Even if you feel the kind of fleeting compassion that trains foster between passengers, the truth is, you are probably glad to get out of there when your stop comes around. Rotting flesh smells really bad — menacing and putrid and full of despair — and you want to run from it. What can you do against that, really, other than flee?

Recently, I read one of C.S. Lewis’ counterblasts to agnosticism, “The Screwtape Letters.” This is admittedly weird reading material and is not very zeitgeist at all, given Christopher Hitchens’ untimely demise (author of “Why God is Not Great”). That, and the fact that Lewis’ book is a bit of Christian propaganda. But rest assured, I read it for the literature value only, and maybe to see how Lewis would have approached the matter of the smell. Charity, devilish Uncle Screwtape would have us (not) believe, is a daily attitude shift that starts at home. Then, the Dalai Lama’s “The Power of Compassion” is a series of lectures on the subject of compassion that an old friend once sent my way. I certainly didn’t set out to write a book review, and find each book I’ve mentioned pleasing in its own way; I’m also not about to launch into a propaganda piece about compassion in general, and how we could use more of it. If anything, I have ambivalent views. I once set aside a Buddhist tract on the subject with frustration because it counseled us to “love our children a little less” and “love our spouses less” all in order to achieve a more transcendent kind of compassion: the kind accompanied by true detachment. That may be fine in the Himalayas, but it doesn’t resonate in NYC, where the intensity of every day experience is amped so high. Detachment itself seems like a goal that’s hard to achieve. Anyway, love seems to be the good stuff in the universe, so why not love your child or your spouse as much as you can, helplessly and without restraint and to distraction? And there’s still the conundrum of the smell on the train; reading doesn’t help with that, unless your book is so engrossing that you forget the stench between stops.

Last year ended on a high note for me. In December, Samosapedia was asked to speak at a conference in Jaipur called INK. My business partner Vikram gave a well-received talk, and attending the conference brought us inspiration and opportunity. Like TED, the INK Conference is the kind of venue that eludes categorization; you bump into exceptional people from different fields — scientists, dancers, artists, actors, humanitarians, entrepreneurs, musicians, technologists, doctors, and historians, amongst others — and then, after a day of talks, you go out on the town and experience synergy. At INK, I saw someone speak that gave me a radically new perspective on compassion. Just knowing someone like that even exists is inspiring.

I saw Prakash Amte being interviewed about his life. Prakash is a man who has dedicated his entire life to providing medical care for tribes in a poverty stricken part of India, in a way that verges on mythical. He set up shop as a doctor in an area so forgotten by time that human sacrifice was still practiced there by a malnourished populace, seeking cures from witch doctors. Amte and his wife slowly introduced modern medicine to the area, often uncovering extraordinary human courage coupled with devastating tragedy. There’s the story of a man attacked by a bear in the forest, who was carried through the forest for 48 hours till he reached the make-shift hospital. The man’s face was horribly mauled; his scalp hung off his skull like a loose bandana, and he had lost both his eyes. Amte cleaned up the wound, and stitched him up without anesthesia, giving the man over a hundred stitches in front of his family. The man didn’t even flinch or cry out once as his scalp was stitched back on, showing extraordinary tolerance to pain. He was sent back blind, but alive. And the story may well have ended there, with Amte as a local hero. But when Amte asked after the man’s fate some time later, he found he had died slowly of starvation. His blindness prevented him from feeding himself properly.

You can watch the talk to learn of how he performed a cataract surgery straight out of the manual for the first time, and how he helped someone recover their eyesight, or about what it is like to raise leopards, tigers, and lions, and watch your children play with poisonous snakes. He was asked by the interviewer why he feels no fear around wild animals; he answered with a word, predictable and saccharine, yet so affirming: “love.” I thought of sadhus in ashrams, mystical men surrounded by a coterie of big cats, radiating peace. I found it inspiring, and deeply moving. I glanced around the room, and saw a few damp eyes. This wasn’t just the love you give your children, or the love you give your spouse. It was something bigger than that, something that encompassed other beings, whether they were humans or animals or the environment you live in. Do a search for Prakash Amte on the web. One of the images that comes up is of him with his hand in a leopard’s mouth.

Towards the end of the talk, he was asked what he might demand of the audience. Here, you could imagine a solicitation for donations, but instead, all he asked was for us to visit places that give you perspective, like the remote forest village where he works. To go to places where people live so differently than you do, that you gain a bigger understanding of the world you live in, just by having having that experience.

