The wait till The Dark Knight Rises

I have seen ‘The Dark Knight’ twelve times and I still get chills when I hear Gordon give the speech after his son says “He didn’t do anything wrong”. The first few times I watched the movie, when Batman hops onto the Batpod and zooms away fading out into the credits, I was stunned and kept hunting for news and rumors of the possibility of an equally stunning sequel. I think when I watched it the fourth time, I saw a page come up for an ‘Untitled Batman Project’ on IMDB. The page did not have any details about the cast, but that wasn’t what I was looking for anyway. I was excited when I saw the director’s name, but was upset it was going to take a wait till 2012.

Waiting became more difficult in 2010, with several teasers and pictures of the set coming out in what was possibly a planned leak to generate interest in the movie. After a bunch of people and reviews spoiled a couple of movies I would have otherwise liked, I learnt to go into the theatre without any expectations and keep away from the news as much as possible. But ever since I learnt that ‘Untitled Batman Project’ had become ‘The Dark Knight Rises’, I just couldn’t ignore any of the random information about it that was spread around blogs and news sites. Every trailer had been seen. Every TV spot revised, and there were a good 20 of them too. I kept expecting more and more out of this movie. The wait finally ended yesterday, and I got to see it today. Despite all the impossibly high expectations I had created through the last couple of years, and despite having seen so many TV spots which had so many little scenes from the movie interspersed, I went and saw the movie today and it seemed so fresh and so superb that it blew my mind.

Christopher Nolan. Thank you.

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I saw the movie at DT Cinemas, DLF Promenade, Vasant Kunj and they forced us to see the movie with subtitles and with an incredibly bad projection that made the movie seem blurry. The movie was so good, I could still come out and feel happy about it. This is the third consecutive movie I’ve seen here and their projection seems consistently dull. The last time, I blamed it on 3D glasses that tend to make the screen look less bright, but today I realized all movies they project are affected. It seemed like their projector lamp needed replacing. Now I want to see this movie again at a better theatre.

US F1 Visa Interview

I gave in and activated my Facebook account a good two months back as Georgia Tech has an official group that lets students interact and post questions. There are also half a dozen unofficial groups created by students where you can ask questions, post about experiences and plan travel arrangements with others who are going to leave when you do. I saw posts about long queues while waiting at the various consulate offices for the visa interview and decided to reach the US Embassy an hour early. I thought I would be first in line and I could save some time. I was not first in line and unlike in other cities this wasn’t something to worry about. The whole thing was very organized and everybody was called only in the 15 minute slots they were in. Even if you were last in queue, it would have only taken you 15 minutes inside.

Seeing her interview others before me, I thought the lady I was going to face was pretty stern. She gave me a big smile when I went forward and I was no longer nervous.

She asked me three questions and was really nice throughout:

Where do you want to go?
A. Georgia Tech.

What do you want to do there?
A. Human-Computer Interaction

I have never heard of that before. Does this make sense for you professionally?
A. I want to be a designer. I’ve pursued Computer Science so far and HCI falls in the intersection of Computer Science and Liberal Arts which falls perfectly in line with what I want to do.

Superb. I’m approving your Visa, you should have it home in 5 days by courier.