The Tintin Film

I had been looking forward to the Tintin film ever since I saw the first teaser. Probably from before that too, but after watching the teaser (or was it a proper trailer – can’t recall that now), I just had this weird exciting feeling in my stomach that this was going to be a really worthwhile experience.

Since that brief introduction to Spielberg’s (and Jackson’s) latest masterpiece, I have read several rants about how unlike Herge's version this Tintin looks, how it's just blasphemous and a sign of crass commercialism to remake the simple, refined 2-D drawings into a 3-D film. And not been able to completely understand what the fuss was about.

After having seen the movie today, I am even more perplexed.

I think Herge made the right choice when he asked Spielberg to make the Tintin movie. Now, this choice might have come across as smoothly as Spielberg generally implies in his interviews, or not so much as some of the critics of this transfer to the big screen might allege, but that it happened to come about is a great thing.

From the moment the film begins, with that wonderful tip of hat to Tintin's creator, this is a well-designed extension of Herge's vision. The credits pay tribute to several of Tintin's books, and the film mixes elements from various editions to come up with a truly enjoyable story.

Ah, the thrill of meeting again the characters you have known for so long. The bumbling Thompson & Thomson. The ever-abusive Captain Haddock. The wonderfully voiced Bianca Castafiore. And good ol' Snowy (with the amount of stunts he does, it's a good thing they didn't use a real dog).

And, of course, the boy wonder. Yes, he looks a bit different from what I would have imagined as a three-dimensional Tintin to look. And the British accent made him sound like Harry Potter a few times. But, those are minor issues really.

The winner, as it should be in general, is the script. It incorporates great elements from multiple books, ties them up together and comes up with an intelligent, respectful, adventurous and utterly funny ride.

And also worth mentioning is the motion-capture technique. It might have worked great in films like the Lord of the Rings trilogy or King Kong, or even Avatar, but in a full length film based on this technique like The Polar Express it had fallen a bit flat. It just works wonders here. The bastardized child of animation and live action truly comes on its own in this film.

Just watch and wonder at the way Sakharine's hair or the camel's fur waves in the wind. Beautiful.

I bloody hope they are making a sequel.

On Reading. Virtually.

Don't know if anyone noticed, but had made the blog private because had grown sick of feeling like shooting myself in the morning all too often after another stupid post written late the previous night. Yep, am not happy right now, but it has been a recurring element of my life, and will probably continue to be.

On the other hand, a road trip to Surat last weekend to conduct a quiz made me extremely happy. If only there was more money in conducting quizzes.

Didn't get back to blogging because of another reason. I have found something else to do, which keeps me tied up after work and on weekends.

On an impulse, a few weeks back, I bought the iPad. The iPad 2 to be precise. Like my fairly expensive, and quite apprehensive, purchase of an iPod video during my internship in 2007, I haven't regretted it for one moment.

I am an information junkie. I want to read as much as I can, I want to know as much there is to know about stuff around me as I can. It's a different story that I can hardly retain about a tenth of it. But I love reading. And iPad is a boon for anyone who does.

Two of my most favorite apps on iPad (with the exception of the Angry Birds game of course) are Instapaper and Zinio.

Instapaper helps you save online articles for reading later. It works seamlessly across your laptop browser and the tablet, and is ideal for those 'longform' articles that you keep coming across but never get the time to read. Have already discovered one of my favorite writers through this app - Atul Gawande, a US doctor of Indian origin, who writes for The New Yorker (which I discovered truly for the first time through the iPad also - it's a brilliant brilliant journal), and very incisively on complex issues like the American health care system or solitary confinement in prisons.

Instapaper also helped me find this site called Longform.org that picks out some amazing articles daily for you to read. The range includes a piece written by the inimitable Pauline Kael on Citizen Kane to an article on the unavoidable Amanda Knox to the phenomenon called Sasha Grey to a very objective story of the downfall of Mel Gibson by Peter Biskind, whose books on Hollywood I am a big fan of.

Zinio claims to be the largest magazine store in the world. And certainly looks like it. I have bought magazines from the US, the UK and India on it and browsed through some more from France, Brazil and other assorted places. I love magazines. And so, browsing through Zinio is to me, to use a cliche, what a 5 year old must feel like in a candy store.

And, of course, there's the Kindle app. Which is a fairly ordinary app. It does its job well. No frills. But the massive collection of books that Amazon has just kills you, figuratively.

And the one-click purchase kills you in more literal (and financial) terms. I used to curse Flipkart for their easy check-out of the shopping cart. But it's no wonder that the Bansal duo learned their craft at Amazon. Because the Amazon store doesn't give you a chance. One click and the book is on my iPad. And a few more dollars have disappeared from my bank account.

A malfunctioning mouse can turn your purse lighter by a few bucks in a few seconds. And in the age of a falling rupee, it is not a happy condition.

But I am still some time away from staring at bankruptcy. And more books (and articles) than I can read in my lifetime.

First Day First Show

Have been reading this rather delightful book called First Day First Show. It is essentially a collection of articles written by Anupama Chopra during her career as a print journalist on the movie beat. For a long time with India Today.

Am not a big fan of hers, mainly because she comes across as too gooey on NDTV. But she certainly is one of the more intelligent people writing (or talking) about films in India. Hell. if she had the foresight to marry Vidhu Vinod Chopra, one of the most successful producers in Hindi cinema, she has got to have some brains.

Anyway, the book, which starts with a rather narcissistic foreword by Shah Rukh Khan (and what else would one expect), covers a fairly comprehensive tract of moviedom starting from the mid-90s.

If nothing else, it just helps you revisit those crazy times when to be able to own a mobile phone was a status symbol, when Devgan (Devgn) and Kajol did films like Hulchul, AB was being crucified for doing Mrityudaata, and Kuchh Kuchh Hota Hai was classy. The 90s look as crazy now as the 80s looked in the 90s.

