This new Cadbury ad...

On the other hand, I really liked the Diary Milk Silk ad; Hey, atleast the girl is acting her age! Sigh...remember those oldies? Like the mehndi ad or even the overjoyed cricket-fan girlfriend ad? Coke used to make such intelligent ads, but this time round, all we get is the Brrrrrr, which defies all comprehension and almost seems like its insulting the viewers.

Love all the ZooZoo ads from Vodafone, though. Hands down winner when it comes to comparing with other IPL ads. They have managed to keep the intelligence and the imagination intact!

Chanakya's Chant - Review

 

Synopsis - The novel retells the story of Chanakya the great political strategist of ancient India, whose machinations resulted in the installation of Chandragupta Maurya as the emperor of Magadha. In parallel, the novel tells the fictional tale of a Brahmin from Uttar Pradesh, Gangasagar Mishra, who decides to mentor a little girl from Kanpur's slums and groom her to become India's Prime Minister.

Verdict - A good Sunday read, but will be insulting to serious history buffs. Parallel present-time story not interesting as Chanakya's.

Having not yet read Ashwin Sanghi's previous work, The Rozabal Line, I nevertheless picked this one up because I was intrigued by the notion of a re-telling of Chanakya's tale. After only vague re-collections (as most of you must have) of Doordarshan's TV series of yore, my curiousity about the time period was re-kindled.

The story itself, shifts between a modern day political strategist who rises from anonymity to promote his candidate to the prime ministerial post, and ancient India of the Mauryan empire which served as the playground for Chanakya's shrewdness. There are plenty of questions about Chanakya's origins and his part in Chandragupta's rise to power, but not including this, the author has taken plenty of liberties in depicting the history of this tremulous time period.

I did like several descriptions of the day-to-day life of ancient India, on the streets and in the opulent palaces. I did detect a hint of Ashok Banker, but I guess that could just be coincidence. Chanakya's ascent initially at Taksasila, and his burning desire for revenge is well portrayed by the author. However, Chanakya's desire to see a united Bharat is another one of the liberties assumed here. I don't think anybody in that age would have had such aspirations; a desire for personal glory through a consolidated Mauryan empire might have been more true of most kings and protagonists of that era.

Although the parallel story of Gangasagar in present times starts strong, it starts losing it's edge very fast. His story is of a modern political thriller where ascent to power means double-dealing and making enemies along the way. The author has clearly borrowed from several newspaper headlines of recent times to chart this course, which sometimes makes the narration sound cliched (I remember this one instance how Gangasagar advises another protagonist to send transgender groups to collect tax from defaulters). This parallel story quickly descends into improbability with sprinklings of unnecessary and brutal violence. Although the author stresses constantly on Gangasagar drawing inspiration from Chanakya, the link is not so tenable, and is mostly lost by the end of the book.

There's nothing much described about the wars, which was disappointing for me. With Alexander's invasion shaping the actions of the kings during the time, I was expecting some thrills from the engagements. But then, with the book named after Chanakya, the focus I guess should be more on subtle strategy than brute force. In fact, Chanakya states that multiple times in the book, how direct confrontation is wasteful.

I got a bitter-sweet feeling in my mind when I had read the last page, and was reflecting on this. It definitely felt like the last few chapters (shouldn't call them that, because Ashwin's style of writing is of brief sections every page or two) of the book were hurried. Chanakya had achieved something great, unite most of north-India, but somehow I did not feel this in those last pages. It was the same sense of partial betrayal with the parallel story, with Gangasagar achieving what he had set out to do. The author though has succeeded to keep the narration quintessentially Indian, with the colloquialism intact. Overall, an engaging novel, but not without it's flaws.

Shogun 2 - Total War - Review

Verdict - Not so impressed.
Score - 3 out of 5

Shogun 2 - Total War teases, but does not have the potential to be right up there with Empire Total War or even Napoleon Total War. The game looks like it is built on the same engine as Napoleon with just a few minor tweaks like camera and lighting changes.

The campagn map is nothing new. You start out as one of the warring factions in Japan and build stuff, raise armies and go conquer provinces. The buildings and resources available are very familiar to the previous editions. The change here is that you get to manage all the buildings in a province by just accessing the city info panel. The objective of the game is to capture the Shogunate and other certain provinces as per your faction, and hold them for a year.

What I did not like right at the outset is how there is no way of researching technologies in parallel. No more multiple schools and universities, you have to get to do with researching the slow, tedious, one pip per turn way. I was not impressed with the technologies on offer as well. There are plenty to research terms of military, but there wasn't anything good to build your economy at the offset. Diplomacy has much more weightage here, with plenty of factions to trade with and keep you occupied. But the problem arises once you have conquered a substantial number of provinces and move towards the shogunate. Things immediately get difficult with all factions turning against you (normal difficulty). Diplomacy goes right out the window, never mind if you have been trading with them for years and never mind that your Daimyo's daughter is married to their general.

Battlefield warfare is very similar to the previous installments. The AI does do things differently with its cavalry and try to outflank you, but that gets old very soon if you are careful. Castle defence gets some refreshing changes like towers that fire arrows and ramparts which are excellent for archers. However, with no large siege weapons till much later in the game, it usually comes down to how many and how good your archers are. There is no occupying buildings, which is again a let down. You get all these towering castles within the fort, but can't fight from within them.

Sea warfare is a bit of a let-down, in my opinion. But then, after those epic batttles I played with Napoleon's 300 gun ships-of-the-line, these slow, ugly arrow boat fights pale very much. In fact, the lack of any kind of gun-powder units in substantial numbers kind of make all the battles boring (of course, that's just me).

