Mr. Hammond welcomes us to the Jurassic Park!

To put it quite simply, to my mind, this is the greatest movie ever made. None of the concepts here were new. Everything this movie showcases, from the character backgrounds, the moral issues, the action and the suspense had all been done to death from the earliest rendition of The Lost World in 1925 to the first iteration of King Kong in 1933. But everything about this movie was NEW! it is, to me, the pinnacle of movie making, and nothing before or since has come even a mile close to what this did for movies and for movie audiences. It took the concept of movies to a whole new level.

The book was fantastic for its visualization of a world in which Dinosaurs roam free. It gave us the framework for a new kind of terror. A species so alien to us that it could have existed on another planet, but for the fact that fossils tell us otherwise. It showcased the visceral terror of these majestic beings. But apart from this, much of the ethical dilemmas were merely background filler for the real deal - the action. Characters were pretty much one dimensional and what you would expect. Greedy business tycoons, nerdy kids, skeptical scientists and evil saboteurs; the lot straight out a pulp fiction suspense novel. But it was the seed for something so much better than itself. Like a plant germinating to life from a pod, Steven Spielberg took that basic idea and had Mr. Hammond to Welcome us to Jurassic Park.

When you talk about the greatest movie ever made, you also have to think about the greatest director to have ever lived. For movies of this genre, that list is indeed illustrious. You have James Cameroon with Terminator and Avatar. You have George Lucas with Star Wars. You have Stanley Kubrick with 2001, a Space Odyssey. And you have Stephen Spielberg. See, the thing with James Cameroon is that he is all high concept, but quite condescending in the delivery of the message. George Lucas is about stunning set pieces that drive a story forward. And Stanley Kubrick is the king of style and little substance. Spielberg, in this movie atleast got the mix bang on target.

For an excellent and revealing discussion about the movie, please watch Confused Matthews video reviews. I am just going to focus on two scenes from the movie and the musical score. I think these taken together sum up the movie for me.

When John Hammond, the owner of the them park takes the Scientists out for the first time to see the dinosaurs, the sheer majesty of these beasts is staggering. To think that these giants once roamed the very earth we stand on today is beyond imagination, beggars belief. No matter how many fossils and computer renditions we may have seen, nothing could ever prepare us for the shock of seeing one in the flesh. How can someone hope to bring that awe to us, let alone on a screen? How can  someone transport us to such a magical place as this, the land of the last titans the world ever had walk on her? Well, it is a combination of brilliant animatronics, camerawork, acting or rather reacting by the cast and probably the best rerecording in the history of films. But mere words can do no justice to this, and for the first time ever in these blogs, I am going to stop writing and just ask you to see for yourselves:

In this scene, you see from Richard Attenborough's delight at his guests' reactions that he is not the TV trope evil tycoon. He is truly joyous of his creation, his baby, and wants it to be his gift to the world. You also see the lawyer ready to merchandise the crap out of this. You see the skepticism in Jeff Goldblum's eyes. And you see the culmination of their lives' work and the fear that comes when you confront giants from a dead past in the eyes of Sam Neill and Laura Dern. And you see the the leviathans themselves in their milieu, going about their day, naturally, uncaring of us puny little insect - like beings. This scene conveys so much of what this movie is about. Yes, there are special effects, but they are a backdrop for the fact that nature is so much more superior than man's machinations. No matter what you do otherwise, life doesn't care and it will continue to do what it must to go on, no matter who's watching or what they're manipulating. It is also a very nice teaser, the docility of these creatures now, for what is to come.

"Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet's ever seen, but you wield it like a kid that's found his dad's gun." This scene serves three purposes. One to get the exposition of the far reaching issue of the morality of creating a world that is not supposed to be. To be playing God. Without being condescending or pedantic, it lays bare the issues the movie is trying to address. Two, it gives us a glimpse of the motivations of the central characters. Man seldom manipulates science with disaster as the end goal. But lazy science - by which I mean, science removed from fully understanding its consequences - has, well, consequences not fully fathomable. And these consequences are invariably bad even with the best intentions. Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed us that. What stock do Stem cell and DNA manipulation research have in store for us? And three, it sets up all the carnage to come in an ethical framework. These are the hallmarks of a great sci - fi action movie. The movie begs us to think about what we are seeing. Again, mere words may elucidate the scene, but the mood of people discussing Darwinian concepts in a relaxed setting that diffuses the ferocity of nature's raw savage should be seen. That this kind of a scene even features in a movie like this is an indication that this is much, much more than just a sci - fi thriller. Watch:

A great science fiction tale is one in which moral questions are asked to which we as a society have no clear cut answer. The tale puts these in a context of a situation far removed from personal experiences so that we may objectively try to approach them without being invested in them on an emotional level. And through the answers we find, we might hope to learn something, and maybe apply them to our own lives. And the role of action and special effects are to show us the consequences of choices made in this fantastical setting. They are not the be all and end all of the tale. That is what this movie does so well. Action set pieces and stunning visual effects that changed the face of CGI and VFX forever are found aplenty here, but they are all part of the grander scheme. That's what I meant about the director balancing his tray.

And finally, the music. As far as I'm concerned, the background score of this movie is everything it needed to be. It captures the thrill of seeing impossible beings walking amongst us. It adds to their majesty. It is suspenseful and awe inspiring, but in a soaring, uplifting way. It tells us that no matter what, life will find a way. Be it the dinosaurs, or the humans who erred in making them in the first place. Life will always find a way. And to add to all this, its haunting tune always brings a tear to my eyes. It is quite simply,  to my mind, the best soundtrack ever composed for a movie. But don't take my word for it. Listen:

Even after 20 years, with all the budgets and technologies at out disposal, no one has seemed to have understood the role of visual effects. No one has seemed to be able to balance a truly great sci - fi tale with adventure. No one has seemed to be able to show us the real adventure, that of life itself in a more majestic way than this movie has. To take a dead civilization alien to us in every way and make it come alive again... oh God, what a treat. You may have not seen this in a long time. If so, you must watch it again. Because when you do, you, along with Dr. Grant, and dear Dr. Suttler, will be "Welcome to the Jurassic Park."

Nayagan vs Thalapathi

Life throws up so many curve balls that there isn't necessarily a logical progression from one state to the next.  Like a Markov process, cinema seems to be that bag of jellybeans from which your first pick might be a delectable strawberry while the next could as likely be a raw onion. This is precisely the case with Nayagan and Thalapathi. Mani Ratnam, having reached the high water mark in Indian cinema with a masterpiece of unparalleled storytelling, seemed to have deigned that he has done enough, and gave a squarely middling performance in his next gangster flick.

Everyone, including Time Magazine have heaped lavish praise on Nayagan, and for good reason. It is immense. It is a fantastic movie with a fantastic cast, fantastic music and fantastic camera work. It has mesmerizing dialogues, mesmerizing flow and mesmerizing character development. It has a brilliant story arc, brilliant scenes and brilliant continuity. That is why its on the all time greatest movies ever made list. Not just in Tamil, not just in India, but from around the world. Mani Ratnam the director shined through as India's Francis Ford Coppola, as our very own version of Martin Scorsese.

And then, suddenly, it all hit the fan catastrophically with Thalapathi. While Nayagan was like watching hot caramel sauce melting on vanilla ice cream, Thalapathi felt like being in a boiling sauna, under a UV lamp with an ice cream cone dribbling over your sticky hands. It was a mishmash of ideas, ill-conceived sequences and very very poor acting. It also had a stellar cast, fantastic music and a solid story. But, where everything fell into sonorous unison in Nayagan, this felt discordant, somehow. And the worst part? It was all yellow. Ugly, horrible, mucky yellow! Why, Mr. Ratnam, why did you have to use a filter on every damn scene? Why did you have to go from Coppola to Carrot Top?

Both movies have their ups and down, but for Thalapathi, sadly, it is in a stable equilibrium at the bottom of a deep ravine. Nayagan on the other hand, for all its overt homages to The Godfather, is fighting us every time we watch it and try to pick at it, to stay atop a tall hillock jostling to go back to the apex whenever it is shoved a little this way or that. True, they are both gangster movies. They both chart the lives of people from childhood through a troubling adolescence to their conclusions. They are both set in pretty much the same world of lawlessness and justice for the previlaged. They are both about how the protagonists tackle fire with fire, but are ultimately flawed but righteous individuals. But that is where the similarities end.