The book is chronologically set and I am just about in the time when the new Bollywood brigade led by Anurag Kashyap is beginning to show its attitude in the 1990s (Satya is making people pee their pants) and Devgn and Kajol have got married. This has covered more than half of the book. So Chopra probably got less prolific with time.

But, exciting times ahead. I have cheated and looked ahead in the chapter headings. And it goes at least as far as Love, Sex aur Dhokha.

The Overrated Samit Basu

Someone who leaves IIMA to pursue a career in writing ought to be a fantastic writer. Or so I thought.

I have been trying to find that spark that Samit Basu is supposed to possess. The spark that makes publishers keep publishing his books.

I bought the three books in the GameWorld trilogy, but got bored midway through the second book. The plot was interesting, but the execution was plain boring.

I also tried to read Terror on the Titanic. Which put me off reading fiction for a month.

And I am reading Turbulence right now. I am through about 40% of the novel. The plot is very interesting. How could a Heroes-X-Men-Misfits clone not be interesting? But I am not sure I can read it the whole way through.

Basu's characters talk so much. So much! Each one of them is too clever by half. Every one takes pot shots at each other. And the narrator keeps trying to beat them at this cleverness. In every book. It's like the same character with a different get-up turning up in every book of his.

BORING.

Flipkart

Is it only me or are you also seeing Flipkart ads everywhere? Almost every Google ad, on any site I visit is invariably a Flipkart ad. Every alternate ad during IPL (yeah, I am one of the five-odd people in India still watching it everyday) is one of those mouse ads. Which I have gotten bored of completely now. And they were not all that clever to begin with.

It is only because the site itself is so awesome that I don't mind it all that much.

They have a phenomenal collection of books, offer great discounts and have the fastest check out of the shopping cart I have seen on any e-commerce site.

But, the best thing has to be the service standards. Which, unfortunately, most Indian firms that directly interact with the customer don't seem to realize.

I had been resisting joining the Flipkart bandwagon for a long time. Despite glowing recommendations (and Facebook 'Like's) from IITD alumni (one of the founders, Sachin Bansal, is a batchmate from engineering - we used to play Age of Empires together. Would have bonded with him some more had I known he was going to start such a successful firm). Because of my usual disdain for too many people asking me to like something.

I also prefer touching and feeling a book before buying it and browsing through the various aisles at the local Landmark store. Which is about the only decent bookstore (bookstores, actually - there are two) in Mumbai in my experience.

But, I was looking for a book recently and the only place I could find it on was Flipkart. I gave in. Placed an order. Was done placing an order in just about a couple of minutes because of the really smooth interface. Kept getting updates on the movement of my book. And then it got delivered to my office in 3 days! The delivery man was very polite - unbelievably so. And they have Cash On Delivery.

One reason why their delivery system is so good is because they have their own courier network. They do not rely on the usual courier firms. At least for the larger cities.

The second reason is that there seems to be some thought given to the kind of people they recruit. I have ordered a fair amount of stuff from them in the last 2-3 months, and every time the person delivering the package has been very polite. Which is so so rare in India.

And I was sold on them completely today when I called their Bangalore center after a rare fuck-up. I had placed an order way back on the 5th of May, but even though the order showed up as approved in my account, there had been no movement in terms of dispatch. Had got an inconclusive response when I had checked with them last week. And since I really wanted the books, I called them up again. The call center guy was a little lost as to why the delay had been caused, but then he connected me to someone obviously more senior. He was very polite, apologetic to the right degree for the fuck-up and replaced my order right away, promising that the books will be delivered from Delhi in 2 days. He checked before that if the books were available in Mumbai, in which case they could have been delivered today. They were not, and I still have to see if the 2-day delivery promise holds true. But, when you are pissed off, and the person at the other end just listens to you and understands your concern, it makes up for so much.

Flipkart is great.

And it also feels great that a person I played AoE with (and defeated on very rare occasions - Sachin was quite good at it) is responsible for it to some extent.

Of beautiful magazines and ugly people

I should probably create a label called 'magazines' now.

Continuing my love for Lounge a bit further, I loved this week's edition of the magazine. Firstly, it had some nice articles about gaming, of both the online and the board type, by Krish Raghav, whom I ran into at IIT Kanpur recently. The meeting inspired me to read up on European board games like The Settlers of Catan, and a whole new fantastic world opened up for me. It's been a Narnia moment for me, the one where you open a door and discover a whole new unexplored world that you didn't even know existed.

I also liked the article by Aakar Patel. He must be the man whose articles generate the most hate mails for Lounge. He seems to enjoy doing something that I can't describe in English - 'ungli karna', and there can't be a better phrase for it (I think). He loves bursting the bubbles that we Indians of the present time seem to live in and it's always great to find someone who shares my lack of faith in the 'India story'.

There's a lot going great for our country. But Indians are also the most uncultured, crass group of people I can think of. And Patel captures it phenomenally well. Great credit to Lounge for keeping him a part of its even otherwise great portfolio of columnists, including the Mint editor who writes about graphic novels.

The article by Patel this week was about how we Indians are not city builders. In fact, we bring our cities criminally down, including the great ones like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. The name changes are not the worst of it.

This lack of civic sense continues into our daily lives too. I was reading the article after my trip to the local mall. People waiting right in front of the elevator door, breaking queues, not letting the people inside to get out, as if it were a vertical motion version of our Mumbai's local trains. A woman just walking away casually after her child took out several DVDs from the shelf and threw them on the ground at the Crossword store without bothering to place them back or even apologizing to the staff. Just two instances of how uncouth we are.

And the daily assault on my senses as people spit casually and honk madly on the roads is agonizing. I am increasingly beginning to hate being an Indian, or at least appreciate the merits of living within perpetually air-conditioned environs, where one does not have to encounter the real India.

