spiderman

BJP MP Calls Nitin Gadkari ‘Spiderman’ for Building Web of Roads Across Country

“I have changed Nitin Gadkari’s name to Spiderman. Like the web of a spider…Nitin Gadkari has been laying wide network of roads in every corner of the country. Gadkari hai to mumkin hai (Gadkari makes it possible),” Tapir Gao said.

New Delhi: Bhartiya Janata Party MP Tapir Gao on Monday, March 21, praised Union minister Nitin Gadkari, calling him a ‘Spiderman’, and said he has built a web of roads across the country.

Participating in the discussion on the ‘demand for grants of Ministry of Road Transport and Highways’ for 2022-23 in Lok Sabha, the MP from Arunachal Pradesh said, “I have changed Nitin Gadkari’s name to Spiderman. Like the web of a spider…Nitin Gadkari has been laying wide network of roads in every corner of the country. Gadkari hai to mumkin hai (Gadkari makes it possible).”

With the Narendra Modi-government in power, the speed of construction of roads in sensitive areas of the country especially on the India-China has border has picked up pace, Gao asserted.

Also Read: India Building Critical Road Along Border With China in Ladakh: Home Ministry

“With Modi government coming to power, the pace of road construction near the China border has also grown. Today, under Modi’s leadership, a two-lane road is being constructed till McMahon Line in Arunachal Pradesh,” he said.

“I hope that ‘Spiderman’ will continue to carry on with the speed at which roads are being built,” Gao added.

Gao said when as the BJP president, Gadkari had formed a committee to visit sensitive areas near the Indo-China border and it took them several days to cover all the points due to poor condition of roads. Now roads are being constructed in all those areas, he said.

(PTI)

Narendra Modi and the Pantheon of Superheroes

The world may be glutted with superheroes but what it desperately needs right now are real-life heroes.

The June sun beat down hard as I walked past a row of shops in the little local market. Chemist… stationer’s… grocery store… boutique… shoe shop… toy shop…

Toy shop!

I slowed down as I always do in front of toy shops, possibly because they always bring back happy childhood memories. This one even had comic book superhero figurines in the window display.

Superman… Batwoman… the Incredible Hulk… Wonder Woman… Narendra Modi…

Narendra Modi?

I stopped, backed up a bit and stared. Yep, it was him all right. Dressed in a saffron waistcoat and about half the height of Superman and Batwoman – Narendra Modi had finally taken his place amongst the pantheon of comic book super heroes.

I wondered what his superpower was. Winning elections? Creating alternative realities? Getting into the minds of the masses like Charles Xavier from X-Men?

I asked the genial old storeowner how much the figurine cost.

“Rs 700,” he said cheerfully. “The head moves if you tap it. Shall I pack it for you?”

Also read: Letter from a Teacher to the Parents of His Students in ‘New India’

I politely declined. Then, as an afterthought, I asked, “But if you have any figurines of Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, I’ll take one.”

“No, we only have superheroes here,” he said, and as I went on my way, I realised the storeowner had just educated me about a very important distinction: Real heroes and superheroes are entirely different people.

The first and most obvious difference between the two is that superheroes are fictional, but real heroes are real. In every sense of the word.

Superheroes are manufactured. They are clever products of imagination. Real heroes are born out of flesh and blood and genuine struggle.

Superheroes are illusory characters who essentially denote an escape from reality; real heroes are men and women who have faced it at its worst.

Superheroes can do absolutely anything. They can repel alien invaders, defuse rogue nuclear devices in the nick of time, save entire civilisations, and routinely perform the impossible. Superhero hai toh mumkin hai.

Real heroes, on the other hand, are acutely aware of their own shortcomings and limitations and consciously work on overcoming them. They don’t try to hide who they really are. Their heroism lies in their ability to first and foremost win deep, personal victories of character in their own lives.

Another big difference between the two is that superheroes entertain, but real heroes inspire.

