Harshavardhan Raju’s blog

'Subramaniapuram' is a film directed and produced by Sasikumar, Amir's assistant.

This is a love story that happened in Subramaniapuram during the 80's.  The locale and the locality are original.  The story is fiction.

The film starring Jai and Swathi also has director Sasikumar and Ganja Karupu in it.  All the actors are made to look like the people of the 80s, with beard, step cutting and so on.  It is a recreation of the 80s time with bell bottom, tight shirt and Lamby scooter.

Sarkar Raj

Beautiful Song by Ronan Keating.

Anjathey

Written & Directed by : Mysskin
Photography : Mahesh Muthuswamy
Music : Sundar C. Babu

Anjathey (No Fear) by Mysskin is an engrossing movie about friendship & human emotions. Though the movie is little lengthy (03:03:45) it engages you because of its beautiful story & characterization. Every actor has done their role brilliantly.   Performance of Narin as Satya & Prasanna as Daya   is  outstanding. Ajmal as Kripa has done a good job. But the real hero of the movie is Mysskin. His story narration is unique.  From the opening scene onwards you would start appreciating his work.

Story

Satya & Kripa are neighbors & friends living in Police Quarters colony with different approach towards life. Kripa's aim is to get selected as Sub-Inspector & Satya is aimless & spends his time drinking & fighting. Because of this Satya is frequently bullied by his father.  On a festival night celebrations in his colony, Satya picks up a fight with Daya (a psychopathic kidnapper) for his behavior towards Kripa's sister Uttara & for this, he is beaten &humiliated by his father. Out of anger towards his father he wants to get through SI selections. With help of his uncle (PA for a minister) influence, Satya gets selected for SI post instead of Kripa.

Now Kripa couldn't believe that he is not selected even after his hard work But Satya got selected who never took it serious.  Frustrated Kripa develops enmity towards Satya, becomes drunked & always stays to himself. Satya after his training joins as Sub-Inspector in the same town. Satya now slowly changes from an easy going to a responsible police office & gets appreciation from his higher officials for saving a poor fisherman's life. This even makes Kripa more jealous & hates Satya, while Uttara starts admiring Satya.

Daya along with Logu kidnaps young girls for money. Keerti, investigating officer takes Satya into his team to work the kidnap case. Daya knows that Kripa hates Satya and waiting to take revenge So, he takes the help of Satya in collecting the money from the hostage parents. Now story revolves around these three powrful characters Satya, Daya  & Kripa 

And the rest, u have to watch for yourself.

Highlights

1.Narin as Satya's performance is excellent and the character transformation from an aimless person to an responsible police officer is very clear and one could feel his sorrow & helplessness for Kripa who has lost everything in life.   
2.Daya as a psychopathic did his role very well. I hated the character and his hair style.
3.Kurvi, a handicapped and a common friend of satya & kripa did his role well.
4.Mysskin didn't shown face of a character through out the movie.
5.In one scene the camera focus only the legs of the character. He leaves it for the audience to visualize what is happening.
6.The photography during the opening scene & the climax in the sugarcane fields at the andhra border is beautiful.
7. Movie has got only 3 songs, the last song Thakida thakida... is very peppy & pictured well.

Conclusion

Rating : ****1/2. (MUST WATCH)

Speech by Steve Job at Commencement at Stanford.

Source : http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1422863/posts

Video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBp-VGDYOc8

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Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.

This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.

My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. "Stay hungry, stay foolish." And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Thank you all, very much.

Farhan Akhtar is one of India's most prominent young filmmakers. His film, Positive, follows the story of a young boy and his parents and how they cope with the devastation that AIDS can visit on a family. The film stars Boman Irani, Shabana Azmi and Arjun Mathur. Positive is one of four short dramatic films by cutting-edge Indian directors Mira Nair, Vishal Bhardwaj, Santosh Sivan and Farhan Akhtar that aim to dismantle myths and misconceptions about HIV/AIDS.

Mira Nair's film, Migration, deals with AIDS as the great class leveler in society by following its transmission through interweaving stories linking urban and rural India. Shiney Ahuja plays a rural labourer who leaves his wife for work in Mumbai, where he gets mixed up in a dangerous triangle with a frustrated wife, performed by Sameera Reddy, and her closeted husband, played by Irfan Khan. Migration is one of four short dramatic films by cutting-edge Indian directors Mira Nair, Vishal Bhardwaj, Santosh Sivan and Farhan Akhtar that aim to dismantle myths and misconceptions about HIV/AIDS.