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In a world where it is often proclaimed that “the customer is king”, we are constantly bombarded with items or services that are custom-made for us. The word custom has always held a deep fascination for me because of the inherent contradiction in its uses.

The earliest recorded use of the word custom is in the 13 century. It was used in law to distinguish between common law and what was a customary act. So it basically stood for something that was done over a period of time and was accepted as common behavior.

Sometime in the 18 century, the word got another meaning and when used in conjunction with words like made or built, it came to mean something that was not customary or common.

Today, in the world of application development, it is the latter meaning, without the suffixed words, that has taken prominence. As technical writers, we must always be aware that custom on its own does not mean the same as when it is used in conjunction with words like made or built. This is a good thing to keep in mind when we are reviewing UI text or error messages.

Take this example:

Field1: A custom field to which you can assign any value.

This usage of the word is wrong and the sentence must be edited to read as follows:

Field1: A customizable field to which you assign any value.

Failure to catch such instances also has serious effects during localization. To test this, all you need to do is, paste both the above messages into Google Translate and see the difference. I tried it in Hindi and Google transliterates the word custom instead of translating it. In the latter instance, though, it actually translates the word. For a user, this may mean the difference between using your product or moving on to another one.

As is the custom, I shall wrap up now.

Director: Atul Sabharwal

It is not often that one gets to see two stars of the future make a mark together in one film. In Atul Sabharwal’s Aurangzeb, we are given that fortune. Intense performances by Arjun Kapoor and Prithviraj make this wonderfully tight movie even better.

First Arjun Kapoor. The son of Boney Kapoor (Vishal/Ajay), he is a definite star for the future. It may have been the similarity of his role with that of Amitabh Bachchan in Don, but I couldn’t help myself from seeing the return of the angry young man to our screens. He is comfortable in front of the camera and carries the burden of being the main protagonist rests lightly on his shoulders.

Even rarer is to see a South Indian actor take on a North Indian role. Prithviraj (Arya) not only plays a north Indian in the movie, it is his voice-over that tells us the story. For once a Malayali who doesn’t speak Hindi in Malayalam. Then there is his performance as the quiet, desperate-to-please young man. While his histrionics are well-known and appreciated in the south, it is nice to see him get a role due his talent in Bollywood.

Rishi Kapoor, Jackie Shroff and Amrita Singh (yes, you read right) all play key roles in the movie.

Atul Sabharwal’s debut full-length movie tells a tight tale with very little to distract from the story.

Two days before his death, Arya’s father (Anupam Kher), informs him that he has another family and he would like him to take care of them after he is gone. When Arya visits the family to inform them of the death of his father, he is stunned to see that the son is a spitting image of the son of a notorious underworld don, Yashwardhan (Jackie Shroff). In fact, it was a blotched encounter against this don that destroyed his father’s career. Instead of killing the don, he kills the don’s wife and child. An error he never recovered from.

On investigation, he discovers that the woman and boy are actually the wife and child who died in the encounter. Arya (Prithviraj) then hatches a plan along with his uncle, Ravikanth (Rishi Kapoor) who is also a top cop, to send Vishal (Arjun Kapoor) undercover in the place of Ajay (Arjun Kapoor) to collect information about the gang and destroy them from the inside. This is possibly the weakest moment in the movie because not enough is shown about the operation to switch one for the other.

The rest of the movie tells the story of the operation and how things finally pan out.

A definite watch. Apart from a tight thriller, Aurangzeb is elevated by some very nice performances by the main actors – both young and old. 

Director: Lal Jose

Some movies leave you with a pleasant after taste that lingers long after the final after the final credits have rolled. Ayalum Njuanum Thammil is one such gem.

The movie confronts the ethical dilemma confronting most professionals today – to do or not to do!

The story is told through a doctor who takes a call based on his experience and his knowledge. That decision, unfortunately for him, works out bad. The media vilifies and demonizes him even before he has an opportunity to present his side of the story. He finds himself tried in the court of the media and found guilty.

The movie moves between the present day experiences of Dr. Ravi Tharakan and those from his days in college and as a rookie doctor. Prithviraj, who just gets better with each passing role, plays Ravi Tharakan perfectly. With minimal make-up, he straddles the young, brash, cocky youth that was Ravi Tharakan and battle-weary, mature doctor that he has become. Enough cannot be said about the sheer brilliance of his performance.

The return of Prathap Pothen is so welcome in an industry that has lost some stalwarts off late. After his menacing performance in 22 Female Kottayam, Pothen turns in a fine performance as the mentor to a young man in whom he sees many possibilities.

The main two are ably supported by Salim Kumar, Kalabhavan Mani, Sukumari, Rima Kallingal and Sreenath Bhasi.

Verdict: Don’t miss.

