entertainment – Pertinent Observations

Stereotypes, K-Dramas and ADHD

My wife is currently watching a K-drama which she said I might like, because the leading female character in that is autistic. “You have ADHD, and you might be on the spectrum, so you can at least half watch with me”, she said.

Given that it is in a language that I don’t know, I can’t really “half watch”, but I’ve sat through an aggregate of about ten-fifteen minutes of the show in the last 2-3 days.

My first impression of the show and the character was “gosh she’s such a stereotype”. They showed her in court or something (the character is a lawyer), and she takes something someone says extremely literally. And then there was something else that seemed rather stereotypical and then I almost wrote off the show.

And then they showed one scene, which is also possibly stereotypical (I don’t know) but which I massively massively empathised with, and then my view of the show turned, and at this point in time I’m “half watching” the show (to the best extent you can when you need subtitles) as I write this.

I might have written about this before – back in 2013, after about six months of taking methylphenidate for my ADHD, I had started to believe that it was crimping my creativity. What I thought had defined me until then, which is also something you see a lot on this blog, is connecting very random and seemingly unconnected things.

In fact, I considered that to be one of my superpowers – to see connections that a lot of other people can’t. After a few days of not taking the medication (when I saw myself making those connections again), I decided to get off them. I didn’t get back on till 2020 (as things stand I take them).

Anyway, back to the show, the protagonist is shown having a vision of a whale, and that vision reminds her of something else, and she keeps connecting one thing to another (I was really empathising with her in this snippet), and gets a massive insight that solves the case that she is on. My view of the show turned.

A few pertinent observations before I continue:

One of the speakers at one of the early episodes of NED Talks made a point about how some of have possibly evolved to have what are now considered as “disorders”. “Hunting and gathering are team activities, and you need different skills for it. Not everyone needs to run after the prey. The autistic person in the tribe will be able to detect where the prey is and the rest can hunt it”.
So we have evolved to be different like this. Putting together genetics and game theory, it is a “mixed strategy”.
The downside of being able to connect seemingly unconnected things is that you tend to hallucinate. I’ve written about this, in a completely different context.
Another downside of seeing visions and connecting unconnected things to find a solution to the problem that you’re working on is that it makes it incredibly difficult to communicate your solution. Having seen it in a “vision”, it is less explainable. You cannot “show steps”. Then again I don’t think this trait is specific to people with ADHD or on the autism spectrum – I know one person (very well) who doesn’t have ADHD by any stretch of imagination, but has a worse problem than me in showing steps
I have always been happy that I didn’t study law because it’s “too fighter” and “involves too much mugging”. But then the protagonist in this show shows remarkable attention to detail on things that she can hyperfocus on (and which her visions of whales can lead to). I’ve also read about how Michael Burry found holes in CDOs (back in 2008 during the global financial crisis) because he was able to hyperfocus on some details because he has Aspergers (now classified under the autism spectrum in general)

Anyway as I was writing this, I half watched parts of the second episode. In this again, the protagonist had another vision of the whales, which led to something else and an insight that led her to win her case. Now it appears stereotyping again, after I saw the same setup in two different episodes – it seems like the standard format the show has set up on.

I don’t know if I’ll half watch any more.

Conductors and CAPM

For a long time I used to wonder why orchestras have conductors. I possibly first noticed the presence of the conductor sometime in the 1990s when Zubin Mehta was in the news. And then I always wondered why this person, who didn’t play anything but stood there waving a stick, needed to exist. Couldn’t the orchestra coordinate itself like rockstars or practitioners of Indian music forms do?

And then i came across this video a year or two back.

And then the computer science training I’d gone through two decades back kicked in – the job of an orchestra conductor is to reduce an O(n^2) problem to an O(n) problem.

For a group of musicians to make music, they need to coordinate with each other. Yes, they have the staff notation and all that, but still they need to know when to speed up or slow down, when to make what transitions, etc. They may have practiced together but the professional performance needs to be flawless. And so they need to constantly take cues from each other.

