Quiz question. Fill in the blanks (Yeats poem, famous film)

Fill in the 5 blanks. Film related hint below the poem

Sailing to Byzantium
- William Butler Yeats

THAT is __ _____ ____ _____ ____. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

==
Hint: The blanks gave the title to a famous novel published in 2005। This was made into a film that won 4 academy awards in 2007, including Best Picture.

Interview with Danny Boyle

Interesting interview with Danny Boyle, the director of Slumdog Millionaire:

AVC: Were there places it was difficult to get permission to film?

DB: There's lots of things that can be solved with cash. [Snickers.] And there's occasional things that can't be solved with cash, which become a bureaucratic nightmare for some reason, and there's no distinction between the two. There's no way of reading a situation and saying, "Yes, that'll be a bureaucratic nightmare, but that one we'll be able to buy off." It just depends on the day, apparently. The most extraordinary thing, you'd be given permission for, and then the weirdest, simplest things, you just wouldn't be able to obtain permissions. And it would go on and on and on forever and ever, and there was no way to know. You have to kind of approach it with an open, quite optimistic mind, no matter what's thrown at you, because it will only ever result in damaging the film if you let any kind of despondency get to you. You have to remain optimistic, and that's clearly how people live their lives there. Against all the odds, they retain kind of a spirit which allows them to get through against insufferable odds. The poverty, the traffic, the lack of infrastructure, the flooding during the monsoons—there's just so many things that are coming at you at the whole time that your spirit has to remain, and that's certainly true. It enters the minutia of filming

My ideal job - Women's beach volleyball referee

My wife and I have been having this ongoing argument about the Olympics. She considers beach volleyball sexist since the men get to wear shorts and tank tops, while the women wear almost nothing. [My counter argument is that women get to see a lot of eye candy in the men's diving competiton, where the women wear one piece suits and the mean wear not much except sweat.]

Anyway, I checked the rules of Beach Volleyball. It appears that there is a rule concerning the *maximum* amount of clothing that women participants can wear.The rule states that "women's uniform bottoms have to be two and a half inches wide on the sides."

I also checked the website of the FIVB for rules concerning the names of the players and found this:

"Sanctions will apply in case the team name of a men player does not appear on his shorts, while it is only recommended, due to the limited space, to feature the same information on the women's bottom during the 2008 season. Therefore, the FIVB will not fine any women athletes for not placing their names on the bottom of their uniforms in 2008,"

My first question is this one: How the heck do they enforce these rules? I can picture a guy going around with a measuring tape and saying; "Now then, young lady" and measuring the clothing around all vital areas below her navel.

My second question is this: "Are they hiring?"

Quiz Question: Name the English equivalent

Fill in the Blanks: (cut and pasted from Wikipedia)

• Fulano, Zutano y Mengano — in Spanish
• Hinz und Kunz — in German
• Jan en Alleman — in Dutch
• Tizio, Caio, Sempronio, Mevio, Filano e Calpurnio — in Italian
• Fulano, Beltrano e Sicrano — in Portuguese
• Ivanov, Petrov, Sidorov — in Russian
• Are, Oore, Shamsi Kooreh — in Persian

_______, _____________ & _____________ in English.

Hint: Think of the 3 tortoises from the Galapagos brought by Charles Darwin in HMS Beagle

Nissim Ezekiel: Irani Restaurant Instructions

Happy Friday folks! Here's a nice Nissim Ezekiel poem for your enjoyment:

IRANI RESTAURANT INSTRUCTIONS*

Please
Do not spit
Do not sit more
Pay promptly, time is valuable
Do not write letter
without order refreshment
Do not comb,
hair is spoiling floor
Do not make mischiefs in cabin
our waiter is reporting
Come again
All are welcome whatever cast
If not satisfied tell us
otherwise tell others
GOD IS GREAT

------ Nissim Ezekiel, 1972

For more poems by the great Indian poet Nissim Ezekiel, please refer to his works in the Digital South Asia Library.

'Awaara' of Raj Kapoor & its Turkey connection

Raj Kapoor's Awaara in Turkish

The IMDB entry has this interesting information:
Comment 1: "The movie and the song were quite famous in Turkey during 50s, 60s, 70s and even 80s and it inspired a whole genre of films produced in Turkey"

Comment 2: "yes, it is. it is remade starring Sadri Alisik and Ajda Pekkan in Turkiye. The remake was named "avare" and released in 1964."

