Happy New Year

I watched Happy New Year on the day of its release. It was all that I expected minus long overly emotional scenes. My expectations were based on previous Farah Khan movies such as Main Hoon Naa and Om Shanti Om. While these movies were high on entertainment value, they also had some scenes which seemed stretched. This was, thankfully, absent from Happy New Year. There was an attempt to provide emotional underpinning to overall heist plan and also loose patriotism at the end but it did not affect the pace of the movie. Actors were good. Or rather they fit their characters very nicely. There were more than its fair share of songs and dances. Story was normal but then one should not expect original story. There were some loose ends but then again one should judge a movie based on what is expected of it. Bullet points summarizing my experience:

• I don't regret watching it paying full price 
• I don't regret spending 3 hrs of my time watching it  

On assembly results of Aurangabad

2014 Assembly elections in Maharashtra has resulted in MIM opening its account in state. One of the seats it won is Aurangabad. Supriya Sharma has a nice write up on the candidate and relevant history. Article can be found here. Many interesting points: (1) Lack of reasonable alternatives for minorities when it comes to elections (2) Lack of reasonable alternatives for people who want to contest election (3) Compulsion of electoral politics in India. All in all a good and timely post. 

Google Scholar at 10

Google Scholar, that beautiful service from Google especially helpful for out-of-organized-research-community people like me completes 10 years in 2014. Medium has an article on it at here. 

Document management

I have been using Calibre for managing my ebooks. Recently I started using it to manage all my reading documents, particularly journal article. While it has good enough functionaliy, I find it liitle slow for my taste. May be about time I should write some document manager for my local machine. Fact that caliber was written and even today mostly maintained by an individual assures me that I can try to muild a rudimentary, local running, optimized for a single machine document manager. Till then, calibre is more than sufficient.