5 Legendary Chennai Movie Theatre Advertisements

Watching a movie in Madras is a elevating experience, at par with a hit of Ecstasy or a night of drinking pure ethyl alcohol straight from a test tube. Because you get to watch, apart from the movie, all these works of consummate genius:

That 'War on Wastage' Lalitha Jewellery Ad

That sword buried in CGI mud in CGI backdrop, that awe-inspiring CGI-sun-pottu, that CGI horse, those clueless ladies on that CGI hot air balloon, the Iyshwarya Rajesh lookalike on the horse liberating them from CGI-wastage with deft movements of swords and knives, her costume, her boots... dear Lord, her boots (?!)... but most importantly, her eyes. Watch the video again, just for her eyes. What gloom-ridden secrets are hiding behind them? What message is she trying to convey to the world? Is she asking us to save ourselves? Or save her from this ad? Madam, tell us, please, put us out of our misery. Madam... Madam... Madam?

Dr. Reinhard Fricke and Whole Body Cryotherapy

I used to go for any movie that friends invited me to (even Singam Puli and Vengai) just to watch this ad. There's so much happening in it - the inductive logic of the treatment, the TR-blue-suited-fellow's absolute upbeat confidence in his product, endorphins, German thatha (Dr. Reinhard Fricke), and that old paati speaking about her abject fear of 'minus 110 degree'. Freeze your pain, brothers.

Creepy Kids in Jewellery Ad

What do you do when you want to make an advertisement about gold jewellery for kids? (Yes, that is a thing.) You take kids, dress them up like adults. Make one guy kid act like he's hitting on a popular girl kid, and make her reject his advances. Make another guy kid a playboy posing for photos with two different kids. Make a third one the fashionista. And then, to top it all, make two kids act like a couple announcing a new entry to their family... Totally appropriate.

Bombastic Adjectives for East Europeans

The jewellery industry in Madras seems to produce the craziest stuff. This ad, for instance, features wan East Europeans (one of whom looks like a Latvian Shruti Hassan) with that East European jawline, doing random white-chick things like dressing up, sitting on plush chairs and fake-driving posh cars, being described in the most alien bombastic terms like 'elegant', 'lavish' and 'extraordinaire' in an Indian accent. Importantly, do not miss that most non-elite font in which the word 'Elite' is written.

The mother of all dirges

I'm at a loss for words, really. (Except to say that the fellow who sang this probably makes that 'Inthiya tholaikkatchigalil muthal muraiyaaga...' announcement on Sun TV. And also that Leni Reifenstahl could take a couple of tips from the director and editor of this video.)

Auteur, madarchod!

When you are in bed all day, wrapped in a bedsheet in the sultriness of Madras, knocked out by a fever, wavering ever so subtly between sleep and waking until you don't know which is which, your brain starts functioning in a zone of its own. Time becomes fuzzy, even irrelevant. Fungible. Ah, yes. That's the word, fungible! I like that word, it's so cuddly, so flexible.

Your brain thinks thoughts, your brain reaches startling conclusions, and when you try retracing the steps you went through to reach there, you find the breadcrumbs eaten away by the demon-like birds in your head.

The little iPod embedded in my brain, constantly buzzing, always on shuffle, sings now in Anu Malik's voice, "She gives me fever, fever, fever." His distinctive inflection, his fake not-Bombay-not-America accent, his slight tunelessness at the end of each line, all ring clearly in my head. This hasn't happened in a while. I open my eyes, and find my neck drenched in fevered sweat, the fan groaning while it whirs unenthusiastically, and vague sounds of a Tamil serial from the adjacent room. I reach out to the bottle of water on the bedside table and drink a rather large gulp. When that water break morphs back into my febrile sleep, I hear that voice again. Anu Malik. That paragon of frivolousness. That antonym of mellifluousness. "She gives me fev-uh, fev-uh, fev-uh."

My closed palms feel warm, my feet feel cold. I shiver a little.

The song makes it way to the core of my existence, it consumes my soul, it kindles the flame within, and it unearths a curious memory that lies buried deep, deep within.

I am now in the summer of 2000. My friend and I have been packed off to Trichy to spend some time with his aunt. The mornings and evenings, we spend cycling in and around the little town. We unexpectedly run into some girls in a park. We make nervous conversation with them. The voices in this conversation seem to come from a well -- there is a slight reverberation about them. Like dream sequences in the movies. The girls ask us if we want to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger's End of Days in a theatre nearby. I hold one of the girls' hands throughout the movie and kiss it just before the climax. She blushes.

The kiss wakes me up. I am back in the present, and I realise that my brain just added its own cinematic masala to a rather monotonous holiday. I smile. I doze off again.

Now we are in my friend's aunt's house in Trichy. It is a dreary, meandering, dull, drooping, dreadful, afternoon. We are channel-flipping between vague Bollywood music channels. And we discover this song. The anthem of my fever. "She gives me fev-uh, fev-uh, fev-uh." A pre-Big Brother, pre-UP-Bihar-lootne, pre-yoga-in-extreme-tights Shilpa Shetty, looking extremely desirable, canoodling a drugged-out Sanjay Dutt on an uncomfortably shaped sofa in a dingy set. And in the background, off-key women chorus singers going "Whose that girl with the lovely, lovely smile...", soon to be joined by Anu Malik trying to sound lovelorn and horny at once.

The movie, I finally recall, is Jung.

I am not in that drawing room anymore. I am now in Kalpana Theatre, Udupi, and the moth eaten seats bring a flood of memories. Of the the jail-like ticket queue, of Rs. 18 balcony seats, of drinking local cool drink Ba-Jal during the interval, of vague art deco construction, of actually kissing a girl in the the darkened halls while watching Mission Impossible 2 in Hindi.

"She gives me fev-uh, fev-uh, fev-uh," Anu Malik continues singing, now in surround sound. Shilpa curves and cavorts around Sanjay Dutt and the sofa. I am not sure which of the two is luckier. My friend's hands are not where they should be. Our verdict, "Shilpa Shetty has come out good, man!" She scorches our senses and blanks out the rest of the movie.

(I am now reminded of Sanjay Gupta's previous outing, Khauff, which I watch in the same theatre with the same friend. Until the movie starts, I think I have come for an English movie called Cough.)

As Jung hurtles towards its laborious climax, I hear a threatening baritone from my left. I turn around to see a dark, bulky, french-bearded figure bearing down on me, asking, "You must be a fan. You seem to have seen all my movies."
It dawns on me. The new entrant is Sanjay Gupta himself. I reply, in a voice that isn't my own, "Not all. I missed Aatish: Feel the Fire. Although I must admit, of all your movies, that one has the most thrilling title."
He smiles, "You lucky bastard. Imagine how many times I must have seen it during editing."
"That explains the mindnumbing Hameshaa. I knew it couldn't have come from a straight-thinking mind," I console him. "Your expertise always lay in remaking Hollywood movies, featuring silly, overloud comedy, steamy song sequences, desperate posturing, a bored Sanjay Dutt and faux grittiness."
"Thank you for reducing my life's work to a stereotype," he says.
"Oh, come on. I'm telling you that you're an auteur," I offer, "A French word, monsieur. That must make you feel posh."
He collapses into the seat next to me, and says, "You know. It's funny you use that word -- auteur. It's become famous in India these days." There is a gleam in his eyes, as he turns around to the projection room and shouts, "Projectionist! Start from the beginning!"
I look at Sanjay in horror, "Dude, I cannot go through this movie again."
"I merely want to refresh your memory, pal," Sanjay says. The 'pal' proves he watches too much cheap Hollywood for his own good.

The titles are now on the screen. Familiar names whizz past me. Jackie Shroff, Sanjay Dutt, Raveena Tandon, Anu Malik... And at one point, he stands up and screams again, "Projectionist, pause!"

I stare at the screen in shock at the name on it. Anurag Kashyap. Yes, that very same Anurag Kashyap -- the Hindi New Wave hero, the man they call the saviour of Indian cinema, the toast of the Cannes Directors' Fortnight -- is involved in writing an embarrassing rip-off of a middling Hollywood film called Desperate Measures.
Sanjay roars with laughter, "But Anurag is an honourable man!"

I am dismayed. I ask into the void of Kalpana Theatre, "Et tu, Anurag?"

A pair of dark-rimmed spectacles appears on the screen. Soon these are filled by large, keen, black eyes. A round, stocky face forms itself around the spectacles, and an uneven beard grows. In a barely masked North Indian accent, the face speaks, "I can explain myself!"
"Admit it, Anurag!" Sanjay hollers, "You did this once more. This movie called Paisa Vasool."
I ask, utterly disappointed, "Anurag, you wrote that cinematic excreta also?"
"No, no. Wait," Anurag tries.
But Sanjay interjects again, "Anurag is an honourable man! Hahahaha. You see, young fellow, where Gangs of Wasseypur comes from? It's not him going nudge-nudge-wink-wink at masala. He's just making what he knows how to make, and people are attributing nudges and winks. Auteur, saala madarchod!"

"Order, order," I shout, my legal instincts coming to the fore, "We must allow the accused to present his case."
"Milaard," Anurag starts, "Around 1999, there was this series on TV called Darr starring Kay Kay Menon and Irrfan Khan. Neither actor was well known then -- their career defining roles still more than half a decade away."