This is a feeling similar to what I have had in relation to Bihar for a long time. I love the state, and feel very comfortable when I am in Bihar (even though I haven't been there since 2004), and it is an integral part of me. But, I can't identify with a lot of the typical cultural elements of the state. I can see what is wrong with the state, even though most of my fellow Biharis can't seem to, and they even revel in perpetuating these problems.

The same is happening with India on a larger scale now. We might be one of the fastest developing economies, but our mindsets are not developing at even a quarter of that rate. We might be the largest democracy, but we are unimaginably inconsiderate of other people's opinions. We might be the land that gave birth to non-violent protest, but we are easily one of the most violent people, looking forward to getting offended for the smallest of things.

******************************************************************

As might be clear by now, I am a sucker for great magazines. Am reading this other fantastic entrant into my pantheon. Forbes India has recently come out with their quarterly called Forbes Life India. It must be the most beautiful thing I have held in my hands in the last few months (without any sexual connotations). And the articles match up to the layout. I had been seeing it at bookstores for some time, but the (sterile) cover did not appeal to me at all (even though it has a naked person's picture). Then while waiting for the movie today (I saw Tanu weds Manu, which is really really good), I decided to spend some time at the Crossword store at the mall, flipped a few pages and fell in love. Really looking forward to seeing how the Network 18 guys follow up this class act.

Palestine and Kashmir

It makes my blood boil at times when people treat me with polite amusement when I start sounding all passionate about graphic novels. There are an amazingly high number of people who seem to not realize that it is a medium that can say so much, so effectively, and is not only about superheroes wearing their undies over their leotards.

Not that undies over leotard type comic books are things to scoff at.

This is very similar to the life-long irritation I have had with people who consider fiction a waste of time, and utter with great pride that they read only biographies or books like the one about the monk who sold his Ferrari.

Maybe such people should read one of those graphic novels that have the ability to change your complete perception of the medium, with not many graphic novel artists probably being more effective than Joe Sacco. I have been a fan of some of his previous works like Safe Area Gorazde, Palestine and Notes from a Defeatist, all of which hold a special position of pride on my bookshelf.

But, his latest creation - Footnotes in Gaza - is quite something else even in the light of the brilliant work he has done over the years. The hardcover edition is a 400-plus page wrist-sprainer of a book, which deals with two forgotten incidents of massacre of Palestinians by Israeli forces.

These incidents occurred in the 1950s during the Suez Canal Crisis, and Sacco deserves great credit for making the effort of traveling to Gaza Strip, talking to the residents there in detail and chronicling all of it for us. Because the incidents really had been relegated to footnotes of UN reports over the years otherwise.

People have a habit of forgetting things, no matter how traumatic. Especially if the traumatic incidents keep hitting you incessantly over decades. For a community, large parts of which has not known any reasonably long period of peace, the massacres of Khan Younis and Rafah might just be a blink in their painful history, but, as Sacco says in the foreword, it goes a long way in understanding how 'hatred was planted in the hearts' of the people of Palestine.

I was in Iraq when the First Intifada was on, and the understandably pro-Palestine Iraqi media would give a lot of coverage to those young boys throwing stones and crude Molotov Cocktails at the Israeli forces. I had never seen unrest like that on TV before. And, unsure of the historical context though I was, I used to wonder what kind of dissatisfaction would make young people come out on streets like that and face armed forces fearlessly. It seemed like the last act of desperation - the final step you took after you realized that nothing else could save you. Nothing else could make others hear your side of the story.

So, over the last few months, it has been extremely spooky seeing fairly similar clips from Kashmir. Reading Footnotes in Gaza, I am forced to think if, irrespective of cross-border instigation, India has really been remotely as inhuman to Kashmiris as the Israelis were to the Palestinians. So much so that the young boys there too would come out on the streets to throw stones at our forces.

I understand that the situation is much too complicated for me to make a general comparison like that.

But, I hope people in Kashmir don't hate me as badly as the people in Rafah hate an Israeli.

The Last Man

I just realized that two of Brian K Vaughan's most brilliant graphic novel series - Y: The Last Man and Ex Machina - are being made into films.

The man also wrote Pride of Baghdad, which remains one of my most loved short series. And the man also wrote a few episodes of Lost, but I haven't been following the series after the first couple of seasons because it got too confusing. Will probably buy DVDs of the entire series.

Y: The Last Man is a story that gave me goose-bumps. The story of a man being left alone in a world filled with women is got to be one horrifying tale. But, the way its many chains were handled and brought to satisfying closure it made one feel fortunate to have witnessed the creation of a milestone in graphic novel writing.

Ex Machina, in many ways, is similar to Y: The Last Man, particularly in terms of the various trails of stories it keeps leaving and picking up. I have not come to the end of the chain yet, so don't know if I'll be completely satisfied, but the episodes till now have been worth the devotion.

Coming back to Y: The Last Man, I can still recall the evening I read the last issue of the series. I was crying. I named my best friend Ampersand that night. And hopefully he understood.

It has been one of the most satisfying and gratifying graphic novel experiences of my life. And, I would love to see how it shapes up on the big screen. I am sure I'll crib about some issue with the film version, but it's a story that needs to be experienced by more people, even if in the form of a film and not in its original one.

Reading Hood

I read Sidin Vadukut's Dork recently. That and responses from some of the people who have read the books by Arnab Ray and Fake IPL Player have sort of convinced me that it might not be a great idea of asking every popular blogger to pen down a book. Writing a blog-post for laughs/comments and writing a book that, apart from other differences, people would have to pay for are two different things. One sure can be good at both, but being good at one does not certify being good at the other.

