There’s a saying in India which essentially means that “An idle brain is the house of devil“. Sitting idle at home is something that I truly dislike. So, to fight the boredom, I have been trying to find interesting stuff on the net. Following a thread of links, and a barrage of garbage, I have finally settled on to trying to create a Google Gadget or Orkut Plugin or a WordPress theme to consume most of my day.

Now, while doing all this ‘research’ I was amazed, yet again, to see that Google corp. is still launching so many products. New products, and yeah, they are already updating products that they already have, like Docs, Gmail, Picasa and Google Search. Man! they are throwing away goodies right (Lively), left (Gadgets) and center (Android). Man! I wonder how they are able to manage so much, so seamlessly. Yet keeping most of their products interoperable. Its as if they own the net.

Recently, Google has started giving some competition to Wikipedia (which happens to be one of my favourite places on the net) with their own Google Knol – “a unit of knowledge“. One major difference between the two is that Knol is not so open, the authors have to give their true names, get verified and all, unlike Wiki.

A quick look at World’s top 500 most visited sites (courtesy Alexa) points that they own around 20+ of the top 100 of these sites. Sometimes I am scared that they know a lot more about me than my closest friends do. What if some random Google Employee decides to keep a watch on some random internet surfers life. He’ll know what videos you watch, what goes on in your chats and emails about and with whom, you search queries and the sites you finally visit. If Google AdSense is setting a cookie on your PC (which they surely must be doing right now, I never checked though) they’ll also know which sites you have been visiting, even outside of Google searches. And yeah, that evil-maniac will also be able to see your private photos with your loved ones. Scary.. huh! And now, as Google Docs is catching on, and people are starting to migrate to the cloud, they he’ll also have access to your personal documents. {Gulp} “Don’t be Evil“, Google. Please.

Well, here are a few links if you want to -

• Google – Products list (Grossly inadequate)
• Google – Code of Conduct
• Wikipedia – Google Knol
• Wikipedia – List of Google Products

I like to watch good movies. Who doesn’t ! But it breaks my heart to first really admire a movie and then realize that it was plagiarized or “took inspiration” from some other movie be it bollywood or hollywood. Damn! What is wrong with Indian mainstream cinema, why can’t they write up good scripts themselves, more often. Why do they have to copy dialogues (verbatim at times).

Me and my group of friends, are fans of the extremely good performance by KK Menon while delivering this dialogue in the movie “Shaurya” (you can find text of the dialogues here and here on Amit’s blog) -

But what do you know, “Shaurya” took inspiration (read-ruthlessly plagiarised) from the hollywood classic “A Few Good Men” -

Now, this does not, in any way make me doubt the acting prowess of KK Menon, and I’ll still vouch that he infact outdid Jack Nicholsan, however, this does in fact, make me lose all the respect for the director of this movie. Come-on guys! We have done Rang De Basanti, we can do better than just copying a flick almost as it is.

Talking of plagiarism, allow me to rant away to glory. “Sarkar Raj” takes inspiration for dialogues like “Sab niji hai” (verbatim copy) from “Its all personal” (Godfather). I wish we’d do better then that. Promising actor Ranbir Shourie’s upcoming movie “Ugly and Pagli” seems to be a copy of the beautiful romantic Korean movie “My Sassy Girl”. The beautiful songs (so they seemed) of “Life in a Metro” (2007) were inspired, that is the composer Pritam literally copied many foreign hits. Part of the story of “Life in a Metro” was plagiarised from hollywood movie “The Apartment” – the part about call center employee giving away his apartment keys to his boss(s) for their escapades.

I mean COME ON, damnned frigging bozos, atleast accept that you are making a scene by scene copy.

Explore more about

• itwofs.com – chronicles of plagiarism in indian film music
• Review of Shaurya – 1
• A Few Good Men Vs Shaurya

Update: Google Analytics tells me that the keyword “Ranbir Shourie” is referring a lot of people to this page. Some research tells me that I have mis-spelled the name, actually it should be “Ranvir Shorey” or “Ranvir Sheorey” or “Ranveer Shourey”. Well, I don’t know how to correctly spell his name, and neither do a lot of my esoteric set of visitors {smiles}.