I remember it being a fairly gripping series about a dope-head serial killer (Irrfan) called, if my memory serves me right, "Desi Jallad" engaged in a battle of wits with a policeman (Kay Kay). I wonder where the accused is going with this.

"It was directed by my brother, Abhinav Kashyap, and the two of us co-wrote it. At some point during the series, my name stopped appearing in the credits, and the series turned a little less edgy and a little more melodramatic." He pauses, catches his breath, and asks, "You want to know the truth?"
"Yes," I say.
"You can't handle the truth," he says, his voice acquiring a stentorian quality.
"Dude, too many movie references. Stick to your story."
"Sorry, milaard," he says. "The truth is, I never wrote Darr. My brother wrote it, he directed it."
Sanjay laughs. I make notes in my notebook, and say, "Yes, Mr. Accused. Go on."
"You see, Satya was out by this time, and he only wanted me to lend my name to it. You know how far a name goes in show business. And I did this only for my brother. My own brother. My own blood. Same mother. Same father also. Mere bhai ke liye main itna bhi nahin kar sakta kya? We both came from Uttar Pradesh searching for jobs. We slept on benches, footpaths, beaches. We often ate Tiger biscuits for breakfast, lunch and dinner because you got nothing more wholesome for Rs. 3. Sometimes, we didn't even have enough money for that... Is what I did wrong? My hunger did this, milaard. My desperation did this."

Sanjay wipes a tear off his cheek.

I think for a while and pronounce judgment, "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. 'Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.' "

Anurag says, "Saale, milaard ke bacche, you think only you've read The Great Gatsby? Even Bachchan Amitabh has read it now."

I smile sheepishly. "Wait. You haven't explained Paisa Vasool. Your co-writer (and director) on Paisa Vasool was a man called Srinivas Bhashyam. He can't be your brother. Even if he his, he's definitely not same mother, same father."
"You must understand. Bhashyam's greatest achievements at that point were that he was Assistant Director on the hilarious Tamil classic Magalir Mattum and Second Unit Director of Mani Ratnam's blockbuster Bombay. He was making a Bollywood debut with Paisa Vasool. I was helping him out... After all, even an artist needs to eat some light Indian breads with lentil soup twice a day, no?"
"Srinivas Bhashyam sounds like he would prefer rice and mulligatawny soup."

I hear a distant voice. It is my grandmother's. Anurag, Sanjay, my friend, the theatre, all dissolve into my bedroom, now bathed in a dim yellow light from a distant bulb. My grandmother says, "Wake up, kanna. Eat some rasam saadam. It will do you good."
I say, "One minute, Paati. Coming."

I start my laptop, open Youtube, find the song, and listen to it.

The Dark Knight Rises: An Early Review

You know how in competitions you don't want to go after the best act because you fear you'll get judged harshly? That's exactly what The Dark Knight Rises must feel like, as audiences around the world queue up for it with one question lingering somewhere in the back of their minds, "Will it be as good as The Dark Knight?" If I had to answer in one word, I'd say, "No." Two words, "Nowhere close." Three words, "Oh, fuck off!" But then, coming second to The Dark Knight isn't really that sad, and TDKR does a lot of things right.

It gives the Batman a lot of time to introspect (He's been sitting in the east wing of his mansion for eight years, and still doesn't have answers when the movie begins!), it asks difficult questions of him, it pushes him even further down the rabbit-hole he jumped down in Batman Begins. He ponders, at various times, the purpose and price of his life. His parents are central to all this, as ever, but that explanation for his anger grows old -- perhaps even within him. Alfred wants him to run away; he thinks that's the only way to move on. Wayne's wounded, he's rusty, and Alfred isn't sure how battle-ready he is; but he is, on the surface, raring to go. What drives him? Is this impulse true? He isn't sure. He learns, first, that conquering all fear might not always be the best thing to do, and later, that he hadn't really conquered it in the first place. He learns that only fear can make you free, only the fear of falling can push you to make the jump. There is, of course, a lot of back and forth on relationships crucial to him -- with Alfred, with Gordon, with crime, with justice, with Gotham. In other words, it gives the Batman a lot of time to be Bruce Wayne, the eccentric millionaire.

With him on this journey, are a quirky set of characters.

There is a smooth, sizzling, scheming cat-burglar with an eye for his mother's pearls, who, strangely, steals his fingerprints. She is as planned and as deliberate as the Batman's other nemesis, the Joker, was impulsive and reckless. Even without the Batman having a vague mix of a crush and suspicion on her, she has dilemmas of her own -- an identity she's trying to get rid of, and an almost unnatural desire for self-preservation.

Then there's the bizarre man in the mask -- Bane. No surname, no first-name. Just Bane. (Clearly he's no boon) A disciple of Bruce's guru, Ra's Al Ghul, and an outcast from the League of Shadows, just like Bruce, he has the brain, the training and the brawn to pose the most serious threat in eight years to Gotham -- a threat grave enough to force Bruce out of his mansion and into his long abandoned costume. His plans are clear for us to see, but his motivations remain unclear.


There is another orphan, a too-curious-for-his-own-good, smart, tough, honest, rookie cop who has discovered Bruce's mask and is intrigued by it. He wants to understand the Batman's motivations, he almost seems like he wants to wear a mask himself. He perceives more than most others, he acts swiftly, decisively and level-headedly.


There are the people of Gotham, basking in the sunshine of the Dent Act, named in honour of the white knight, Harvey Dent -- it gave teeth to the police, the Commissioner says in a speech --  that cleansed the streets of Gotham of organised crime. The very people who believe the Batman betrayed them and murdered their saviour.


Commissioner Gordon lives that lie, repeating it each day, and hoping he will be able to get the truth off his chest soon. He thinks they should know the truth, but he doubts the people's ability to take the truth with equanimity. The lie is eating him from the inside, slowly.

There is a nuclear fusion reactor in the middle of it all -- belonging to Wayne Enterprises, controlled by the redoubtable Lucius Fox and Miranda Tate, a clean energy activist -- that Bane converts into a tick-tocking nuclear time-bomb. The scale of the plot, as you can see, is fairly large.

The gadgets are all there -- the new and improved Batpod with a sweet new wheel move, a flying machine simply called The Bat, and multiple Tumblers rumbling along the streets of Gotham. The action sequences are intense and inventive, the CGI simply breathtaking, and the cinematography broodingly beautiful.

But something doesn't fit. Somehow, the movie doesn't come together as an overwhelming meal that The Dark Knight was. The narration in the earlier movie was more sprawling, more messy. There were many sidetracks, many staircases that led nowhere. But that seemed to work in its favour. The tauter, more focussed approach in TDKR seems almost limiting. You're not plunged into a vast drama that no one seems to have total control over, and that, funnily, takes away from the movie.

For a movie where characters think so much, they seem to think too loudly, they seem to speak their thoughts too often. The movie doesn't ponder enough. In the previous two movies, Christopher Nolan found a way to not let the pace drag while still feeding us enough to think about. Here, he does neither.

Most disappointingly, TDKR's philosophy is re-hashed and superficial. Ra's Al Ghul and the Joker, even the Scarecrow (who makes a guest appearance here) and Dent, had their own set of ideologies -- political, social and economic -- and ethics. And this made them incredibly colourful. One of them was flawed, one greedy, one plainly unhinged and one wronged. They were coloured by what they saw, they reacted to what they experienced. Even the Joker, who unleashed mayhem for the fun of it, did it because he believed it was necessary for there to be someone to do it. "This city needs a better class of criminals," he said. They were all uniformly fascinating exactly because they took strong stands on the world around them.

Sadly, none of the villains on display in TDKR had any of this spunk. Seline Kyle was never really a villain, Bane's motivations were unconvincing. The third villain (shan't let the cat out of the bag!) was pushed by a need for... wait for it... revenge! No, I'm not suggesting that revenge sagas are necessarily simplistic. I'm saying that a revenge saga needs the avenger to lose something dear, and for the audience to feel that pain and that loss. Here, the whole thing is reduced to a plot twist -- now that's flimsy, that's insubstantial, that's fruitless.

And that's why TDKR is underwhelming -- because it builds a structure that is gigantically grand, achingly beautiful and painstakingly constructed, but builds it around a hollow, shallow core.

Vinod Agencies...

... or How I Fashion a Blog-post From Some Disorganised Thoughts on Cinema
***

I watched Agent Vinod last night, and it wasn't an eye-opener. In fact, I struggled to keep my eyes open every now and then. Let's start at the beginning, in Afghanistan, in that Desert of Doom or Death or Some Other Such Dangerous D-Word where a skirmish between 75 terrorists (Were they terrorists? Taliban? ISI? Business-sponsored interests?) and two Indian RAW dudes - one of them being a slightly overweight Ravi Kishen (whom I totally love, by the way) who looks like he hasn't run 500m at a stretch in two decades. The two Indian dudes win, of course, bharat mata ki jai etc., and while they are at it, they rescue a scantily-clad damsel trapped in a sack (bharat mata ki jai!). The action sequences are slick enough, if not particularly spectacular, and Saif and Ravi Kishen exchange endearingly silly banter. I want to see more of that woman (in both senses of the phrase). I am hooked.