Dork was not unreadable, and really quite enjoyable in parts. But, at many points the antics seemed extremely forced and unnatural. As if the publisher had rushed Vadukut to make a submission by a deadline. All said and done, though, the book is among the better ones churned out by IIT and/or IIM grads in the last few years. Maintaining even this for a trilogy (why does every new writer have to come up with a trilogy!) might be too painful though. For the readers.

The whole premise of The GameChangers sounds like a bad idea. I have not read the book, but just rehashing stuff from the blog, very obviously to make a quick buck in the IPL season, does not a good book make.

As far as Arnab Ray's book is concerned, I have read bits of it, which bit me enough to not try reading the whole thing. I have not exactly been one of his fans, and feel that his writing is way too over-rated. He comes up with some funny stuff once in a while, the instances of which have gotten rarer over the years, maybe because of the constant pressure to amuse the many regular readers waiting thirsty for some drop of humor in their lives, no matter how dull and stretched the joke might be.

I do appreciate his ability to poke fun at all sorts of cows, holy or not, which is always a good thing in our times, when everyone has a reason or two to get offended.

So, what I have been reading instead are some very good books. Just finished Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill. A plot that essentially revolves around a killer ghost being bought by a retired rock star, who then tries to find a way to save himself, his girl-friend and two dogs, driving across a stretch of America, pursued by the ghost in his own ghost truck sounds extremely corny. And I would not have tried this out if I hadn't just got done with Hill's 20th Century Ghosts - a collection of some brilliant short stories - some time back. But, if writing spooky stories can be genetically inherited, Joe Hill has the best genes possible. His dad's Stephen King.

I also recently read Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindquist, the Swedish writer who had written Let the Right One In. Just as the latter is a unique take on vampires, Handling the Undead is a curious tale of the dead coming back to life. With very little actual 'action', unlike what we would expect after having seen films like Dawn of the Dead, the book is a look at how normal people react in such a situation.

These days, I am alternating between Way to Go by Upamanyu Chatterjee and An Englishman's Cameo by Madhulika Liddle. I have liked Chatterjee's writing, even if not all his books, ever since I read the phenomenal English, August. Very often, the sum of the parts of his books ends up being less than the parts themselves. As in, there are parts that are just brilliant, and the manner in which he describes extremely mundane happenings - an FIR with the local police in the first scene of Way to Go, for instance - is something I have not seen any other Indian writer be able to do. He has this knack of observing things that we see but do not register consciously. And end up having a sense of deja vu when we read it in his books.

Way to Go has started off on an interesting note, but remains to be seen how long it can maintain that.

Madhulika Liddle's book is a murder mystery set in Shahjahan's kingdom. I am through the first 80 or so pages of the 270-odd, and the investigation by the young and handsome Muzaffar Jang is still in its early stages. He has just spent some quality time with the courtesan Mehtab Banu, and we can look forward to some good sleuthing. No idea who the Englishman is.

I would have preferred the book to be darker, more in the zone of My Name is Red, but the tone here is not un-enjoyable either. I doubt if every custom, nuance of language, geographical and structural detail in the book is authentic, but the author has made a great effort and the sheen never fades off.

Next up is Agassi's Open.

In the recent series of interviews I conducted with B-school candidates, it was painful to see that even those who would mention reading as one of their interests had not gone beyond Dan Brown and Chetan Bhagat. It was just too dull talking to them about books in most cases.

I had once read an old mail from an alumnus who had been involved with the IIMC interview process about how he and the professors felt that the young just don't seem to have any interesting interests anymore. No one has any passion. No one goes beyond the common. The same books, the same sports, the same films, everything. I can't recall the exact theme of the mail, but it was roughly about the same dullness.

It made me feel quite old, but I had the same feeling during these interviews.

Best Films (and Books) of the Year

I love reading year-end lists. Helps me identify stuff I might have missed. Or tally my favorites with the list-maker. Or just give a last collective thought to things that made the year great.

I didn't watch as many films or read as many books as I have been doing in the last few years. But, the number might still be higher than most people I know. Since there is still a day to go, and since I don't really have much of a partying plan for tonight, the final number is still not signed and sealed.

But, among the movies and books that I have seen and read till last night, here are the ones I liked the most. The list has 18 movies and 6 books. All of them didn't necessarily come out in 2009. I just saw/read them this year (I know because I have maintained a list of all movies and books I have chatofied since 2004).

In no particular order:

Frost/Nixon - For proving that a film can be thrilling even if most of it is about an old American and a younger Brit talking to each other.

Wilde - For Stephen Fry being an even Wilder Wilde than Wilde could have been.

Dev D - For Kalki Koechlin speaking in Tamil on the phone. For helping forget SRK in the Devdas role. For the horniest Paro ever.

Luck By Chance - For that beautiful opening credits sequence. For Farhan Akhtar doing a typical filmy dance number.

Gulaal - For Ransa. For Piyush Mishra's music and lyrics.

Red Cliff I and II - For showing that there is still a lot of juice in a Far-East war film.

Marley & Me - For Marley, the World's Worst Dog.

The Hangover - For making me laugh more than I have watching any other film this year.

Pontypool - For being a zombie film, and still being interesting.

District 9 - For some of the coolest weapons in films. For some of the ugliest creatures in films.

Chintu Ji - For being that small film, which so many more should have watched, and which I almost did not. For Sophiya Chaudhary dancing to Akira Kurosawa (the song).

Inglourious Basterds - For Col. Hans Landa. And for, well, everything else.

Kurbaan - For being a rare Hindi thriller that actually thrills.

Choke - For Sam Rockwell.

Waltz With Bashir - For showing that even non-Nam/Korean/Desert Storm/Afghan war movies are worth talking about. Or maybe more so.

3 Idiots - For being a rare instance where we can say that the movie was better than the book.

Avatar - For Pandora. For Cameron, the King of the World.

Kaminey - For the music. For the Priyanka Chopra. For the Fahid Kapoor.

