Meetha Sa Chadha Hai Bukhaar...

Does it happen to you that a song that you heard some time back hits you suddenly in as mad a rush as the Mumbai rains?

It happens to me.

Very often.

I am not an expert on the intricacies of what constitutes a great song, but I do fall in love with songs once in a while. Like people tend to fall in love with other people for no rhyme or reason.

And then I fall out of love. As people tend to do. For no rhyme and reason again.

These days I am in love, for no reason I can explain, with O Pardesi from DevD. It's a beautiful sultry song that asks me to make love with it every time I hear it. I have multiple orgasms listening to it, and I keep playing it in an infinite loop on my iPod Touch.

I don't even dare to watch the clip from the film on YouTube for I am afraid I might die of happiness.

Ok, it's been 10 minutes since I listened to the song, and I need to get back for my fix now.

Nainon mein sapne hajaar, and all that...

Nihari (and Butter Chicken) in Mumbai

I had made a memorable trip to Pakistan with college friends in 2006, and during our stay in Lahore, our host had helped us do a round of some of the best eating joints in the city. One of those memorable experiences included a breakfast of hot, soft Nihari and Khameeri Roti. A decidedly heavy meal, which still makes my mouth water on occasions.

Having spent a few years in Delhi, I also had the good fortune of trying out Nihari in the Jama Masjid area, but the less than clean environs do not encourage one to make frequent trips.

So, I had been looking for a long time for a clean eating joint that serves great Nihari - a dish very likely to figure among the top contenders when shortlisting a menu for gods.

And since I am writing all this here, it must be obvious that I have finally found a place like that in Mumbai.

The Lokhandwala outlet of Jaffer Bhai's Delhi Darbar does not have a seating arrangement yet, and I had to make a long pilgrimage from my flat in Goregaon East to the place and back before I could partake of the divine food, but it was all worth the trouble in the end.

The soft, succulent piece of meat accompanied with the delicious Khameer ki Roti made the one hour of combating Mumbai's weekend traffic a small price to pay.

And the gravy! The rich, thick gravy, sprinkled with green chillies, is not for the faint-hearted. A few hours after my lunch, I was already missing its taste.

The chicken biryani - one of the better ones I have had in Mumbai - and the shahi tukda - an absolute must after a good dum biryani - added to the beauty of the meal.

If you like (love) non-veg food, not having tried the Nihari at Jaffer Bhai's is unforgivable. The chain has outlets in other parts of Mumbai as well, where they also have full-fledged restaurants.

And this was on Saturday. I was back in Lokhandwala the next day. Their butter chicken is almost as memorable.

To think I still haven't tasted their Paya (which they make only in the evenings) and Khichda and so much else.

Rajneeti, and Aloo ka Bhujiya

Two things I think Rajneeti could have significantly improved upon were the editing and the dialogues.

The film felt unbearably long at times. In fact, when the interval sign came up on the screen, I could hear several people exclaim, "What, abhi interval hi hua hai!". But, one can excuse the length given the large number of important characters and so much happening between them. The Chopras took tens of episodes to cover the stretch of Mahabharat that this film covers in around 3 hours.

The dialogue, on the other hand, can't find refuge in any such excuse. Except for some rare moments of brilliance, I felt the dialogues did not pack the punch that the situations, the characters or the film itself deserved.

But, barring these small issues, and Arjun Rampal's wooden-ness (and even that seemed less wooden here), the film was a very enjoyable experience. Thankfully, I didn't go by Raja Sen's review and went ahead with the late night booking. I feel he was unnecessarily sarcastic and critical of a film that is a great watch not only because of the deliciously cruel and human characters it is populated with, but also the fun one has in drawing parallels with the original Mahabharat. Like Bharti's first son being born out of wedlock after a night spent with someone called Bhaskar, whom she worships like a God.

Raja Sen's review made me feel if he is being paid now to write reviews making fun of films, just as Nikhat Kazmi and Taran Adarsh seem to be in the pay of Bollywood to write glowing ones.

What I like about Prakash Jha's movies is this rawness that seeps through the frames. That rawness might seem to have dulled, with an out-of-place item number, where Katrina Kaif does her patented shimmying moves (you know, those ones where her hair is untied, blown by some unseen industrial size fan, she looks down, looks at you, smiles coyly?) almost providing the nadir of the man who started off with Daamul.