Which I suppose brings me back to the F train. I had to come back there somehow, didn’t I? A city like New York is like Mumbai or Sao Paulo, maddening with contradictions. In the same city as last night’s venture capital event, someone with a gangrenous wound, huddled by themselves, isolated beyond recognition, is sharing my ride. Now I suppose I’ll gesticulate adamantly into the ether, saying we have to have a health care system that doesn’t let this happen. I didn’t promise to solve the problem; I’m just calling it out. But I know that by leaving the house, on my way to a place I’m supposed to get to, I’ve ventured to a place that gives me perspective. The year’s still young; taking the NYC subway might not be what Amte means, but it’s all I’ve got for you now, really. Every day gives you a chance to be “conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.” DFW said that to a graduating class; I’m going to crib my New Year’s greeting to you from him, too: I wish you so much more than luck.

Let us also say you’re vague on the answers, mumbling something about a startup, about Sanford Meisner, about films, and about some writing that you intend to do. You like what Woody Allen said about how much of life and success is just showing up, so you show up a lot: you’re seen loitering at TEDx events; you attend meetings at generalassemb.ly; you fidget in the background at writer’s meet-ups in Brooklyn; at the New York Public Library, you find the quietest reading room possible and skulk there with your laptop; you hang out with web developers at a hackspace, doing something; once, you’re even seen on stage in an off-off Broadway scene. The vagueness doesn’t bode well, since it doesn’t douse the curiosity about your structured sabbatical, and certainly doesn’t help answer the hardest questions of them all: are you happy and do you like NYC? To complete this picture, let us also say that on Big Love Day in mid February, you aren’t certain that you even want to go out, really. You don’t like Valentine’s Day, owing to circumstances beyond your control.

But you do go out, in the end. Your buddies Dave and Dhruva — the guys behind Sub Swara — tell you it’ll be a cool house party, and something about staying in by your lonesome smacks of concession to the winter (you resolved earlier on that you wouldn’t bail on things because of the cold). Before long, you’re in the Village, and you find yourself in one of the nicest apartments you’ve ever seen. You look around and have some questions. Like, why is everyone at this party so tall? And who is the host? And who are these people? The food’s really good, though, and soon you’re in line waiting for a shot at the punch bowl. A really intense young woman plays piano and sings her ass off about heartbreak. She’s a friend of the host’s, and you’re impressed with her song. The host has musical friends, and an incredible record collection.

“GORDON is going to sing soon! Right after Joan!” someone tells you.

Oh, you say. You politely nod. She seems a bit nonplussed by your attitude, and walks over to someone else.

“Do you even KNOW who Gordon is?” she says to no one in particular.

So you feel embarrassed. You want to ask her how you can possibly know who Gordon is, since you’re new around here? Or who Joan is. You just walked in, and you only know the two people you walked in with. You want to point out that her irritation is unreasonable, and express that you wish she wasn’t so snooty, but then, you’re afraid you’ll seem unreasonable, and you’re not actually unreasonable. You lose yourself to the punch bowl for a while, and make small talk with people.

You soon discover that you’re surrounded by musicians, and by music. And then, when Joan finally does sing a lovely song with a piano accompaniment, you realize that Joan is Joan Osborne (who is demonstrably one of us — unlike God — but with more ethereal beauty). The Gordon mentioned haughtily earlier is actually Gordon Gano of the Violent Femmes.

You find yourself enjoying yourself at this party now. You marvel at the fact that you could have stayed in, but you chose to go out. When Gordon actually sings, you know you’d recognize that voice anywhere, really, given enough context. He’s really short, and he’s losing hair (but so are you) and you flash back to long discussions about his unique voice in college. You remember listening to Blister in the Sun and Kiss Off and Gone Daddy Gone and you remember a beer-sodden conversation once about how much Gordon was in all your favorite music at the time: Gordon Gano from the Violent Femmes, Gordon Downie from The Tragically Hip, and then the album Gordon by the Barenaked Ladies. Dave is playing drums at the party while Gordon is singing, and it is all improvisational, and you suddenly feel awed by circumstances beyond your control.

It dawns on you then that this year, with her fluoridated water and her ad hoc punch bowl and her frigid winds and impatient snootiness, New York City is your Valentine, and you resolve to court her for some more time yet, as best as you know how.