Story and characters
Nayagan is a rock solid saga set in changing eras of post independence India and spans nearly three generations. The journey of the hero also mirrors the greater journey that India herself undertook from the thirties to the late eighties. From lifting her people out of poverty to urban agglomeration to the formation of slums to the restrictions on development by a ham fisted government and recalcitrant masses, to the development of parallel regimes and kangaroo courts, this story itemizes all these issues through the eyes of the hero.

It delves deep into how the principle characters become the people they become. It thoroughly threshes out the reasons behind their interacting in certain ways. How Selva forms a lasting friendship with Velu is fluid. Not only that, but this relationship that moves from scorn to friendship to respect to love above life itself is a microcosm of the adoration the people of Dharavi heap on Velu Naicker. So too is the gradual development of resentment by his daughter towards him. Not only are the character interactions so logical, they are also surrogates for the grander scheme of a Don's life. This is where Godfather scored, and no wonder this is the reason why this story also shines.

Secondly, because it spans an entire lifetime, and because it elevates the life of one man to beyond his four walls, its scale is epic. It chronicles the history of a nation, and it teaches us something about right and wrong. It subtly answers questions about Karma, that good deeds cannot bury underfoot the evils that beget them. That is why Velu Naicker has to suffer in his personal life. That is why he has to die in the end. No matter what good the Lord Krishna did for the world, as a human being, he had sinned. He had cheated and he had enacted a protracted brutal war to teach the virtues of good to the world. With millions dead in the Mahabharatha's wake, Lord Krishna had to die a human death, and a painful one to teach the final lesson. Every deed has its comeuppance.

Thalapathi, which also borrows heavily from the Mahabharatha, had none of those things going for it. It is the story of two men set in a tumultuous place. That's all. There are no parallels to be drawn here. Yes both Deva and Surya are doing pretty much the same things that Velu did, but you don't get the sense that it is important. One could argue that the focus of this story is just the two of them. Okay, but I'm sorry, that falls flat too.

Where is the development of the relationship between Deva and Surya? In just one one scene? Is it possible for a man like Deva to shrug off the death of a valued and long serving member of his cabal and just embrace his killer? If he is so amenable to sudden change, then why is that trait of his not reflected in the rest of the movie? Why is he so hell bent on revenge against the collector when all the latter has done is only his job? Why, if he is so concerned about justice that he would even forgive the killer of his associate, is he hell bent on massive carnage over a personal gripe?

And talking about growth, sadly, nothing here. The bond that Deva and Surya form in the beginning remains without progression for the remainder of the story. Yes, its true that the relationship between Karna and Dhuryodhana was also stilted and one dimensional,  but that was not the focal point of that tale. It is here. Surely, for a man forged by cruelty and with so many bitter experiences in life as Surya, more conflict has to be in the offing, even with his best friend. Every character in this movie has only one face. Yes, Deva and Surya are hooligans. Yes, the collector is a virtuous man. Yes Karivaradhan is evil. But there is more to a human being than just what he is perceived to be. There are internal struggles, there are relationships, there are emotions and there are circumstances.

While Nayagan explored all of these in great detail, this movie does not. A white dhothi is a white Dhothi. There are no stitches, hell, even the border is not visible. There is no tapestry here. And therefore, that sense of grandeur is absent. This is one long tirade of violence, and pile driven good vs evil gospel.

Music and songs
In both movies, the music by Ilayaraaja was magical. Both movies had brilliant songs, and just to prove to you that I am not biased, I will openly state that Rakamma is one of my all time favorite songs. Not just mine, it is ranked as one of the top hundred songs of all time from around the world. The BGMs were outstanding and captured the mood of every scene. But the litmus test is this: if you are blind, and could only listen to the audio track, you would still get what Nayagan was on about. With Thalapathi, all you would get is a sequence of phenomenal tunes.

While the BGMs were muted and subtle in Nayagan, enhancing every facial expression and adding weight to the dialogues, in Thalapathi, they were there to substitute the lack of anything on the actors' faces on anything coming out of their mouths. Mind you, this not a crtique of Raaja's excellent work, but in Thalapathi, all you remember from each scene is how good the music was, and nothing else. Its as though the savage rumbling V8 soundtrack of a Formula One car was playing over the wheezing throttle of a Maruti 800. The visuals did not justify the BGMs.