The traces of that rawness that are to be found here are deeply cherished. Even though chief-ministerial candidates getting down to shootouts and vindictive baseball bat sessions might seem far-fetched, the other bits of naked greed and ambition were extremely enjoyable. Especially considering that all happens within one family. So much for the Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham brand of cinema.

Even though Kalyug remains the best Mahabharat adaptation into modern life, Rajneeti does not do a tawdry job either. Any film that is well-made, largely well-paced and well-acted, and has almost no character, like Mahabharat, and like real life, completely fault-less, ought to be encouraged.

An experience with a film like this is like eating dal, bhaat and aloo ka bhujiya. It hits the right spot, even if the bhujiya might be a little too oily or the rice slightly under-cooked. Unlike most other good Hindi films today, which might be momentarily delicious like a pizza, but not what the body truly craves for.

***Spoiler Alert***

I did hope for a while that it would be revealed at the end that Indu was responsible for the death of Prithvi and Sarah - ek teer se do nishaane, getting the seat (CM's) and the meat (Ranbir's, if you may allow the rhyming) - maybe with the help of Brij. Draupadi and Krishna finally doing what they should have all those eons ago.

Also, Prakash Jha makes a Hitchcockian (or Ghai-an, if you prefer) cameo appearance towards the end of the film. Can't recall him doing that in any of his earlier films.

Mani Order

I had met Mani Ratnam during his visit to our campus at IIMC a couple of years back, and have been in touch with his team ever since. Got a chance to see his newest release today. Helped by a special invite, you might want to know, to an exclusive premiere.

Raavan has to be the most quixotic film Mani sir has ever made. I am known to be biased against Amitabh Bachchan's son and daughter-in-law, neither of whom can act to save their lives, but who manage somehow.

Till now at least.

Abhishek Bachchan outdoes himself in the film. In overacting. If Mani sir hadn't been sitting beside me I would have probably walked out 1/3rd into the film. It's an insult seeing Abhishek Bachchan get another chance to come on the screen. He is just too bad.

The rest of the film, including the regularly idiotic Aishwarya Rai, is a lot more bearable. Now I know why she would want to act with her husband in films. It just hides her inadequate talents.

Sushmita Sen must burn so much (partly responsible for her tan) every time she sees Ash hamming through another role, and bagging all decent roles.

Friends

This must be the official pushing-away-friends week.

I very often feel that I am multiple people living within me. At least two different people. And the more stupid one, the one who is probably writing this, is the more dominant one.

I told a friend, whom I always want to meet and love immensely, that I was in Bangalore over the weekend. Even though I was whiling away time on a rare free weekend in Mumbai.

I haven't replied to this girl I knew in school, who was a close friend, and whose name I have been googling for ages to get a clue on where she was, and who finally mailed me this week. The last time I corresponded with her was in 2000. Because I am not sure I want to show her who I am now.

Have been avoiding talking to a close friend from engineering because I just don't know what to talk about.

And I have been trying to pick up fights deliberately with the friend I value the most.

And I can't control any of it. I really can't.

Maybe this is an apology.

But, we are like this wonly.

Beera!

It's kind of unfortunate that I so look forward to a movie despite it having the irritating Aishwarya Rai and the even-more-irritating Abhishek Bachchan.

Of course, if I knew Tamil I would have watched the Tam version, which I am sure is going to be better.


In the meantime, listen to Beera (http://rapidshare.com/files/379327415/Raavan__2010_.rar).

Consult Focused

Please do read the post below, where I appear to be a heartless capitalist bastard, but say, and more importantly, don't say, enough to show that I might not just be one.

I just found a few interesting articles that I really wished to share here, before I forgot, and hence this abrupt increase in frequency between consecutive posts.

Vibhor mailed me this link to a series of articles written by an MIT alumnus called Keith Yost, who worked for The Boston Consulting Group in Dubai for a few months and got back to Boston a lot wiser.

He writes extremely well, and even though I feel he is being a bit too harsh on Dubai, and way too harsh on BCG, thanks in no small measure to the immediate surge of antagonistic feelings one is bound to experience when leaving a job or a posting (refer my posts on Bangalore from last year), I enjoyed reading his articles on life in Dubai and life as a consultant.

Dubai's artificiality I can vouch for, and have written about more than once earlier. There can be few places I despise more.

