Shatrank ke khiladi is a movie directed by Satyajit Ray and story is written by Munsi Premchand. Its about how two aristocrats enjoy playing the game of chess and completely forget their duties even while their own kingdom is taken over by British and their king surrenders.
Satyajit Ray is known to have made stories which are critical of the society and which depict the situation of poor and ignorance of middle class. At least that is what I felt after seeing his movie Pather Panchali.
Here the King is too involved in enjoying his royal stature and has no interests in governing or ruling the kingdom. He feels that he has been forced to become the king and since the people are not voicing against his rule, he continues to enjoy it. He has been keeping the East India Company happy and always ensured that he provides the necessary monetary help whenever required.
The aristocrats are too very involved in their game of chess and the peace with British makes them feel safe and hence they completely ignore their duties towards the state. They feel proud of their ancestors and hence are in a delusion that in case of any threat from British, they are well prepared to defend themselves. When the British actually decide to impose their rule on the kingdom and plan to overthrow the King, the aristocrats are fearful that they might have to join the war and hence decide to flee from the city and go and stay at a mosque outside the city. They talk to themselves as if they actual decide to flee only because they do not want to be disturbed while playing chess.
The people are introduced at the end of the movie. When the aristocrats go outside the city, they find from a local boy that all the people have ran away fearing the British soldiers and the boy himself has remained just because he wants to see how the British soldiers look like. He is too happy to serve the aristocrats and hope to make some money out of it.
Though this story is from an era much before the existence of a middle class per se in Indian society, the role of aristocrats or the ones who governed can be considered as middle class, the royal family being the upper class and the general public being the lower class.
A similar story is currently being played in Indian society. The government is too busy ensuring that they continue enjoying their royal stature and nothing destroys their rule. They have no interests in governing the country for the people as representatives of the people and hence are very happy ensuring that the Corporations are kept happy and nothing hampers their business.
The middle class is busy enjoying their games of chess and do not want to be disturbed by anything. They are too proud of their current status and how their ancestors worked hard to get there. Get a job, buy a flat, get married, go abroad, have kids, educate them to get a job and continue the same cycle again. Important social issues like caste discrimination, communal riots, growing inequality, child labor, health are all ignored.
The poor currently is running everywhere. Farmers are moving to cities, poor from cities are running abroad working hard to ensure that consumerism does not take over them.
Its amazing how the times have changed, the rulers have changed but the social structure has changed little and how we continue in enjoying the game of chess while the country is being taken over.
Tag: review
March 10, 2013
January 2, 2011
2010 – the year I was associated with 3 companies
Year 2010 has been really a mixed bag or I should say started very bad but kind of ended in great shape. But overall I grew a lot physiologically and technically though not financially. 
I started the year by making the decision to quit the company where I started my professional career. Though I had learnt a lot during my 8 months in the company, I was not getting paid regularly and I was forced to ask money from my house for my living. Also I wasnt able to see any near future changes in the company which will change the situation. However that was probably the most risky decision I had taken last year. I stopped going to office from Jan 4th without having any other job in my hand. This was followed by 2 months of non-employment where I gave number of interviews out of which finally I was selected for a quality engineer position in a telecom VAS provider. Again this was involved with lots of mystery. On Feb 1st, I had been to my brother’s house in mangalore to attend the car festival. As I was jobless, I had the liberty to take a week off and enjoy the famous ratha yatra in mangalore. I had missed it for four years when I was studying in Durgapur. On the day when I reached mangalore, I found a mail from TCS in which I had got placed during college campus placement asking me to join them in Kolkata. However moving again to Kolkata meant that my mom who was planning to move with me will have to move to Kolkata and adjust there. For next three days, with lots of discussions with her, I decided that I will first move to Kolkata and get settled and later take her there. However on Feb 4th while I was visiting venkatramna temple in mulky, I got a call from HR of the telecom company confirming my selection for the role of a quality engineer. Since this position was in Bangalore, I readily agreed to join it instead of moving to Kolkata even though the position in TCS was that of a software developer. This again turned out to be a big mistake. Even though I was promised that my job would be completely in Linux, as I found out after joining, the component which I was going to test was only for Windows and it had not yet been ported to linux platform. Moreover it was completely blackbox and manual testing. Though the component was one of the important component for the overall product, no effort had been put to automate its testing which meant that every month when the new release came, I had to repeat the same set of tests manually. Also I found out that component had very little documentation which meant that my testcases never covered all the features. This way I learnt the hard way the importance of both documentation of a product and automation of its testing. Out of the eight months that I spent, the first five months I repeated the same testcases without learning much technically. By then I had realized that I was not growing technically and I had to move out. I got more frustrated when I saw that every small feature was being pushed as a new release which meant repeating the cycle once again. In less than 8 months, I released around 6-8 releases and I was never confident of my releases as I always had a feeling that even though I had tested new features adequately, I had not tested a old feature properly. I remember having nightmares about my releases getting crashed in crucial sites with heavy load. Moreover, I could clearly see that the company had clear differentiation between quality engineers and developers and the differences in compensation was huge. This meant that even though I was struggling hard for the releases, I wasnt compensated for that effort equally where as a developer who would develop the feature in less that half the time I required for my testing was getting twice the time to do it and was getting heavily compensated also. This was again mainly because the testing team in which I was hadnt been concentrating much on automation which meant we were not progressing anywhere and hence management didnt want to spend much over the team. However, I had few advantages also after joining the company. First of all and the most important, it meant regular pay which meant I could take care of my mom with my own salary. Secondly, since my office was very close to my house, I could come to my house for lunch. Thirdly, I