“VISHAL MALHOTRA - Magnamags stardust” plus 1 more |
| VISHAL MALHOTRA - Magnamags stardust Posted: 31 May 2010 06:48 AM PDT Message from Five Filters: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it.
Though most of your earliest memories of Vishal must have been of him hosting Disney Club, he vehemently claims he was never a child artiste. "How old do you think I am? I started off with Disney when I was 18-years-old and then went on to do Hip Hip Hurray (HHH)" Since Vishal isn't from a film background, he was never inclined towards acting. In fact, he was studying to become a pilot. "Flying was my passion and I was heading in that direction," he says. He was spotted by some guys who were doing a talent search at colleges. "They asked me to come and read for them. I didn't even know what that meant. But I went and was chosen. It was as simple as that. I took it up as a summer job, because they offered me shit loads of money! For an 18-year-old, I was getting much more than pocket money," he reasons. Thankfully for Vishal, he never had to struggle. He talks about his acting experience and the reason why he is in this field. "Right from day one, I felt really comfortable in front of the camera. In fact, even now there are moments in my life, where I am more real when I am in front of the camera. I don't know the reason but I switch off from all worldly worries at that time." Vishal started taking his acting career seriously after HHH became a rage. "I never really thought of acting as a profession before that. The repercussions of it I realized much later. I was shooting so much, that when I went to any other cities, people would recognize me. People wanted to write about me and talk to me. You can call me stupid, but at the end of the day, I wasn't trained and wasn't from this background. It was all new for me." That's how things started. His entry in Bollywood also wasn't much of a struggle. He talks about bagging Ishq Vishk, his first Bollywood film. "One fine day Ken Ghosh, who is now one of my closest friends, called me up, and asked if I would be a part of his film. My first reaction to Ken was 'No'. I mean, it was films for God sake! No disrespect to him; it was purely because of lack of knowledge on my part about the film world." He went on to play the memorable character of Mambo in the film and as they say, the rest is history. I know that my career graph could have gone in a very different direction than what it is now. I would have got much more fame and would have made a lot more money at an earlier stage. But as a human being, I would have completely burned out. Working on television would entitle me to shoot 30 days a month. I was just starting off. I was offered the leads. If I took one show, I would land up taking more. But those are just the peripheral reasons. I purely couldn't identify with the roles and didn't want my career going in that direction. I didn't know what I wanted but I was clear about what I didn't want. I didn't want to be a soap star," he says with conviction. And so he has no regrets whatsoever. "I did do a few fictions shows and episodics. Today I can tell everyone that I was also offered to be a VJ on MTV but I didn't want to do it. I was even offered the lead in Just Mohabbat but I didn't take that up as I was clearly told to leave HHH. I am the kind of person who believes in professional relationships and it has made me the person I am." We move on to the recent controversies surrounding him. Apparently, he was asked to leave the reality show Perfect Bride which he was hosting a while back, as he was unable to perform well and also because of his unprofessional behaviour. When asked about it, Vishal sighs and says, "I think the whole world knows about it. There was a public apology as there was no issue at all. It has been cleared out by the channel head. I don't know why or how this came out. There was suddenly this one article about how I couldn't pronounce certain words like kuwar and kumari! The thing was that I was doing two shows Prefect Bride and Entertainment Ke Liye Kuch Bhi Karega simultaneously. So the producers of Perfect Bride and I had mutually decided that there would be a certain section of the show which I wouldn't be hosting. It wasn't humanly possible for me to be at two places at one time. I even gave the channel the option of replacing me completely, since I was swarmed with work." He muses on and poses some logical questions, "If the channel had a problem with me, why would they call me back? Why would I host their finale? As a sensible journalist, how can you say that I can't spell certain words? Anyways, I don't know and I don't care. I am not that small a person that I will go behind the person who spread this. I look at it this way; I have become popular enough for people to plant stories about me! These things have never affected me. My conscious is clear and there is no masala here." Sure enough, after Perfect Bride, Vishal has done many other events for the same channel. They stood by him and he appreciates it. "These are all films which are coming out now. I had shot for them two years ago. The future holds different things for me. But the scare of being slotted is always there." Vishal also believes that no matter how good you are in a film, if the film doesn't work, you won't either. So now he is seeing to it that he chooses his films carefully. "I have more choices now. My future roles will be more character driven. But I am not ashamed of any of the projects that I have done. I feel that I have grown," he says simply. We tread on his personal space and he tells me who his best friends in this industry are. "I have held strongly to my base from school and college. But if you want to know who I hang out with in this industry, they would be Ken Ghosh, Riteish Deshmukh, Milap Zaveri, Kunal Deshmukh and Mohit Suri. Am also friends with Shahid (Kapur) but we both are too busy in our lives. In the girls, Lara (Dutta) and Jacqueline (Fernandez) are close friends. And there is Amrita (Rao)." And what about his Jaane Kaha Se Aayi Hain co-star, the gorgeous Jacqueline? "I don't know how to answer that. I can say ten thousand things, but it will be all twisted. I agree there is no smoke without fire, so let's just leave it at that. Let people think what they want to think. I am clear as to where I stand in my relationships. That is what is important," he says. Though