The Good Read

A timeless classic, an unparalleled masterpiece, a visionary pioneer. Though often unheard or casually ignored by many movie fans of today, to almost all directors, critics, journalists unanimously, Citizen Kane is the most valuable piece of cinematic art. Why? Simply because it is  Citizen Kane , a film that has single-handedly exerted greater influence in the history of cinema than anything else. Sounds too unreal? Well, by the time you finish reading this, it won’t anymore! (I hope!) This 1941 black & white movie directed by Orson Welles basically tells the story of world’s biggest media tycoon, Charles Foster Kane (a fictional character very loosely based on William Randolph Hearst)- his background, his rise to fame, his inevitable fall, his melancholic end. It’s very, very tough to squeeze 80 years of a man’s life into 2 hours, especially all the more so if that man never existed in the real world. And Citizen Kane does just that; and that too in a groundbreaking fa...

To some, it is the future; to some, the end. Since its foundation as an academic discipline in 1955, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has always been one of the hottest topics of controversy around the world. Whether you love it or hate it or don’t care about it, artificial intelligence deserves the attention it demands. For a name so popular, AI is often, unsurprisingly though, misunderstood. It is very tough to define AI, because it’s almost impossible to understand Intelligence in the first place. John McCarthy, father of AI discipline said, “Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” Though we usually assign learning, reasoning to the term intelligence, the underrated processes that we take for granted, such as- commonsense, general intelligence, perception etc, are also some integral parts of intelligence. As we continue to understand the concept of what makes us human, the d...

Mystery, thrill, suspense, drama, action- Inception, Christopher “Dark Knight” Nolan’s masterpiece has it all. Unquestionably one of the greatest films ever made, Inception has stunned us with its uniquely twisted plot, baffled us with its intricacies, confused us with its ending, made us forget about our own surroundings. But don’t worry, I am not here to say what has already been said about it a thousand times before; rather I want to break down to you, as simply as I can, how the whole movie unfurled. (So needless to say, if you haven’t watched it yet, please, for your own sake, go see it now and come back later, if you want to.) The thing about this movie is, no matter how many times you watch it, whenever you start talking or thinking about it, you always have to straighten up some things in your mind first- ‘what does the dreamer do’, ‘what does ‘subject’ mean’, ‘how does the subconscious react in a dream’- things like these. To get you going, the dreamer builds the world ...