was given a wonderful Lenovo Thinkpad to work on. Since the company was small(around 1200 employees), the rules were flexible and I was able to install and use Ubuntu on the laptop. This gave me access to work and learn on many more stuff apart from my work on it. I had taken internet connection in my house and spent daily 2-3 hours trying different things on linux. Hence even though I was not learning anything during my work, I was learning after coming to my house. However this meant that I was not able to dedicate proper time on things I was learning. Sometimes I would be so tired with my office work that I wouldnt be able to give time to learn anything in house. Also as my responsibilities increased in my team, I started extending my work timings which meant I came to my house only to have dinner and sleep living very little time for my personal life. So I decided to look for a job which would give me a chance to learn during my job. This time I had much more time to be selective for my job profile. Hence again I started attending interviews. However I could clearly see that due to present job profile, I was no longer able to look for developer roles. Also I was proficient in Perl and perl is mainly used in industry either by sys-admin or by testers to automate. Hence I started spending more time on revising programming concepts in C. However my lack of experience in development meant I had to either look for a job as a fresher giving up the benefits of experience. But that would mean that I wouldnt be able to expect much increment to the current compensation. I was ready to give that up as I knew that the more I spent on the job, the more I would loose any hope of coming out of it and getting into something more related to linux and perl scripting. Finally I was in luck when a consultancy company called me looking for a person with experience in perl for a job profile of developing automation framework in a leading silicon chip manufacturing company. Luckily I was able to clear all the interviews and I got selected for the position. But again there were some slight hiccups. The new company wanted me to come on board with in Nov 8th and this they informed me on Oct 19th. This meant I had to be relived with in 15days of my resignation. my then manager made it very clear that it would be impossible and I had to spent a anxious week before I was able to talk to the complete management of the company and finalize my reliving date for 19th of Nov. My new company agreed to extend my joining to 22nd Nov. And I joined my third company in the year on 2010 with a resolution to at least complete more than 8 months and break the jinx of not being associated with a company for more than 8 months.
Overall to summarize, I think I learnt a lot professionally this year. I understood how to adjust with a already set team and how to contribute to it. I also learnt how to value others knowledge and gain from it. I understood the importance of documentation even for personal good. I understood how big softwares are developed and tested and what are the most crucial points in software development. After joining my third company, I was given a one week training on Java and OOPS concept which helped me understand OOPS concept much better. I have also understood the roles of different people in an organization.
Now I hope that I will be able to grow much more in the year 2011 professionally as I am definite that I will break the 8 months jinx.
January 2, 2011
2010 in review
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.
Crunchy numbers
A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 7,000 times in 2010. That’s about 17 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 30 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 144 posts. There were 4 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 280kb.
The busiest day of the year was April 15th with 63 views. The most popular post that day was FOSS for budding developers workshop.
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were dengmao.wordpress.com, ranacse05.wordpress.com, hurley.wordpress.com, sunxran.wordpress.com, and myithaca.wordpress.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for drupal error reporting, call to undefined function ldap_connect(), drupal turn on error reporting, drupal enable error reporting, and fatal error: call to undefined function ldap_connect().
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
FOSS for budding developers workshop April 2010
how to add different vim color schemes July 2009
How to enable error reporting in drupal October 2009
1 comment
using routes.rb to change the default home page in redmine September 2009
1 comment
How to enable Wireless on CentOS? April 2010
June 13, 2010
Rajneeti-Impressed but could have been better
After hearing mixed response from people about Rajneeti, I finally found some time to watch it. Though I hardly watch any hindi movies until I hear very good reviews about it, since this was about politics, I wanted to watch it. Strangely Politics and Underworld plots are the only movies that I like to watch in bollywood. Anyways so when I finally sat to watch the movie, I knew from the start that I had like it.
Overall I actually liked the plot. Story was very well written. The script had many instances taken from GODFATHER, like the one in which driver plants the bomb and runs away, keeping a dead body on the bed to threaten a person and also that a foreign returned son has to stay back as his father has been attacked . But many other instances were quite original and i liked it. Even those picked from GODFATHER were very well utilized and credit should be given to the script writer for that.
Characters for the film also was very well chosen and though there were big names in the movie, it was clearly not just to attract their fan followers. Ranbir again impressed me with his acting. Ajay and Nana have always done justice to such type of roles and this was nothing new for them. Among the characters, I was disappointed by the small role given to Naseeruddin Shah. He could definitely be utilized in a much better way. Also Nikhila Trikha, who played the role of Samar’s (Ranbir) mother did not do justice to her role. Especially,in the scene where she goes and talks to Suraj(Ajay Devgan), I could see nothing from her side in the scene. Though that scene had a very small significance in the overall story, but still that scene required much more from her. Why she was selected for the role still mystifies me but a explanation can be found here.
Throughout the story one point is very clear, Mango Man is a complete fool. With all the political drama happening around, Suraj, who was supposed to be representing the Mango Man clearly also becomes a politician and forgets his being a Mango Man. His roots being a Mango Man is again shown at the end where he does not join the side of Samar even when he is offered the highest seat. Also when Katrina comes forward and cries for the injustice done to her, Mango Man supports her and makes her win the election without realizing whether she is the right person for being a CM or whether she will be able to run the government for next 5 years. This is very much true in real life and I guess that is the main idea that Rajneeti wants to spread. Even though this is a democratic country, only members from the so called royal family are chosen as the right person for the royal seats. Also between the fight for seat in the royal family, it is the Mango Man who suffers but still supports the royal family. This can be clearly seen in Maharastra where the fight inside the Thackeray family is clearly the main reason for dividing Mumbai as a city for Maharastrians and not for Biharis.