the actor is single at the moment, he has had his share of relationships. "I have been in several relationships. I don't plan or try to keep it to myself. I just think that people haven't been interested enough to write about me. And when they do, they always get the wrong person. I am proud of all my relationships." But of course, Vishal isn't one to advertise the spicy details of his life either. Happy and extremely content at the moment, Vishal is looking forward to his future projects. "Banda Yeh Bindaas Hain is my forthcoming film. It is very interesting. But since I am very superstitious, I won't tell you more. Also, there is the third season of Entertainment Ke Liye… which I am hosting." Earnestly, he tells me he doesn't have any lead role yet in his kitty. "I am realistic about my capabilities and at the same time, I believe in myself and my talent," he says modestly. With a perfect balance of confidence and sensibility, one can safely say that Vishal has a bright future ahead. *By Purvaja Sawant
Five Filters featured article: Into the Abyss. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Posted: 31 May 2010 04:25 AM PDT Message from Five Filters: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Like a modern horror movie villain who keeps coming back from the dead, a false story can take on a life of its own: Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow, Millard Fillmore ordered the first bathtub for the White House, that sort of thing. Even after they are shown to be false, some stories are repeated, embellished, and occasionally built into entire belief systems. These fictions may ordinarily be little more than curiosities or mere affronts to our concern for the truth. But our concern here is with one such story that is put forward as part of a case against the effectiveness of free markets and individual choice. This story has consequences. Our story concerns the history of the standard typewriter keyboard, commonly known as QWERTY, and its more recent rival, the Dvorak keyboard. Pick up the February 19 edition of Newsweek and there is Steve Wozniak, the engineering wunderkind largely responsible for Apple's early success, explaining that Apple's recent failures were just another example of a better product losing out to an inferior alternative: "Like the Dvorak keyboard, Apple's superior operating system lost the market-share war." Ignoring for the moment the fact that just about all computer users now use sleek graphical operating systems much like the Mac's graphical interface (itself taken from Xerox), Wozniak cannot be blamed for repeating the keyboard story. It is commonly reported as fact in newspapers, magazines, and academic journals. An article in the January 1996 Harvard Law Review, for example, invokes the typewriter keyboard as support for a thesis that pure luck is responsible for winners and losers, and that our expectation of survival of the fittest should be replaced by survival of the luckiest. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. In the Los Angeles Times, Steve Steinburg writes, regarding the adoption of an Internet standard, "[I]t's all too likely to be the wrong standard. From Qwerty vs. Dvorak keyboards, to Beta vs. VHS cassettes, history shows that market share and technical superiority are rarely related." In The Independent, Hamish McRae discusses the likelihood of "lock-in" to inferior standards. He notes the Beta and VHS competition as well as some others, then adds, "Another example is MS-DOS, but perhaps the best of all is the QWERTY keyboard. This was designed to slow down typists...." In Fortune, Tim Smith repeats the claim that QWERTY was intended to slow down typists, and then notes, "Perhaps the stern test of the marketplace produces results more capricious than we like to think." In a feature series, Steven Pearlstein of The Washington Post presents at great length the argument that modern markets, particularly those linked to networks, are likely to be dominated by just a few firms. After introducing readers to Brian Arthur, one of the leading academic advocates of the view that lock-in is a problem, he states, "The Arthurian discussion of networks usually begins at the typewriter keyboard." Other prominent appearances of the QWERTY story are found in TheNew York Times, The Sunday Observer, The Boston Globe, and broadcast on PBS's News Hour with Jim Lehrer. It can even be found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as evidence of how human inertia can result in the choice of an inferior product. The story can be found in two very successful economics books written for laymen: Robert Frank and Philip Cook's The Winner-Take-All Society and Paul Krugman's Peddling Prosperity, where an entire chapter is devoted to the "economics of QWERTY." Why is the keyboard story receiving so much attention from such a variety of sources? The answer is that it is the centerpiece of a theory that argues that market winners will only by the sheerest of coincidences be the best of the available alternatives. By this theory, the first technology that attracts development, the first standard that attracts adopters, or the first product that attracts consumers will tend to have an insurmountable advantage, even over superior rivals that happen to come along later. Because first on the scene is not necessarily the best, a logical conclusion would seem to be that market choices aren't necessarily good ones. So, for example, proponents of this view argue that although the Beta video recording format was better than VHS, Beta lost out because of bad luck and quirks of history that had nothing much to do with the products themselves. (Some readers who recall that Beta was actually first on the scene will immediately recognize a problem with this example.) These ideas come to us from an academic literature concerned with "path dependence." The doctrine of path dependence starts with the observation that the past influences the future. This conclusion is hard to quibble with, although it also seems to lack much novelty. It simply recognizes that some things are durable. But path dependence is transformed into a far more dramatic theory by the additional claim that the past so strongly influences the future that we become "locked in" to choices that are no longer appropriate. This is the juicy version of the theory, and the version that implies that markets cannot