BCG, on the other hand, is an interesting pack of people. Would reserve my comments on it. And other similar firms, who are the easiest targets for disillusioned grads from the top colleges across the world who think of themselves in more complimentary terms than they ought to.

Leaving Vidarbha

It might be evident that suicide is one of my favorite topics. I am intrigued by the various reasons why a person would want to end his/her life. In that spirit, I have been trying to understand the Vidarbha farmer suicides, including visiting some parts of the region because of some work-related assignment recently, and I have come across some startling facts. Startling for me, at least.

Most of the farmers who are committing suicide had a much better standard of living compared to farmers in backward states like Bihar, UP and Orissa. They owned significantly large pieces of land, their families owned cell phones, they had married off their daughters in grand style.

In fact, just taking loans to hold grand marriages so that neighbors would not consider them poor was the reason for so much misery. Relying purely on cash crops - like cotton and soybean, alcoholism, sending sons to private colleges they could not afford - these are just some of the reasons I had not realized were responsible for the much-publicized deaths.

Farmers were just living beyond the means they could afford to, and many took their lives, without thinking about the wives and daughters they were leaving behind, because they could not bear to not afford those means any more. Many were expecting that the compensation their families would get from the government after their deaths would help tide over the situation.

I cannot feel any degree of support for these people. Yes, there might be genuine cases of destitution in Vidarbha, where excessive reliance on unsustainable crops or belief in the wrong kind of financial institutions might have caused farmers to hang themselves or eat pesticides, but it largely comes across as another crop of Indians stretching their feet beyond what the bed-sheet permits.

The problem is not so much from the Government's side, as many self-righteous NGOs and social reformers allege, but from within. Tackle alcoholism. Teach the farmers to live within their means. Let them know that marrying your daughter by taking unserviceable loans is not intelligent. That might help save some lives.

Only some though. The impression I also get is that the situation has reached a tipping point where men almost unanimously feel that killing themselves is a good way to handle relatively temporary difficult times. It is a scary situation when a large chunk of the population decides to give up and not fight instead.

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.

Life

I got to know a few days back that a girl I knew in my engineering college days died recently. She took her own life. I didn't know her too well. But, I knew her.

In my final final year in Delhi, I had too much time on my hands, and I had joined an NGO that worked towards creating awareness about suicide. My job there was to talk to people who contacted the NGO for help. These people were on the verge of killing themselves, but had enough will to hold on to something.

That girl I knew, and had spoken to a few times, lost that will sometime last week.

She was a very good student. Belonged to a not so well-to-do family. Parents wanted to marry her off. I felt she preferred being with women. Her marriage was fixed. I got to speak with her 4-5 times in February-March 2006. She had got married a few months after I left Delhi. She wanted badly to escape. She finally did.

I had contacted that NGO because I needed to get some sanity in my own life. After the craziness that my last couple of years in Delhi involved, I had given up a lot of hope. Just talking to people there helped a lot. I am a fair bit suicidal myself, but I have never gone to the limit of actually getting close to dying. A few cuts, a few rat-poison induced nose bleeds are mostly enough to give me enough of a scare. But, when I felt I was going beyond these relatively harmless limits, I sought help. I recovered, thanks in no small measure to some very important friends. It was suggested that, having been through those killer times, I should talk to others in similar situations. It was very cathartic, and probably helped some other people too, in that they found someone who was not judgmental.

During those painful years, what I realized was that the worst thing you can do to a person contemplating suicide is to tell him that suicide is for cowards. It really does not help. Very often, a person thinking of taking his own life is at the absolute bottom of self-worth. Telling him that the one resolution he can think of will only make him appear even worse cannot be of help. It might appear like an attempt at simplifying something that is really a lot more complex, but just listening is a lot more helpful.

A person inherently does not want to die. It is difficult to imagine how caged one must feel to take that step. Most people also do think of what effect it might have on their loved ones - their parents, friends, everyone who came to know them. To ignore all of this, to ignore all the pain, to just give up not being there tomorrow in the scheme of things - it's not an easy decision. It is taken only when multiple calls for help are not heeded. It is taken only when everything else seems pointless.

During my association with the NGO a school girl had jumped to death from her 5th floor flat because she thought she had not done well in her Boards. I had spoken to her two days before she died. It is not a great thing knowing that there might have been a chance I could have convinced her to live.

It is still not a great thing four years down. I am sorry Sakshi.