My buddy Cindy Li fixes things. Like the time she fixed my kitchen sink with a broom, or realigned my closet door with a kitchen knife. Her blog post on DIY VW Bug lightbulb changing received more comments than any other blog post she wrote. She’s also designed a bunch of stuff, and so I pestered her to give my blog a face-lift.

Matt Harris, who translated Cindy’s design into code for WordPress (and code is poetry), gave me a three-column HTML5 template and some widgetry. Cindy used a picture of me clambering over a rocky hillock in San Francisco as a metaphor for the ‘new new arunerblog.’

So there it is. I’ve given the medium a facelift, and I promise you’ll hear more from me on my shiny new blog.

A day after getting back home from Norway, I took off for Whistler, British Columbia (taking my Scandinavian jetlag with me) to attend the Mozilla Summit.  In case you haven’t heard yet, here’s a brief summary of the various adventurous goings on: on Day 1, a traveler with worse jet lag than me saw a black bear rummaging through garbage; on Day 2, the Sea to Sky Highway collapsed, leaving us stranded atop the beautiful glacier park; on Day 3, the power went out in the conference hotel.  I opted out of the 8 hour bus drive back to Vancouver, and chose to circumvent the rock slide via sea plane  It was just… splendid.  I documented the whole thing in my Moz08 Flickr set.

I gave two talks at the summit — one on standards (links to my slides and a blog post summarizing what we talked about), and one with Seth Bindernagel on Firefox in India, my particular passion.  The India discussion occured on Day 3, when there was no power in the hotel.  So, a group of interested parties huddled around my laptop in a semi-circle, and we had a small, intimate and dimly lit discussion in a small room about fonts, the Indian government’s e-governance initiatives, and the propagation of standards-based platforms.  I had a deja vu moment when I realized that so many problems with the top Indian sites reminded me of the early era of callow markup, when the evangelism team was first constituted.  Seth and I are going to talk to major Indian ISVs about Mozilla, and plan some workshops to coincide with foss.in in November. India is like the new old frontier of the Web; proprietary stuff (like MSHTML particularities and Microsoft’s Dynamic Fonts) still permeate the marketplace. At the same time, the comScore data about India tells us that it has “one of the fastest growing Internet populations.”  It is high time Mozilla did something there.

See what I mean by eventful two weeks? Scandinavia and the Canadian Rockies, all for the Web.

But change is really in the offing for me, too, so all this talk of change in 2008 resonates with me on a more personal level. I resigned from AOL to do my own thing for a little while, and so far, it’s been great. Here’s what I learned about hard decisions.

You just make them.

OK, a bit too pithy, that last sentence. What I mean is, you listen to that voice inside your head, and you evaluate your opportunities, and you agonize a bit over things, and then you see the light.

That’s how it was with me. I liked working at AOL. A retrospective of my career there includes the time I spent as one of Netscape Communications’ Technology Evangelists, before we shipped viable Mozilla-based browsers. This was followed by the creation of the Mozilla Foundation in 2003 (and mass layoffs at AOL’s west coast campus, and soul searching on my part …). There was work with the Technology Strategy group, and work on Web Personalization (check out Mgnet), and W3C Standards work as AOL’s Advisory Committee Representative. Your work place kind of becomes a part of you. I mean, I was there for a whopping 6 years (and more, counting my time as a consultant for iPlanet doing work on Netscape’s Communicator 4.x series of browsers).

I’ll miss the great people I worked with. But the technical future of Web Personalization (check out Mgnet already) is in stonse’s able hands. And W3C stuff is in Kev’s able hands. And AOL will be AOL, with or without me.

So I’m going out to do some traveling, and some work on my own projects, and some searching, and some mending, and I’ll be back. Watch this space.

Now look –errare humanum est, right? Especially after a transatlantic flight, when you’re really, really tired and groggy? A sea of humans goes and stands in line behind various immigration counters, and I flow with them. I can’t really read the signs, since people are blocking the path ahead. And the lines are long.

As I near the counter, when I’m four people away from the end of the line, I notice that the sign on top of that particular counter says “EU Nationals Only.” And I glance a few lines to my right, and see a very long line of non-EU nationals, behind a counter that says “Non EU Nationals.” Whoops. I’m not an EU national — I have an Indian passport. What to do? I’m in some haste, since I don’t want to miss the connecting flight. Should I have gone to the back of the non-EU line, or waited to see what would happen at the end of the “EU Nationals Only” line? I wasn’t sure. I reasoned on the spot that the German official behind the “EU Only” line would perhaps stamp me through, but point out that I was in the wrong line. There was a chance that he would make me go to the back of the other line, but I was willing to take it.

