, which no traditional European conservative could. Some of them have drawn from European conservatism when they write about the constructive role of civil society, the habits and mores needed to exercise liberty, and the limits of government action. But strictly speaking, they are go-slow, curb-your-enthusiasm liberals like Tocqueville, not conservatives like Burke or T.S. Eliot or Michael Oakeshott. As for those like Congressman Ron Paul who promote a minimal state and an unregulated economy, their libertarianism is actually a mutation of early liberalism, not conservatism. This is important to bear in mind.

All right then!  After positing that it is their stance on human nature that divides liberals from conservatives, it turns out that this distinction is moot in the contemporary American context because, well, everyone is a liberal: they all believe that individuals come before society.  What separates them, then?  Well, it seems to me that it's their stance on the welfare state.  Self-identified conservatives (from the early Public Interest neo-conservatives to the Tea Party) take a far more skeptical stance on the possibility of the welfare state to do good; whereas self-identified liberals are more optimistic about this.  (Note that we've now talking about the American context.) 

But there's another point here.  The ability of the welfare state to do "good," it turns out, is in a specific context: of providing government services to the underprivileged (poor blacks, foreclosed homeowners, and so on).  The difference between liberals and conservatives is thus over two points: (a) the possibility that a some kind of systemic injustice exists.  Liberals will admit to this, and possibly some conservatives will too.  (b) The possibility of doing something about this systemic injustice: It is here that the key difference between conservatives and liberals comes through.  With some oversimplification, one might say that liberals typically agree that if the injustice is bad enough then some steps (i.e. government actions) need to be taken to mitigate it, even if they impede human freedom (within limits).  Conservatives might think that the so-called injustice is not an injustice at all and even if it is, the costs of mitigating it are far more than the expected benefits.  This skepticism may range from Ron Paul-style complaints that, say, forcing Jim Crow-supporting restaurant owners to admit black people into their restaurants is an insupportable infringement of basic liberty to a cautiously Oakshottian stance that since changing social mores rarely works out the way we want it to, strict government regulation might lead to results that we may not quite like, and that therefore policies to remove, say, racial discrimination need to be a little less heavy-handed.

It turns out then that Corey Robin is right after all: the dispute between liberals and conservatives is indeed about the existence of system-wide injustices and over the means to mitigate them.  The question of whether human nature is contingent or fixed, or whether society is ontologically prior to individuals, becomes relevant only in the context of debates over the existence of systemic injustices.  Conservatives are indeed counter-revolutionaries, in the sense that they see no need (or are afraid of) agressive action to remove systemic injustices.  This might be out of the genuine fear that agressive action can have unexpected consequences (which comes out of an ontological belief that society is prior to individuals) or the idea that the systemic injustice in question isn't an injustice at all, but merely a matter of just desserts (which is an apotheosis of extreme individualism).

Indeed, the problem with Robin's book (which I haven't read!) may be what Matt Yglesias points out: it is too mean to conservatives.  And as Sheri Berman points out in her insightful review: it cannot account for fascists who were indeed revolutionaries, not traditionalists.  Far more importantly, it does not account for why conservative ideologies have such populist appeal, even to the very people whose "interests" it is supposedly against (at least, not without using false consciousness as an explanation, which, as Berman points out dryly, is "always a bad sign.").  

Indeed, this brings me back to the reason why I began writing this post.  As Lilla remarks, Americans are all liberals today, in terms of their stance on human nature.  Indeed, the only people who may be truly conservative in the Burkean sense are academics, who are often disparaged as part of the "academic left."  My own discipline of STS (Science and Technology Studies) is explicit about its assumptions: that a great deal of work has gone into constituting human nature as we think about it today, even if that work is not really obvious.  This is often called "social construction": the idea that the institutions that consitute society (say, gender, the family, merit and so on) did not arise spontaneously , in and of themselves, but that they are what they are as a result of a great deal of work (anonymous and overt) and particular historical circumstances. 