When you have $n$ musicians who need to coordinate, you have $\frac{n.(n-1)}{2}$ pairs of people who need to coordinate. When $n$ is small, this is trivial, and so you see that small ensembles or rock bands can easily coordinate. However, as $n$ gets large, $n^2$ grows well-at-a-faster-rate. And that is a problem, and a risk.

Enter the conductor. Rather than taking cues from one another, the musicians now simply need to take cues from this one person. And so there are now only $n$ pairs that need to coordinate – each musician in the band with the conductor. Or an $O(n^2)$ problem has become an $O(n)$ problem!

For whatever reason, while I was thinking about this yesterday, I got reminded of legendary finance professor R Vaidya‘s class on capital asset pricing model (CAPM), or as he put it “Sharpe single index model” (surprisingly all the links I find for this are from Indian test prep sites, so not linking).

We had just learnt portfolio theory, and how using the expected returns, variances and correlations between a set of securities we could construct an “efficient frontier” of securities that could give us the best risk-adjusted return. Seemed very mathematically elegant, except that in case you needed to construct a portfolio of $n$ stocks, you needed $n^2$ correlations. In other word, an $O(n^2)$ problem.

And then Vaidya introduced CAPM, which magically reduced the problem to an $O(n)$ problem. By suddenly introducing the concept of an index, all that mattered for each stock now was its beta – the coefficient of its returns proportional to the index returns. You didn’t need to care about how stocks reacted with each other any more – all you needed was the relationship with the index.

In a sense, if you think about it, the index in CAPM is like the conductor of an orchestra. If only all $O(n^2)$ problems could be reduced to $O(n)$ problems this elegantly!

Does alma matter?

I just spent the holiday afternoon massively triggering myself by watching the just-released Netflix documentary Alma Matters, about life in IIT Kharagpur. Based on the trailer itself, I thought I could relate to it, thanks to my four years at IIT Madras. And so my wife and I sat, and spent three hours on the documentary. Our daughter was with us for the first half hour, and then disappeared for reasons mentioned below.

I have too many random thoughts in my head right now, so let me do this post in bullet points.

I have always had mixed feelings about my time at IIT Madras. On the one hand, I found it incredibly depressing. Even now, the very thought of going to Chennai depresses me. On the other, I have a lot of great memories from there, and built a strong network.
Now that I think of it, having watched the documentary, a lot of those “great memories” were simply about me making the best use of a bad situation I was in. I don’t think I want to put myself, or my daughter, through that kind of an experience again
My basic problem at IIT was that I just couldn’t connect with most people there. I sometimes joke that I couldn’t connect with 80% of the people there, but remain in touch with the remaining 20%. And that is possibly right.
The problem is that most people there were either “too fighter”, always worried about and doing academics, or “too given up”, not caring about anything at all in life. I couldn’t empathise with either and ended up having a not so great time.
My wife intently watched the show with me, even though she got bored by the end of the first episode. “It’s all so depressing”, she kept saying. “Yes, this is how life was”, I kept countering.
And then I think she caught the point. “Take out the cigarettes and alcohol, and this is just like school. Not like college at all”, she said. And I think that quite sums up IIT for me. We were adults (most of us for most of the time – I turned eighteen a few months after I joined), but were treated like children for the most part. And led our lives like children in some ways, either being too regimented, or massively rebelling.