Also, it is interesting to note that superheroes invariably lead double lives. They are forever ducking into phone booths and donning different identities. Real heroes, on the other hand, are who they are all the time. They strive for integrity and oneness. They walk their talk and are who they say they are.

One is reminded of Gandhi’s speech to the House of Commons in England. Using no notes, he spoke extempore for two hours and brought an essentially hostile audience to a standing ovation. Following his speech, some reporters approached his secretary, Mahadev Desai, incredulous that Gandhi could hold his audience spellbound for such a long time with no notes.

Desai said, “What Gandhi thinks, what he feels, what he says, and what he does are all the same. He does not need notes… you and I, we think one thing, feel another, say a third, and do a fourth, so we need notes and files to keep track.”

Green Lantern, Spiderman, Batman, Superman, Ant Man, Wonder Woman, Thor, and now, Narendra Modi. The world is glutted with superheroes.

It doesn’t need any more. What it desperately needs right now are real-life heroes, those with deep, inner strength of character that those of the next generation can look up to and emulate.

Also read: India and The Cult of Stupidity

We need more heroes like Dr Kafeel Khan of Gorakhpur who saved the lives of 60 children suffering from encephalitis and ended up being incarcerated for his selflessness.

We need more genuinely concerned citizens like Afroz Shah who successfully pulled off one of the world’s biggest beach clean-up projects at Versova Beach in Mumbai. We need journalists like Gauri Lankesh who paid the ultimate price for her absolute commitment to truth and freedom, and we need more peacemakers like Harsh Mander, who actually took his Karawan-e-Mohabbat across India and grieved with the families of those who have gotten lynched in the name of religion.

Superheroes are products of the artist’s pen who live in comic books, TV serials and movies, and who ultimately go on to become merchandise.

Real heroes are the products of tough choices and hard decisions.

Perhaps it is now time for each of us who are seriously concerned about the future of our country to start making some of those choices and decisions.

Rohit Kumar is an educator with a background in positive psychology and psychometrics. He works with high school students on emotional intelligence and adolescent issues to help make schools bullying-free zones.

There’s a Reason Siri, Alexa and AI Are Imagined as Female – Sexism

When we can only seemingly imagine an AI as a subservient woman, we reinforce dangerous and outdated stereotypes.

Virtual assistants are increasingly popular and present in our everyday lives: literally with Alexa, Cortana, Holly, and Siri and fictionally in films Samantha (Her), Joi (Blade Runner 2049) and Marvel’s AIs, FRIDAY (Avengers: Infinity War), and Karen (Spider-Man: Homecoming). These names demonstrate the assumption that virtual assistants, from SatNav to Siri, will be voiced by a woman. This reinforces gender stereotypes, expectations and assumptions about the future of artificial intelligence.

Fictional male voices do exist, of course, but today they are simply far less common. HAL-9000 is the most famous male-voiced Hollywood AI – a malevolent sentient computer released into the public imagination 50 years ago in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Male AI used to be more common, specifically in stories where technology becomes evil or beyond our control (like Hal). Female AI on the other hand is, more often than not, envisaged in a submissive servile role. Another pattern concerns whether fictional AI is embodied or not. When it is, it tends to be male, from the Terminator, to Sonny in I, Robot and super-villain Ultron in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Ex Machina’s Ava (Alicia Vikander) is an interesting anomaly to the roster of embodied AI and she is seen as a victim rather than an uncontrolled menace, even after she kills her creator.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe, specifically the AI inventions of Tony Stark, and the 2017 film Blade Runner 2049, offer interesting and somewhat problematic takes on the future of AI. The future may be female, but in these imagined AI futures this is not a good thing.

Marvel assistants

At least since the demise of Stark’s sentient AI JARVIS in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2013), the fictional AI landscape has become predominately female. Stark’s male AI JARVIS – which he modelled and named after his childhood butler – is destroyed in the fight against Ultron (although he ultimately becomes part of a new embodied android character called The Vision). Stark then replaces his operating system not with a back up of JARVIS or another male voiced AI but with FRIDAY (voiced by Kerry Condon).

