As seen by my iPhone during my morning walk along the Singapore River.

Off MG Road, Bangalore

Hmmm…

…at the crowded Sigma Mall on congested Cunningham Road, it was quiet only here. The coffee was good.

Still the hub of commerce of a type.

You like Costello though he is a killer, though you see he is depraved, remorseless, and, in the end, falling off his rocker. You like Costello because you see Jack Nicholson inhabiting him. Matt Damon is not so fortunate in his role, though. You give him all the hate you feel for his character, though you know it's Damon and he's merely playing the part. Why the difference? I must think. But you love Leonard di Caprio, he is vulnerable like Vera Farmiga says to him when he comes visiting her in her home, and you feel for him all the sorrow you're capable of, for almost all of two hours and thirty-one minutes.

Has anyone ever screwed up his face like a rat's so perfectly, and as endearingly, as Nicholson? Have you seen the movie? How did you feel seeing how the naughty look never left his face, even as blood welled in his mouth? For me, watching him in this movie was like attending a masterclass.

The movie has so much music in it, music I like, from start to end, beginning with the Stones! The music had to be there, to balance the relentless, rapid-fire profanity. Do the police really speak so foul like that to each other in the United States? Do they punch each other's face at work in the office and go around calling each other a prick? And use the f-word so freely?: Man to man, man to lady, lady to man, again and again in every conversation!

I've seen the film twice now, and I will surely see this masterly Scorcese a third time—this bloody and cruel tale of two rats, one ratting on the police, the other ratting on the thugs, and the police and the thugs each trying to achieve their ends through pinning everything entirely on their respective rat. Playing rat versus rat.

Today, I watched Volume-1 of the 18-volume DVD set, Bharat ek Khoj, which covers Nehru's ruminations on how India has held its core over 5000 years; the civilizations of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro; and the coming of the Aryans and the age of the Rig Veda.

It is not a big-budget venture, but V.K Murthy's talent and Shyam Benegal's creative handling keep up the interest—though a theatricized gambling in an Aryan settlement was excessively drawn out, rather in embarrassing Bollywood style. In showing the panorama of India, Murthy is kind to Benares, and the filth the nation has gathered he has avoided. Nehru smiles kindly, warmly, fondly, at his poor peasant countrymen. He deserves no criticism for that moment, because the peasants were under another ruler's yoke. Now, some three generations later, the lot of the peasants under a government of their own is remarkably unchanged, in this world and in our nation which have experienced so much change.

Om Puri's narration, when it began with a matter-of-fact telling, was an aah moment. Roshan Seth has absorbed Nehru so completely unto himself—a sprightly Nehru, in this first volume!

Ryan Bingham lives up in the air and in hotels and airports. He has reached exalted levels in the road warrior's loyalty programs, and lives the life of nobility that the programs provide, and so his neglected home is less than a young man's starting-out pad. His least desired journeys are trips home. All is well and he weaves efficiently through hotel receptions and rental car parks and check-ins and security and boarding gates, collecting nights and miles on a journey to a 10-million miles status with his preferred airline. While almost there he meets Alex who is living likewise, and is as unattached as he, it seems, and they begin a non-relationship, experiencing each other when their circuits cross. Then they begin to design their travels in a way as to have them cross, and in the meantime Bingham's office teams him with another woman, Natalie, very much younger, who promises to automate Bingham's job into a back office process, threatening to ground Bingham before he has reached his 10-millionth mile.

Bingham works in the offices of others. His job is to mass-fire people for his clients, and his business is at its best when the general business is at its worst. He does his work pat, with smooth confident talk that shows pickles of humanity while he works his subjects. He fires so many people in his travels, he cannot remember the calm threat one of them made that she would jump off a bridge into the river near her home. He really forgets—Bingham is not the type to lie. But the woman's suicide is not the crisis; the story has no crisis.

There are revelatory moments for Bingham as the story advances, specially on the run up to his sister's marriage, and after that, when he goes to Alex's home to surprise her there. Bingham is a good man with a tough job, driven by his journey to 10-million miles. What happens when he crosses that mile? When he wins the promise of that very special status, denoted by a loyalty card that is gray-black but gleams like it came from heaven? The movie is mostly funny, threatens to get sentimental for a time, but lands back soon enough and safely among the contradictions where it is set.

Director: Jason Reitman | Writers: Walter Kirn (novel) ; Jason Reitman (screenplay) | Stars: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick

Mr. Ramadorai at the UTC Supplier Conference

Ramadorai—the former CEO of TCS—was the keynote speaker and the man who commanded the most silence at the UTC Annual Supplier Conference in New Delhi this week. Such experience, such wisdom, and he said so many things that I should learn, but I kept thinking how might be his lifestyle. And I wondered about his net worth. Hmmm. I need to talk to me.

See also, UTC Supplier Gold