The picturization of every song in Nayagan, even the gratuitous item number Nila Adhu Vaanathu Mele forthered the story. Every song came at the right place and did not distract from the larger picture. In Thalapathi, most songs, though pciturized beautifully, felt out of place. They were roadblocks to an already molasses like trickling pace. Rakamma was fantastic, and yet it was basically a standard hero Intro song. Suitable for Rajnikanth, but not for Thalapathi. Kaatukuyile, while being a brilliant technical achievement, did nothign but add five more minutes to an already bloated flim. Sundari Kannaal Oru Seidhi was again well imagined on a grand scale. But is there any time in the movie before or since that shows Shobana envisioning Rajni as her knight in shining armor? Has their love been developed in that vein? Or for that matter, developed at all?

Acting, Dialogues and Recall
Every single facial expression by every single character was appropriate in Nayagan. More importantly, every body language was captured. While there is no equal to Kamal when it comes to thespian prowess, all the others also did magnificent jobs. Janakaraj, Delhi Ganesh, Nizhalgal Ravi, Nasser, even the villains and the female leads had enough screen time and presence to justify their being in those roles. Every single character, even Velu's lowly minions are memorable. Their dialogues were so natural, and so well elucidated. They had so much power and conveyed the emotions so well. If you were reading a transcript of this film, you'd still be enthralled. If you had to shell out Rs. 1000 and go see this as a play, you'd come out with your money' worth of satisfaction. My close friend Ganesh once told me that his barometer for a good scene is if he can put himself in the actor's shoes, and if he can see himself reacting the same way, and saying the same things as those on screen. By that yardstick, Nayagan was an opus.

Thalapathi, regrettably started that irritating Mani Ratnam trend of qualifying every single line by the principle verb beforehand. What am I on about? Well, sample these gems:
Vittudunga, elaathayum vittudunga (Stop it. Stop everything)
Irukka. Indha oorulethaan irukka (She's here. She's in this very city)
Inge oruthen irundhaan. Uyiroda irundhaan. Ippo Ille (He was here. He was here and alive. Now he's not)
Thooki pututtaa. Yenna goods vandiyile thooki potuttaa (She threw me away. She threw me away onto a goods train)

Oh, here's one dialogue that should go down in the record books for the most stilted echange in film history:

Mamooty: Yeppadi? (How?)
Nagesh: Sandai.(Fight.)
Mamooty: Yethana peru? (How many?)
No name: Or aal. (One man.)
Mamooty: Yaaru? (Who.)
No Name: Surya. (Surya.)
Mamooty: Paakanam. (Must meet.)

Seriously, who talks like this? Seems to me that every one in this movie was high on weed or that it was studio full of attention deficit disorders and remembering long lines was going to be trouble from the start.

Where Nayagan made synergetic utilization of even minor extras, Thalapathi falied to provide any recall for  even its name actors. Nagesh and Charu Hassan were completely wasted in this movie. Bhanupriya was paid for just showing up. What about Amrish Puri? Such a talented veteran, reduced to a stereotypical Dick Dastardly role that they had to bring someone else in to dub his rotten lines for him. Mamooty was probably told to tone down his performance in keeping with the lethargic dialogues and allow more screen space for Rajnikanth to... well, come and stand really.

When I wachted Ayudha Ezuthu, I told my friends that Madhavan had merely shaved his head, and not really done much else. Well, Rajni shelved his style, and pretty much that was it. This was the one chance in a lifetime for a director to extrude Rajni's true potential as an actor. It was the once chance for a rabid audience drunk on style and action to enjoy a truly remarkable performance from a misused actor. And Mani Ratnam blew it by giving him the same pablum he calls lines as everyone else in the movie. Admittedly, Rajni did manage to salvage a few scenes, especially the one with Jaishankar and the one when his mother comes to visit him. But even these scenes are so BGM heavy, out of focus and YELLOW that they sap any performance out of them.