But then, over-long opening credits ensue, taking one through not just the key actors and technicians, but also the lawyer and chartered accountants. This got me thinking - when the lawyers decide to do the legal work for the movie, do they say, "Boss, we'll waive some part of the fee if you credit us." I mean, I can't think of why a lawyer must be credited for a movie. He doesn't contribute to it creatively, does he? I mean, are the credits about everyone who did anything for the movie? Are they a vote of thanks? Or should they only credit people who worked on the movie itself? The fellow who brings chai for everyone on the set - should he be credited? What about the caterers? Or the hotels at the various locations where the unit stayed? The travel agents? Kareena's dentist?

You see what happened there? When the credits began, I was thinking of spies in Afghanistan. By the end of it, I am engrossed in the health of Kareena's gums. Detailed opening credits, a hat-tip to an earlier era of filmmaking, no doubt, probably work best when there is no action before them. It's like putting lengthy acknowledgments after a gripping prologue in a novel.

And this was the issue with Agent Vinod. There is some pretty engaging stuff - a smart joke here, a fun sequence there, some boiling tension - only to be killed by inconsistently paced and plotted stuff.

For instance, there was that brilliant scene with the Empress of Blandings-esque pet camel that Prem Chopra mercy kills with a heavy heart and moist eyes. There was a silliness to this scene, yes, but it was pitched and timed perfectly that I couldn't stop laughing. Was I the only one who thought Prem Chopra as David Kazaan was himself a bit Lord of Emsworthy - slightly out of sync with the world around him (he gets conned by Vinod, Iram and one man he believes is his own - the Colonel), slightly old, slightly beyond his prime, slightly clueless.

The camel made another appearance, as the password to a nuclear bomb in the last scene. There, it was just downright silly. And, somehow, not funny. The greatest password to defuse a nuclear bomb in all cinematic history still remains "Dulhan ki bidayi ka waqt badalna hai" from the seminal 16 December. Not only did the bomb in that movie require a password, it required the password to be spoken in Gulshan Grover's voice. The bomb has been smuggled into a college fest (yes, a college fest - who would expect a terrorist attack in an engineering college!) as "musical equipment", and Gulshan Grover immediately does what every terrorist does before launching a nuclear attack. He plays the drums. Fakely. With an expression conveying heightened calm and fulfillment. Like he's just slept with three supermodels at the same time. (If you don't believe me, watch the movie here.)

And how do they get him to say the password? They have a phone conversation with him where they "trick" him into saying the relevant words out of context. So ingenious. So yummy. 

You know the other great thing about 16 December? The "agents" are not coolly RAW or Intelligenec Bureau or any such thing. They are from the vastly underrated and underrepresented Revenue Intelligence. (If you're sniggering away, let me remind you that it was the very same Revenue Intelligence that exposed the Nira Radia scam.) But then, I'm not sure the Revenue Intelligence are even one-hundredth as cool as this movie makes them out to be. I don't think they have posh snipers, state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, an army of hackers, Milind Soman and an informer as hot as Aditi Govitrikar. For that matter, I don't think RAW has a single fellow like Agent Vinod either. As far as I know, these agencies have your standard-issue, slightly pot-bellied, middle-aged, mustachioed Government employees who do their job and come back home at 5 pm and lounge around their verandah in a torn banian and faded veshti and complain about corruption and rogue politicians. None of the hanging-from-a-cable-car-in-their-childhood nonsense.

I met a detective once, at a wedding, and I was aghast. He wasn't one of those, as Lauren Bacall so eloquently put it in The Big Sleep "greasy little men snooping around hotel corridors". Nor was he fast-talking, super-smooth, gun-toting Sam Spade variety. Not even the highly analytical, verbose Byomkesh Bakshi types. He was a Brahmin mama who lived in Mylapore, and when I spoke to him, was scooping paal payasam off his banana leaf and slurping it off his palm greedily. 

But this is a thing about making films about spies or detectives (or even lawyers for that matter). You have two options. You can either stick within existing tropes, and re-imagine or reinvent existing cliches - they are lies anyway, so you make a slightly different lie. Or you can go research the truth, and show them as they are. (No, while making films about lawyers, don't try being realistic. Some incoherent murmuring, an adjournment, and the bench clerk calling out the next case does not make for watchable cinema.) Sriram Raghavan was, clearly, doing the former. But he didn't go the whole hog - he seemed too constrained by prior art. Barring stray sequences, like that unbelievable sequence in that sleazy hotel in East Europe - that heart-stopping four-minute tracking shot gun-battle weaving in and out of corridors and rooms, with a dreamy song playing in the background, the blind pianist, those silent guns and their muted noise - he was stuck, not knowing which way to go.

There is another kind of spy movie. Vinod, a quiet family man, runs a gas agency, called "Vinod Agencies". But that is only a front. When he is not answering innumerable inquiries from various angry customers on when their gas cylinder will arrive, he is a super-agent. But he finishes all his work so subtly and clinically that he's home at 6 pm each evening to play cricket with his children. Something like a Bob Biswas working for the good guys. Now that's a compelling spy movie.

Aap Kaa Surroor v. Rockstar

A comparative examination of the dialectic dinchak discourses and discombobulated lumpen demetia.
***

Fifteen years ago, if someone told me that there would soon be two movies about Indian rockstars singing in Hindi who are wildly popular in Europe, I would've said sarcastically, "Yeah. And Govinda and Navjot Sidhu will end up as Members of Parliament." At that point in time, the only non-English singers to achieve mass hysteria were Ricky Martin and Las Ketchup, and neither was a rockstar in the Himesh Reshammiya or Ranbir Kapoor mould.

The parallels between Rockstar and Aap ka Surroor - the Moviee - the Real Love storyyy are plain for everyone to see. An Indian rockstar, with humble roots and extreme angst caused by flimsy reasons, rises to the top of the Indian music firmament, and in a totally unexpected turn of events, has wild shows in Europe. He gets arrested. He romances some woman who cannot act. There's a spunky other woman whose love he cannot reciprocate. He sports a stubble. He pontificates in Urdu.


(Oh man, Himesh should think of a copyright suit!) 

A detailed point-by-point analysis is required.


Name
Himesh is just called HR. Human Resources. Human Rights. High Risk. Hrithik Roshan. Heart Rate. An html code that creates a horizontal line...
There's a gilt-edged glitz to it. A starry shiny feel. It's the sort of name that can inspire and conspire (and the name rhymes with TR, who rhymed many things with many things).

Ranbir is called Jordan. Jordan? Why would you want to share your name with a Hashemete Kingdom, a retired basketball champ and an erstwhile pornstar? And dude, you're from Pitampura. Face it.

AKS: 1. Rockstar: 0.

War Cry
A no-brainer.

"Jai mata di. Let's rock!" versus "Sadda Haq!" The former is traditional with modern outlook. The latter sounds like a burly Pakistani middle order batsman's genial brother.

AKS: 2. Rockstar: 0

Lead star costume and make-up
This is a toughie.

Himesh's wardrobe included the bizarre Hrithik Roshan inspired black see-through banian showing off his insides in gory detail, the Neo-from-the-Matrix-trenchcoat with an incongruous red baseball cap, and a red turtleneck sweater I'll never forget for as long as I live. But let's face it, the costume was monotonous. And you couldn't see his hair, which just eliminates so many possibilities.

Ranbir wore a Sgt. Peppers' jacket and a Subhash Chandra Bose topi for one concert. For merging these two influences, and showing that the rebel can be a patriot (or a fan of Balakrishna, who famously wore the topi in this mind-warping, soul-twisting, brain-hurting video) Rockstar deserves an award. Those harem pants, those strange things hanging from his neck (sources tell me they included one item from the dargah, one from the temple and a miniature samosa), the I'm-a-turban-I'm-not-a-turban... Rockstar had some incomparable gems. And the hairdo - when Nargis is in coma, Ranbir's hair simply transforms from shoulder-length to middle-of-back length, and he grows a Craig McMillan moustache. Magical realism only.

AKS: 2. Rockstar: 1.

Pained expression of lead star
Himesh was the definition of pained. Even when he woos Hansika with a song, he looks pained. When he is arrested, he looks like someone pinched his nipples with tweezers. And when he asserts his innocence with the legendary, "It's a mistaaaake!" the German prison establishment's hearts melt and they allow him to be rescued by some auto-rickshaws.

Ranbir's expression somehow didn't convey the requisite pain required to be a rockstar. When he played with those Sufi people, for large swathes of the song, he looked bored, not troubled. I guess there's only that much pain you can convey about missing Nargis Fakhri.

AKS: 3. Rockstar: 1.

Lady love
Nargis Fakhri made me wish Genelia played this role - she is that bad. Her mouth is always in the wrong position, her eyes look eternally glazed, and her body is stiffer than Sadagopan Ramesh's feet.

On the other hand, Hansika Motwani deserves every accolade for playing her role with rare elan and panache. She had to act like she was in love with Himesh Reshammiya and repeatedly refer to him as HR. She also gets additional points for holding a cello like it was Himesh Reshammiya, and holding Himesh Reshammiya like she should have been holding the cello.

AKS: 4. Rockstar: 1.