[Btw, IMDB lists a 1970 Turkish remake of the same name too.]

Sure enough, here's the Turkish version and the Turkish version of the song.
And yes, hear Raj Kapoor "speak" in Turkiye in the final scene of the dubbed version of Awaara. Beautiful. And other scenes from links.

I found other Turkish sites/youtube videos where there are references to it:
like this tv dance competition, this remixed version (Hindi and Turkiye), and this looks like a wedding celebration dance set to the song.

HBR: Daniel Vasella's inspiring story

From the Harvard Business Review article (Feb 2007) by Bill George and others. Bill George is a Prof at Harvard, and was the CEO of Medtronics. He has written bestsellers on leadership, including his latest "True North". You can listen to Bill George being interviewed my Michael Krasny on KQED Forum here.

excerpt from his HBR article
==

[..]Novartis chairman and CEO Daniel Vasella,whose life story was one of the most difficult of all the people we interviewed. He emerged from extreme challenges in his youth to reach the pinnacle of the global pharmaceutical industry, a trajectory that illustrates the trials many leaders have to go through on their journeys to authentic leadership.

Vasella was born in 1953 to a modest family in Fribourg, Switzerland. His early years were filled with medicalproblems that stoked his passion to become a physician. His first recollections were of a hospital where he was admitted at age four when he suffered from food poisoning. Falling ill with asthma at age five, he was sent alone to the mountains of eastern Switzerland for two summers.He found the four-month separations from his parents especially difficult because his caretaker had an alcohol problem and was unresponsive to his needs.

At age eight, Vasella had tuberculosis, followed by meningitis, and was sent to a sanatorium for a year. Lonely and homesick, he suffered a great deal that year, as his parents rarely visited him. He still remembers the pain and fear when the nurses held him down during the lumbar punctures so that he would not move. One day, a new physician arrived and took time to explain each step of the procedure. Vasella asked the doctor if he could hold a nurse’s hand rather than being held down. “The amazing thing is that this time the procedure didn’t hurt,” Vasella recalls“Afterward, the doctor asked me, ‘How was that?’ I reached up and gave him a big hug.
These human gestures of forgiveness, caring, and compassion made a deep impression on me and on the kind of person I wanted to become.”

Throughout his early years, Vasella’s life continued to be unsettled.When he was ten, his 18-year-old sister passed away after suffering from cancer for two years. Three years later, his father died in surgery. To support the family, his mother went to work in a distant town and came home only once every three weeks. Left to himself, he and his friends held beer parties and got into frequent fights. This lasted for three years until he met his first girlfriend, whose affection changed his life.

At 20, Vasella entered medical school, later graduating with honors. During medical school, he sought out psychotherapy so he could come to terms with his early experiences and not feel like a victim. Through analysis, he reframed his life story and realized that he wanted to help a wider range of people than he could as an individual practitioner. Upon completion of his residency, he applied to become chief physician at the University of Zurich; however, the search committee considered him too young for the position. Disappointed but not surprised, Vasella decided to use his abilities to increase his impact on medicine. At that time,he had a growing fascination with finance and business.He talked with the head of the pharmaceutical division of Sandoz, who offered him the opportunity to join the company’s U.S. affiliate. In his five years in the United States, Vasella flourished in the stimulating environment, first as a sales representative and later as a product manager,and advanced rapidly through the Sandoz marketing organization.

When Sandoz merged with Ciba-Geigy in 1996, Vasella was named CEO of the combined companies,now called Novartis, despite his young age and limited experience. Once in the CEO’s role, Vasella blossomed as a leader. He envisioned the opportunity to build a great global health care company that could help people through lifesaving new drugs, such as Gleevec, which has proved to be highly effective for patients with chronic myeloid leukemia. Drawing on the physician role models of his youth, he built an entirely new Novartis culture centered on compassion, competence, and competition. These moves established Novartis as a giant in the industry and Vasella as a compassionate leader.

Vasella’s experience is just one of dozens provided by authentic leaders who traced their inspiration directly from their life stories. Asked what empowered them to lead, these leaders consistently replied that they found their strength through transformative experiences. Those experiences enabled them to understand the deeper purpose of their leadership.

===end excerpt==