I was browsing through Crossword couple of weeks back when I noticed the last remaining DVD of Malgudi Days Vol 1 on their Best Seller DVDs rack. Grabbed it gleefully and rushed home to check my prize catch; thankfully the 3 DVD volume hasn't disappointed! Among the 27 episodes are the 8 episodes of 'Swami and Friends' - the story of the adorable kid Swami played by Manjunath and his bunch of improbable yet lovable friends.

Somehow, any discussions or reminiscences of 'Malgudi Days' always made me nostalgic - the opening title track of 'taa na na tana nana naa', R.K. Laxman's trademark illustrations (that town center statue with a bird sitting atop) and, more importantly, those simple yet poignant tales! 'Malgudi Days', without a shred of doubt, embodied all that was good about Doordarshan - tight scripts, impeccable direction and unforgettable performances. Frankly, the first time I watched Swami and Friends was on this DVD, but, damn, don't you just love Manjunath for the absolutely breathtaking portrayal of Swami!

While watching another episode starring Manju on the 3rd DVD, I was suddenly struck by a vague recollection that I had seen this kid in a movie. And right I was! He played the role of the child musical prodigy in K. Viswanath's awesome Telugu movie "Swathi Kiranam". Anyone who has seen the movie would agree that this guy sure is one bundle of enormous acting talent!

Did a little search on the net to find out what stage he would have reached in what no doubt must be a stunning acting career. Guess what, his IMDB page indicates that Swathi Kiranam was his last movie! And as per this article, Manju gave up acting and was working on an online portal about Bangalore (as of 2001). What a loss! Would you give up something that made you famous nationwide and do something that your heart believes in? That's conviction.

P.S: A word of appreciation is due to the actor-director Shankar Nag, who has directed many Malgudi Days episodes (inluding 'S a F'), and for me, pulled Malgudi out of the two dimensional paper and added the important dimensions of shape and sound.

I don't think this might appeal to all the people, but I just saw one awesome movie. Into the Wild is the journey on the road of a young college graduate with the ultimate aim of reaching and living in Alaska. Guess that's a very very brief take on this deep movie, but it's best you experience it rather than me talking about it.

Some of the review(er)s might be a bit harsh, but one can't take away the movie's amazing scenery, the characterization and an even better music by Eddie Vedder. Didn't even know Sean Penn directed movies! Kudos!

Do let me know your views, +ve or -ve, if (once) you have seen the movie.

I know what you are thinking. It took me more than 3 months to not do anything I said I would in the last post? Of course, the implicit assumption is that it is a matter of an instant to do nothing. It's not as simple as that. You see, Time is traditionally treated as a concept linked to an event happening. Time taken for light to travel one metre - 1⁄299,792,458 seconds; for earth to complete one revolution around sun - 365 days; human evolution - around 400,000 years; for India to win an olympic gold medal - well, current age computers are not yet powerful enough to generate the astronomical number. So, for most questions of the form 'how long would it take for this event to happen', you have some answer, even if it is 'never' (how long would it be before  Katrina Kaif can act?). But what is a logical answer to a question about time taken for an event to not happen? If the answer to the question about the time taken for the same event to happen is finite, then the time taken for the event to not happen is almost always infinite. Think about it.

So, who am I to fight against such odds? :)

There are two things you can't escape on TV these days - cricket and Shah Rukh Khan. And if your stars are not in the right positions, you'll be hit with both of them at the same time! Mind you, I can stand any amount of cricket, but anything above the doctor-prescribed dose of SRK causes nausea and heavy bout of skin allergies in me. Cricket can be avoided by mostly changing channels, but SRK infestation has spread to every conceivable channel in the world in every conceivable form. Public health officials say this can't be controlled just by the government itself but would require a large scale public brainwashing to get rid of this pest!

My team has been performing exceptionally well! Under the inspired leadership of our Very Very Special Laxman, they are slowly but surely moving towards one end of the table, albeit the bottom one. Way to go Dhakkan Chargers!!

