Many of you (at least, those of you who were able to pass ninth standard) would have been forced (if you weren't interested in science) to learn about how scientists in the late 19th and early 20th century started messing around with electricity and managed to pass electric discharges through gases to find out what secrets of the universe would reveal themselves. Some of you (at least those with good retention, and some with genuine interest in these things) will recall something about a cathode ray tube...
Well, for those of you who don't, here's a recap:

When a huge voltage discharge was passed through a highly rarefied (which means very few molecules in the tube) air, strange things start to happen. At one point, dark and bright portions appear. After a certain value of voltage, the pattern starts moving towards one of the terminals.

Electrons are (thanks to Benjamin Franklin) negatively charged particles and if you apply a voltage to two terminals inside a discharge tube, the electrons will be attracted to the positive terminal. ``Voltage'' basically is the energy the electricity provides the electron for travelling to the positive terminal. Which means (for those of you who passed eighth standard) that this potential energy is given to the electron as kinetic energy (thus increasing its velocity). The final velocity of these electrons, when they are closest to the positive terminal, is gonna be dependent on the potential (voltage) applied:

where m is the mass of the electron, e is its charge, v is its velocity, and V is the voltage. Thus, the square of the final velocity depends directly on the voltage applied (direct dependence means that if we increase the voltage, the final speed of the electron will be higher... duh!).

Let us illustrate this for those of you who did not understand. Hindi movies are very very useful in these situations, and here's an example from one such movie. Unfortunately, I do not remember the details: the name, the hero, the villain. If you have an idea, please email me and let me know. I think it could either be Dharmendra or Mithun in a movie like this, but I could be wrong.
(Note: Thanks to Jayendra Baliga, this was corrected immediately. I guess my ballpark estimate was alright, it *was* Mithun, the villain was Anupam Kher, and the mother was Nirupa Roy. If we give five seconds to Subroto, I'm sure he will be able to find out what movie it was)

The scene: Its the climax of the movie. Standard action thriller, so you can imagine the situation. Bad guy forces good guy into his (hi-tech) lair by holding captive good guy's MBB (Maa, Behen, Biwi - mom, sister, wife) or maybe it is MBM (Maa, Behen, Maashooka - girlfriend) - actually, this is more probable since there HAS to be something to look forward to at the end of the movie - like, for example, the marital bed, with said good guy and Maashooka singing the same song they sang about half an hour into the movie, and then a huge red boldface The End spoils any chances of you getting a good look at what's going on under the sheets.

Anyway, good guy is inside lair, beats up a few henchmen (dressed in tight black leather or silk costumes, some of them with capes, and the villain's insignia on their chests), but gets caught and is forced to stop fighting because bad guy threatens to fry his MBB. How, you ask?

Good guy's fighting, and bad guy says: ``Vijay! Isse pehle ki tum koi chalaaki karne ki koshish karo, wahan dekho!'' (before you try anything funny, check this out!), and presses a button or something, and a panel in the wall opens up, and we see the three weaknesses (I think it was Ajit who once said, ``Uski koi to majboori hogi, koi maa, koi behen, koi beti'') tied to a pillar.

Now, let us pause here a minute and note that if this rope was made of jute/nylon, then things would have been different. There are two possibilities: Mashooka and Behen are wildcats, or are just meek onlookers. Usually the girlfriend HAS to be a wildcat, dressing in red coloured pants and a thick leather belt. Anyone wearing this particular combination is either a wildcat 60s/70s heroine, or a 70s/80s/90s Malayali hero. If there is at least one wildcat in the family, then what happens is this: the knots are never tied! So the wildcat manages to wriggle free, and manages to rescue the mom (the old lady is a wildcat no more, she had her days, but she learnt a lesson when the guy she loved left her for someone richer and left her with a sin in her stomach that she had to bring up on her own, and for which she and her elder son had to work for hours washing utensils in Goregaon and polishing shoes at Nariman Point, respectively), and takes them to safety, while the good guy manages to take on the three hundred and sixty goons by himself. Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration. Sometimes, the wildcat lends a hand by bitch-slapping a goon or two, for comic relief. If there is a vamp, its even better, cos then you can have a catfight! More comic relief.

Come on, Sundar!!! Stop making such stupid generalizations! Hindi filmmakers are original and NEVER do such cliched stuff! Well, at least in this movie, they don't!

The MBB are tied to the pillar not by ordinary rope, but instead by a length of conducting wire. The wire is long enough, and thick enough (if you passed class twelve and you still remember this stuff, the resistance of a wire is inversely proportionate to its cross sectional area, so the thicker the wire, the lower is the resistance, and since the heat given off by the wire - borrowed from the energy being given to the wire by the electric generator - is related to the resistance... well forget it, trust me on this), and one end of it is connected to the MAIN
REACTOR or something that sounds equally forbiddingly dangerous. At a signal from the main bad guy, a goon can throw a switch and the next thing you know, everyone is eating at KFC (Kher's Fried Chicks). What would you do?

Here's what Mithun does. Bad guy says, I'm gonna throw the switch, save them if you can (``Bacha sakte ho to bacha lo'')! Button dabaao, he screams, and everything happens in slow motion.

Again at this point, let me interrupt this narration and make another note. Remember what we were talking in the beginning? The (dark/bright) pattern starts moving towards one of the terminals... Well, then listen to this!

What happens? Mithun starts to run in slow motion, and you can see a bright flash moving along the wire, headed in the direction of the MBB! The good guy starts running slightly faster, and actually overtakes the flash, when the bad guy orders his henchman to increase the voltage: ``Voltage badhaao!'' and the voltage is jacked up a little bit, and the flash travels slightly faster... overtaking the hero again! After a few milliseconds of this contest, the good guy eventually catches up with the flash and manages to break the circuit before the flash of electric current can do his majbooris any harm.

Why does this happen? As I said before, electron velocity is directly dependent on the voltage (no longer in the same fashion as the equation above, this is a wire we are talking about, so technically we go into the whole conductors thing, which brings me back to saying that the worst person to talk about such stuff would be me, so let's not go into the technicalities of these things, shall we?), so as the voltage increases, the electrons travel faster, and since they travel (according to this movie) like the bright flash pattern observed first at the turn of the last century, the hero is able to a) detect it and b) outrun it.

See how a little bit of knowledge of physics can help you at least try to fry some chicks? It is definitely unfortunate that the bad guy doesn't succeed, but that is because the hero is also driven by a higher potential to move at a rate higher than that of the electrons - this acceleration is caused by a different potential - the potential flop that this movie would be if they killed off the three women who mean most to the hero, thus killing his spirit.