It’s finally my turn, and I give him my passport.

“Wrong line, Mr. Gandhi” he says, and throws my passport back at me.

Umm, what?

“Gandhi?” I say stupidly?

“Yes, Mr. Gandhi. It’s zat line over zere. You go zere.”

I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“Gandhi?” I ask again. But now, I’m stung. I’m feeling the helpless sting of racism, and it feels really bad.

“Go ZERE. To ZAT line.”

Don’t get me wrong — there are worse things than being called Mr. Gandhi. I mean, the movie won a lot of Oscars, the guy liberated a nation through non-violence, and his face is on money and stuff. But, shouldn’t an official of the German government not say things like that? Or was this all humorous, with me being a bad sport?

So I went to the back of the line, choosing to ignore the urge to grin ruefully and say “Thanks for the pointer, Mr. Sauerkraut.” Because at that very instant, I couldn’t think of a positive historical figure from Germany that was around at the same time as Gandhi was, so that’s the best I could come up with.

Ricardo Elias’ The 12 Labors is as watchable as its peers, and shares thematic elements with Black Orfeu. Like the 1959 “cross-over” classic, the protagonist of The 12 Labors, Heracles, is named after a character in Greco-Roman mythology. The connection to mythology here, however, is not as pronounced. As we slowly learn, the mythical 12 tasks of Heracles (which includes slaying beasts, cleaning a filthy celestial stable in a day, and other impossible errands of redemption) serves more of a symbolic role in the story of a black youth in Sao Paulo.

Heracles (a winsome Sydney Santiago) is just out of the notorious Febem reformatory (a jail for minors), and seeks employment as a “Moto Boy” in Sao Paulo under the tutelage of his cousin Jonas (Flavio Baraqui). Moto Boys are errand and delivery boys on motorcycle, typically associated with a courier company. Sao Paulo’s streets run thick with 300,000 such Moto Boys, and as they weave their way through horrendous traffic conditions, it is said that as many as 2 a day die in a road accident.

Heracles’ tasks aren’t monstrous, but are more in line with the various trials and occasional indignities suffered by the Moto Boys in general. I won’t spoil it by breaking down each task, since a comparison to mythology isn’t instructive. The Brazilian hip-hop soundtrack choreographs scenes through intense Sao Paulo traffic beautifully. Heracles is a budding artist, and has shrewd observations about the people he meets as asides in his head. There’s a particularly thrilling scene which is essentially a short movie within a movie, in which one of Heracles’ comics is brought to life in a flashback sequence.

This movie bursts with life, but is dark, with a closing scene involving a motorcycle journey to the edge of the earth, by the ocean, serving as a striking metaphor for mortality’s encounter with the infinite. As the credits rolled, the audience was pensive and introspective.

We got a chance to speak to Ricardo Elias in person after the movie, and he said something that struck me as emblematic of what this movie is about. He said that in order to rise above your circumstances when you are black and poor in Sao Paulo is to do something akin to what a demi-god like Hercules had to do in the myth. To thwart your destiny, you had to achieve the impossible, like a member of the Olympian pantheon.

The opportunity to chat with Elias in person in a five minute aside about the parallels between Brazil and India as he walked out will be one of the highlights of this year’s SFIFF for me. There’s more to be said about finding in Brazilian narratives a vicarious link with Indian realities, but I’ll leave with the sentiment that I’d like emerging Indian cinema to be inspired by what’s coming out of Brazil.

Such ruminations on what constitutes revenge and payment in kind came to mind after I left the Kabuki theater following a screening of Kore-eada’s Hana. Remember that I said I’d review it as part of my role as a member of the citizen press corps? Hana is a beautiful, slow-moving treatise on the subject of revenge and forgiveness, steeped in Japanese samurai culture, and set in a time when the samurai are pretty much extraneous. Kore-eada’s story takes place in the Edo era (old Tokyo, circa 1701) when there are no battles to be fought, and the glorious samurai of yore basically sit around unemployed as festering malcontents.

The protagonist of the movie, Soza (played by Japanese pop star Junichi Okada) is sent by his samurai clan to reside in a village in Edo to avenge his slain father. We find this out slowly, as the village where the killer supposedly resides wakes up from slumber, and each of the characters are slowly introduced.