“Now I can see why people don’t grow up when they go to IIT”, my wife said. After I had agreed, she went on, “this applies to you as well. You also haven’t grown up”. I couldn’t counter.
The “maleness” of the place wasn’t easy to notice. After one scene, my wife mentioned that we spend such a long time in the prime years of our lives dealing only with other men, that it is impossible to have normal relationships later on. It’s only a few who have come from more liberal backgrounds, or who manage to unlearn the IIT stuff, who manage to have reasonably normal long-term relationships.
The maleness of IITs was also given sort of ironic treatment by the show. There is a segment in the first episode about elections, which shows a female candidate, about how girls have a really bad time at IIT due to the massively warped sex ratio (in my time it was 16:1), and so it is difficult for girls to get respect.
And then that turned out to be the “token female segment” in the show, as girls were all but absent in the rest of the three hours. That girls hardly made it to the show sort of self-reinforced the concept that girls aren’t treated well at IITs,
After intently watching for half an hour, my daughter asked, “if this is a movie about IIT, why aren’t you in it?”. I told her that it’s about a different IIT. “OK fine. I’ll watch it when they make a movie about your IIT”, she said and disappeared.
While the second and third episodes of the show were too long-drawn and sort of boring, I did manage to finish the show end-to-end in one sitting, which has to say something about it being gripping (no doubt to someone like me who could empathise with parts of it).
Finally, watch this trailer to the show. Watch what the guy says about people with different CGPA ranges.
He talks about “respect 8 pointers and don’t like 9 pointers”. That sort of made me happy since I finished (I THINK) with a CGPA of 8.9

If you’re from an IIT, you are likely to empathise with the show. If you are close to someone from IIT, you might appreciate them better when you watch it. Overall three episodes is too long-drawn. The first episode is a good enough gist of life at IIT.

And yeah, trigger warnings apply.

Spirit of Rangeela

The bad news is that Rangeela songs are not available on Spotify (my music streaming app of choice). The good news is that instead I turn to Youtube to watch them, and get the “full experience” instead.

It’s 25 years since Rangeela released, and Mint has done a feature on “25 reasons to love Rangeela“. Here are my own thoughts on why I loved the movie and why it had such a big influence on my life.

I remember the date when I watched Rangeela. 25th October 1995. It was the last day of an epic long weekend caused due to Diwali and a total solar eclipse. Two of my cousins were visiting us, and the previous day, after the eclipse had passed, we had gone to watch The Mask (along with my dad). On the 25th, we went to watch Rangeela.

I watched Rangeela in the theatre only once (sadly, in hindsight), and watched it sitting next to my dad (and cousins). I was nearly 13 years old. We had gone to Urvashi, which was then (and maybe even now) one of Bangalore’s biggest cinema halls. Urvashi had recently undergone a makeover, getting a Dolby stereo system in the process. And I had never listened to Rahman’s music before.

I remember it being a insane experience. It was so insane (in a positive way) that even today, 25 years later, listening to the songs rekindled the memory of sitting in Urvashi, and imagining Rahman’s sounds hitting my ears from all directions. And to combine that with the awesome visuals – remember that I had just hit puberty and this was one of my first movies after that event (The Mask, obviously, being another).

Watching the videos on Youtube now, I still think Urmila Matondkar looks stunning in the movie. Even otherwise, the cinematography is first grade, and the visuals are stunning. I can only imagine how the 12-year-old me might have felt looking at all that on a big screen back then (with my father sitting right next to me).

I have written here earlier about how the teens are possibly the optimal years of movie appreciation. And it was influential for sure. For the next couple of years, Spirit of Rangeela was a fixture for choreography shows at inter-school cul-fests. Some of us little teenagers who assumed we were jilted in love sang (or whistled) Kya Kahe Kya Na Kahe. Tanha Tanha, of course, was yet another level.

Sometimes I wonder, if the movie would have had the same effect on me had I not watched it on a really large screen, in a theatre with awesome audio. Maybe Rahman’s Hindi debut deserved that.

My apologies if this post appears scattered. I’ve been listening to (and watching) the songs of Rangeela on loop for the last two hours, and it has triggered all sorts of thoughts in me. And there have been too many things to write here.

Maybe I should’ve done a tweetstorm instead.

Jio, Amazon and Information Content

A long long time ago I had installed the Jio Cinema app on my Fire TV Stick. I had perhaps watched two movies on that, and then completely forgotten about it. This evening, I had to look for a movie to watch my the wife, and having exhausted most of the “compatible content” (stuff we can watch together on Netflix) and been exhausted by the user experience on Prime Video, I decided to give this app a try.

