Adventure 45

Trip to Disneyland, Paris (A photo essay)

Ever since I was a kid, I used to fantasise about going to Europe on a Raj Travels Deluxe Jain Package, with Hindi commentary and pure veg Gujarati food and a cable car ride at Jungfrau. That dream never did materialise, but I was even more determined to go to Paris after they opened a Disneyland there. Finally, I did make it to Paris, and at the very first weekend, while my other friends did gay shit like going to the Louvre and other artsy places, I made the pilgrimmage to my Mecca; and boy, was I impressed!

Disneyland, Paris is extremely impressive, and the aura of the place struck me as soon as I stepped out of the underground Metro. The gate where I got in was like a park, with statues that seemed to be made of marble. I could not make out some of the characters being depicted, but the first statue I saw was of some stallion having his way with a woman.

I strayed into a huge building, which had Walt Disney and his girlfriend's pictures on its facade.


Inside, I was totally awestruck by a statue of the Little Mermaid.


There were a lot of rough drafts of (probably rejected) drafts of cartoon films (single frames presumably). In some cases, the lazy artist had used dots to draw the scene, instead of colouring properly. Such quirks cost Disney millions of dollars annually.


There was a statue of a scene from the ever-popular Hannah Montana series as well.


Walt Disney was known for drawing self portraits of himself.

Certain artists on Disney's payrolls had the temerity to sign their drawings, causing a huge wastage of Disney's money, since such frames can never be used in cartoon films.

Certain frustrated artists have strayed away from the standard template in movies like Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast. Such rejected scenes are now part of Disneylands everywhere.

There is a very impressive replica of the Sleeping Beauty's palace inside Disneyland, Paris.


They have even built a mini-river or where boat rides are offered.


There are dark rooms which have stained glass for those artsy, intellectual whiners whiners who tag along with fun-loving guys like me.


The folks at Disneyland sure do have a sense of humour, and have livened up things by putting funny stuff on serious shit like statues of eminent people.

The kind folks at Disneyland, Paris have recognised the importance of Indian tourists, and have special Indian stores and centres, with names carefully chosen to reflect the Indian cultural ethos and diverse milieu.

Once the sun sets, there are a few adult entertainment zones in this great amusement park that slowly come to life.

Did you know that Disney makes porn flicks too?


I did not know that Moulin Rouge (the movie with our Chhamma Chhamma) was shot in Disneyland Paris.

On the whole I had a great time walking through the great Disneyland, Paris. Did you know that they have taken great interest in our tradition and named some dishes in their food stalls after great Indian sages. I ate an interesting sandwich called Panini (named after the great sage who created Sanskrit grammar). It contained jambon (I guess that its French for "jamoon", though it was not sweet). I was so happy to find Brahmin food in the midst of Europe!

On the whole, I recomment Disneyland Paris to one and all!

Adventure 44

IISc and the Slow Death of Innovation

Today's newspaper carries an article saying that IISc plans to restrict internet access of its denizens to 1 GB per week per head. As a recent alumnus, I am not surprised. The Institute, for many years now, is degenerating into a bureaucratic corporate company well past its sell-by date (think General Motors, Air India), focussed on attracting on huge cash infusions, rather than the liberal centre of learning it was meant to be. In the recent past there has been a flurry of articles (press releases?) in various sections of the media, hailing J.N. Tata's gift to India on its centennial year, and the high quality of academic research being performed by the faculty here, and all of this is indeed true. But, does faculty research alone make an institution great? Unfortunately no. Let us look at some quirky aspects of the world's great educational establishments - places considered to be hallowed portals of learning - and we will soon realise that there is more to learning than just cutting edge research (with high-speed computers and the latest gizmos), and these quirks have contributed in equal measure to these centres of learning, along with their huge numbers (higher than IISc's) of scholarly publications with high Impact Factors.

MIT is known for its high quality of research in physics, engineering, economics, and a variety of other subjects. But, its students are better known for their annual April Fools pranks that have an astonishing degree of innovation in them. Recently, some students hacked into the Institute's website and posted the headline that Disney would acquire MIT for a few billion dollars. Now, not only would an IISc student ever be capable of such a prank, they would probably be expelled if they did execute it. MIT officials, on the other hand consider it a sporting challenge to thwart such attacks, and publicly share a laugh with the community when such a thing is perpetrated. Students at Caltech managed to change the flashcards in a cheerleader routine in the Rosebowl, while Oxford students managed to mysteriously place a car on the roof of one of the University's buildings many many years ago. Since gambling is forbidden in India, there will probably never be an IISc Blackjack Team either!

Jason Katz-Brown, a 19-year old undergraduate student at MIT created Quackle in 2006, a sophisticated Scrabble simulator that can thrash the best of champions (it is to Scrabble's Artificial Intelligence what Deep Blue is to chess), apart from creating quirky Linux games like Kolf. The entire scientific community (and scientific institutions who are cash-strapped) are thankful to the John W Eaton, the creator of GNU Octave, who, as the chemical engineering department's computer administrator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, created what was intended to be a basic differential equation solving package. Today, Octave is a fully functional math and simulation package, and the favourite of students with limited access to the expensive MATLAB. Berkeley Madonna, developed by George Oster, a biologist at UC Berkeley is another instance of a popular software package coming out of an academic institution.

Molecular simulation packages are the staple of doctoral students the world over, and Indian scientific institutes are no exception. Countless students of physics, engineering and chemistry in institutes like IISc, JNCASR and the IITs depend on at least one of GROMACS, NAMD or CHARMM to acheive their publications. These packages were not made by highly-paid PhDs sitting in cushy offices. GROMACS (Groningen Machine for Chemical Solutions) was developed at the University of Groningen, with inputs from the University of Uppsala, the Max Planck Institute and the University of Stockholm. CHARMM (Chemistry at Harvard Macromolecular Mechanics), though not free, is the hallmark of Martin Karplus and his group at Harvard. NAMD (Nanoscale Molecular Dynamics) was developed by a research group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Sadly, even though crores of rupees are spent every year in organising conferences and schools dealing with these simulation packages, nothing close to their usefulness seems to be ever coming out of the hallowed portals of IISc, even as these packages continue to account for a large chunk of high-impact publications coming out of there.

Let us not even go into the advent of Google (Stanford), Facebook (Harvard), TeX (Stanford) and Napster (Northeastern), that changed the faces of their respective genres beyond recognition. Even if a similar innovation did ever come out of IISc, the Internet restrictions placed on its denizens will ensure that these never see the light of the day. Hell, they may even be rendered dependent on commercial software, since Linux upgrades and the various new free packages available on the web will no longer be accessible to IIScians due to the regressive download limit. The computer administrators of IISc are like the CEOs of the defunct American Investment Banks - they just refuse to believe that the world around them has changed. IISc may have been the pioneers of Internet access in India, but it continues to live in that curious time warp, even as millions of rupees are spent to upgrade computers, electron microscopes and spectrometers. What is required, however, is an upgrade of mentality instead.