Miscellaneous

Vijay Narayanan on October 22nd, 2011

This morning I helped an elderly couple pick their first ever smartphone. It was a wonderful experience; eye-opening at times. I have known them for a while, and they have been telling me for a couple of months that they wanted to buy an iPhone. I had asked them to wait until Apple launched their [...]

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Vijay Narayanan on October 21st, 2011

[To Gokul] In his review of The Godfather, Roger Ebert explains why we are enamored of the movie’s characters: We tend to identify with Don Corleone’s family not because we dig gang wars, but because we have been with them from the beginning, watching them wait for battle while sitting at the kitchen table and eating [...]

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Vijay Narayanan on October 5th, 2011

Christmas Eve 1987 will forever remain etched in my mind. I was four years old. And it was the first time I witnessed my mom, a strong-willed lady, cry. MGR had died. I did not understand back then why anyone would feel so strongly about the passing away of another person they had not even [...]

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Vijay Narayanan on August 29th, 2011

An excellent short film — a beautiful tale, very well told. You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video Like Robert Browning wrote: Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made

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Vijay Narayanan on August 21st, 2011

The word “flautist” entered my vocabulary when I started listening to Sir James Galway several years ago. It did not seem right to me at the time, because “flutist” was elegant and to the point. Nevertheless I have consistently thrown the term around in conversations since then, owing to its uncanniness and an urge to [...]

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