It was just a one-day matter, um.

First read this article on wikipedia. This post is pretty much about various artistic interpretations of that song. The song has been controversial, but I have fond memories of singing it, making jokes about it, etc. from my childhood days. In case it isn’t clear from the title, calling trivial things “one-day matterums” was one of the highlights of second and third grade for me. It just dawned on me today that for a song that’s so controversial and has a strong history of being used to impose traditional Hindu nonsense, there is great variety in the way people interpret it… People have been all kinds of experimenting with western-fusion interpretations of the song, and they’re all fun to listen to.

The regular old version sounds something like this:

Whenever we sang it in school, that was the kind we recited. It wasn’t totally a capella, there was almost always a harmonium to accompany. If you don’t know what a harmonium is, well, it looks like:

Image from wikipedia

and sounds like:

Anyway, coming back on track, Vande Mataram was a fairly boring song. I found a couple of old-school interpretations of it such as:

and

The above two versions are basically meant to boil the blood of the masses and remind the people of the glory of the motherland, blah blah blah. They’re also lame, in my humble opinion. They’re about as repetitive as Daft Punk’s “Around the World,” but then again, the Daft Punk song was awesome and these aren’t.

In 1997, AR Rahman, who you might otherwise know for doing all the music in Slumdog Millionaire and numerous other Indian movies, produced his own interpretation:

It’s not really a “version” of the previous songs, but I feel like a lot of people today would consider this song just about “as important” as the original song. Like pretty much anything AR Rahman has touched, it was really good. It got everyone psyched up, possibly because it was released right around India’s 50th Independence Anniversary.  The lyrics are pretty powerful too.

Anyway, there seems to have been quite a few such interpretations. One I remember was from Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham:

It’s way more subdued than the previous one, and tries to bring in a lot of glamour. I believe it was Usha Uthup and Kavita Krishnamurthy singing it, but I may be mistaken. This particular attempt transitions into another patriotic song, “Saare Jahan se Achcha.”  It’s all kind of ironic, since the scenes depicted therein all take place in the UK, and here’s this Indian guy, hanging out with the hot white ladies wearing saffron, white, and green, dancing Bharatnatyam or something. It sold well, I guess.

MIDIval Punditz, one of the more prominent names in the relatively nascent Indian Electronica scene, have produced this gem:

It’s very chill, and I think goes a long way to stripping the song of its religious and political connotations. Its unpretentious, doesn’t try to do any fancy technical stuff, has a very simple beat, and gives the feeling of sipping a gin and tonic at a basement party. Name me a young man or woman cannot agree with that feeling, and you will have named a bona-fide twerp.

Here are some instrumental versions of the song:

Mr. Vishwa Mohan Bhatt playing on an improvised version of the guitar:

Only the first of the two songs is Vande Mataram. The other is Jana Gana Mana, India’s national anthem.

Some dude playing it on the alto sax:

He goes wrong one or two places I think, but hey, we all make mistakes.

Another dude with a “Soul music” version, which I think is pretty good:

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time or the patience to google for balalaika, theremin, and ondes martenot covers of the song, but if you find some, feel free to send it my way.

Thinking in polar coordinates: #weareallcartesiansnow

You remember those polar coordinates we did in pre-calc/calc/trig classes? Yeah, it is clearly my desire to revive memories of those days on which we wrote equations as f (r,θ) instead of f (x,y), tried to plug-in values of -2π to 0 to 2π and figured out the direction of a graph, when we moaned and groaned about who would actually use something as pretentious as polar coordinates.

Turns out dart boards are a very straight-forward real-life application of polar coordinates. Each wedge extends from θ to θ+18 and from s to S where s is the radius of the outer bulls eye rings. The double and triple rings also span the same angles, but are characterized by different bounds from the center.

Why am I talking about polar coordinates and dart boards today? Well, due to sheer boredom I started throwing darts recently. It took me a while to get a majority of my throws on the board. I’m doing well now, and I’ve been trying to hit one number consistently. It’s very easy to get carried away throwing darts… the target is well-defined, it’s easy to experiment and improve your throw, and every so often you can hit the target, which is a major motivational factor.

I was trying to hit the double ring on the 17 today. It was way more difficult than I thought it would be. Initially it was difficult to pinpoint why it was so difficult, but I think it all has to do with the fact that we’re not good at dealing with polar coordinates.

Throw a dart randomly and hope it hits a spot in the scoring area. Somewhere along the radius passing through that point lie a few points which are included in the triple ring. If you haven’t already hit your goal of triple ring, you can say, “Ah, I need to throw at the same θ, but just need to change my r up a bit.”

Of course, our first instinct is to not say that… we say “I need to move it x units to the right [or left] and y units down [or up]” and try all kinds of stuff (gravity assist, monocular vision, offering of red jasmines hibiscus flowers and modaks to Ganesh) etc., with the hope that the dart will behave the way we want it to behave. This is perfectly fine. Gravity and initial velocity have an enormous influence on the trajectory of the dart, so we kind of have to isolate the vertical motion of the dart from the horizontal.

Yeah,  dart boards are a straightforward example of polar coordinates, but thinking in polar coordinates is decidedly not straightforward. Polar coordinates are a pretty elegant method to describe some stuff mathematically, but in everyday life it’s going to be really difficult to think of objects as being r units away and θ degrees clockwise/counterclockwise from some other point. To re-iterate the point in my title #weareallcartesiansnow.

So, yeah, it seems way easier to control the horizontal motion of a dart than it is to control the vertical motion. As noted above, there are 3 major factors affecting the trajectory (gravity, initial velocity, initial height; air resistance notwithstanding) whereas the horizontal coordinates are only affected by the initial position and velocity.

Phew, enough intellectualizing about darts. Time to sleep.

–Gautam

EDIT: h and j are very close to each in the English alphabet.