Supporting female characters
Ah. Mallika Sherawat, called "Ruby James", in love with Himesh Reshammiya (this gives men of all shapes and sizes hope). Plus, she's a lawyer and I have professional bias. Plus, she dances to Mehbooba o Mehbooba sung by Himesh in all his nasally overwhelming voice.

Aditi Rao Hydari's ultimate dollness on the other hand.

Hmmmm. Difficult. Hmmmm.
Ok. The sheer yumminess of Aditi Rao wins this. But it is a close call, very very close.

AKS: 4. Rockstar: 2.

Sufi-based song
Gun Faya is a great song, and I love the way the guitar blends into it. Somehow, that part of the movie reminded me of the story about The Beatles at Hamburg. But that's a subject of a different post. Gun Faya is superlative, and the only thing going against it is that in English those words sound like someone setting off some ammunition.

Listening to any of Himesh's songs is like going down the Carrollian rabbit hole. But have you heard Assalam Valekum in an indefinite loop on a still, quiet night, alone in a hostel room through booming speakers and felt a brown creeper growing from beneath your feet, crackling as it wraps itself around you, digging its knife-like thorns into your flesh until the pain becomes your friend and puts you to restful dreamless sleep?

AKS: 5. Rockstar: 2.

Climax
Rockstar's climax is poetic, with that execrably translated Rumi verse about someone meeting someone else in a field and the ambiguity surrounding her death - there's one perplexing shot of her in coma with her bosoms heaving. But she's waiting. On "the field". For him. Really, she should give him better directions. 


Aap Kaa Surroor, on the other hand, had a climax that even Kidnap couldn't compare to, where the villain's confession is surreptitiously recorded on a mobile phone and beamed live on a large screen. And what does the villain confess to doing? In Wikipedia's words, "Khurana reveals that he wore a face mask to appear like HR and committed the murder to frame him."

We have a winner.

AKS: 6. Rockstar: 2.

The Best Movie about Indian Rockstar in Europe Award goes to...

(As a consolation, we give (posthumously) Shammi Kapoor the Best Fake Shehnai Playing Award.)

Father, Child and Holy Dinosaurs

In the last five days, I have watched two movies that portrayed a father-child relationship and featured dinosaurs. Apart from this superficial and slightly freakish similarity, I think I can confidently state that Deivathirumagal and The Tree of Life come from two different universes.

The former approaches the subject like a sugarcane juicer would approach sugarcane, extracting every little drop of sugary sweetness it can from the story of a childish father and an too-smart-for-her-age child. The latter, ah, well... The latter approaches the subject with a microscope, a syringe and fine piece of forceps; digging into the cane, showing you little nuances, droplets of saccharine, strands of rough fibre and unexpectedly zooming out, to explore the existence and relevance of the sugarcane itself. Deivathirumagal is about the unordinary, it is about special people in special circumstances, but it is told in the most ordinary of manners, milking the specialness of the situation for every cheap teardrop, being needlessly cute, needlessly melodramatic, needlessly obvious, needlessly over-the-top. The Tree of Life, on the other hand, is about normal people, everyday relationships, regular emotions, jealousies, happinesses and freedoms, but it is about finding the magic in that normality, and still asking questions of it, it is about valuing those emotions, validating them, almost, but still placing them amidst a tremendous canvas. The Tree of Life is a meditation, it is a probing, self-indulgent journey, it is an artist's quest to understand his own emotions, and their place in the cosmos around him.

In Deivathirumagal, as a result, there is constant chatter, the father and daughter have a family-whistle, they have cute duet acts, he tells her stories, and gets proud of her reciting nursery rhymes. In trying to show that special people are normal, the movie forgets that normal people don't have any of this. The love between a parent and a child manifests itself far more subtly, in the way parents look at their children, in the way they discipline them, in their inherent protectiveness, in their pride, their disappointments and their desires; in the warmth of their touch, in the way they hold their them, in quiet intimacy. The Tree of Life captures that - and this is its greatest achievement.

Ultimately, The Tree of Life is Syama Sastry asking Goddess Meenakshi difficult questions in Ahiri; Deivathirumagal is the Backstreet Boys telling you which way they want it.

No Animals were Harmed in the Making of this Movie

When you're jobless on weekday afternoons, and you decide to channel-flip, you'll come across Telugu movies dubbed into Hindi with rather strange titles. Indra - The Tiger. Narasimha - the Powerful Man. Meri Jung - One Man Army.

The below-mentioned, Cheetah - the Leopard is in a league of its own.


The movie, needless to say, isn't some wildlife thriller like Jungle (or one of those 80s movies that features a dog, an elephant and a pigeon). Venkatesh is a singer, Venu, whose father wants him to be an IPS officer. By the end of the movie, he becomes both. Like a cheetah who is also a leopard.

Now that you've finished guffawing, I have a question - what is the difference between a cheetah and a leopard?

(Tougher than you think, no?)

Review Time!

I know I'll make a horrible music/cinema journalist - the sort that reviews music and movies week after week. The profession requires you to react quickly to something, and spew out length-bound opinions. I can't do that, because I have a theory. (God, I'm so full of doddi.)

There's three kinds of art. One that makes no impact on you at all. The second that makes immediate impact, but disappears into the recesses of your memory soon. The third makes some (or even no) impact on the first attempt, but stays with you, haunts you and begs you to come back for seconds, thirds and (on occasion) infinites. Then, there is that insignificant minority that catches you by the balls the first time around and lives with you for ever. Most art falls somewhere in between these categories. (I know I said three categories and ended up with four. It was intentional. I'm a Douglas Adams fan. Or, you could count the first sentence as tisram, and the rest of the paragraph in chaturasram. Ok, forgive me for that random Carnatic joke. God, I'm so full of doddi.)

Now, when you write a movie review on Friday evening, after having watched the movie on Friday morning, anything that is in category 1 gets dismissed immediately, anything in category 2 gets elevated to category 3 (Rang De Basanti, for instance), lots of things in between categories 2 and 3 get interchanged, and anything in category 4 gets just deserts. (No. The spelling of the word is not 'desserts' in this context. Check this out. (God, I'm so full of doddi.)

See what happened with Vinnaithandi Varuvaaya - the first time I heard it, I thought, Bleddy Hell. Rahman's taken his structurelessness too far. And then I heard it again. And again, and again. Until structures, forms, meanings were discovered, and Mannippaaya became a better song than Aaromale. I know Rahman's music very well. Hell, I know Rahman's music better than I know Tyagaraja's (I've listened to Rahman uninterruptedly since Roja, circa 1992, but there was a long gap where I heard almost no Tyagaraja). But the dude's managed to surprise me again - with that naadaswaram in Omana Penne, with some fresh hip-hoppy stuff from Blaaze in Hosanna, that bluesy-angsty-Malayali singing in Aaromale, and the sheer uncatchability of Mannippaaya. (One mustn't forget the lovely vocals in the title song.) He's also surprised me with two doddi songs - I mean, what is with Anbil Avan and Kannukkul Kannai?! Why are they even in the same galaxy?

Just a couple of additional things about Mannippaaya. (God, I'm so full of doddi.) Shreya Ghoshal's Tamil accent is getting better by the day, and her voice, oh man, so pretty. There's many kinds of female voices, most of which I'm not too fond of. (Wait, Mary Wollstonecraft. Don't kill me. There's many kinds of male voices also, most of which I'm not too fond of.) Shreya Ghoshal's is the loveliest sort, really. Not too timbrous, not too shrieky. Fully in shruti, at all points of time. Really helps when you're negotiating a melody as complicated as Mannippaaya. And Ra-ghu-man, suppper only. That introduction line, "Kanne thadumaari nadanthen..." when he comes in with that high note, crooning. Abbah. Bliss only, it is.

Similarly with Ishqiya. I came out of the theatre too numb to talk. I mean, one can take only so much of Vidya Balan playing a sexual manipulator and still remain coherent and sane. If I had to write a review in two hours' time, I would've praised the movie to the skies, flooded paragraphs with superlatives, fantasised about Vidya Balan and collapsed under the excitement. But I exercised restraint - for two days. Today, my opinion is slightly different. The movie has its stretches of brilliance. (No, I don't use that term lightly. I mean it. There were stretches of brilliance - the way she dangles the two men was outstanding! You could feel Kalujaan's tender love and Babban's erotic infatuation (as Babban puts it, "Tumhara isqh, aur hamara ishq sex?"), and Krishna's perfect understanding of what both of them want. But there was the rest of the movie - a convoluted plot where nobody's motive was made clear. The dude playing the husband did a very good job of hiding a confused character's shallowness. And the lady's voice over the phone was, as one Mr. Happy put it, 'an unnecessary device'.

Even so, Ishqiya was a very good film. That "Mamta ko dhoka nahin de sakta" scene, "chuttar dhone se pahele bandook chalana seekh jata hai", that scene where they dance to "Dekha jo Tujhe yaar", the addition of chutiyum sulphate to my vocabulary, all makes it a great movie. But some coherence, some consistency, and it could have been God-level.

Ishqiya continues, in an equally engaging manner, a genre started by Manorama: Six Feet Under - of rural, desi noir (or, as Jabberwock put it once, phillum noir). That one was quieter, more brooding, less quirky and more dangerous. This one is funnier, edgier and madder. But both deserve more attention than they're getting.

