Actually, this clearly means imbalance in the wild. There is an alarming decline in population of wild beasts (Tigers, Lions) which is allowing the elephants’ population to grow by such huge number. This growth also means more nuisance to already worried farmers having farms near forests.

Somebody uploaded the audio of this opening score on Internet (which you can download from here too) but there is no info on where Mr Shyam Benegal have taken the shlokas from. So here it is.

The opening score (title song) starts with a sanskrit shloka from सूक्तम् (sooktam)129, मण्डलम् (mandalam)10, अष्टकम् (ashtakam) 8 in ऋग्वेद संहिता (Rigved sanhita). It is from नासदीय सूक्तम् (Nasadeeya sooktam).

This is the first shloka in sookta. It goes like this:

नासंदासीन्नौ सदासीत् तदानीं नासीद्रजो नो व्योमा परो यत्।
किमावरीव: कुह कस्य शर्मन्नम्भ: किमासीद्रहनं गभीरम्।।१।।

Thereafter the chorus starts with the meaning in hindi.

The ending score is a sanskrit shloka from सूक्तम् (sooktam) 121, मण्डलम् (mandalam) 10, अष्टकम् (ashtakam) 8 in ऋग्वेद संहिता (Rigved sanhita). It is from the सूक्तम् (sooktam) called हिरण्यगर्भ: सूक्तम् (Hiranyagarbha sooktam).

The ending score is first shloka from हिरण्यगर्भ: सूक्तम which goes like this:

ૐ हिरण्यगर्भ: समवर्तताग्रे भूतस्य जात: पतिरेक आसीत्।
स दाधार पृथिवीं द्यामुतेमां कस्मै देवाय हविषा विधेम।।१।।

Thereafter the chorus starts with the meaning in hindi.

Here is the complete version of opening score.

नासंदासीन्नौ सदासीत् तदानीं नासीद्रजो नो व्योमा परो यत्।
किमावरीव: कुह कस्य शर्मन्नम्भ: किमासीऱ्दहनं गभीरम्।।१।।

सृष्टी से पहले सत नहीं था, असत भी नहीं
Srishtee se pehle sat nahin thaa, asat bhi nahin
(Before creation there was no truth, or untruth)
अंतरीक्ष भी नहीं, आकाश भीं नहीं था
Antariksh bhi nahin, akash bhin nahin thaa
(no universe, not even the sky)
छिपा था क्या, कहां, किसने ढका था
chhipaa thaa kyaa, kahaan, kisne dhakaa thaa
(What was hidden, where, who hid it)
उस पल तो, अगम, अटल जल भी कहां था
us pal to, agam, atal jal bhi kahaan thaa
(At that time there was no water)

सृष्टी का कौन है कर्ता
Srishtee kaa kaun hai kartaa
(who is the creator of nature)
कर्ता है वा अकर्ता
Kartaa hai vaa akartaa
(is he a creator or distroyer)
ऊंचें आकाश मे रहता
Oonche aakash mein rahtaa
(Who stays up there in the sky )
सदा अध्यक्ष बना रहता
Sada adhyaksh banaa rahtaa
(who is in charge)
वहीं सचमुच मे जानता.. या नहीं भी जानता
Wahin sachmuch mein jaantaa..Yaa nahin bhi jaanataa
(He truly must know everything.. or maybe not!)
है किसी को नहीं पता, नहीं पता
Hai kisi ko nahin pataa, nahin pataa,
(no one knows..no one knows)
नहीं है पता, नहीं है पता
Nahin hai pataa, nahin hai pataa
(no one knows..no one knows)

Complete version of ending score.