FRIDAY is a far less prominent character. Stark’s AI is pushed into a far more secondary role, one where she is very much the assistant, unlike the complex companion Stark created in JARVIS.

Likewise, in Spider-Man Homecoming, Stark gifts Peter Parker (Tom Holland) his own super suit, which comes with a nameless female-voiced virtual assistant. Peter initially calls her “suit lady”, later naming her Karen. Peter imbues his suit with personality and identity by naming it, but you wonder if he would have been so willing to imagine his suit as a caring confidant if it had come with a older-sounding male voice.

Karen is virtual support for the Spider-Man suit, designed to train and enhance Peter’s abilities. But in building a relationship of trust with her, Karen takes on the role of a friend for Peter, even encouraging him to approach the girl he likes at school. Here, the female voiced AI takes on a caring role – as a mother or sister – which places the Karen AI into another limiting female stereotype. Female voiced or embodied AI is expected to have a different role to their male-aligned counterparts, perpetuating the idea that women are more likely to be in the role of the secretary rather than the scientist.

Blade Runner‘s Joi

Another classic example of artificial intelligence can be found in Blade Runner (1982) and its bio-robotic androids, the Replicants. These artificial beings were designed and manufactured to do the jobs that humans in the future didn’t want: from colonising dangerous alien planets to serving as sex workers. Although stronger and often smarter than their humans creators, they have a limited lifespan that literally stops them from developing sufficiently to work out how to take over.

The recent Blade Runner 2049 updates the replicants’ technology and introduces a purchasable intelligent holographic companion called Joi (Ana de Armas). The Joi we are shown in the film is Agent K’s (Ryan Gosling) companion – at first restricted by the projector in his home and later set free, to an extent (Joi is still controlled by K’s movements), when K buys himself a portable device called an Emanator. Joi is a logical extension of today’s digital assistants and is one of the few female AIs to occupy the narrative foreground.

But at the end of the day, Joi is a corporate creation that is sold as “everything you want to hear and everything you want to see”. A thing that can be created, adapted, and sold for consumption. Her holographic body makes her seem a little more real but her purpose is similar to those of the virtual assistants discussed here already: to serve often male masters.

Subservient women

When we can only seemingly imagine an AI as a subservient woman, we reinforce dangerous and outdated stereotypes. What prejudices are perpetuated by putting servile obedient females into our dreams of technology, as well as our current experiences? All this is important because science fiction not only reflects our hopes and fears for the future of science, but also informs it. The imagined futures of the movies inspire those working in tech companies as they develop and update AI, working towards the expectations formed in our fictions.

Just like in the movies, default real-life virtual assistants are often female (Siri, Alexa). But there is some promise of change: having announced in May that their Google Assistant would be getting six new voices, but that the default was named “Holly”, Google more recently issued an update that assigns them colours instead of names, done randomly in order to avoid any associations between particular colours and genders.

This is a promising step, but technology cannot progress while the same types of people remain in control of their development and management. Perhaps increased female participation in Silicon Valley could change the way we imagine and develop technology and how it sounds and looks. Diversity in front of and behind the Hollywood camera is equally important in order to improve the way we present our possible futures and so inspire future creators.

Amy Chambers, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Bitten by Marvel Studios, Hero Gets Younger, Stronger and Way More Fun in ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’

Instead of just a CGI upgrade or villain excess, in ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ we get a new character, a fantastic villain and a diverse supporting cast.

Instead of just a CGI upgrade or villain excess, in Spider-Man: Homecoming we get a whole new character, a fantastic villain and a diverse supporting cast.

A poster image for <em>Spider-Man: Homecoming</em>.

A poster image for Spider-Man: Homecoming.