And then there were books:

The Strain - Even though it got a little tedious towards the end, I still can't believe how scary I found it in the first hundred pages or so.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - I haven't found the two sequels in the same league as the first book. Maybe because the first one had more than one incestuous, murderous, rich men.

Cujo - Turning a dog into a scary creature is about the most sacrilegious thing Stephen King has done. And one of the most effective.

Cuckold - I had been told it's one of the most under-rated books in Indian Writing in English. I think I agree. It took me a while to figure out who the lady being spoken of in the book is.

Palestine - The graphic novel made me realize how so many people today are paying the price because the world still hasn't been able to forgive itself for the Holocaust, and so lets Israel do anything it wants to.

Moonward - Ugly fat creatures. Very little text. Almost no color. Sometimes difficult to get symbolism. What's not to like?

The Strain

I had the scariest nightmare last night.

My dreams are normally quite awesome. Not exactly the way her sweet dreams are, but good fun. Even the slightly bad ones get nasty only to the extent of me missing an exam (yeah, I still have those ones) or losing a grade because of having low attendance.

But, this one was a proper nightmare. Where I actually woke up completely frightened and was spooked enough to not go back to sleep for a fairly long time.

I sleep very lightly and even the least bit of sound makes me wake up. Because of my sinus problems, I snore on some occasions if I am sleeping on my back (I always have to sleep sideways) and end up waking myself with the noise of my snoring. Yeah, it sounds funny even to me, but true.

So, last night I woke up partly because I was really frightened, but also because I could hear myself moan in sleep. That bad. And I could feel the physical pain I had experienced in the nightmare even after waking up.

What probably led to this rare occurrence was the fact that I had gone to bed reading the new book jointly authored by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan - The Strain. It's a fast-paced book, not very different from most other horror/thriller works of fiction, but this somehow got under my skin. And I would like to believe that it's not easy to do that.

On a (hopefully) unrelated note, I'll be in Bangkok for the next 3-4 days. If any of you are also going to be there by some interesting twist of fate, mail me and we could meet up. Would probably need some break anyway from all the presentations.

Cheap Thrills

I think I went a little overboard in writing about my job in the last post. The job's OK. Which I have realized is better than most people's jobs around me. I just need to stop posting here when I am under the influence of spirits, or on Monday mornings.

Of course, there's no bit of frustration that a few good films and books can't rid you of.

My habit of trying out films on my own, and not relying too much on how known or well-received they are, bears fruit very often. I ran into this film called Pontypool recently. It's a Canadian horror/thriller film, and a very interesting take on a genre that has seen some interesting experimentation in the last few years.

The other film I enjoyed - I am not talking about Kaminey because, well, everyone knows I enjoyed it - was this low-budget, really low-ranked, film called Train. It's a mindless gory Hostel-kind of movie. Just the way I like them. The funniest bit is when the lead male star gets caught by the killer while he is running through the train in his jock-straps. His running through the train bit is thanks to this amazingly idiotic game Truth-or-Dare, which Americans seem to take a little too seriously. Getting caught by a deranged killer while you are in your jock-straps must be an ignominious way to die. When you get caught, you feel embarrassed or afraid?

I also saw Mirrors, which I wasn't very enthused by when I saw the trailer a few months back. I don't like the Sutherlands. But I hadn't realized that it's been made by Alexandre Aja. It's fairly decent, with a superb ending. The scene where Amy Smart's character's reflection makes her tear apart her jaw in the bath-tub (I know it sounds complicated) is awesome for its creativity.

Creativity in killing people reminds me - The Final Destination 3D is my most awaited movie right now. I might have written here earlier that I am a big fan of the earlier three movies in the series because of the sheer innovation in killing off people. The plots are threadbare and repetitive. Acting is basic. But, the real star in these films is Death.

I just got done with reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It's worth all the hype that it has created in the recent past. Sourcing it in Mumbai had become really difficult, because it seemed to be out of stock at every bookstore. Will be getting on to the 2nd book in the trilogy soon.

Not keeping with the thriller/horror theme of this post, am reading this very interesting collection of short stories called In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin. I love reading about Pakistan, and the stories here are very simple, leisurely portraits of ordinary Pakistani folk, who are strikingly similar to the folks this side of the border.

Reading Hamza in Mumbai

It's really difficult fitting a whole lot of things to do in the few hours I get free after work and before I go to sleep. Reading Dastan-e-Amir Hamza, playing with my new iPod Touch, playing with my slightly old Wii, watching all the stuff I copied from a friend recently, watching all the stuff I have been copying from other people over the last few years (I still have movies left from the 1st trip I made back to Delhi after joining IIMC), watching TV, watching YouTube videos (I came across these bunch of awesome videos made by the 2007 Civil Engg batch at IT-BHU, actually made by essentially one chap, but starring many of his batchmates), and a lot of other stuff.

Surprisingly, watching TV wins. At least on weeknights.

I am really enjoying Rakhi Ka Swayamvar. As Amit Varma said, WTF-ness abounds. I actually do respect Rakhi Sawant for having achieved whatever she has despite all the apparent handicaps, but that still can't keep me from cringing almost every other minute with what people do there. Of course, you'd know by now that I love cringe-worthy stuff.

I was also enjoying Entertainment Ke Liye Kuchh Bhi Karega before it got over a few days back.

There are two things I saw on TV in the last 2-3 days, which made me marvel at how far we have come from the DD days, for better or for worse. One, they actually showed Chetan Hansraj (who, incidentally, I realized, had played the young Balram in one of the biggest DD hits - Mahabharat) take a shower in Iss Jungle Se Mujhe Bachao. Don't think any of the other Big Brother/Survivor clones had gone into that territory yet. And the other thing was the absolute voyeurism of Sach Ka Saamna. If the first episode's questions are anything to go by, I am hooked. Who wouldn't want to see a seemingly ordinary lady admit in front of her family that she had once wanted to kill her husband! Or computer-ji, or whoever Sid Basu has got in this time, telling the same lady that when she said that she wouldn't sleep with another man even if her husband never got to know of it, she was actually lying according to the polygraph. Late night TV gems are made of these and more.