Perhaps the worst aspect of the spotty acting in this movie is evident in the climax. While Nayagan's climax was in perfect keeping with the tone of the rest of the movie, and Kamal's delivery of his last lines were true to the character built through the film, the last fight sequence in thalapathi was a complete anathema to Rajni's  persona in this. Outporing of emotion can be shown in many ways, but having asked your star to cheese every fiber of human emotion for two hours and suddenly requiring it to dial it up to eleven and ham it in the last scene is just plain dumb. I'm sure that the describe-your-friend-punch-villain-in-face rinse and repeat sequence must have seemed like pure inspiration to Mani, but sorry mate, to me it was all constipation. Seriously, how could anyone deliver staccato lines like that unless their bowels were ganging up every few seconds and refusing to come out?

Cinematography

Finally, Nayagan's camera work for scintillating. Every scene had its own hue that kept with the time of day it was, the mood of the moment and the state of affairs in the background. Sunrises and sunsets, pigeons and Gateway of India, nothing was allowed to come in the way of the cast's expressions and body language. It was a textbook display of how to create atmosphere.

The scene when Kamal takes a gang to the house of the factory owner to show him what it means to destroy a dwelling was ominous in the abscene of any life in the building complex. The scene when he meets his future wife near the Marine Drive was set at dusk, encapsulating the end of his bachelor life, but still with enough light left to bode a new radiant future for them. When his daughter weeps on the roof garden and states she is leaving his auspices for good, the lighting and background were sorrowful. And the final scene outside the court was bright and clear, essaying the fact that the verdict is a good one. No ominous grey clouds here to spoil the suspense of the climax.

Thalapathi on the other hand was yellow. Nothing more, nothing less.

So to sum up, Nayagan was the magnum opus of a gifted young director who showed the world that it was possible to take mainstream cinema to unscaled heights. The Mani Ratnam of 1987 gave us a riveting and emotional piece that was art and yet not dull. Every moment in this film flowed from the moment before, and spawned the one next like a harmonious raga. Truly, this was a five star film for the ages. Thalapathi, on the other hand, was yellow.

What is DRS

I have wondered many times about the quality of F-1 fans. I mean, you talk to a Cricket fan, and he would be able to run you to the ground with his explanation of the cover drive, the role of the sweeper, the "Dilscoop" - although it pains me immensely to use that term - or on how to get Sachin out in the most statistically probable fashion (thank you, dad). Ask a Football fanatic - there really weren't any "fans" to being with, because they actually KILL for their teams, and sometimes their own team members - and they'll go into a brass tacks argument on why Poland was wrongly denied a goal against Russia early this month on a questionable offside decision. A Tennis connoisseur will be able to tell you why he believes that the rain actually didn't help Nadal with the French Open this year because he already possesses superhuman stamina and superb base play.

The common thread in all this is that the rules are simple and the skills are tangible. All it takes for a fan or fanatic - I'm not judging - is to place oneself in his idol's shoes and imagine that they got game to make the right call.

F-1 is slightly different though. After you've sifted through the glitz and glamour of saying you like a sport in which your favorite diva was seen at a page three gala hobnobbing it with other favorite divas and wondering why you weren't born rich enough to afford the five thousand dollar paddock entry cover, or after you've stopped seeing red everywhere (Ferrari, after all, is the most glamorous of all), and after the cool factor of boasting to your friends that the only way to see an F-1 race is on that brand new HD TV you got, there remains one little niggle: what do you really know about how it all works? I mean, how do the little bits fit together?

A disclaimer: By now, you're thinking to yourself - wait this has nothing to do with Tamil Movies. All of this is a rant against casual F-1 viewers. You're thinking either, hey wait a minute... I get what this guy is on about, or hah, screw this know it all, I have a HD TV! Well, the way I see it is this: F-1 is a complex sport - a blending of Science, Engineering and high performance high endurance Sportsmanship. I have seen too many people claiming to be fans who don't have the slightest clue that for every Schumi or Alonso or Vettel or Hamilton, there is a whole team starting with Brawn or Fry or Newey or Michael that is solving often seemingly insurmountable Engineering problems offscreen. Just like how a true cricket fan must know the intricacies of a reverse swinging ball or the difference between a dilscoop - aww that word again - and graceful a pick-up behind the keeper to enjoy the game, so too should a real F-1 fan know a little bit about what's going on to really get into it. Otherwise, you'll be left with an inane observation like "shiny red car... me like it win. Weeeee....."