Considering the fact that they had time, I would have expected a proper campaign, like Napoleon's or like the USA campaign in Empire Total War. All you do is select a faction and each time, the objective is to capture the shogunate. Also, the campaign map is just too small, it gets tedious looking at the same map of the Japanese mainland and the few small islands around. What would have been awesome is if they could have added a campaign in which Japan invades North Korea, like they did in 1592. That war happened in the same time period as the game is set and it would have provided an expansive map, not to mention the added incentive of fighting the Chinese (who aided North Korea). Ah well, here's hoping for an expansion pack perhaps.

Why I got sent out of the theater - Avatar

I was sniggering through the movie, especially during the mushy-mushy parts. WTH, it's a total ripoff of excellent movies, like Ferngully!

World War II

I think World War II is and will always be my favorite war.

I watched 'Stalingrad' from the Battlefield series (Battlefield - The Battles that won the Second World War) for the umpteenth time today, and I couldnt help wondering how it would have been to live in those times.

Different times, a different map



I realized that this is more than just idle musings. It was watching this series that put my mind on the path of an alternate-history (increasingly restless) idea for a book or atleast a bunch of short stories/novelettes. It spurred me onto read more on not just WW2 but also great conquests of earlier - Alexander the Great's empire and Napoleon's. On a side note, I should say, playing Napoleon Total War has made me realize how much potential the period has for more research material. 'Band of Brothers' and the several WW2 games have only helped.

When I think about it, WW2 has it all - clashes of mighty industrial nations who din't shy away from war, charismatic and forceful leaders, spectacular victories and equally spectacular debacles, massive armies and materials and above all, Hitler. You should admit, the cheek of that man was legendary. To rally a nation in tatters towards a single-minded, definitely purpose is not something that any ordinary person could have achieved.

The Battlefield series is here, btw - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1748705/ and my review is here.
If you are looking for a definitive guide to troop movements, dispositions, etc. in the WW2, there is nothing better than Tim Piggot-Smith's narrative of this series. It is surprising that it is not as popular as BBC's 'World at War' series, but I believe it is because the level of detail can put people off. We aren't so lucky as to get the Military Channel over here, but somebody's uploaded the series in Youtube.

Resolution....The Windows 7/NVIDIA conundrum

Of course, what else could it have been? It was Windows 7 64-bit and our partners' reluctance to write proper drivers. Wait, did I just say 'our'? w00t! Loyalty towards the company rearing up. Lol, that's quite odd because I just watched this excellent video on how to progress within any company in India - http://www.scubeproductions.com/jakkuboys.html. It may be rough around the edges, and lengthy, but the message applies to all of Indian management.
But, to get back to the Nvidia and Win 7 issue - I installed Windows 7 32-bit, got the Nvidia 32 bit drivers and updated Windows diligently until there were nothing but those lame language updates. Can't believe its running smooth now. No blue screens, no HDMI or screen resolution issues and no errors on startup. It's like you wouldn't know there are even problems with NVIDIA drivers. Made me lose about a day of my life in troubleshooting, way to go you DBs!

The Windows 7/NVIDIA conundrum

So...
It's been almost a month since I've dusted off the old PC and been trying to breathe some life into it. Here was how it was when I took it off the shelf:
Asus M2n MX
NVIDIA 256 GB onboard graphics
1.5 GB RAM (333 MHz..read as 'really old')
Creative Audigy 5.1 sound card
It booted up absolutely fine into Windows XP Pro which was what I had left it at about a year ago. At one point, I had of course fallen into the Windows Vista trap and installed the Enterprise edition. Needless to say, I removed it as soon as I started seeing problems with my games, I remember it wouldnt even run AoE 3! Fortunately, I had had the prudence to not remove Win XP, preferring to dual boot.
With Win 7 already RTMed, I decided to give it a try. But first, I wanted to juice up the box. I got 3 of more GBs of RAM. Win 7 64 bit worked perfectly fine. the plus was, this time I connected it to the LG 32 inch LCD (HD Ready) display. I was able to get a max resolution of 1368x768.
For a while...it was all good.
Then, I went and got greedy as usual. With Napolean Total War and Starcraft 2 coming up, I wanted a real GPU, atleast one that could fit into my budget. I got the NVIDIA 9400 GT with 1 GB memory and some kind of obscene max resolution. Installed it into the cabinet, enjoyed the sound of it whirring up aaaaand...poof...blue screen.
0x0000008e
Oook. Maybe it was one of those RAM sticks that I had purchased. I tried to switch out cards, changed RAM ports, the usual stuff. Worked fine for a while, and I actually got around to installing the drivers for the GPU through Windows update. Bang! Blue screen
0x000000ce (MEMORY_MANAGEMENT)
And so randomly. It wasn't like I was playing a game, taxing the system or even running intensive applications. This last one looked like it was being caused by the windows search indexer (atleast thats what support.microsoft.com said). I disabled the thing. and for a while, it worked...and it was good.
That's about when things really hit the roof. I started getting blue screens on boot up, when IE opens, when I leave it alone for a few minutes...and whenever else the PC felt like it. Got everything from BAD_POOL_HEADER to SERVICE_MANAGEMENT. Never since the days back in Dell support have I seen so many blue screens. I ventured again into the internet and finally discovered within some windows-bashing sites that this is because of the problems with the NVIDIA drivers for Windows 7 64 bit systems. And as expected..no resolutions available.
And that's where I am at right now. I have a copy of Win 7 32 bit on one hand and my trusted old Windows XP Pro on the other. Do I dare try Win 7 again and (possibly) go through another round of frustrations?