I ended up selecting a movie, which I later found out has a 4.5 IMDB rating and doesn’t even have a Wikepedia page. Needless to say, we abandoned the movie midway. That’s when the wife went in to put the daughter to bed and my fun began.

So Jio Cinema follows what I call the “Amazon paradigm for product management”. Since Amazon tries to sell every product (or service) as if it is a physical book, it has one single mantra for product management. “Improve selection and they will come”.

The user experience doesn’t matter. How easy the product is to use, and how pleasing it looks on the eye, and whether it has occasional bugs, is all secondary. All that matters is selection. Given that the company built its business on the back of selling “long tail” books, this is not so surprising, except that it doesn’t necessarily work in other categories.

I’ve written about Amazon’s ineptitude in product management before, in the context of that atrocity of an app called Sony Liv. The funny thing is that the Jio Cinema app (on Fire TV Stick) looks and feels pretty much exactly like Sony Liv. Maybe there is an open source shitty fire TV app that these guys have based themselves on?

In any case, I started browsing the Jio Cinema app, and I found something called “movies in 15 minutes“. Initially I thought it was a parody. The first few movies I noticed there were things I had never heard of. “This is perhaps for bad movies”, I reasoned. I kept scrolling, and more recognisable names popped up.

I decided to watch Deewana, which was released just before the start of my optimal age of movie appreciation, and which, for some reason, we didn’t get home a video cassette of.

It’s basically a collage of scenes from the movie. It’s like someone has put together a “highlights package”, taking all the important scenes and then putting them together.

And for a movie like Deewana it works. The 15 minute version had all the necessary plot elements to fully follow the movie. It is a great movie, for 15 minutes. Maybe at 30 minutes as well it might be a great movie. However, I can’t imagine having watched it in the full version.

That was two hours back. I’ve since gone crazy watching 15 minute versions of many other movies (mostly from the 70s and 80s, though they have movies as recent as Jab We Met). It’s been fantastic.

However, I have one crib. This has to do with information content. Essentially, the premise behind “movies in 15 minutes” is that the information content in these movies is so little that the whole thing can be compressed into 15 minutes. The problem is that not every movie has the same amount of information.

15 minutes was perfect for Deewana. It was also appropriate for Kasam Paida Karne Waali Ki, which I watched only because it gets referenced in Gangs of Wasseypur. Between these two, I “watched” Namak Halaal, and I didn’t understand the head or tail of it. I had to go to Wikepedia to understand the plot.

Essentially the plot of Namak Halaal is complex enough, I imagine, that compressing it into 15 minutes is impossible without significant information loss. And the loss of information was so much that I couldn’t understand the summary at all. Maybe I’ll watch the movie in full some day.

I’m writing this blogpost after watching the 15 minute version of Don. I guess whoever made the summary realised that the movie is so complex that it can’t really be compressed into 15 minutes – and so they have added a voiceover to narrate the key elements.

In any case, I’m feeling super thrilled. I normally don’t watch movies because the bit rate in most movies is too low. Compression means that I can happily watch the movies without ever getting bored.

I wish they made these 15 minute versions of all movies. Jio, all (your Amazon-style product maangement) is forgiven.

Now on to Amar Akbar Anthony.

Conductors and CAPM

Recently I watched this video that YouTube recommended to me about why orchestras have conductors.

The basic idea is that an orchestra needs a whole lot of coordination, in terms of when to begin and end, when to slow down or speed up, when to move to the next line and so on. And in case there is no conductor, the members of the orchestra need to coordinate among themselves.

This is easy enough when there is a small number of members, so you don’t see bands (for example) needing conductors. However, notice that if the orchestra has to coordinate among themselves, coordination is an $O(n^2)$ problem. By appointing an external conductor whose only job is to conduct and not play, this $O(n^2)$ problem is reduced to an $O(n)$ problem.

When I saw this, this took me back to my Investments course in IIMB, where the professor one day introduced what he called the “Sharpe single index model“, which is sort of similar to the CAPM.