In the end analysis, neither Vinnaithandi Varuvaaya (the music), nor Ishqiya will form a part of me - unlike Thiruda Thiruda or Maqbool, but I will recollect both fondly. (God, I'm so full of doddi.)
***

a. Doddi means shit in Telugu/PD.
b. Yes. I invent words. I'm like Shakespeare.

Before Sunr-eyes!

The other day, when I watched Before Sunrise (again), I spent the entire movie watching their eyes. Through quick glances, fluttery glimpses, stares, glares and glints, their story unfolded, and the movie was even more enchanting than it used to be!

I love that stupendous scene in the listening room of a record store - their eyes truly rule it. The record starts playing, a guitar plays a repetitive string of chords, they look at each other briefly, smile and look away immediately. The scene is slightly claustrophobic (they're closer than they are comfortable being?) - the low, close camera angle, them leaning against the corner of a presumably small room, music all around them. They turn away from each other for a few seconds, and slowly, her gaze sets upon him. A smile is beginning to develop on her face when he suddenly turns to her. Deftly, she looks away - as if she had never been looking at him at all.

Now, he looks in her direction - his expression shows that he likes looking at her. Julie Delpy's cuteness sure is infectious. The song starts, she smiles to herself. He smiles, his eyes are still on her. She turns to him suddenly and catches his stare, he turns away uncomfortably and there is an impish smile on her face. They both look away at the soundproof walls around them.

It's her turn now. She barely looks in his direction when he turns to her. Has he caught her? The moment is too brief for her to really know. Then, he gets a good, long look her her as she pretends to take in the music, glancing at him from the corner of her eyes a couple of times. For a second, their eyes meet. They smile, but it is a fleeting one. Then, they're back to playing their game. She looks longingly while he stares at the ceiling and turns away just as he turns to her, he does the same, they flash slightly longer smiles at each other just as the singer croons, "I have never wanted you so much/ Come here." Then, the scene cuts to them walking down a road.

The scene in the listening room isn't more than a minute long, but their relationship strengthens from this point onwards - it is almost as if that closeness, those glimpses and that music somehow convinced them that their idea might not have been such a bad one after all. Maybe, it gave them time to be with each other, but not talk - something they didn't have until then.

Later that evening, they're sitting in a church (one of the few places open at that time of the night) and they've just had an aimless conversation about how she feels like a very old woman, and how he feels like a thirteen-year-old boy. She jokes about how, earlier, on the ferris wheel, it was a very old girl kissing a very young boy. She finds it funnier than he does. Their eyes meet, his hand reaches out and tucks her hair behind her ear.

He asks her, "Have you heard about the Quakers? The Quaker religion?"
She tells him she hasn't.
He says, "I went to this Quaker wedding once. It was fantastic." He goes on, "This couple comes and kneels down in front of the whole congregation, and nobody says a word unless they feel that God moves them to say it. Then, after about an hour of," a slight pause, he turns, fixes his eyes on her, "staring at each other, they're married."
"That's beautiful. I like that," she says.
He's staring at her now, watching her eyes, hoping she will also stare at his. Three or four seconds pass, she looks away. The look on his face tells us that he has realised that they still have a long way to go.

Somehow, they traverse that path very fast, for by morning, they cannot take their eyes off each other. They hear a harpsichord play from a house on the street, they look through the window to find a man actually playing it, peering nervously into the notation in a book. They watch him for a bit, and they launch into a brief, impromptu dance to the music. He asks her if she has ever danced to a harpsichord, she says, "Of course not..." He twirls her and releases her. She stands a foot-and-a-half away from him now.

Their eyes are locked, and he says, "Wow."
"What?" she asks, unsurely.
He puts his hands on her shoulders and says, "I'm going to take your picture... So that I don't forget you, or... or... all this."
"Ok. Me too."

Then, they face each other and just stare at each other, like the Quaker wedding, soaking in each other, till their mind cannot forget the scene. Their eyes look tired, because they haven't slept all night, but there's still a freshness about their gaze, there is longing, nostalgia for just the previous day, there is this urgency, there is even a touch of sadness. The photograph they take is not of that second, or that street, or of their faces, or the harpsichord-player - it is a photograph of an entire day - of the train, the men in the cow-play, the record store, the poet, the church, the concert in the bar, the wine, of making love. The photograph captures the fact that they will probably never be together like this again, and yet, that they are just where they want to be.
***

(I just realised that two of my favourite movies are set in Vienna. I wonder if that is just a coincidence.)

Break an Egg

Here are some choice comments and observations on Wake Up, Sid (in bullet point format for easy reading):

• The Director seems to have watched Dil Chahta Hai too many times (which is not a bad thing). And I think he liked parts of Lakshya also. So, there's either tons of internalisation (a la Kavya Vishwanathan) or lots of nudge-nudge-wink-wink-check-out-this-tribute to DCH (that scene where Ranbir Kapoor tells someone on the phone - "Mard ban. Be a man!").

• Every father seems to tell his son to "kal se office aa jaao" at the breakfast table after the son has scraped through (or, as in this case, not scraped through) college. We saw it in DCH, in Hero No. 1 and so on and so forth. Moral: chilled out sons must avoid the breakfast table.

• I have no issues with understated drama. But no drama? Instead, a series of highly convenient (non) events - not my tumbler of filter coffee. Even Sooraj Barjatya films are slightly edgier than this.

• Do all rich kids drink orange juice in the morning? If so, I want to be a rich kid. Yum. Orange Juice.

• I want to understand Konkona Sen's revenue model. The way she moved into a new home, painted and decorated it in a highly un-struggling-writerly manner even without having gotten her job was a bit much. Then, she just allowed Sid to stay with her, not thinking of how she would feed him two square meals a day. Maybe she was also a rich kid masquerading as a non-rich kid.

• Wasn't the Background Score highly elevatorly? Yet, it failed to elevate. (Ok. Fine. Bad joke. Sorry.)

• The paper birds in on the wires in the house represent the fact that the inhabitants are aware of the fact that they can fly, but they prefer sitting on a wire. If this were a Fellini film, I'm sure this interpretation would be welcomed with open arms in the psuedo circles. Unfortunately, this just seems to be the art director being arty and the director going along with the idea.

• Am I the only one who found it significant that Sid had major senti feelings towards the rain and his father's company manufactured showers?

• Is there any reason why one would cry at the end of the movie? (Other than crying out of sheer frustration.)
***

(a) No. I didn't hate the movie this much. Feeling slightly uncharitable currently.
(b) Oh, super super girl, Francis Buchanan (swalpa gender-identity-crisis) has a hilarious blog. Go read.

Friendship, Love, Forgiveness and Remembrance

Before I start on the actual business of this post, I would like to point out that 'monads' is not a fake word. Check this out.

Also, major SPOILER alerts.
***

When I watched Dalapathi last Sunday (yet again - will I ever get tired of this movie?), I wondered if they were showing the movie because it was Friendship Day. The thought didn't strike me until I discovered a random channel showing Boys simultaneously. Dalapathi is currently my favourite Mani Ratnam movie, for reasons ranging from deeply personal to highly technical. But the one reason that I want to share in this post (I'll write another long one on Dalapathi sometime.) is the portrayal of a friendship. Mani Ratnam does play the senti card, and plays it quite heavily too. But as a viewer, you never feel its melodrama. Compare this with the recent Nadodigal. This movie is about three friends who help one of their friends run away and marry a girl. Now, this couple are children of rival politicians. In the bloodshed that ensues, the friends who help them suffer severe losses - one loses hearing, another loses a leg and a third gets an ugly gash over his eye (he also loses a girl forever - but the girl is so irritating that you hardly empathise with his loss).

So far so good.

Then the friends discover that the couple have broken up - that they only had lust, no love. So, these friends decide they will kill the couple. Throughout the movie, there are extremely sentimental references to friends and friendship. After a point, I cringed at each mention of the word 'friend'. The movie suggests, on many occasions, that the sole purpose of having friends is so that they can help you run away with your girl/guy at some point.

Which is why a friend who didn't like the movie got asked, "Yen, Meydam? Onga love work-out aaidchaa?"

Nadodigal as the title suggests is a nomadic film. It is never clear on what it wants to say or prove (or disprove). Its biggest drawback, though, is that it doesn't even have good-looking people to make the ticket price worth it.

Love Aaj Kal doesn't suffer from this problem. Deepika looks absolutely delicious. I think her yumminess in this movie is only topped in recent times by Sushma Reddy in that Limca ad (I'm telling you - if I had found any theatre showing that ad before the movie, I'd buy a ticket, watch the ad and cut. Even four shows a day.). Harleen (whose real name is being kept secret, although the internet reveals she's some Brazilian model) looks really cute too! Love Aaj Kal is a strange movie - its humour is smart and subtle, its romance is unconvincing (and a bit sudden and random), its 'message' is not really a message, its point is a bit unclear. If Imtiaz Ali has some insights on love, he's not making them very apparent. One theme that runs through his three movies has been this sudden discovery of love for the person next to you, after being engaged/married to some third party. A friend turns into your 'love', and you discover it a bit late, always.