This is in itself a conservative argument: that "tradition" is prior to individuals.  Yet, the conclusion it takes is the opposite: if one can show that the deepest traditions are made, it is also possible to change them, and indeed they do change with time.  Most social constructionists will agree with conservatives: that changing our deepest traditions requires hard work, with the ever-present possibility that this work will yield unexpected consequences.  Yet social constructionists are not conservatives (and nor are they considered to be) primarily because they agree that the institutions of society often contain systemic injustices and that work that addresses these inequities is necessary and urgent (even if not easy). 

Harold Garfinkel again

In the latest issue of Social Studies of Science, Michael Lynch has a nice review essay (and obituary) of Harold Garfinkel and ethnomethodology and its relationship to STS.  Well worth your time, and the bibliography, I think, is a great resource!

Related post: How to read Garfinkel.

Google Sharing vs. Tumblr? Tumblr!!

Main point of this post: I'm now going to share interesting links that I find with commentary on my Tumblr page.  (RSS feed is here.)  You can stop reading right here!   For more on the reasoning behind this decision, keep reading ahead. 

I wrote a long post on how the disabling of the Google's "Note in Reader" bookmarklet (which went hand-in-hand with disabling Google Reader's sharing features) had taken the wind out of my sails, turning it into a lengthy point about how designed products end up working out for reasons other than what their designers envisioned. 

That was an academic point.  But what next?  I am really confused.  On the one hand, there is the Greasemonkey script that re-installs the sharing features in Google Reader; on the other is Tumblr which I have started to use as a sort of scrapbook of excerpts of interesting articles that I have read.

The Greasemonkey script is great - and it sort of suggests that Google has left the infrastructure for sharing in Reader intact while disabling the outer manifestations of it (the "share" "share with note" buttons, the list of followed people, etc.)***.  But how long will this infrastructure stay the way it is?  Google Buzz is going to be phased out soon and many people used Google Buzz to see the shared items rather than seeing them to Google Reader - so will this feature ever be the way it was?  And on and on - the uncertainty seems too much.


Which is why I've pretty much decided to take the leap into using Tumblr.  Of course, this means that I have to start building my network from scratch - but at least there's no uncertainty.  And one of the great things about Tumblr - as I've discovered from using it over the past few days - is that it really makes you read the piece in question.  That's because Tumblr is set up as a kind of commonplace book which means you need to pick out a paragraph or so from the piece that really really intrigues you; I've found myself reading pieces with that in mind and it's a big help.  Plus the commentary format where you take an extract from the piece and offer commentary on it is great for expressing quick thoughts on the piece in question.  In Google Reader, I would often share a piece without reading it with great care; it only needed to pass a certain minimum standard of "interestingness" and Reader made sharing much easier than Tumblr.  But all in all, there may be some advantages to the Tumblr model.  (Again, the whole thing goes to show how technical systems structure our practice in interesting ways.) 

That is all.  Tumblr link here. 

*** This seems like a true instance of the "Do no evil" motto that Googlers spout.  Also it's an interesting facet of information systems in general.  You can leave the infrastructure intact while still disabling a feature, thus allowing users to use it for themselves if they are enterprising enough.  Plus only some users need to be enterprising (the guys who wrote the Greasemonkey script in this case); the rest of us can reap benefits if the workaround is shared widely enough (and it seems to be, in this case). 

The unintended consequences of technical tools: the demise of sharing in Google Reader and why I will miss it

One of the first things we learn in fields like STS, HCI or Design Studies is that technologies often get used in ways that their designers have not imagined, and that this is both wonderful and productive, but can also be subversive and frustrating (for different people).  It's particularly trying for a designer: after all, the most important thing about design is to make people behave in a certain way, through certain kinds of artifacts (the button that is the only thing that can be clicked, the door-knob that has to be turned in order to pull the door, etc.) - and yet try as you might, it's never quite possible to get people to behave in exactly the way you want.  However, sometimes, having users do things with your design is a boon; it makes the application more flexible and increases its value.  One of the things about good designers then is that their designs are useful, rigid but not too rigid, and leave just enough room for all those workarounds, tricks and shortcuts that users will come up with.