Here we find all the evocative imagery of a rural, poor Japan, and meet all the somewhat eccentric inhabitants of the village where Soza spends his exile. There’s the scheming, crafty village elder Sadashiro, who takes Soza under his wing, claiming to have located his father’s killer. And the village simpleton, who jumps up and down with glee, often at his own facile logic. Then there’s the attractive widow Osae (Rie Miyazawa), who Soza gazes shyly at for much of the movie. The love story, like the eventual unraveling of the revenge story, moves slowly, with humor (often slapstick) and deliberation. This is not a samurai movie with dazzling swordsmanship and riveting action scenes. It is Kore-eada’s first samurai movie, and I suspect bears his imprint as an auteur.

The baby faced Soza eschews violence, is actually a pathetic swordsman for a samurai, and prefers to teach reading and writing to the women and children who attend his school. He is the classic fumbling but likable anti-hero, viewed with suspicion by the ronin who reside in the village in disguise to avenge their master (a sub plot in the story), and with outright derision by Sodesan, a dark character with an intriguing past and connection to the village (another sub plot).

Kore-eada weaves in traditional Japanese art forms and pieces of Edo history into his movie. Soza is put in the humorous situation of playing a character in a “Kabuki Revenge Play” who wants to enact revenge in front of the entire village. This irritates the restless ronin, themselves members of the historically famous “47 Ronin” who serve as a backdrop to the story of Soza. The resulting scene is one of the slapstick delights of the movie.

Despite the obvious optimism about the human spirit on parade here, the conclusion of the movie is not excessively saccharine. The actual enactment of revenge is deeply touching without bordering on the mawkish. The movie felt long (127 minutes) but I was never restless. I laughed out loud several times, and was impressed by the clever symbolism. There is one extraordinary revelation on the connection between rice cakes and manure that had my peer group chuckling well after the movie ended. The discourse is witty enough through subtitles.

Not all the subplots are elegantly brought to resolution, however, and this remains my strongest nit about a movie that I thoroughly enjoyed. The story of Sodesan, the movie’s one dark horse, is not bought to a satisfying conclusion, and I wondered what purpose his angst-ridden existence served, since he isn’t a suitable character foil to Soza. In the end, my single nit could say more about my need for catharsis and less about Kore-eada.

I’d recommend this movie. It isn’t yet available on Netflix (my service of choice), but other works in Kore-eada’s corpus are. I suspect I’m going to have another love affair with Japanese cinema, following my first one with Kurosawa.

On Saturday at 4.30PM at the Kabuki, I’m going to watch Hana. This is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first samurai movie. Kore-eda apparently always wanted to make a samurai movie, and dabble in the genre that so captivated my imagination after watching Akira Kurosawa‘s Seven Samurai, Ran, and Yojimbo. There’s something about the reluctant (and perhaps fumbling and incapable) warrior with a sense of duty in the face of unpleasant circumstance that speaks to me personally. I’m really looking forward to it.

Later on in the evening, armed with a press pass, a blazer, and sheer panache, I’m going to try and hit the W hotel for the Midnight Awards party, honoring Rosario Dawson and Sam Rockwell. And even later on still, the Surya Dub guys are throwing their Saturday night party.

On Sunday I’m going to check out Desperately Seeking Images. Amongst other things, it includes short films made by camera phones. The whole short film genre is something I’m entirely ignorant of, and so I’m considering this an exercise in genre expansion.

I’m really compelled to check out Brazilian film The 12 Labors, either on Sunday night or later. It takes Heracles’ 12 Tasks as mythological inspiration for one young adult’s trials in modern day Sao Paulo. Using Greco-Roman myth as inspiration for a contemporary Brazilian story has been done before, notably with Orfeu Negro (made in 1959) and a mediocre 1999 remake. Brazilian cinema continues to floor me, with Eu Tu Eles, City of God and Carandiru. I have high expectations.

Other events I may try and catch include a night of readings and discussions in honor of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road (50 years later!) with folks like Peter Coyote (making it a very San Francisco event), and a conversation with Spike Lee, in which a screening of episodes III and IV of his documentary “When the Levees Broke” takes place.

This is the 50th Anniversary of this film festival. I still can’t believe I scored a press pass. It’s going to be an interesting weekend.