But I enjoyed myself. I'm not complaining.
***

The most enjoyable, layered, complicated, honest movie I've watched in a while is Blessy's Bhramaram - in Malayalam, starring Mohan Lal. A stranger turns up at a man's house claiming to be his old friend from school. The stranger knows lots of details about this man's school and class and teachers, but his name doesn't seem familiar. As layers peel off the stranger's story, and its emotional core is thrown open to you in a powerful last scene, you are shocked, saddened, silenced. You're blown away.

The movie deals with forgiveness and remembrance. It deals with both a society's inability to forgive, and an individual's ability to do so (even if it might have been out of necessity). It deals with raw emotions of a man whose life has been blown apart by his past catching up with him unexpectedly.

I don't want to reveal more, because this is a movie I'd hate to spoil for anyone. Watch it. Watch Mohan Lal take on a most difficult character's role and play it with accomplished ease. Watch a relatively unknown director take his steps towards superstardom.

The Odds and Ends Post

So, every now and then, there's one of these - a collection of random angst, outpourings, jokes, links and suchlike. As always, in bullet point format.

My Brother's Birthday

Today is my brother's birthday. I wish him a great day, month, year. Wish him more writing, more fun, more jokes. A joke dedicated to him on his birthday (since I've spent most of the day in the hospital):

Munnabhai MBBS = Durjan Surgeon.

Rama's Birthday
Ramanavami happened. I have a ritual on Ramanavami (and have had it for 4 years now) - I give a concert privately to myself. Sit in a quiet place with a sruti box. Start with a varnam, and then sing/play various Rama songs for about two-and-a-half hours in concert format replete with alapana, neraval, swaram, a main ragam, a sub-main, some small tukkadas. This year, I made a concious effort to include as many non-Thyagaraja songs as possible in the list. I played Mohanam as main (Ra Ra Rajivalochana Rama), Nannubrovarada in Madhyamavati, Brochevarevarura (Khamas) - all compositions of Mysore Vasudevacharya, Ramachandram Bhavayami (Dikshitar), and of course Palukebangaramaayera, Rama Rama... There were some perennially favourite Thyagaraja songs also.

It is my favourite time of the year!

It's funny, though, that Rama is today associated with the most unwanted elements. First, and most prominent, is the Rama Sena and its culture-vulturing, its war against pub culture (that beats the war against Iraq to the most pointless war in the world), its war against immoral women, and its upholding of a warped, ancient Hindu Dharma. Then, there's the whole did-he-build-the-bridge-or-not controversy, where, ridiculously enough, the Supreme Court is called on to decide if he existed at all. Then, there's the Ramajanmabhoomi mess... I'd like to quote a Tyagaraja song right now, but I shan't.

Random Conversation on Love since Last Post

"Are you still in love with me?"
"No. I think its faded now."
"Yeah? I'm glad!"
"Yeah. Love is like a pair of jeans. If you're in it for long enough, it fades."
"What about pre-faded jeans?"
At that point, I had no reply. (And even if I did, it was some non-notable one.) But then I wondered, pre-faded jeans = arranged marriage?

This love and fading jeans analogy has much scope. Hmmm. Must explore.

A Wednesday

I watched A Wednesday today, fully and finally. I know this statement is politically incorrect and could lead to serious loss of social life, but I didn't like it. I thought the premise of the film was flimsy, and its execution was cliched. Go on then, excommunicate me.

Pyaasa

I watched it again last night. No one makes films like him. No one does. Really.

Of Two Plays

Finally caught a show of God - a play by Woody Allen. This new group in Bangalore called Tattvam Theatre was performing it. I thought it was fairly well executed, although it didn't go entirely with my interpretation of the script. I also felt in places that I had laughed a lot more when I read the script than when I watched it. Crucially, I was a bit disappointed with the half-hearted adaptation to Indian circumstances. All of Woody Allen's works are written in a context, and outside that context, many of the jokes lose their humour. Therefore, I think an a fuller adaptation (at the very least, Bangalore-ising the entire play instead of a half-hearted Bangalore- New York type adaptation) would have been much better. Also, I didn't like a couple of actors. Lastly, it looked like they had taken too many ideas from a Youtube video of the play being performed by some other amateurs. A little thought and a little research (for instance, Sardi's - often referred to in the original play - is a famous restaurant in the theatre district of New York. A Wikipedia search would have told them that. In adapting that to McDonald's takes away from the humour of those lines) would have made it much much better. In any case, it is a very difficult play to pull off, and despite a sluggish start, they really did a wonderful job, and deserve a round of applause for it. Oh, the guy who played the Actor deserves fourteen rounds of applause. Absolutely wonderful!

The second play was The Doctor Despite Himself by Moliere, performed at Alliance by a group called Miracle Entertainment. I had major reservations about this play.
1. The script wasn't the strongest around - and by no means is it Moliere's most revered work. Wonder why you'd still want to do it today in the same way. It is a story that could have been completely adapted to modern Indian circumstances and performed with more natural dialogue (I'm not too fond of Christ College type people playing Jack and Tommy and Lucas speaking sentences beginning with "Aye!")
2. The dialogue is a translation of some 17th Century French into 18th century English, and the actors just couldn't emote in that language. Hell, some of the actors just couldn't emote.
3. The production was super-tacky. The sets weren't imaginative, the lighting was really patchy, backstage work was much like college drama. The director dude (who spoke too much at the end of the play) said this was their fourth play, and still made some song-and-dance about amateur theatre. Boss, at some point, you must shed that amateur tag? And a fourth production is a reasonable time to expect that?
4. And, the curtain call. Um, why did you inflict that on us?

An Announcement

I'm seriously thinking of starting a Carnatic Music blog. No no, not one of those blogs with some technical discussions on vague ragas quoting from the Sangeeta Sampradaya Pradarshini. This will be a fun exercise - concert reviews, jokes, the occasional serious article on some issue (rants about bad amplification systems or mobile phones, for instance), photos and related items. Basically, a blog where one writes from the heart. Cheesy enough?

Anyone interested in being co-blogger, helping with design/technical fundae, angel investors, donors, mail me - swaroop dot mami at gmail dot com - or leave a comment here. The idea is still in my head. No concreteness yet. So, suggestions welcome.

Snippets from Yesterday: 2 Nos.

First, A Phone Conversation with a Good Friend

"Macha, I really like that song from Jaane Tu Ya Jaane na..."
"The Aditi song?"
"Yeah - I mean, there's something about songs with people's name in them..."
"Hey Mickey, You're so fine..."
"No da."
"The Obama Song by the Obama Girl?"
"Hey..."
"Monicaaaaaaaaa, O My Darling!"
"Wait..."
"O Raveena raveena raveena oooooo."
"Dai..."
"Oye Raju, pyaar na kariyo, dariyoooo, dil toot jaata hai."
"Um, I was thinking more along the lines of 'Dil Kya Kare', or 'Tu hai Meeeeeri Kiran!' or 'Meri Bheegi Bheegi Si...'
"My name is Manjeetttu."
"Hey da, something like 'Onnavidaaaaa'!"
"En peru Padaiyappa..."
Click.
Jokes apart, there is something about songs with names in their titles. Like right now, after listening to the Aditi song six times in a row, I want to find an Aditi and sing it to her. (No, I didn't feel similar reactions with the Mickey song.)
***

Second, The Day of the Freaks

(Yes, yes, that title is inspired by this. Yes, yes, I haven't read it yet.'Yet' being the crucial term. Just acquired a copy. Also, this is a long and rambling post. You are warned.)

I spent a fruitful last evening eating cheese sandwiches, with homemade ice lemon tea and watching two sporting freaks weave their magic around much-fancied opposition - the first was a 22-year-old upstart with a forehand that caused many tornadoes, none bigger than the one yesterday; and the second was a, um, a spinner (in the most liberal sense of the term), who reminds me of a Mak Lubricant advertisement with the tag line, "Legspin, Offspin, aur yeh bowled!" I watched a lot more of the Spaniard than the Lankan.

I was nervous even before the evening started. I felt underprepared for the final, and that was largely because I had watched only one Federer game this year, and that was his first round match against Hrbaty. A the first set got under way, and there was this torrent of whirling topspinners, scurrying, indefatigability and improbable angles, the nervousness grew. Federer wasn't playing all that badly, but Nadal still got his nose in front. Federer gave it his all, to be fair, but Nadal made him play one extra ball each time, and the errors came. The second set was more of the same angles, the body-serves, the gruelling down-the-line backhands. I could feel it two continents away - the champion's will weakened, as breakpoint after breakpoint slipped through his fingers.

At two sets down, depressed as hell, I switched to the cricket. Sehwag - 59 off 33, the TV read. I was stunned! Along came Mendis bowling his Right Arm Guile - for that's what he bowls. And its not just variations in direction of turn, but in length, flight and pace. One over, and Sehwag and Yuvraj were out. Before I could digest that news, Raina and Sharma fell. Now, both channels were depressing.

I switched back to the tennis and watched Federer grind out service games, and spill chances on Nadal's serve. It was going well till the ninth game. After looking comfortable for most of the set, Federer got himself into 15-30. He barely wriggled out of that when the rain came. I gathered that Nadal had chased down each ball, and used the wind to his advantage to disturb Federer. And Federer refused to play the slice return. I was aghast, and needed some consoling. I called a friend, great Federer fan, but he sounded gloomier than me. Vijay Amritraj spoke of mental blocks. I logged on to orkut, and checked out the Federer community. That was most distressing - most people were already speaking of revenge next year (often in Portuguese). What gave me confidence was the Goran-Henman game in the 2001 semifinal. Goran came back a different player after the rain break.