P.S:

I just now read about a shocking news item about Vodafone and the ad agency getting a notice from the animal welfare board for their new ad featuring their famous pug. Read this carefully - "the dog was made to undergo severe pain and suffering due to the exhaustion caused by chasing (the bus)". Gawd, what cruelty they have subjected the dog by making it (hold your breath!) run and gallop!! I just hope they didn't make it sit or shake its tail! As some one sagely said, this country is going straight to the dogs!

P.P.S:

Till some time back, I thought the prime example of a worst thing that could ever happen to anything is K.P.S Gill to Indian Hockey. But I now humbly change my opinion. It's Sony to Indian Cricket. The disgustingly abysmal production quality, the obscenely intrusive ads, brandification of every conceivable word/image are all pardonable. But what my blood boils at is the panel of the personnel that are manning the microphones. To think that Sony brought some random blabbering ad models as 'anchors' to talk about cricket is Sacrilege of the highest order. I miss those good old days of ESPN-Star Sports and their clean, flawless coverage. And I don't understand why people are behind the lives of the poor cheerleaders. Unlike the people involved with Sony's coverage of IPL, these are professionals doing their jobs to the best of their ability. Insulting to our culture, my left foot! Raping our country's guests and then covering it up is glorifying to our so called culture?

Jeez...this place is in absolute ruins! Cobwebs and layers of dust covering the place like a blanket ... requires lot more work than anticipated to bring this place back to living conditions. Hmmm....even re-painting might not be such a bad idea!

Rolling the sleeves up and grabbing that vacuum .....

It's been a while since I posted here. I've been cribbing about lack of time for so long that you'd bop one on my head if I utter that one more time.

This Saturday evening, as has become a ritual of late, I performed the silver screen puja - to 300. One additional reason was our team's absolutely dazzling display of cricketing talent, against the world's best one day team at that. In a way, the movie offers an uncanny comparison to the match of the evening. Where just 300 spartans almost held back the million strong Persian assault, India with its, ahem, blue 'billion' wilted before the mere million. Btw, 300 is already in IMDB's top 250! It's good but hardly top 250 material! And spare us the shamelessly explicit pro-war harangue. Sin City was a much better movie, at least for its superior visual effects. The other movie this week-end was Honeymoon travels ltd. Yeah, my idea of a wild sunday night! The movie was funny...when intended as well as unintended. Probably, that's the best I can say about the movie. Another pointless movie you 'must' watch is Apocalypto. 'Must' because no other director (I think), puts as much effort as he does in bringing out the graphic details of violence. Cringe, you might, at the blood, gore and the innards but a full blow to the head with a blunt log doesn't just result in a blotch of blood (as our bollywood movies have us believe), but a mess of broken skull and brain with a spray of blood in the air. 'Pointless' because you walk out of the hall thinking, 'hmmm...now why did the producers spend so much of their money, and I mine, on this movie!'

Btw, I want to highlight an issue of prime importance that has inexplicably escaped the nation's attention till now. Everyone, in their life time, would have encountered at least once what I call the 'Restaurant Terrorirsts'. Those insensitive boors who just explode into blood curdling bellows of laughter without warning, leaving the other unsuspecting poor souls in the vicinity choking on their pina coladas. Yes, you have suffered them too. At times, I feel like doing what my seventh standard science teacher did to me once - stride up to those RTs, tilt my head to one side, tap the table and say 'now, wouldn't the entire class be interested in knowing what's so funny?'. It's time we woke up to the seriousness of this menace and eradicate this from our society before it becomes the next AIDS! If government can invent new ways to tax people (who could've thought of the FBT - Fringe Benefit Tax!), I propose they force the restaurants to have a LBT - 'Loud Buggers Tax' too. Each table should be fit with a decibel meter that starts charging as and when the sound emanating from that table exceeds an agreed pre-set limit. Of course, the meter should pick up only human voices, lest the patrons should be unnecessarily charged for the sound of a waiter whacking the RT's head with a metal platter. Laugh louder, dig deeper! Whaddayall say?

The past one month has been baaaad! And sadly, change in the year doesn't seem to alter the situation. But New Year's eve was thankfully better. Had a chance to catch Rahman live in concert!

Happy new year everyone!

For Humanity's sake, somebody please get the eServe Citigroup Global Services ad off the air, before I throw something at the damn screen!

