Album art, Apollo 13, Lagaan and banking for the poor

Came across this audiovisual commentary about a chap called Storm Thorgerson who designed many of Pink Floyd's album covers. I have been trying to develop some understanding of art for some time now and need to dig much deeper to figure out what the covers really mean.

In connection with Apollo 13 completing its 40th Anniversary, I happened to see a video of Jim Lovell, the real Tom Hanks.  A couple of his quotes really stand out for me. They exhibit the spirit of  much of human society's evolution as I would like to put it.  It can become a nice opening line for a speech somewhere."I think one of the things that (Apollo 13) showed the people of the world was that even if there is a great catastrophe, good leadership and teamwork, initiative and perseverance - these things make for getting an almost certain catastrophe into a successful recovery,". Smell classic American Hollywood movie fare anyone?  One can argue.. but I will leave it there. Jim Lovell  was most certainly a brave man. He goes on to say, "Our philosophy was: had we not been successful, we would have continued to broadcast our indications of what went wrong, what's happening - either until the last battery had died or the last bit of oxygen was gone." It is such brave commitment to charge forward without the fear of consequence that most of the times leads to progress. And speaking of the scrapping of Nasa's current plan to return to the Moon, Lovell delivers another classic line :"Mankind is meant to explore. There is a certain group of us that live on the edge to do that sort of thing. And I think over the years regardless of budgets up or budgets down I think people will find a way of eventually going to Mars, not in my lifetime probably, but we will set foot on Mars one of these days." India's cryogenic engine technology failed in its first attempt to launch a communications satellite into orbit a few days ago. The team at ISRO can take heart from such powerful words of Jim Lowel and his Apollo 13 team. Hopefully, India will be able to launch its own cryogenic engine next year. It will be a worthy tribute to the people who spent 18 years of their lives for one dream!

One more interesting video that I saw yesterday was the performance of a Miami school based on the popular song "chale chalo" by A.R. Rehman from the movie Lagaan. I think music is one among certain things like sports that can transcend cultural boundaries. The video on Miami school's attempt at the orchestral composition is a great example of that.The other good thing about the song is that can act like a motivational or an inspirational song like the "eye of the tiger" with the only exception that while 'eye of the tiger' is more individualistic in nature while 'chale chalo' is more of a group motivational song. (Ironically, I know I am back to the tiger debate.. quite intuitive isn't it...tiger=individualistic). I liked the treatment to the song  sung in the orchestra performance because orchestral performances also happen to be of interest to me off late. I am not sure if each school in US has a choir  where school kids learn music and participate in an orchestra, but I sure am an advocate of such a thing in Indian schools if it can be done. The song "Chale chalo" also led me to the discovery of a fantastic film on the making of Lagaan. I have been impressed with Lagaan ever since I saw it for the first time, however my appreciation of Aamir, Ashutosh and the film has gone up tremendously after watching the making of Lagaan.

Finally, to conclude, here is something about another interesting little video that I saw on banking for the poor by Andrew Hinton of pilgrimfilms.com. It is an amazing video about how a South Indian bank manager called J S Parthiban has transformed the lives of many poor villagers in Tamil Nadu. It was heartwarming to see the compassion of Mr. Partiban and it reminded me instantly of the TED video I had seen about Aravind Eye Hospital sometime ago. A line from that video by Dr. G. Venkataswamy the founder of Aravind Eye hospital will remain etched in my memory.

"When you grow in spiritual consciousness, we identify with all that is in the world so there is no exploitation. It is ourselves we are helping. It is ourselves we are healing." -Dr.G.Venkataswamy

For me these are very powerful lines and they have a strange appeal which I can't explain. They appear so simple yet so deep in meaning that I can only hope to understand  it completely some day. J S Partiban's voice was as compassionate as that of Dr. Venkat's and I wish him well. Interestingly the video ended with a special thanks to many people including Sarosh J Ghandy. Mr Ghandy taught us Ethical leadership in XLRI and I am not surprised to see his name in the video. Mr Ghandy also happens to be one of the nicest people I have seen in my life.