Where to buy:

• MyMovieMall
• MaEbag
• MyIndiaShopping

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Today, most content is developed on word processors. This wonderful software give writers many advantages in terms of spellcheckers, grammar checkers, layouts, etc. One of the many benefits of word processors is the ability to move your content around easily. Whether you want to move words, paragraphs, images, or tables, it is just a mouse drag away. To make full use of this freedom, it is necessary that you change the style of your writing subtly.

A key aspect of making your document flexible is to avoid the use of words like following, above, before and preceding.

Study these examples.

The list of colors in the rainbow is as follows: violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow and orange.

The following image shows you the colors of the rainbow.

In the first sentence, the whole sentence will move together and the use of the word follows is not too much of a worry. In the second sentence, however, we are limiting ourselves to keeping the image below the sentence. By using the word following, we close out options to put the image above or adjacent to the sentence.

The concept of single sourcing and reusable content has been floating around for a long time. Software developers are constantly trying to build tools to achieve the dream of single sourcing or reusable content. However, tools alone are not enough. We must first change the way we write so that we are able to take advantage of the tools available.

In the years following its inception, the CBI investigated and prosecuted thousands of cases successfully. Apart from thoroughness, the CBI also came to define an organization that was clean and untainted by the government in the center.

However, the last four years have seen the image of the CBI being eroded as the Manmohan Singh led UPA government uses it as its strong-arm department. Over and over again, we have seen the CBI being used to threaten and cajole coalition partners to stay in line. This behavior has led to increasingly vocal demands to free the CBI from political control.

While on the surface there may seem to be a very strong case to pursue this course of action, there is one over-riding reason why we should not embark down this road – Democracy.

Even allowing for corrupt and ethic-less ministers, it is dangerous to create an extra-constitutional power. One look over the border will show us why it is necessary that the army, courts and the CBI must stay under civilian control.

Kiran Bedi and her cronies keep telling us that we need a Lok Pal to oversee the actions of such departments. But that just puts an extra layer of bureaucracy in a system that is already weighed down enough. Any authority, constitutional or otherwise, is only as clean as the people manning it. So a Lok Pal is not a solution. Instead, what we need are honest people in these key departments.

So how do me make sure only the honest get there? We cant.

All we can do is ensure we remain honest and we bring up honest children.

It started with the CBI director disclosing to the Supreme Court that he had been asked for and had shown the preliminary investigation report to the Law Minister and members of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). This is a shocking revelation in more ways than one. First of all, the court had specifically ordered the CBI that the investigation report was not to be shown to anyone by the court. Secondly, the period being investigated was the time when Manmohan Singh held the Coal portfolio. So in effect, it was the government being investigated.

Another minister in his cabinet found himself in the middle of a scam. Pawan Kumar Bansal found himself embroiled in a scam involving his nephew accepting bribes to give people plum postings in the Railway ministry, which is run by his uncle. What made this especially embarrassing was the fact that Bansal is seen as close to the PM because of his Punjabi roots.

Now, the Punjabis are a hardworking, honest and brave people. Over the decades and centuries, they have shown themselves to be the only Indian people who can lay claim to the tag cool. But their history also consists of being victims of a planned pogrom in the 1980s, when two Sikhs shot and killed the then prime minister Indira Gandhi. Rajiv Gandhi, her son, went on to make the infamous comment, “When a giant tree falls, the earth below shakes”. It was his justification for the calculated and planned massacre of Sikhs in the capital of the country. This happened in 1984 and 29 years later, not one person has been called on to account for this shameful act.

Since that event, Manmohan Singh is the first Punjabi to step up to the PM’s chair. As PM, he could have done at least ensured that the investigation and trials of the accused was brought to a closure. But in the last month, we saw the prime accused walk away from court with not a speck of dirt attached to him. Now, it maybe that he is innocent. But how can 4000 citizens of this country be massacred in cold blood and not one person be held responsible for this barbaric act? Countries have gone to war on less.

Through all this, Manmohan Singh continues to cling to a chair he has no right to, as he has never gone to the people to ask if they wanted him as their representative.

Mr. Singh has not only done disservice to the Punjabi people, but to the people of this country as a whole.

As we hurtle towards the 2014 elections, I am sure we will get to see more examples of gentlemanly behavior from our tallest leader.

Go Goa Gone is a fun movie, with some cute dialogs and loveable characters. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t a great movie, but it isn’t bad either. It is another outing for Saif as a producer and he doesn’t do as badly as he did with Agent Vinod. The best part of the movie are the dialogs. Kunal Khemu, Vir Das, Anand Tiwari and Pooja Gupta are okay in the roles of young executives who are out to have fun in Goa. Saif Ali Khan shines in the role of Boris, a Russian drug dealer from New Delhi.

The background music is jarring at times. But it maintains the mood of the movie, never letting it get too serious.