Federer, too, came back with a vengeance. He played a few brilliant points, as he had done in the game until then, but ensured that he didn't allow his serve to be broken. After playing a solid tie-break, he unravelled more drama in the fourth. On each Championship Point, I felt more nervous than I had ever done in my life. And when he saved one with the shot of the match - a bachkand down-the-line, I was convinced that he would win.

The fifth set, all was even, when rain came again. The Borg-McEnroe tiebreak aptly played in the break. The second break hadn't changed the tense atmosphere - it was gloomier than ever before, and the players produced tennis that only they could produce. This rivalry beats all that I've seen in my life. Sampras-Agassi was a stop-start, and there were times when one was better than the other. On Sampras' home turf, Agassi couldn't make a dent. In this rivalry, Federer doesn't have a home turf anymore. And Nadal sits proudly on two thrones. Just last year, people spoke of invincibility, ultimate greatness and everyone on the men's tour fighting for second spot. Only a fool or an optimist would do so today.

What makes Nadal so special? He's got this style that's entirely his own - I don't think there is a single player with that forehand, with that superhuman athletic ability and the sheer tenacity to gnaw away at a player's will. He's also got this uncanny court sense - he sees passes and winners that others cant see, he is excellent at guessing where the next ball will come, and when the rallies get longer, he uses this same court sense to small dents on the opponent's hits until he creates a chance for a winner. Above all, he hits the ball so bloody hard. So, if his unorthodoxy doesn't trouble you, the weight of his hitting sure will.

All unorthodox players need a second, more consistent, weapon to make up for players getting used to their unorthodoxy. Nadal has two - his backhand that hardly ever fails him, and his ability to retrieve. Anil Kumble, another bowler who would fall under the category of Right Arm Guile had many such weapons - his accuracy, his lionheartedness, his love for the longest spells, and his supremely sharp brain. Mendis needs to develop these weapons to sustain himself over a period of time. In the one-day game, when players are trying to take him on, he might get away easier. But in the Test matches, when a Rahul Dravid decides that he will wait endlessly for the bad ball and just block everything else, or a Laxman begins to read his mysterious fingers like he read Warne's, he might not be this effective.

The true test of an unorthodox player comes then - when he has to adapt to newer parameters and better opponents. Nadal came out with flying colours yesterday, when he showed why he was better than an unorthodox Fabrice Santoro, and put his name amongst the greatest in tennis history. Kumble did it when he picked up all those wickets on a comeback in Australia. Chanderpaul has been doing it for nearly two seasons now scoring runs everywhere and against everyone. Mendis, therefore, has a fair distance to go.

NOT a Review of Sarkar Raj

Let me reiterate at the outset that this is not, and I stress, not a review of Sarkar Raj. These are merely uncritical (and the term 'uncritical' is crucial), amateur (equally crucial qualification) notes on my experience of watching the film yesterday with the mysterious A.X (who now blogs here - oh, don't bother clicking on the link, the blog is only open to invited readers - I wonder if A.X. needs to be 'in love' with these readers to invite them). Again, I stress - I am not a critic, and this is not a review. I mean, I don't want Ram Gopal Varma revealing to the world that I hound producers who refuse to touch me. Oh, my favourite bit from his diatribe:

"Khalid Mohammed has made such horrendous films like Fiza, Tehzeeb, Silsilay etc (sic). If he or anybody thinks otherwise, the whole industry knows how many actors and investors are queuing up in front of his house fighting each other to get his films made (sic). Even I made big flops and precisely because of that I don’t become judgmental on someone else’s work (sic)."
(Emphasis mine)

So, A.X. and I watched Sarkar Raj last evening. It was a delightfully gay evening - we walked from Cunningham Road to MG, bought a phone for his mom, ate sandwiches at Indiana's (burgers weren't available!), and then went for the movie. The movie, however, was anything but gay. (I mean 'gay' in the 'happy' sense.)

Depressing plot turn after depressing plot turn are punctuated by Abhishek Bachchan's I'm-intense-because-my-face-never-changes expression (honestly, Big B's sentimental speech to Abhishek Bachchan's photograph at the end seemed so natural, because Abhishek's expression was the same throughout the movie - Sarkar could have mistaken him for the photograph!), Aishwarya Rai's what-am-I-doing-in-this-movie look, the sidekicks' please-cure-my-constipation mien and the just-in-case-you-don't-get-it-,-this-is-a-serious-movie background music. In fact, that is the real problem with Sarkar Raj and Ram Gopal Varma in recent times - he takes himself too seriously. Its reflected in the unnecessarily arty lighting in each scene of the movie (twice in the first ten minutes, characters come out of the darkness into the light and stare menacingly), camera movements that toe the line between high craft and a drunken cameraman, dialogue straight out of an 80s Hindi movie, and a grey-gloved, enigmatic contract killer who evokes more laughter than fear.

And then, there are the villains - a double-crossing Deputy CM with Jim Carrey-esque facial contortions, a needlessly slimy Hasan Qazi (play unmistakable cheap movie villain background music), the two villains whose identities I shall not reveal (I don't want to spoil Big B's Poirot-like explanation at the end), and Vohra. Now, Vohra has his trademark line, "Wohraa, not Vohra," that seems to be inspired by Dr. Winkel ("Vinkel, not Winkel") in The Third Man (yes, yes, I'm obsessed). RGV will obviously claim that there's no inspiration whatsoever, and probably that he's never even watched the film, which is a pity, because Sarkar Raj could well have done with some music by Anton Karas (Man, that zither! Is there anything as haunting?).
Recently, I watched Kshana Kshanam again, and managed to catch the last half of Shiva on TV. I wonder where that Ram Gopal Varma's gone. As I go through his filmography I see classics like Gaayam, Govinda Govinda, Rangeela, Satya, Kaun, and Company. After Company comes the fall - with Bhoot that looked like a Ramsey Brothers product, the average Sarkar, unmentionable Darna Zaroori Hai, the seriously flawed Nishabd, a bad remake of Shiva, and an even worse remake of Sholay. His older films had great humour (watch this selection from Kshana Kshanam); they had everlasting characters - Bhiku Matre (Manoj Bajpai) from Satya, Chandu and Satya in Kshana Kshanam, the villain eating Eclairs chocolate in Ananganaga Oka Roju, or even Durga, the villain in Jungle; most importantly, his older movies had soul. His newest one only has Abhishek Bachchan imitating Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator.

Subtle Subramanian - Part III

Finally! After months of laziness, and lack of inspiration, and lame excuses, here's the follow-up to Part I and Part II.
***
Vinod missed Madras. He worked there for only four years, but had grown to love the city - gossipy Mamis complaining about loose morals, loudly discussing sentiments and values in the latest loud Tamil Serial - "Poor Abhirami. Tholakappian shouldn't have betrayed her like that!"; updating each other on where their offspring are - "Oh, your son is in Berkely-aa? Mine is in New Jersey," "Software-aa? Mine changed over to finance," or "Tamil Matrimony is better than shaadi.com! My daughter got nicer matches, but we are still looking... Do you have the latest photo of your son?" or "I exchanged some jaadakams at the T. Nagar Horoscope Exchange meet, lets see what happens"; auto-drivers who have little random-number-generating-software to set fares; priests filling their pot-bellies with more naivedyam than it can hold; and citizens having to choose between Karunanidhi's dark view of progress and Amma's attempts at self-discovery and self-improvement. They gave the city a certain character - sometimes, not a very desirable character, but character nonetheless. Every person on the road wore his story on his checked shirt. Every person was interested in the other's story, and often scrutinised the other's checked shirts like an auditor. Knowing what everyone else was up to and forming strong opinions based on weak rumours was a way of life in Madras, and Vinod missed that.

Bombay was scarily anonymous. He walked into his apartment each evening wishing there was someone for company. His neighbours probably entered their apartments thinking the same. But nobody ever breached that barrier of anonymity. It was a code etched in stone. The landlady never bothered to find out anything more than whether Vinod had a job, and if he was married. She'd've preferred it if he was married, she told him, and he promised to rectify that situation, but nothing more was asked.

Such a contrast from Madras, he thought.

"What does your father do?"
"He's a retired civil engineer. Now he does some consultancy for the Railways."
"Mother is a housewife?"
"Schoolteacher."
"You have any siblings?" Now Vinod was getting irritated.
"Yeah. Brother in Bangalore. Software. Before you ask me, let me tell you my father has two brothers, one in Madras and the other in Hyderabad. Both work in Syndicate Bank. Their wives are both housewives. My grandfather was an economics professor in Hyderabad, and my grandmother, a housewife. Actually, my grandfather was a freedom fighter - a Gandhian - and I made the engineering cut through the freedom fighter quota. But I learnt all about Gandhi only through Munnabhai. By the time I was old enough to make conversation with my grandfather, he was senile and only told me about crocodiles in the flush tank and rats in my cupboard."

Before the landlady could make any admonishing remarks, her husband butted in from behind his Hindu, "Good that you're not a Gandhian. The only reason why our country suffers today is because of Gandhi and Nehru shepherding it in the early years..."
But before he could elaborate, the landlady said to him sternly, "One more time I hear this lecture, you will never get coffee in this house!"