Have been going to sleep these last few days reading stories from the English translation of Dastan-e-Amir Hamza. When I was in school, I used to be desperate to lay my hands on any book of fiction and had digested every book worth reading in my school library (it wasn't all that big anyway) and one of the books I had chanced upon was Stories from the 1001 Arabian Nights. Quite evidently no teacher in the school had ever read it (and probably no other student as well, as it ran into over a 1000 pages), or it wouldn't have been available in a school library. I was all of 14 years then, and the descriptions of all kinds of sexual deviance and tasteful paeans to private body parts (both male and female) provided a wonderful introduction to Central Asian literature. The book I am reading currently hasn't reached those standards yet, but I am still in the first 100 pages only. Hopefully, things will get more rewarding.

I hope even more that they do because Hamza was Prophet Muhammad's uncle, and I just love the Prophet. You can't not love the chap.

TOW We Resume 'Normal' Transmission

Last one was the 150th post. Decided that the usual racist crap - you know where I rant against surds, chinks, nepalis, maddus, muslims, hindus, etc. - would not be in good taste in the current conditions in India, when everyone is getting touchier than usual about such things. And I do see the irony in looking for taste in a deliberately tasteless post. So, I decided to write on the thing I could identify as the next most outrageously idiotic. But, I was hoping to get some more comments. Just one person chose to comment, and that too anonymously. Damn you!!

Work and other higher pursuits have kept me from writing about a lot of stuff I would like to.

These stuffs include:

1) The fact that I am missing Delhi now after reading this.*

2) A value-for-money, slightly unhygienic, hole-in-the-wall joint called Zaks that I discovered recently, which serves Arabic food. I had khaboos, or khubus as they spell it, and grilled chicken after such a long time!

3) I had a Takashi Miike retrospective at my home recently. Saw Ichii the Killer, Visitor Q and Crows: Zero almost back to back. Several more are in the pipeline. I can't even begin to describe how much I enjoyed watching these movies. So, I won't.

4) Am almost through with a book by Syd Field. He would be a really great author to read if he didn't keep dropping names and enlisting all his achievements. His other books might be better. This one's supposed to be autobiographical and he is really painful. But his theories on screenplay are quite interesting, if not always as revolutionary as he makes them out to be.

5) My Tanzania trip got cancelled. Now, I am never going to talk about my trips till they actually materialise. Though I am not particularly unhappy about the Tanzania thing. We were going to do around 3500 km BY ROAD in about a week, and were covering pretty much the whole of the country except Mt Kilimanjaro, Mt Meru, Serengeti and other touristy areas. Plus meeting a whole lot of boring government officials.

6) Have finally given in to the temptation of buying original DVDs, which have all the additional features intact, unlike the pirated ones. Have bought Taare Zameen Par, Rock On!, The Bourne Trilogy, Om Shanti Om and a couple of others in recent times. I also found this gem of a DVD brought out by FTII, which has the first films of around 20 FTII grads, including Jaya Bachchan, Smita Patil, Sriram Raghavan and some others.

7) Have taken up reading soft copies of grahic novels again. Mainly because sourcing all of them in Bangalore is difficult. Not, as you thought, because I realized buying each one of them was getting too expensive. Nope.

8) Found a DVD print of Burn After Reading, which is quite good. But Coens have the habit of coming up with an under-whelming experience once in a while to balance their general greatness. So, NCFOM had to be followed by something like this.

* Disclaimer (issued after the anonymous commenter struck again): I did not do everything that the blogger talks about. No, I didn't buy cotton kurtis at Dilli Haat (did have momos and fruit beer though). No, I didn't swear and curse in a bus after being groped. And no, that does not mean that I was groped and enjoyed it instead. As far as I can remember, I certainly never had to worry about my long-wrinkled-cotton-Janpath-skirt getting tangled across my legs and feet (I generally preferred wearing mini-skirts).

And I didn't go to school in Delhi for him. I didn't go to school in Delhi at all.

But I did bitch about women in LSR.

Love My Neighbor

I am on a Pakistan-induced high right now.

I finished reading A Case of Exploding Mangoes in the afternoon today. I was a fan of Mohsin Hamid. And this far surpasses Hamid's two books. It is one of the funniest books I have read in my life. Of course, you would need some familiarity with our neighbor's politics to get some of the jokes. I would rate it above Shame by Rushdie.

And I just got done watching Zibahkhana. A Texas Chainsaw Massacre-inspired zombie movie based in Pakistan has to be the best thing this side of Mrs Brad Pitt.

I fell in love with Pakistan during my visit there about 2.5 years back, mainly because it is so much like India, and yet so different. And there is genuine curiosity about India among the common people, as there is within India about Pakistan. We so often get carried away in pointless jingoism that we don't realize how much we can achieve if we just try to understand each other a little more. And, of course, share each others' recipes.

The only thing that bugged me during my visit was that Pakistan is, understandably, a little more uptight than we are. But we are getting there thanks to the Thackerays. Also, the youth there are a few years behind the rest of the world in their definition of cool-ness. Which also gets reflected in Zibahkhana. I should not be taking anything too seriously in a movie as campy as this, but since some observations from the movie conform to what I felt when I met people in Lahore, I can't completely ignore them.

The apparently 'cool' bunch of college kids in the movie keep dropping phrases like "chill maar" and smoke up a few joints with such coyness as if they are going full-frontal in a multi-sexual, multi-racial orgy that it makes one wish hard that we could reach out and pull them into 2008.

