Lyrix

Now this was outrageously cheesy, campy and tending towards kitsch. People must have seen the latest promos of Farah Khan's film Om Shanti Om, her ode to bygone cinema era. I really can't believe Javed Akhtar has written these lines for the song - Dard-e-Disco.

Now what is that supposed to mean. SRK worked out so much for his abs and puny torso that he broke a bone or two while disco-ing? The initial lines are the stuff usual words and constructs Hindi cinema lyrics (not Bollywood it is a denegrating word) are made of. And there are some good Urdu words thrown in. The hackneyed lines make me remember the brilliantly humorous movie Chashme-Buddoor (starring suave Farukh Sheikh, girl next door - Deepti Naval and a host of other likable characters). It had a great take on the typical song and dance routine in Hindi cinema. The song went like: Chham chham Payal, kaise ho paagal and all the inane stuff that rhymes.

Coming back to Om Shanti Om. The song took me by surprise after listening to lyrics the recent dud movie - Cash where a despo Shilpa Shetty look alike (errr or is she her sis) cries out for her MindBlowing Mahia! (Aaj Tak watchers was there any hidden connection between her and Mahendra Mahia Singh Dhoni?). She did a hell of Job to Blow [Blowing Minds you dirty minds!]

I never expected this from Javed Akhtar. Probably it was some else who screwed and made the singers sing it, probably it was some underworld don who made them do it instead of extortion to get pure kicks out of the whole meaninglessness of it.

Or does he suffer from multiple lyricist disorder! He has a Sameer residing in him! Or just like Aks (Amitabh Bachchan, Manoj Bajpai, Nandita Das) Sameer enters his body and makes him write these lines to vamoose into thin air leaving even him agape.

AI vs AP

Well the much hailed fruits of Artificial Intelligence are not bearing for the market I think looking at Artificial Personality can be a good option. Prof. Alan Turing gave Turing Test as a benchmark of AI where a human judge has to converse with a human and a machine through a natural language. The machine passes the test if the judge is not able to conclusively say it is a machine with which (s)he was conversing. Quite a subjective parameter but gives a complete picture.

Further developments lead to much hailed poster boy of AI: Expert systems. After this came less 'glamorous' (readd stuff from which sci-fi is made of) more nerdy interpretations and implementations but the core remains the same. There is something such as 'intellectual' tasks that a human can do and we should strive towards making machines do it. So there is a notion of a problem or a question and its resolution.

Where as if we go back to Mr. Turing and see his test in a different light essentially he is talking of creating an Artificial Personality. Surely the judge can test the person on the other side by giving 'intellectual' task/problem/question but overall if you want to see it is a case of personality that we are looking at and not 'intelligence' per se.

BTW this article triggered the dormant thought in me