The Plot

Bunny, Hardik and Luv are roomies who go to Goa, expecting to have some fun. In Goa, Luv runs into Luna who invites him to a rave party on an island. The party is hosted by the Russian underworld through their man Boris. During the party a new drug is circulated, which makes zombies of everybody who took it. The next morning finds our four heroes, along with Boris and his sidekick as the only non-zombies on the island. How they survive the day and one night makes up the rest of the story.

The Verdict

It is time pass movie, which you can watch with friends. I think this movie will be a more enjoyable experience if watched at home with friends on a weekend.

With questions like “What do we know? What did we learn?” that have replies like, “We know nothing and we learnt ghantta”, the movie is definitely good for laughs over a weekend evening.

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Acme enables you to build agile software development tools using code box tools.

Peruse the website of any company that builds software or maintains software and you are bound to come across such noun stacks. Like a freight train, you get noun after noun appended together to form, what I assume is, a term that makes you feel the company is doing something special.

Noun stacks have one, and only one, use – to shorten the length of a sentence. The only place it makes sense to use a noun stack in on a UI screen where real estate is at a premium.

But in any other case, the noun stack is a liability. Let us take the example of an agile software development tool. When this term is thrown at a customer, there is too much happening there for the customer to really grasp what the tool is about. You cannot control how the customer will break up the stack during reading and may end up misunderstanding the tool altogether. The term in question maybe broken up as

agile software + development tool

agile + software development tool

Is that a risk you are willing to take, just so you can sound sophisticated?

So how would you rewrite the sentence?

Acme enables you to build tools that support the agile method of software development by using tools from a code box.

No Smoking traces the story of K (John Abraham), a hardcore smoker, trying to quit. In a bid to save his marriage, he decides to enroll in a program that comes highly recommended to him by his close friends. Run by a dubious godman-like figure, Shri Shri Prakash Guru Ghantal Baba Bangali Sealdah Wale (Paresh Rawal), it is an exacting program where every transgression by the participant results in physical pain to either the participant or the participant’s family member.

The movie is so allegory filled that you need to see it a couple of times to catch all the nuances. Even then, you will find yourself finding a new angle on some scene when you are just sitting around, and having a smoke. J

The frames are filled with crazy colors and, at times, no colors. Kashyap takes you into a world that seems, at once crazy and completely sane.

John Abraham as K, the main protagonist is good without being outstanding. Ayesha Takia is, well, Ayesha Takia. Ranvir Shoey has a neat little role, and he excels as usual.

The two songs in the movie are brilliantly shot and capture the mood of the movie to a T.

It is not the kind of movie to be seen with friends over beers. I suggest watching this movie alone with a lot of beers.

Rating: 3/5

Indian cinema and Bollywood touch a century and as with any anniversary, we can look back and see both the highs and lows. I went into the movie expecting to be treated to four stories that recall big Bollywood moments. But what I got instead was a pleasant bouquet of four shorts which showcase how integral a part of Indian life Bollywood is. Directed by four of the star directors in Bollywood, the experience is at times moving, and at times introspective. The shorts all raise pertinent questions for today’s generation and fortunately does not sermonize.

The Plot:

Karan Johan directs the first short and in terms of fitting the occasion, this is the only one that falls short – why am I not surprised? Randeep Hooda and Rani Mukherjee play a couple trapped in a loveless marriage. Their world is turned upside down by the entrance of Avinash, played brilliantly by newcomer Saqib Saleem. Avinash is young, confident, Rani’s colleague and gay. When she discovers he is gay, she does not even bat an eyelid. Then the young man realizes her husband is gay and pursues him. When she discovers her husband is gay, she throws a tantrum and ends their marriage. In typical K Jo style, the short has nothing to do with the concept at hand, so he uses old Hindi songs to tenuously tie the story to the experience. Fortunately, the story is good enough for us to forgive K Jo his transgression.

Dibakar Banerjee directs the second short. This one is probably the highlight of the experience. The short tells the story of a lower-middle class man who gets to play a small part in a movie. Nawazuddin Siddiqui continues to impress with his acting. The next decade or two should see this fantastic actor take center-stage as Bollywood enters the second century.

Zoya Akhtar gets the third short. This one is a fairy tale that traces a young boy trying to live his dream – to dance like Katrina Kaif, against his father’s wishes. Ranbir Shorey plays the role of the father with usual panache. The most impressive part of this short is the way the relationship between the boy and his older sister is developed. I found myself thinking, “Thank God for sisters” on more than one occasion.

Anurag Kashyap get the final short. This traces a young man’s attempts to meet The Big B. The story is simple, but Kashyap is able to bring home the craze that The Phenomenon inspires in India.

The Verdict

It is a nice experience and you won’t feel cheated at the end of it. So go ahead and watch it.

Reviewed by Vinay Antony Payyapilly