Just before learning the Sharpe Single Index Model, we had been learning about Markowitz’s portfolio theory. And then, as he introduced the Sharpe Single Index Model, Vaidya said something to the effect that “instead of knowing so many correlation terms” (which is an $O(n^2)$ problem), “we only need to know the correlation of each stock to the market index” (makes it an $O(n)$ problem).

As someone who has studied computer science formally, converting $O(n^2)$ problems to $O(n)$ problems is a massive fascination. It is interesting how I connected two such reductions from completely different fields.

In other words, conductors are the “market of the orchestra”.

Half-watching movies, and why I hate tweetstorms

It has to do with “bit rate”

I don’t like tweetstorm. Up to six tweets is fine, but beyond that I find it incredibly difficult to hold my attention for. I actually find it stressful. So of late, I’ve been making a conscious effort to stop reading tweetstorms when they start stressing me out. The stress isn’t worth any value that the tweetstorms may have.

The tweetstorm is an emerging art-form but in most cases it is rather unreadable. A slightly longer form such as a blog or an essay is so much better! https://t.co/OyLcSV7C01

— Karthik (@karthiks) April 18, 2020

I remember making the claim on twitter that I refuse to read any more tweetstorms of more than six tweets henceforth. I’m not able to find that tweet now.

Anyways…

Why do I hate tweetstorms? It is for the same reason that I like to “half-watch” movies, something that endlessly irritates my wife. I has to do with “bit rates“.

I use the phrase “bit rate” to refer to the rate of flow of information (remember that bit is a measure of information).

The thing with movies is that some of them have very low bit rate. More importantly, movies have vastly varying bit rates through their lengths. There are some parts in a movie where pretty much nothing happens, and a lot of it is rather predictable. There are other parts where lots happens.

This means that in the course of a movie you find yourself engrossed in some periods and bored in others, and that can be rather irritating. And boredom in the parts where nothing is happening sometimes leads me to want to turn off the movie.

So I deal with this by “half watching”, essentially multi tasking while watching. Usually this means reading, or being on twitter, while watching a movie. This usually works beautifully. When the bit rate from the movie is high, I focus. When it is low, I take my mind off and indulge in the other thing that I’m doing.

It is not just movies that I “half-watch” – a lot of sport also gets the same treatment. Like right now I’m “watching” Watford-Southampton as I’m writing this.

A few years back, my wife expressed disapproval of my half-watching. By also keeping a book or computer, I wasn’t “involved enough” in the movie, she started saying, and that half-watching meant we “weren’t really watching the movie together”. And she started demanding full attention from me when we watched movies together.

The main consequence of this is that I started watching fewer movies. Given that I can rather easily second-guess movie plots, I started finding watching highly predictable stuff rather boring. In any case, I’ve recently received permission to half-watch again, and have watched two movies in the last 24 hours (neither of which I would have been able to sit through had I paid full attention – they had low bit rates).

So what’s the problem with tweetstorms? The problem is that their bit rate is rather high. With “normal paragraph writing” we have come to expect a certain degree of redundancy. This allows us to skim through stuff while getting information from them at the same time. The redundancy means that as long as we get some key words or phrases, we can fill in the rest of the stuff, and reading is rather pleasant.

The thing with a tweetstorm is that each sentence (tweet, basically) has a lot of information packed into it. So skimming is not an option. And the information hitting your head at the rate that tweetstorms generally convey can result in a lot of stress.

The other thing with tweetstorms, of course, is that each tweet is disjoint from the one before and after it. So there is no flow to the reading, and the mind has to expend extra energy to process what’s happening. Combine this with a rather high bit rate, and you know why I can’t stand them.

Finite and infinite cricket games

I’ve written about James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games here before. It is among the more influential books I’ve read, though it’s a bit of a weirdly written book, almost in a constant staccato tone.

From one of my previous posts:

One of the most influential books I’ve read is James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games. Finite Games are artificial games where we play to “win”. There is a defined finish, and there is a set of tasks that we need to achieve that constitutes “victory”. Most real-life games are on the other hand are “infinite games” where the objective is to simply ensure that the game simply goes on.