But it's hardly an issue in a movie this fantastic. I have yet to see a movie as gory as this in India, and it speaks quite a bit about how actually 'cool' Pakistan is.

Even the book sets new standards of irreverence for the sub-continent. Making fun of a political leader, who is still fairly respected in the country, along with a couple of other holy cows in Pakistan - army and Islam - is something that we will not see for some more time in India. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, and felt perfectly scandalised after every few pages, marvelling at the limits Hanif was pushing.

Neither the movie, nor the book are for everyone's taste. But I recommend both strongly.

Haunted by Humans

Reading requires a fair bit more effort than watching movies and TV. Especially along with a job where at least 15-20% of my average work-time goes into reading articles, reports, mails and other assorted keyboard-poop. But I still continue reading books, blogs, magazines...bus-stand print ads, because once in a while something turns up that reinforces my faith in the goodness of the written word.

I finished reading one such book last night.

It's called The Book Thief and it's by Marcus Zusak. If you are one of those who is not put off by book reviews, and book reviewers (but then you probably wouldn't be reading my blog either), you have probably read something good about it already. It might have put me off with the claims of being 'life-changing', of being 'the one book you must read this year if it's the only one you read', of being 'a truly heart-warming story by an author at his prime', and so on, had it not been for a discount on a rainy day at the Landmark store at Forum.

I was bored, stuck inside, irritated with the massive Koramangala crowd hanging out at Forum and inside Landmark, and bought this book because it was on top of a pile of books mercilessly heaped on to one of the tables. It was like Daryaganj inside a mall. With much less scope for adventure, much lower chance of running into a rare, interesting book. The book had a 30-40% discount on it, and the paperback isn't really all that expensive anyway. So I bought it, along with some other more interesting books.

Why I chose to read this one before the others I bought that day is something I fail to explain. It could have been dark in the room I keep my books in while selecting a book from the shelf or maybe I was distracted and just picked one at random. But read it I did. And faster than I have read any book since I left engineering college two-and-a-half years back.

Because it's really good. I have tons of great movies with me that I want to watch, but I left everything, sat down on my bean bag with my thin, cosy blanket wrapped around me (it's getting slightly cold in Bangalore now), placed my legs on the chair in front of me, and read away to glory.

It's a story of the life of a young girl, who comes to a home in Germany during the 2nd World War at the age of 10 and leaves when she is 14. It's about how words meant a lot to her. It's about how some memories stay with us for ever. How one regrets not having said a few things once the people those things were meant to be said to are gone. How everyone holds more within than one shows. And how the simplest of acts can go on to save lives. Or take them.

And it's narrated by Death.

That Adiga Guy Got Lucky!

Done reading The White Tiger, which surprisingly enough was this year's Booker winner. It's a well-written, evenly-paced story, but the only thing according to me that worked for the non-Indian jury would be that it presents a fairly non-exotic and unusual (for present times) picture of India. Now, this might be a novel novel for them, but for most Indians this would be like reading what they see everyday, something that hardly deserves wasting 300-odd pages on.

What I liked about the book is that unlike most Indian fiction that I know of, the protagonist here is a criminal, with little conscience, and no regret for his crime. He becomes a rich man, mainly because of his entrepreneurship and buckets of good luck, but partly because he decided to take the first step towards that crime.

There's little else in the book that can place it on the same shelf that some of the other Booker winners - The God of Small Things, Midnight's Children, The Blind Assassin, Possession: A Romance, Disgrace and a few others occupy. In style, but also in terms of the way it relies on providence to make things move, its closest cousin could be Q&A by Vikas Swarup. The latter was also a fairly fast-paced decent read, but just another page-turner to be read during, and not much thought about after, a train/bus/plane journey.

A similar feeling of pointlessness was experienced while watching Welcome to Sajjanpur a couple of days back. Possibly one of Benegal's worst movies.

I got original DVDs of Ghajini, Ghilli and Aayitha Ezhuthu from a friend at work today. After recent viewings of Sivaji and Dasavatharam, I have realized that there is definitely sense in watching South Indian movies in the language they are made in if one wants to derive the most pleasure from them, instead of watching remade/dubbed versions. I can't do without subtitles unfortunately or would have done that too.

I realized today that I can't go home or to my cousin's place for Diwali without missing work. That is one thing about being in Bangalore that sucks. I'll probably end up spending the three-day long weekend reading novels and watching inane flicks.

Which might not be a wholly bad thing considering that I have some hectic work-related traveling planned for the near future.

Same Old S***

We moved into a new office recently. This is a three-storeyed building of our own, as against one half of a floor of a three-storeyed building earlier. It's fun to be able to move one's chair without banging into my neighbor. There are other benefits that the new location entails, including being next door to Garuda Mall, which has got an INOX as well. And I just realized while typing this that I can walk over to Blossom now during lunch and browse for some time. I love Bangalore even more now!

The road outside our building is a one-way and gets jammed every evening from 6:30 to 7:30. Last night, we were playing cricket for a few minutes in our office on the first floor and people stuck in the jam and rain outside started staring at us. Well, playing cricket is a better way to ward off tension than shooting one's family!

The Rapidshare account has been one of the best investments in recent times. That and a software called Free Download Manager (FDM) have helped me be in regular touch with TV series as well as watch a lot of movies I hadn't been able to get my hands on for a long time. Am on a Robert Altman film festival these days. All his movies are these beautiful conversational ensembles, with striking camera-work. A Prairie Home Companion was the last one I saw. Am watching Short Cuts, which is 3 hours long, in stages. Have M*A*S*H, The Player and McCabe and Mrs Miller with me. But my favorite will probably remain Gosford Park, easily one of the greatest ensemble acts ever.

Finally finished off Sea of Poppies. A really good book, and am waiting for the next in the trilogy. Reading White Tiger now, which seems rather ordinary in the first few pages.