ૐ हिरण्यगर्भ: समवर्तताग्रे भूतस्य जात: पतिरेक आसीत्।
स दाधार पृथिवीं द्यामुतेमां कस्मै देवाय हविषा विधेम।।१।।

वह था हिरण्यगर्भ सृष्टीसे पहले विद्यमान
Weh tha hiranyagarbh srishti se pehle vidyamaan
(he was born out of the depths..before creation)
वही तो सारे भूतजात का स्वामी महान
Wahi to saare bhoot jaat ka swami mahaan
(he is the lord of all life)
जो है अस्तित्वमान धरती आसमान धारण कर
jo hai astitvamaana dharti aasmaan dhaaran kar
(the one who is there over land and sky)
ऐसे किस देवता की उपासना करें हम हवि दे कर
Aise kis devta ki upasana karein hum havi dekar
(who is this god whom we pray with offerings)

जिसके बल पर तेजोमय है अंबर
Jis ke bal par tejomay hai ambar
(He on whose strength the sky is lit)
पृथ्वी हरीभरी स्थापित स्थिर
Prithvi hari bhari sthapit sthir
(and the earth lies green and stable)
स्वर्ग और सूरज भी स्थिर
Swarg aur sooraj bhi sthir
(the heavens and the sun stay stable)
ऐसे किस देवता की उपसना करे हम हवि दे कर
Aise kis devta ki upasana karein hum havi dekar
(who is this god whom we pray with offerings)
गर्भ मे अपने अग्नी धारण कर पैदा कर
Garbh mein apne agni dhaaran kar paida kar
(Who holds fire in own womb and gives birth)

व्यापा था जल इधर उधर निचे उपर
Vyapa tha jal idhar udhar neeche upar
(who controls here, there and everywhere)
जगा जो देवो का एकमेव प्राण बनकर
Jagaa jo devo ka ekameva praan banker
(who rose by becoming life of gods)
ऐसे किस देवता की उपसना करे हम हवि दे कर
Aise kis devta ki upasana karein hum avi dekar
(who is this god who we pray to ?)

ओ स्ृष्टी निर्माता स्वर्ग रचयिता पुर्वज रक्षा कर
O Srishti nirmata swarg rachiyata purvaj raksha kar
(creator of creation, the heavens and who looked after our ancestors)
सत्य धर्म पालक अतुल जल नियामक रक्षा कर
Satya dharma palak atul jal niyamak raksha kar
(who keeps the truth, justice and the essence of life)
फैली है दिशायें बाहू जैसी उसकी सब में सब पर
Phaili hain dishayen bahu jaisi uski sab mein sab par
(whose hands seem to stretch over all there is )
ऐसे ही देवता की उपसना करे हम हवि दे कर
Aise hi devta ki upasana kare hum havi dekar
(this is the god who we pray to, with offerings)
ऐसे ही देवता की उपसना करे हम हवि दे कर
Aise hi devta ki upasana kare hum havi dekar
(this is the god who we pray to, with offerings)

The town was still under imposed curfew. After lot of searching we found rickshaws to take us to Bus Stand. From there we were to get bus as no other means of travel was available. But no matter which way you ride, its uphill and against wind. Buses were not running and we had to wait till 1800 Hrs for the curfew to be relaxed. Fortunately soon after, the curfew was relaxed and we found a taxi to take us to Gangtok.

Just out of the city limits of Siliguri, we saw a wild elephant standing beside road like a car neatly parked by law abiding citizen. After Rumtek, almost till Gangtok the travel was along Teesta River. Even in the darkness of the night, sound of Teesta seemed like an angry river roaring.

We reached Gangtok at 2345 Hrs. The city shops and restaurants were all closed (they close at 2300 Hrs) which left us without food, hungry. Thankfully the guest house we booked was OK even though they did not serve food.

Next morning before starting for Lachen, learning from previous night’s experience, we had heavy breakfast and made sure that we had enough food with us. Double checked that the vehicle is in really good condition, driver has a license, and fuel tank is full etc. so that nothing can possibly go wrong.