But in order to get what's happening, a little scientific know-how is required, and the casual observer is not necessarily versed in this regard. I hope that with this series of articles, I can try to explain some of the basic science of the cars and thereby make it a richer experience for you next time. Remember, HD looks a lot better when you can see that pass from nowhere and say, "ahh, I know how it happened and thank god that I could see it crystal clear!"

Unfortunately, science is hardly accessible to the common man, couched as it is in Greek symbols and esoteric terms. Hopefully, with this series, I could introduce you to some of the truly fantastic things that make the F-1 car "go" by simplifying the science without loss of generality (a supercilious jargon phrase used to say that its ok to call a spade a spade, even when it has tassels on the handle).

Also, I'm setting up shop this time, so hopefully the coming articles won't be as long winded.

Back to the point.

Rather than the science being an intimidating put-offer, understanding this witchcraft will put you one up on your guests in an after race conversation. It will make you the exalted one in circles that invite people to see races on HD TVs. If you don't own a HD TV, your pure racing knowledge will get you invited to the homes of those who do. Ofcourse, the trick once you've got yourself invited over is not to make it sound like a boring Physics puzzle from IE Irodov and never get asked back ever again, but that's one instance where personal flair is called for if there ever was.

I'd like to take the science and distill its essence for anyone prepared to spend five minutes on its minutiae - practically rhymed, Jeeves. What? I'm Chaucer, who got language to the masses.

I'm starting off this series with DRS - no, not the Decision Review System, you Dhoni-hater-cum-BCCI-seditionist. This is the sinister sounding Drag Reduction System. Over the next few posts, I'll talk about tires and balance, the front wing and its distant cousin, the rear wing, bottom effects, and finally, the big daddy - aerodynamics. By the time I'm done with you, you'll be able to tell your hot date why Alonso won in Valencia and why Schumi was able to hold off Webber till the bitter end. Yeah! Like that's what she wanted to talk about. Exercise flair and use restraint as applicable.

Simply put, DRS is a system that gives a driver hot on the tail of someone in front a speed advantage offering him an overtaking opportunity provided he is within a second behind the leading car in certain parts of the track. This is very different from another kind of advantage which a trailing car has that's called a tow. But that topic is for another day when we talk about wings. And in F-1, tow comes with its own can of worms.

Before I tell you about DRS, there's a couple of voodoo terms that are good to know: dynamic and kinematic. If you're looking at how things work, you're also probably wondering what drives them. A dynamic thing is something you define with both its function and the driving force for that function. So, a dynamic knife is a knife that cuts the cabbage because you pressed down with it. A kinematic thing one the other hand just does what its doing, but we don't talk about the driving force. The force is still there, but we don't really care what it is. A kinematic knife is a knife that cuts the cabbage, period. With a kinematic knife, you have no way of knowing how deep the cut is going to be, what size the pieces are going to be, and what the knife will be doing once its done cutting the cabbage. But with a dynamic knife, you can tell how deep its going to cut because you know how much pressure you're applying. You can tell that the knife is going to be put away, because you also know what your action is going to be after you've cut your cabbage.

A neat example is a car on cruise control. If that car is doing sixty five on the freeway, you don't have to worry about the accelerator pedal for a while, and the car is going to continue to do sixty five. So, the speed of the car is kinematic. On the other hand, if you've just taken the ramp onto US 101, then you have to start flooring it. The speed of the car is no longer a kinematic entity. Now, you're accelerating at a rate determined by how hard you floor it. In order to determine the speed of the car now, you also need to know how much gas you're giving it, so this is now a dynamic thing.

The reason this is important is because the DRS is a dynamic thing. That will become clear soon enough.

Let's look at it word by word.

Drag. Its been a long drive back home and your bladder is suddenly full from all that coffee you drank along the way. You've stopped by a discrete hedge and you're tacking into the wind. Lo and behold, you're legs are getting wet. Why? Because the wind is blowing against you. You can't turn around... other motorists are tooling along. Maybe there's a cop. So, how can you compensate? You can lift it up a bit. This action has two advantages: one, fertilizing fluid would fly farther and not fall on your feet, and two, you would feel less air pressure on it. In technical parlance, the wind has just imparted DRAG on the stream of pee. It has dragged it down. It has exerted pressure on it. What you did when you lifted it up was to change the arc of the pee and make it look flatter to the air. So, the air exerted less pressure on it, and it flew further.