I’ve spent most of this evening watching The Test, the Amazon Prime documentary about the Australian cricket team after Sandpapergate. It’s a good half-watch. Parts of it demand a lot of attention, but overall it’s a nice “background watch” while I’m doing something else.

In any case, the reason for writing the post is this little interview of Harsha Bhogle somewhere in the middle of this documentary (he has appeared several times more after this one). In this bit, he talks about how in Test cricket, the opponent might be having a good time for a while, but it is okay to permit him that. To paraphrase Gully Boy, “apna time aayega” – the bowler or batsman in question will tire or diminish after some time, after which you can do your business.

He went on to say that this is not the case in limited overs cricket (ODIs and T20s) where both batsmen and bowlers need to constantly look to dominate, and cannot simply look to “survive” when an opponent is on the roll.

While Test cricket is strictly not an “infinite game” (it needs to end in five days), I thought this was a beautiful illustration of the concept of finite and infinite games. The objective of an infinite game, as James Carse describes in his book, is to just continue to play the game.

As a batsman in Test cricket, you look to just be there, weather out the good spells and spend time at the crease. You do this and the runs will come (it is analogous for bowlers – you need to bowl well enough to continue to be in the game, and then when the time comes you will get your rewards).

In ODIs and T20s, you cannot bide your time. Irrespective of how the opponent is playing, you need to “win every moment”, which is the premise for a finite game.

Now, I don’t know what I’m getting at here, and what he point of this post is, but I think I just liked Harsha Bhogle’s characterisation of Tests as infinite games, and wanted to share that with you.

Social comedy

I’m reminded of this old interview with late actor and director Kashinath. I’ve forgotten which program it was on, so I’m unable to find the link. In that he kept talking about how as a budding filmmaker, he had been taught to “make films about social issues”.

And so in each of his movies, he made sure he incorporated one or the other social issue. Like I remember as a kid going to this movie called avaLe nanna henDathi (which he remade in Hindi as “Jawani Zindabad”) – this was about dowry.

The thing with Kashinath was that while he made his movies about social issues, he made sure they were at least partly funny. Before we go ahead, I’d urge you to see this legendary song from anantana avaantara , made by and starring Kashinath (trust me, you’ll find it funny even if you don’t understand Kannada).

It’s not just Kashinath who had this mission that any movie should have an underlying “social message”. Go back to any 1990s comedy, and you will find that they follow the same formula. You might laugh for a total of 15 minutes through the duration of the movie, but the need for social messaging means that there are inevitable sad elements in the plot.

Also, a usual template of these movies (across languages) was to pack the first half with jokes and other funny things, and then let the serious stuff take over in the second half (you wouldn’t lose much entertainment by leaving at the interval).

This largely changed after 1999 (or so), when the film industry got “industry” status, bringing in corporate money and formal production houses. The need for sending out social messages went out with socialism, and so the quality of movies in the 2000s became (on average) better. Funny movies could afford to be entirely funny rather than spending one half sending out a social message.

I was thinking about this yesterday when I watched shubh mangal zyaada savdhaan (starring Ayushmannnnn Khurrraannnnnaa), a movie about a gay couple trying to gain acceptance from one of their families. The movie seemed to be a straight throwback to the nineteen eighties.

The first half was funny, with a laugh a minute. All the classic elements of Indian film comedy were present in this half. And then came the intermission (yes, that was indicated even though I saw the movie on Prime Video). And the movie, in 80s style, went off into social messaging mode.

The last 40 minutes was an absolute drag. The story refused to move as the characters went about extolling diversity and inclusion. Whatever was remaining of the story was rather predictable. There was no “information content”. And that left me a tad disappointed.

There is a reason that Ganeshana Maduve remains my all-time favourite Indian movie. Despite being made in 1990, it is an out-and-out comedy, with no social messaging thrown in (the director Phani Ramachandra, who later made the sitcom daNDa piNDagaLu, was a bit of an outlier).