be trusted. Stanford University economic historian Paul David, in the article that introduced the QWERTY story to the economics literature, offers this example of the strong claim: "Competition in the absence of perfect futures markets drove the industry prematurely into standardization on the wrong system where decentralized decision making subsequently has sufficed to hold it." According to this body of theory, if, for example, DOS is the first operating system, then improvements such as the Macintosh will fail because consumers are so locked in to DOS that they will not make the switch to the better system (Rush Limbaugh falls for this one). The success of Intel-based computers, in this view, is a tragic piece of bad luck. To accept this view, of course, we need to ignore the fact that DOS was not the first operating system, that consumers did switch away from DOS when they moved to Windows, that the DOS system was an appropriate choice for many users given the hardware of the time, and that the Mac was far more expensive. Also, a switch to Mac required that we throw out a lot of DOS hardware, where the switch to Windows did not, something that is not an irrelevant social concern. A featured result of these theories is that merely knowing what path would be best would not help you to predict where the market will move. In this view of the world, we will too often get stuck, or locked in, on a wrong path. Luck rules, not efficiency. Most advocates of this random-selection view do not claim that everything has been pure chance, since that would be so easy to disprove. After all, how likely would it be that consecutive random draws would have increased our standard of living for so long with so few interruptions? Instead, we are told that luck plays a larger role in the success of high-technology products than for older products. A clear example of this argument is a 1990 Brian Arthur article in Scientific American. Arthur there distinguishes between a new economics of "knowledge based" technologies, which are supposedly fraught with increasing returns, and the old economics of "resource based" technologies (for example, farming, mining, building), which supposedly were not. "Increasing returns" (or "scale economies") means that conducting an activity on a larger scale may allow lower costs, or better products, or both. Traditional concepts of scale economies applied to production--the more steel you made, the more cheaply you could make each additional ton, because fixed costs can be spread. Much of the path-dependence literature is concerned with economies of consumption, where a good becomes cheaper or more valuable to the consumer as more other people also have it; if lots of people have DOS computers, then more software will be available for such machines, for instance, which makes DOS computers better for consumers. This sort of "network externality" is even more important when literal networks are involved, as with phones or fax machines, where the value of the good depends in part on how many other people you can connect to. What Arthur and others assert is that path dependence is an affliction associated with technologies that exhibit increasing returns--that once a product has an established network it is almost impossible for a new product to displace it. Thus, as society gets more advanced technologically, luck will play a larger and larger role. The logical chain is that new technologies exhibit increasing returns, and technologies with increasing returns exhibit path dependence. Of the last link in that chain, Arthur notes: "[O]nce random economic events select a particular path, the choice may become locked-in regardless of the advantages of the alternatives." This pessimism about the effectiveness of markets suggests a relative optimism about the potential for government action. It would be only reasonable to expect, for example, that panels of experts would do better at choosing products than would random chance. Similarly, to address the kinds of concerns raised in Frank and Cook's Winner-Take-All Society, the inequalities in incomes that arise in these new-technology markets could be removed harmlessly, since inequalities arise only as a matter of luck in the first place. It does not seem an unimaginable stretch to the conclusion that if the government specifies, in advance, the race and sex of market winners, no harm would be done since the winners in the market would have been a randomly chosen outcome anyway. Theories of path dependence and their supporting mythology have begun to exert an influence on policy. Last summer, an amicus brief on the Microsoft consent decree used lock-in arguments, including the QWERTY story, and apparently prompted Judge Stanley Sporkin to refuse to ratify the decree. (He was later overturned.) Arguments against Microsoft's ill-fated attempt to acquire Intuit also relied on allegations of lock-in. Carl Shapiro, one of the leading contributors to this literature, recently took a senior position in the antitrust division of the Justice Department. These arguments have even surfaced in presidential politics, when President Clinton began referring to a "winner-take-all society." Stanford University economist Paul Krugman offered the central claim of this literature boldly and with admirable simplicity: "In QWERTY worlds, markets can't be trusted." The reason that he uses "QWERTY worlds," and not DOS worlds, or VHS worlds, is that the DOS and VHS examples are not very compelling. Almost no one uses DOS anymore, and many video recorder purchasers thought VHS was better than Beta (as it was, in terms of recording time, as we have discussed at length elsewhere). The theories of path dependence that percolate through the academic literature show the possibility of this form of market ineptitude within the context of highly stylized theoretical models. But before these theories are translated into public policy, there really had better be some good supporting examples. After all, these theories fly in the face of hundreds of years of rapid technological progress. Recently we have seen PCs replace mainframes, computers replace typewriters, fax machines replace the mails for many purposes, DOS replace CP/M, Windows replace DOS, and on and on. Five Filters featured article: Into the Abyss. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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