Joss Whedon did his bit for gender equality in an undeniably male-superhero multiverse. Jon Watts has turned out to be a champion of refreshing ethnic diversity. The New York City borough of Queens we see in Spider-Man: Homecoming isn’t polished, sanitised or whitewashed. Everything is that much more believable. Peter Parker’s (Spider-Man with the suit off) Aunt May (a delicious Marisa Tomei) is Italian. At school, his best friend is Asian, his arch rival Guatemalan (Tony Revolori, whom we last saw in Grand Budapest Hotel), his love interest African American. These characters have all been white in the movies thus far. The effect is interesting. Without a suffusion of characters, you’ve suddenly got more texture in the story. It’s not just about the hero and the villain – though that approach could have been forgiven when the bad guy is Michael Keaton in formidable form.

Adrian Toomes, aka the Vulture, is by far the most effective villain since Dr Octopus in Sam Raimi’s second Spider-Man outing. It isn’t the backstory – Toomes is a blue-collar salvage contractor who gets stiffed by the suits. So he begins scavenging forbidden technology from the debris of superhero battles over the years and selling them to the highest bidder. The motive for villainy, clearly, runs out very quickly. It’s just that Keaton sells it with energetic, focused intensity. And thankfully, he isn’t smothered in make-up or CGI. The appeal of the bad guys, clichéd as it might seem, is their humanness. A lack of access to the person underneath the villain perhaps had something to do with the failure of the latter Spider-Man movies and a lot of the other superhero fare that failed. Keaton rends and consumes the scenery from the get go. Right from the introductory scene and up to a brilliant, tense few minutes within the confines of a car. There was so much atmosphere in that car it was like a tube of packed dynamite, ready to blow any second. You don’t usually get that in a superhero movie. Here’s where Tom Hollande, the youngest man ever to play the titular role, musters the maturity of all of his 20 years.

Fresh off a battle with the Avengers (one half of them), Peter is back to the daily grind at home, waiting for the next call, the next mission, which never comes. Hollande is completely convincing as an antsy 15-year-old, desperate to be taken seriously, to be treated as an adult. A grown-up couldn’t have pulled it off. Once it’s done, it seems elementary. Spider-Man wasn’t a man, he was a boy. Ergo, a boy must play Spider-Man. The filmmakers were also very wise in ditching the overused origin story. Where it rather unnecessarily eats up screen time in The Amazing Spider-Man, it is reduced to a punchline in Homecoming. Peter’s friend, who only recently discovered his super-secret, asks him, “Do you lay eggs? Do you spew venom?”

Also read: What Would a Real Spider Man Look Like?

Sony and Raimi kicked off the franchise in style, but after the abysmal disappointment of the third iteration and a largely redundant (except for the excellent chemistry between the leads) reboot starring Andrew Garfield, the arachnid hero seemed to have run out of webbing. The studio arm of Marvel has swung in and jumpstarted the franchise again. Not with a CGI upgrade, but with an infusion of heart.

In fact, the action set pieces weren’t what one would call spectacular. Not that they lacked finesse, just that they weren’t terribly ambitious in scope. Even the finale wasn’t the typical CGI overdose one has come to expect. But it made narrative sense. When Spider-Man was in over his head, Iron Man jumped in to lend a hand or slap him on the wrists. A large spectacle would have seen the Avengers descend on Queens. That this didn’t really matter is where you realise it all works. One suspects the entire movie was a sort of extended shot to establish the new character. Whatever’s coming next is something to look forward to.

If the Easter Eggs in the movie (can’t be discussed without spoilers) are any indication, there’s some good stuff ahead. For instance, one of the weapons developed by the Vulture’s tinkerer – the Shocker – was used by Diamondback against Luke Cage in the Netflix series. Could TV meet film sometime in the near future?

Anand Venkateswaran is a Chennai-based freelance writer.

Note: The actor Tony Revolori is of Guatemalan and not Indian origin, as stated in an earlier version of this article