Drag has a nemesis, its evil twin, lift. Lift is harder to explain. Now you've come back home, but its a hot day. So you stand in front of your pedestal fan tilted up to your face. Your hair is blowing up. Why? Because the air is flowing upwards from the fan. The ceiling fan a few feet behind you is also in full swing. Now, your hair starts to curl upwards and forwards. Its doing this because its experiencing a different pushing forces at its roots and its tips. This difference is LIFT.

Its tomorrow, and you're on an airplane to Tegucigalpa because your boss hates you. Your airplane lifts off at 200KpH. An F-1 car stays on the ground even at 300KpH. What's the difference. A plane takes off because there is a way to make the air beneath it exert more upward force on it than the air above it. This is the shape of the airplane wings. Also, its more likely to take off if the wings don't have too much air pressure in front of them. So, what you want is your wing to have less drag on it, and generate upward lift. It would have look like a piece of paper curved downwards. Also, you don't want it to have much of a profile when facing the air, so you make its front as curved as possible. Its back has to be like a knife edge pointing down to suck the air above it and push it back up against its underside in the back. An F-1 wing one the other hand has to keep the car planted to the ground. So, it has to do everything an airplane wing does, but oppositely. So it looks like an upside down airplane wing.

Reduction. Just what it sounds like. To make your car go faster than your rival's, all other things equal, you need to be able to reduce the pressure of the wind in front of it. As you've probably noticed by now with all those hours if F-1 footage, an F-1 car is by no stretch of the imagination a sleek looker. It has bits and pieces sticking out, big fat uncovered tires, and a new nose job for 2012 straight from the Fiat Multipla design team. What all this does is presents to the wind a clunky profile that increases the drag on it. The only things that can go some way to reducing all this drag, are the wings. Now, the only way the wings can help reduce the drag is their profile to the wind becomes flatter.

System. A system is anything that gets a job done. In this case, its a transducer. What is a transducer, you might ask. I'll tell you. A light bulb tuns on when you switch it on. Electrical impulses travel through the tungsten filament which is heated and starts to glow. So, the electricity was converted to light by the release of high energy particles from the filament. So, in this case the transducer was the filament. A transducer is a device that converts one form of an input into another form of an output. In F-1, when the driver pushes the DRS button which probably activates a hydraulic piston or motor mechanism (which of the two options each team chose is a secret guarded unto death itself!) that flattens the wing by rotating it more horizontally. In this case, the transducer is either the motor or the piston. This thereby reduces the drag and makes the car go faster. But more importantly, being a dynamic system, the wing actually ACCELERATES the car while its being flattened, thereby giving the driver the extra punch over the guy in front. So, while he is going faster than the guy in front, he also able to increase his speed further, overshoot the competitor and make it stick. It has it Achilles heel though. It also reduces the downward lift that kept the car planted on the ground and makes it slide around a bit more (more on this when we talk about tires and balance).

The lawmakers of F-1 have decreed that the driver may flatten his rear wing provided he trails the leading car within a second behind it. Why this one second rule? And why not keep the wing flat permanently if its giving the car so much speed? That we'll see when we come to the wings. As to a question I can answer now, why choose only certain parts of the track where DRS can be used? This is where the F-1 gurus were clever. Most F-1 circuits have dull spots where the race is usually processional. So, by putting the DRS zones here, they're likely to have more on-track action. The existing overtaking spots can then be left to sieve the men from the boys because driver skills becomes very evident in those places anyway.

That's it. That's what DRS is. So, why did Alonso Win and why did Schumi come third? Apart from the totally predictable retirements of Vettel, Grosjean, Hamilton and Maldonado (a big thank you guys, for putting my idol back on the podium), after the safety car period, Alonso was beautifully positioned behind Grosjean, close enough to be able to use his DRS and whiz past. Schumi, on the other hand, was able to keep Webber more than a second behind him through the DRS zones, and thereby retain his place over an ever more irritable Webber.