At 1000 Hrs we started our journey to Lachen, which is on the way to Gurdongmar Lake. All the time we traveled along Teesta. Breathtakingly high cliffs along the ridge and the green cover over it made me forget everything else. The journey was awe inspiring. The landscape was fascinating, which left me becharmed.

We reached Lachen at 1745 Hrs. The guest house there was clean and good for a town like Lachen. It is a small town, about 125 Km from Gangtok at an altitude of 9750 feet. The town is abundantly gifted by nature. The words fall short to describe its beauty.

We stayed in a guest house overnight and started early in the morning for Gurdongmar lake which was another 50 Km drive from Lachen. Soon after we started for the last leg of journey to Gurdongmar, the green cover over the ridges started disappearing. Mountain tops were snow covered, hills and hillocks were barren. The plateau is much similar to that of Leh and Ladakh.

After 4-5 hours of driving we reached Gurdongmar lake. Water in Gurdongmar Lake is crystal clear and calm. This lake is considered sacred and many pilgrims pay religious visits here. It is probably the highest in Sikkim situated at an altitude of 17,200 feet (5170m). The mountains around were untouched, covered with snow which was whiter than white. Nothing can be compared with that whiteness, not even “Rin ki chamkar”.

A kilometer’s run up there for a photograph demonstrated me the real and literal meaning the phrase “dizzying heights”, that it’s not the dizziness because of vertigo but it’s the dizziness that one feels because of lack of oxygen.

Gurdongmar is a distorted name of original name Guru Dongmar. 17th Jat Regiment and 247th Medical Regiment has built a “Sarv Dharam Sthal” on lake-shore. After spending an hour and half there we turned back to Lachen.

Fatigued us were drowsy in the return journey. We reached Lachen at around 1500 Hrs. After having lunch, we started again for Gangtok at around 1630 Hrs.

We barely drove for an hour from Lachen and it was dark already. Though it was cold, we all were happy that everything went as planned without any problems. But little did we know about Mr Murphy’s intentions. All of us but the driver were sleeping. That’s when Murphy’s quirks kicked in again. Despite all the checks on vehicle, it started giving us trouble.

Once again we realized yet another Murphy’s law which says “If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which something can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop”. No matter how well kept the vehicle is, a leak will develop and it did. The fuel supply line developed leaks and started taking air. As a result of which we had to stop every 2-3 kilometers and manually pump the fuel in.

We knew that, left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse. So we stopped at Chungthang. After spending one and a half hour there, driver fixed the leak.. or at least that is what we thought.

Evidently, soon enough we realized the corollary of Murphy’s Law, that says, “It will be impossible to fix the fifth fault, without breaking the fix on one or more of the others”, applied to us. The new leak was now developed in a small washer near the engine. I never understood why the vehicle only breaks down at the least convenient time! When a vehicle breaks down and it is a small repair, the mechanic is at least 100 Km away.

So we continued with same exercise again and on top of all this, it started raining. Rains made some patches of road worse. This slowed us to a great deal. As if all this was not enough, soon we reached to a bend where an army tow-truck was trying to tow another broken loaded truck on those narrow curved roads. Knowing that the largest vehicle always has the right of way, we followed the tow-truck that now formed a caravan behind it.

Finally we reached Gangtok at around 0100 Hrs. Yet again we knew that we were not to find any food. But thanks to our experience, we bought enough food before we started from Gangtok that saved us from sleeping empty stomach. We stayed in the same guest house in Gangtok.

Next day we woke up late as a result of fatigue from last night. Gathered ourselves and started back for Siliguri at 1200 Hrs. On our way back too, there was a landslide which forced us to take a diversion of about 3Km through jungle. The traffic jam at this diversion (in jungle) and slippery ground set us back by an hour. We entered Siliguri at 1900 Hrs. Here too we hit slow moving traffic.