*spoiler warning starts*

Don't you just love it when everyone dies at the end of the movie. More so, if they do it with lotsa blood and gore. Kinda leaves you with the happy feeling that God is in His Heaven and all's well with the world, after all. Of course, it helps if the dialogue is peppered with the four letter words as liberally as the Andhra curries are with chillies. Okay, sad analogy! Jokes aside, Departed is definitely a good movie. The good cop  bad cop routines, moles everywhere, some one always pulling a fast one over someone else - loosely a L.A. Confidential set in Boston. Not as hard hitting as Taxi Driver though, but better than Goodfellas, IMO. Three and half stars for the galaxy-studded movie.

*spoiler warning ends*

Among other news, I've been feeling pretty depressed about the present state of children and the education they get at schools. The other day, one of my nephews showed me a letter he wrote. It was a love letter he apparently wrote to his classmate and I was shocked to my very core reading that!!. I had half a mind to storm into his school Principal's office, throw the letter at his face and question if that's what they are teaching the boys at school! Any warm-blooded man would be shamed to death if he reads that piece of paper, allegedly the form of correspondence in which every child worth his salt should have been proficient in - no proper approach to broaching the subject, no indirect subtle references to lover's claims to fame, no reference to the lovee's striking similarity to the top actress of the day and, brace yourself, not a single poetic reference to Shelley or Keats!! I mean, the kid is twelve and he didn't even have the basic courtesy to sign the letter in blood. Mind you, I'm not even commenting on his two-page travesty of a love-letter missing the universal standard for sixth-grade love letters' length by seven-and-half pages! I was gripped with rage, but that got me thinking. Sincerely, what are we doing to prepare our younger generation for tomorrow's battles? If they are not even aware of the First Law of Life that pink, heart-shaped stationery, and not plain old white paper, should be used for such important correspondence, how do we expect our country to be super power in the 21st century? Now, who was the dumb idiot who thought of putting a bachelor up in the Rashtrapati Bhavan?

Btw, check out the site http://www.celebrityprankcalls.com! They make celebrities call unsuspecting fans and talk mushy stuff. Er...not exactly! How would you like Jack Nicholson making a friendly call to you? A few good men at the website might just do that! Download it, it's small (1 odd MB) but howlarious!!

Names. Faceless fiends.

Faces. Nameless horrors.

Addressing someone by name and then doing so occasionally during the conversation, any behavioral scientist would tell you, is an ideal way to start an acquaintance. Using the name shows that you were attentive during the introduction and cared enough to remember it. I'm no stickler for etiquette but this is one thing I just can't seem to do! It's not the lack of effort, mind you. Even the poor tired neurons vacationing on some exotic island are called to report for duty on war footing just as the name is going to be revealed in an introduction. But before the poor buggers could carry that name and put it in some safe locker in those little congested memory cells, the chap moves on to other things. This causes them to drop their load and run back to pick up the new bits of information. No wonder I can tell, in great detail, how the chap had to wander about for three hours on the streets of Chennai for a decent north Indian restaurant but, for the life of me, can not get past 'his name starts with P'! That is, if one of those frontline neuron soldier manages to carry that letter back to the cell in time.

The tragedy gets even more tragic if the introduced one is a 'chappess'. A whole new battallion of neurons, equipped to deal only with optical inputs, is called upon by the brain, overrunning the authority of the peacetime auditory forces. So, if someone asked me what was the name of the lady you've just been talking to, all I could manage would be something on the lines of 'her smile makes a cute dimple on her right cheek!'

These litle shortcomings can lead to quite a few interesting situations. I've met this guy while on a training session arranged by our company. We even shared a auto back to our office. We talked about a whole range of things but never actually got round to exchanging our names. Couple of months have gone by and everytime we meet we exchange pleasantries, talk about our jobs and crib about our bosses all without knowing each other's names. Now it's too late and too embarrassing to ask for names. It's kinda fun though!

Btw, there's a fear of names too - nomatophobia!!

This is not a typical post, just a small question:

If you were given a chance to be reborn as a character from a movie, who would you be?

For me, it would be Ethan Hawke from 'Before Sunrise'. Probably the recency of my viewing the film pushed the other choices to the back. But I just loved the movie! So what's yours?