The best part of the movie, in hindsight (ok I’ve watched it at least 50 times) is that it ends rather abruptly. The comedy goes on till the very last moment, and when you think that you’re facing a boring scene, all characters get into one frame (the standard ending of 1980s movies) and “shubham” or some such appears on the screen.

If you haven’t watched the movie, I might remind you that it is available in full on Youtube (unfortunately there are no subtitles, so you’ll need to know Kannada for this one).

I really don’t know why this genre of comedy didn’t catch on, and instead we have filmmakers continuing to proselytise us with social virtues.

Diamonds and Rust

So this post is going to piss off the wife on at least two counts. Firstly, she thinks I’m “spending too much time on the computer” nowadays, and not enough with her. Secondly, this post refers to an old crush who my wife thinks I had “blogged too much about” (the implication is that I don’t blog enough about my wife).

Then again, I think I’ve been taking myself too seriously on this blog of late, and so need something to break out of this rut, and this post is something I’ve been intending to write for a long time. So I’m taking a chance here.

The song in question is Diamonds and Rust, originally performed by Joan Baez, and then covered by Judas Priest in their album Sin After Sin.

I was first introduced to this song by the Judas Priest version. It was that time back in college where I had computer, and access to a LAN full of pirated music, and was sampling all the bands that I thought might be cool (it’s another matter that I ended up liking a lot of these “cool” bands, including Judas Priest).

As was my wont then whenever I “discovered” some artist, I would listen to all their works in order, album by album. I do this nowadays as well, when I “rediscover” artists. And so I got introduced to Diamonds and Rust. I remember the song immediately making an impression on me, but not too much (the other song that that made an immediate impact was called “between the hammer and the anvil“, and I’d wondered if it was about the mechanics of the inner ear).

Anyway, in the middle of discovering Judas Priest for the first time, I met this girl. I mean I’d known her for a really long time but this was the first time we were “having a conversation”. We had met at this tiny cafe full of college kids (we were also college kids then) where she had made a big fuss about being a “low calorie person”. Music was playing. Soon a vaguely familiar sounding song played, in a voice that wasn’t familiar at all. Between bits of the conversation, all I caught from the song was that it was “_____ and _____ “. Surprisingly for me, I didn’t try to immediately figure out which song it was upon returning to my room that night.

The years went by. I probably ended up blogging this girl a bit too much for my own good later on. The person who is now my wife read some of those posts and thought she had found a guy who would write loads about her as well. I started off brightly, but in the long term I don’t think I’ve lived up to the expectation.

I don’t recall the circumstances in which I rediscovered Diamonds And Rust. It happened in London, either towards the end of 2017 or the beginning of 2018. I think the rediscovery again happened through Judas Priest – I was working through their albums one by one after a 12 year gap, and chanced upon Diamonds And Rust again. Some chord (not literally) hit. I went down a rabbit hole.

I realised this was possibly the song that had initially registered all those years ago, and that I had heard in the cafe. Googling revealed it was a cover, and the original did sound very familiar (I think this is the story. I’ve sat on this post for so long now I’ve really forgotten). I was convinced. The Joan Baez version did seem very familiar. It all started coming back to me. The next couple of days I was careful around the wife so she wouldn’t realise that I had gotten excited about something vaguely related to an old crush.

In any case, I liked the cover so much that soon I started creating a playlist of “metal covers of non-metal songs”.

I called it “Rust Covers Diamonds” (get the clever pun?). I’m listening to that playlist right now as I write this. It’s a public playlist, so feel free to listen to it. You’ll love a lot of the songs in it! Especially the first “title track”.

Update

There is one thing I don’t like about Diamonds and Rust, and I blame Joan Baez for it (Judas Priest simply copied it without checking it seems). The song is not dimensionally consistent. Check the lyrics:

And here I sit, hand on the telephone
Hearing the voice I’d known
A couple of light years ago
Heading straight for a fall

Light year is a unit of distance, not time. So “a couple of light years ago” makes absolutely no sense. I really don’t know how the editors let that pass. Then again, you don’t expect most editors to know physics!