The Frequent Flier Program

The Rajiv Gandhi International Airport at Hyderabad has to be the best airport in India. Which is not a difficult achievement in absolute terms, considering how sad most of our airports are, but still. I would even go to the extent of saying that it is probably the only airport in India of really international standards, or it seemed like that during my short stay there. Nope, Mumbai airport, which I thought was pretty good, does not come close. They could do with a few more urinals, but that's about the only issue I could find with the airport. Even the approach to the airport is beautiful. So, if UB Group is The Bangalore Group, I am willing to give that mantle for Hyderabad to GMR.

The approach, of course, gets a little intolerable after a few km. But I was told that it could be attributed partly to the heavy rains that have lashed Andhra Pradesh in the last few days. Bad roads were, in fact, the flavor of my one-day trip to the city. Even the posh locations of Banjara and Jubilee Hills had roads in a fairly screwed up condition.

But the city is a nice place. And I would want to visit it again soon, for the food if nothing else.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

My trip to Mumbai for the weekend to meet my cousin and sister-in-law and friends was spoilt partly by the intermediate trip to Singapore that came up at the last minute, but I still had a lot of fun over the weekend. The Bangalore-Mumbai, Mumbai-Singapore, Singapore-Mumbai and Mumbai-Bangalore air-journeys have essentially put me off airline food for some time to come, but it was fun doing the kind of international trip (for a few hours, for just one meeting) that I have only known really rich or really busy men (either of which I am not) make.

I made the cab driver drive past the office I had worked at during my internship last year because my client's hotel was close by. But, I had also intended to visit the hotel near Little India that I had stayed in, but could not. My shopping was limited to the Changi duty free shops.

The feeling of nostalgia while going past those lickably clean roads was unexpected. If it had been a little less humid, Singapore would be one of the best places to stay in the world. Almost as good as Bangalore :D
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Mumbai was fun. Could not meet everyone that I had intended to, but met, and had good time with, those that I really wanted to.

Ate at the Rajdhani outlet at the Inorbit Mall in Goregaon. Nice food. Amazing service. A tad expensive, but worth it definitely. They have opened an outlet at UB City close to our office as well, and we have ordered thalis for lunch on a few occasions, but going there to eat is a completely different experience.

Watched Bachna Ae Haseeno, which starts off really bad and spoils the taste for the remaining movie. It improves a bit gradually and both Bipasha Basu and Deepika Padukone are ably used. As a friend commented, Deepika Padukone is like an Aishwarya Rai who can act. Love the music though.


The fact that I managed to lose my wallet meant that my two visits to the Landmark at Infiniti Mall in Andheri on my last day there resulted in just one purchase - Scorsese on Scorsese. But I had way too much fun getting both my cousin and his wife drunk (moderately only), going out bowling and generally wasting time doing nothing to complain. Even losing a PAN card was worth the good time I had over most of the day.

This was my first non-work visit outside Bangalore after joining work, and it made me realize how earning decently is a fantastic thing. Who was that dumb freak again who said that money can't buy happiness?

Reading Again

I have finally started reading on a regular basis now. So, I can justify all those trips to Blossom and all the money spent there. And now I won't feel guilty spending more time and money.

In the last week-ten days, I have read When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro, Kari (a short graphic novel) by Amruta Patil and The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood.

After having read three Ishiguro books by now, I believe this is going to be a perpetual thing in his novels - the story starting off very very raw, the characters appearing two-dimensional, the attempt at making the conversations appear typical of the land and time being very transparent, and then all of it gradually falling together and you getting into the flow of things, forgetting the awkwardness of the language, and the story.

In any case, this book wasn't as much fun as I had while reading The Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go. When We Were Orphans, very often, seemed to deviate into pointlessness, and I still think there were pages upon pages that could have been condensed into a quarter of their total text, with absolutely no loss to the story. I moved on only because I had encountered similar feelings in the earlier books I had read by him, though to a lesser extent, and had some faith in his ability to provide a payoff. Which did come. I liked the way it ended.

There's something indescribable about such endings, which aren't exactly happy, and where the goal is reached, but not the way it was meant to, where you feel cheated, not by the author, for he has done his job well, but by fate, as maybe the protagonist would have felt. You discover, at the same time as the protagonist, the lie he has lived all his life. You feel, at the same time as the 'hero', pained by the realization that he had no say in the choices that had such profound effects on his life.

Kari is an average book, which I found filled with cliches, but still worth a mention in the growth of the graphic novel culture in India. I find such stories very irritating though, which talk about a 'different' person, someone who finds herself difficult to adhere to the cliches of the society, but the different-ness of that person actually adheres to all the cliches of different-ness propounded by our literature or media.

I had read The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood a few years back. It was one of those phases in under-grad when I was devouring e-versions of novels, one every day. Among the many books I read during that phase, and most of which I forgot, this one stood out. I wonder why I did not read another Atwood after that. The Edible Woman is one of her first published novels, written way back in 1969, and it still did not feel dated. One of the best things about her novels, though I have experience of just two from a collection of around 13, is that, unless you have cheated and read the blurbs, there is no way you can predict the way the story would move. In case of The Edible Woman, I knew from the first few pages what Marian, the central character, would do in relation to her 'boy-friend' Peter, and she did do that, but how Atwood went about making her do that, and the collection of interesting characters she made me meet on the way, is what separates the women from the girls. One of these characters, Duncan, is particularly interesting.

And this is the first woman-writer I have seen who could give the best of men a run for their money in terms of coming up with curious descriptions of ordinary things and clever turn of words. Highly recommended.

Also, my previous post, which, if it comes as news to you, was completely fictional, was inspired from a similar instance in the novel.

Am reading Rant by Chuck Palahniuk, The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood and Woody Allen's Collected Prose these days, which I keep altering depending on my mood.