The later you are running, the slower the people in front of you, and on any accessible side are going to drive. But somehow our taxi driver managed to drop us at New-Jalpaiguri railway station at 1950 Hrs. We had train at 2010 Hrs. After paying the taxi we realized the gravity of the situation that we have only 200 Rs collectively, we needed food and nearest ATM was in town, at least 5 Km away. We managed the show with the available money and reached Kolkata next morning. Though, we reached 2 hours late, we were only happy that Murphy failed its own law as it took longer to come back than it took to reach there.

Now when I look back, the height of mountains makes me think how small and helpless we are in front of nature when standing amidst mountain ranges. But on the other hand, roads made in those ranges by BRO, Sikkimese people and army that is guarding border in adverse conditions reminds me that faith and diligence can make seemingly impossible things easy.

Hence, I can’t abstain myself from recommending that one must visit Sikkim, this masterpiece of the creator, at least once in lifetime.

Xen, a saloon owner who can read thoughts of his customers while giving them haircut, reads minds of Rage, Tanya, Mr. Mittal and Nikita to find that all of them hide their lives, preserving self by pretending everything is fine.

Its disheartening to see such incidences actually happening around. Curiosity takes its toll as one dig beneath the surface to know the well guarded secrets of people’s lives. Knowing the truth is painful at times for the truth is complex and saddening. Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit.

The movie looses its grip on some places and becomes sluggish. Rahul Bose irritates in his first entry with his loud acting. Rehaan Engineer’s underplay is used beautifully. Koel Purie’s bewildering behaviour shown in movie keeps one dazed until the mystery unfolds in the end. In all, a good try by Rahul Bose.

Rain that washes belief of poor that the roof won’t drip this season. Rain that washes confidence of rich that house won’t seep this rain. Rain that washes hope of farmers that it will be enough this year.

Rain that washes our apathy towards nature by cleaning polluted air. Rain that washes lethargy and boredom off the minds. Rain that washes stains of our laziness off the vehicles. Rain that washes make-up off the pretty looking faces exposing reality ;).

Rain that leaves people and animals marooned without food and shelter. Rain that takes lives. Rain that reinstate life. Rain that shows almighty power of nature. Rain, it’s here once again..

Mostly people preferred to stay inside and did not seemed enthusiastic enough to get wet like this lady wading her way through the puddle.

It is was fun to see these kids getting wet in rain, playing, floating paper-boats in this pool of water (usually known as lawn :-). I did this a lot every year in rainy season when I was a kid. Wish other kids here (and their parents) were as enthusiastic as these.

Most of the Indic scripts fall under Complex Languages which require special rendering. To enable this under Firefox we need to recompile the source with just one extra option i.e. –enable-pango.

Marathi (Devnagari) fonts rendered by official binary release is shown in image below.

Marathi fonts rendered by custom built Firefox is shown in image below.

You can clearly see the difference in font rendering.

Download and build Firefox

To compile Firefox, download firefox source from mozilla.org after selecting source directory under appropriate version (2.0.0.5 in this case). The source itself is 35 MB, after bunzipping it expands to whopping 345 MB.

tar xjf firefox-2.0.0.5-source.tar.bz2
cd mozilla

Next step is to create a configuration file. There is a utility for building configuration file (called mozconfig) from Mozilla located here, which makes life a little easy.

It is better to create mozconfig file which include existing build options. You can view the official binary release build option by typing about:buildconfig in address bar of official release Firefox. Below are build options used for binary release:

–enable-application=browser –enable-update-channel=release –enable-update-packaging –enable-official-branding –disable-debug ‘–enable-optimize=-Os -freorder-blocks -fno-reorder-functions -gstabs+’ –disable-tests –enable-default-toolkit=gtk2 –enable-xft –disable-freetype2 –enable-svg –enable-canvas –enable-static –disable-shared

As can be seen here official release Firefox is not compiled with pango support. As you can see, this build is going be static with just one extra option i.e. –enable-pango. The mozconfig file created for custom compilation looks like the one shown below:

# Options for client.mk.
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/ff-opt-static

# Options for ‘configure’ (same as command-line options).
ac_add_options –enable-application=browser
ac_add_options –enable-update-channel=release
ac_add_options –enable-update-packaging
ac_add_options –enable-official-branding
ac_add_options –enable-pango
ac_add_options –disable-debug
ac_add_options ‘–enable-optimize=-Os -freorder-blocks -fno-reorder-functions -gstabs+’
ac_add_options –disable-tests
ac_add_options –enable-default-toolkit=gtk2
ac_add_options –enable-xft
ac_add_options –disable-freetype2
ac_add_options –enable-svg
ac_add_options –enable-canvas
ac_add_options –enable-static
ac_add_options –disable-shared

Please note that in above file I have used –enable-official-branding which makes use of all the trademarked logos while building. However, you should not use this if you are planning to distribute binary, unless you have obtained express permission from Mozilla. Read Mozilla Licensing Policies. As long as you are building it for yourself, you can use anything you want.

Assuming your Mozilla source is in mozilla directory, you can keep this file in this top level source directory with name .mozconfig as a convension. Actually you can keep this file anywhere and export a shell environment variable MOZCONFIG pointing to an absolute path to this file. But this is volatile.

I personally prefer to keep it in top level source directory and export path as a precautionary measure. Next is to issue make command.

export MOZCONFIG=/absolute/path/to/mozilla/.mozconfig
make -f client.mk build

While compilation process is on, you can get caffeinated enough so you can stay up for further tests. On my Celeron 1.7 GZ laptop with 768 MB memory it took freakin 2.5 hours to finish compilation. Most of the compilation is CPU hogging, with constant average CPU usage nearing 95%. This sent load average on my machine to a soaring 4 to 7. Most of the compilation time I had a table fan spinning in full swing facing my lappy as it started heating up like anything in first few minutes itself.

Only last step where it binds some big object files together and finally the firefox-bin binary is memory intensive. It took most of my available memory and all of the CPU bringing other tasks on lappy to a screeching halt.

Big Phat Warning: The official document states that it requires 1.5 GB disks pace for static and XULRunner builds, mine took 2.7 GB. So keep at least 3 GB of disks pace free on the partition where you are compiling Firefox. You WILL run into troubles if its your root partition with /tmp on it and is filled to the brim.
Initially I had just 2 GBs of disk space free on root partition. I thought it would work but did not consider the disk space used by /tmp and space used by sources. Obviously in first try it failed due to lack of disk space. Next I freed up some more space. After everything was compiled properly it took around 2.7 GB of disk space.

After the compilation is complete you can test the new build by running file /absolute/path/to/mozilla/ff-opt-static/dist/bin/firefox. Once you are satisfied with the new build, you can create a tar file which then you can copy on any location you want and run from there. This can be created by running command

make -C ff-opt-static/browser/installer

This would create file firefox-2.0.0.5.en-US.linux-i686.tar.gz in mozilla/ff-opt-static/dist/ directory. That completes building Firefox from source.

The memory footprint did not change for custom built Firefox compared to that of official release. Being static build, memory footprint is rather large (34MB resident and around 14 MB shared) compared to other applications. Its same for official release as well as custom build. I am yet to detect any memory leaks in my build.

Most of the documentation you can find on developer.mozilla.org.

That reminded me of my young sisters and her friends playing same game years ago (they called it tikkerbilla or some-such name). This game somehow propagated over years to today’s kids. As such our society is located in one of the affluent areas of the city. Kids here start chirping in English at the age of 2 while they walk and talk English, play biblets and videogames in their homes. It was fun to see them playing this apparently simple and silly looking game which actually helps build coordination of body and mind, improves synchronization of reflexes. In all it was good to watch them playing.

My file /etc/usbmount/usbmount.conf looks like this (only relevant part):

FILESYSTEMS="ext2 ext3 vfat"
MOUNTOPTIONS="sync,noexec,nodev,noatime"