This early exchange meant that Vinod never felt like he was away from home in Madras. He had to just go downstairs when he wanted a daily opinion on politics and state of the nation, enquiries about his life and job and vetthakozhambu. His landlady in Bombay, a Gujarati widow who called him once a month to thank him for his cheque, lived in the more posh area of town, two hours away from where he stayed. A far cry from the the mami downstairs who asked him who the girl who came home last night was and sent him paayasam on festivals.

His neighbours were most unfriendly, and he knew no one in Bombay. Well, almost no one.

His weekend routine was most dull though. He'd get his Tropicana and chips and plonk himself before the TV. Turn on.

"Kuch kuch hota hai, Rahul..." Remember watching it for the first time with childhood girlfriend. Flip.
"Breaking news just in... " Flip.
"Aamchi..." Flip.
Passionate kissing. Wait for two minutes until they start talking again. Flip.
"Ooooo, huzooor..." Curse. Flip.
"Edged and taken!" Flip.
"One, Two, One, Two. Swing those arms..." Make mental note about staying away from over-muscular women. Flip.
"Call now! Toll Fr..." Flip.
"Pandu, pandu, pandu, erra pandu..." Watch till song ends. Feel nostalgic about childhood in Hyderabad. Flip.
"Desh ka dushman, haraam-zade!" Feel happy about having found the right channel. Settle down into the chips with occasional sip of Tropicana.

Somewhere in the latter half of Tirangaa, when Brigadier Suryadev Singh had made serious inroads into Ghendaswamy's nation-destruction plans, Vinod's Inner Voice left his body, stood five feet away, and examined the scene.

"Dude, what have you turned into?"
"Wait da. I love this part of the movie."
Inner Voice snatched the remote away and turned the TV off. "Brigadier Suryadev Singh and Inspector Waghle?! You've seen this movie a hundred times. A self-respecting man would have inflicted horrible pain upon himself before that."
"What do you want me to watch instead?"
"Call Sharma."
"No. The guy's as boring as Rajinder Tripathi who handles that call-in show on Vividh Bharati."
"He has an interesting friend."
"No. I watched her enough on the train. I want to watch Ghendaswamy die. Come on, those last few scenes are stunning. After that, we'll have a heart to heart."

Inner Voice returned to his body in disgust. Vinod turned on the TV, and watched with bated breath as Brigadier announced the start of Operation Tirangaa. Various men in army costumes rented from the local costume store launched a patriotism-driven attack on Ghenda's fortress. People from either side dropped like flies, but India had the upper hand - not a perceptible upper hand from the visuals, but the sort of upper hand that you can 'see' if you've watched enough Hindi movies. And then, Ghenda revealed his trump card - he had Inspector Waghle's relatives captured.

When the door of the shed opened, Waghle's relatives weren't there. Instead, Lila stood, gagged and bound. Before Vinod could react, Ghenda said, "Vinod, call Sharma!" brandishing a pistol in his trademark white gloves. Vinod turned to Brigadier, who stood with the only things that could stop national destruction - the fuse conductors for the missiles - a smart-counter plan in the movie, but a ridiculous one in reality. There's this madman who could kill the most interesting woman you had ever met in your life, and your saviour waves around a couple of red wires that you probably used in physics lab in the eighth standard.

His Inner Voice suddenly said, "I told you to stop watching the movie!" Vinod woke up with a start. Brigadier said, "Ghenda, maine fuse conductor nikaal diya!" The country was saved again from evil forces in white gloves. Vinod half-smiled before making the phone call to Sharma.
***

Akshay couldn't believe his luck. First, he was made to work on a Saturday, when he should have been watching TV at home, and second, the guy sitting next to him in the train, one who identified himself only as Sen, couldn't stop talking. He hadn't heard such whining since the time he heard recordings of himself talking to his psychiatrist eleven years ago.

Why couldn't they just spare Akshay and let Sen start work...
"... on Monday?" Sen asked fot the seventh time in twenty minutes, "I mean, it makes no sense. I know I'm joining a news channel that knows no weekends and weekdays - only days when the markets are closed and days when they're open. I know that the channel works irrespective of whether the markets do or not. But really, for someone who's coming from a magazine atmosphere, they should allow some settling-in time."

Akshay tried to get a couple of sympathetic words in, but Sen was relentless, "I guess I have to go through this. My first passion was always..."
"Talking?"
"How'd you guess? Yeah!"

Akshay wished he had access to a large RSS danda to hit himself with.

"In the magazine, I was writing the regular business feature, but it was a small magazine, a small section and I couldn't really express myself. Moreover, the people around me were not the sharpest lot, and I think my growth as an analyst was stunted within that system. Be that as it may..." Akshay had never met a person who used the term, ' Be that as it may' in everyday conversation. Sen continued, "Be that as it may, I've always thought that the independence they gave me has made me more mature. I don't think I'd've been ready for a news channel job as soon as I finished studies."

As Sen kept up the steady stream of news, views and analysis, Akshay realised he needed an escape route. "... and Castro is getting too old. I don't really have strong opinions against dictatorships, but..." Akshay desperately needed an escape route.
"Hey! My stop is here," Akshay said, suddenly.
"Oh, I thought you were going to Churchgate."
"Um, no... I lied to you earlier."
"Why?"
"I thought you were cute."

Sen didn't immediately get the full meaning of the sentence, and when he did, it had the desired effect. He let Akshay go.
***

Lila knew there was something wrong the moment she got up. The alarm didn't ring, and she couldn't figure why. Sharma had left, but hadn't bothered to wake her up. The TV had been on through the night. There was heavy metal drumming in her head thanks to all the alcohol. She vaguely remembered commenting on the trip-value of news channels providing background music for drunken sex.

And then she panicked. She had to get to office in an hour, and the taxi took an hour. Finding a taxi at that time wasn't easy either. In fifteen minutes, she found herself on the road trying to catch the attention of a taxi driver. One stopped, but it had someone sitting in it.

"Hi. Are you going towards Marine Drive? I need to get there desperately," she asked.
"In fact, I am!" the man said. She hopped in, "Thanks!"
"That's not a problem. I usually take the train, but there was this guy sitting next to me who ate my brains out. Couldn't stop talking!"

She struck up a lively conversation with him where she tried convincing him to support the Narmada cause. He seemed interested in her. He enthusiastically gave her his card and told her that his office was only a block away, if she should ever be interested in coffee. She got off, walked ten metres, made sure she was still within his view and tore the card and threw it away.

She had made it on time. Like every morning, Lila entered her office building, took the first corridor to the left from the main entrance, pressed helpful red button to summon the lift, smiled at liftman as he checked her out, exchanged meaningless pleasantries with the her colleagues in the lift, as each one tried to outdo the other. Like every morning, she got off at the fourth floor, waved at the receptionist, entered the make-up room for a quick touch up before going on air.

Something was wrong. The make-up room didn't have her usual buddies. Instead, a nervous newbie sat staring at the mirror.

"Hi," she said suspiciously.
"Oh, h-hi."
There was that look again. Like she was the looker's long lost lover. She got that from every man who saw her for the first time. Only, with the mirrors all around, there were four Sens staring at her.

"I'm Sen, Surendranath Sen."
"Sounds cooler when Bond says it."
Sen was put on the back foot too quickly for his liking. He needed a comeback. "Oh, my friends call me Suri Sen." There it was. The world's worst comeback.
"Hi. Lila. That's what my friends call me also," she said, not being able to think of a more suitable reply to an unnecessary fact.
"Oh." he said.

There was a pause. They looked at each other, and looked away. And then, given the lack of things to look at, and the proliferation of mirrors in the room, they looked at each other again. Neither had anything to say.

Sen finally said, "I met this really strange guy on the train today."
"You aren't the first person to tell me that this morning."
"No. You have no idea. This guy, initially tells me he's travelling to Churchgate. We were having a conversation when he suddenly got up to leave way before Churchgate. So, I asked him what the deal was, and he told me he was going to Churchgate only because he thought I was cute."

Lila couldn't believe the coincidence! She was dumbstruck. Sen thought he'd brought up the wrong topic for a first time conversation. Discomfort, shiftiness ruled. And yet, the mirrors meant that they had to look at each other.
"Where is everyone else?" Lila asked suddenly.
"Um, who else?"
"I'll ask someone outside. Its okay."
As she was leaving, she told him, "You are cute, incidentally."

As she walked back to the receptionist, she realised something - it was a bloody Saturday. She didn't need to do the Breakfast Show. Hell, there was no Breakfast Show. Ravi would do the news-reading for reruns of the previous night's stories. She didn't need to hurry in the morning, share a taxi with a troubled insurance agent who complained continuously of a man who never stopped talking to him in the train.

Just then, Sharma called.
"Hi. You remember my friend Vinod?"
"On the train?"
"Yeah. I'm meeting him today. Want to join us?"
"Why not? I can find another person to add to the list of people checking me out today."
"Pah! Subbu's a nice chap. Actually, he's your sort - all senti about love and all."
***

When Sen walked out into the corridor, he heard Lila say, "Mondy's? Seven? Cool."
He made a mental note of the time and place.
***