All of this is a long way to say: I am bummed because Google Reader has disabled its "Sharing" features. I'm still going to continue to use Reader, I still like its interface and I love its "tagging" feature and its keyboard shortcuts.  I'll miss the "Sharing" aspects because I'd built up a group of like-minded contacts (most of whom, I'd never met or talked to, my Reader buddies, so to speak) whose links I often found most interesting and most relevant to my own interests.  But even more than that, the "Sharing" feature of Google Reader allowed me to do what I'd always wanted to do: have one receptacle for everything on the Web that I found interesting, which I could then search through as and when I wanted to.  I don't think the Reader designers imagined that their "Sharing" feature could have other uses but that's what hurts most right now.  I had a workflow which I thought I had perfected and it was all through Reader - and now I have to start all over again and come up with another workflow.  In a way, this goes to show the danger of overly relying on one particular technology. 

Let me start from the beginning.  The discovery of RSS feeds was the best thing that happened to my web reading habits.  I read randomly back then, and one had to actually go to a website to read - and this was difficult to do, I used bookmarks to remember all these sites I found interesting - yet it never quite worked out.  Then came RSS feeds and suddenly, I didn't have to go to a website anymore, instead the website came to me.  I experimented with a number of desktop RSS readers, then shifted to Bloglines (remember Bloglines??!!!) for a long time, before finally taking the plunge into Google Reader. It was great - I loved it.  I could tag items that I thought were interesting and worth storing and it had an excellent "Search" feature which meant that I could look through all my feeds using keywords.  This is most useful when you are blogging or writing: you can look through all your read-and-tagged articles and find the ones that most relate to the argument you are making.

There was one problem.  But to explain that, I have to talk about my long-standing obsession with information.  One of the things about reading on the Web is that you get access to lots of material that you wouldn't have before.  And you don't actually get to read most of these pieces; some of them you skim, some of them you skim, find interesting and then read deeply; some of them you don't even skim but you think these could be potentially useful at a later time.  Which means that you want to store everything that you think is useful - even remotely.  And the great thing about the internet is that storing things is inexpensive and easy, although there are infinite ways to do it.  I tried a variety of options: Google Bookmarks, Evernote, Delicious - but it never worked.  There were just too many options and working across applications was tiring and inefficient and frankly, not very useful.  Storing links and text is only useful if you re-read them and use them; and I found that I was rarely going back to what I had stored.

This started to change as I started reading more and more through Google Reader, I would tag anything I thought remotely useful (the story of what tags I came to use is something I'll tell another time). Thus I had a nice folder of items that I thought might come in handy for me later.
 
But there were other articles that I would read outside Reader (usually links that came from the blogs that I read in Reader).  And I wanted to store these too - but there was never a way to put them into Reader.  So for the longest time, I had two places where I stored interesting things I'd read: in Google Reader and in Evernote - and needless to say, it got pretty unwieldy.

And then I discovered sharing on Reader which was pretty cool.  And somewhere in the midst of this, I discovered Google's "Note in Reader" bookmarklet, which was designed so that you could share interesting things with you Reader friends even if what you were reading was not actually through Reader. 

That was the breakthrough.  But not in the way the Google designers imagined.  True, I used the bookmarklet to share more links.  But once I clicked on "Note in Reader," I had the option of not just sharing the article, but also tagging it so that it would be accessible from within Google Reader.  So there were a lot of pieces that I used the bookmarklet to just save and tag, and not necessarily to share with others.  I had my one application to store everything on the Web that I found interesting: it was Google Reader.  At some point, I stopped using Evernote.

Which is why the loss of the Sharing functions in Google Reader is depressing.  Now when I click on "Note in Reader" here is what I get:

So forget sharing, I can't even tag and web-page and move it into my Google Reader folders.  Which means I have to start my search for one storage application all over again - or content myself with two.  I'm hoping that even as Google has disabled Sharing through Reader, they will at least allow us to import web-content into Reader folders.  But we'll see.

As we learn all the time as designers, when  you take away a feature, you take away practices that users have been relying on, practices that may not have been what you intended.  It's a good lesson to learn as a user - hopefully it'll be something I'll remember when I do any kind of design work.