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Sunday, October 22, 2006

ULULACIÓN! Real Madrid ganada

Wow Real Won.

3rd Minute Raul scored.

Sometime in the early minutes of Second half NistelRooy scored.

And that was it. 2-0. Which could have been 4-2 or something. It was a fantabolous game as both sides got n number of chances but failed to get many more goals. Ronaldinho was as expected quite thanda but his Brazilian counterparts Emerson, Roberto Carlos and Robinho had a great game. Complete team effort which closes the gap now to two point. Even if they don't win the league this time Real fans would be OK with another victory when they go back to Catalan later in the season. That victory would really do a bit in toning down the humiliation faced by Real last time they were beaten 3-0 at home by Barca and Ronaldinho given a standing ovation.

Check out few of the classic encounters here.

Do you think Madrid will win the League this Season. Comments???

Real Madrid vs Barcelona

Just today I saw a vintage Arsenal performance after so so many days. It was the same one touch football that Wegner had promoted all these years which was back in action. Fabre, Persie, Hleb, Rosicky, Gallas and obviously HENRY producing some great entertainment. Though whenever I see Arsenal matches I fell nostalgic about college and stuff. It was great fun watching between all Arsenal fans there. Also there was Liverpool ManUtd match which Liverpool lost. My favourite player Gerrad just keeps on playing for that stupid club and I know he would never leave it.

Anyway after this in half an hour its Real vs Barca. Hope it goes well and without much trouble. But if there is bashing and trouble I will sure enjoy that.

Though Barcelona may have been the better team over a time in Spanish football the Power shifts between the two sides once in 3-4 years. I don’t know whether it will happen this year but Madrid sure have an upper hand to win today at the Santiago Bernebau arena named after there prolific President in 50’s and 60’s who set the first era of Galacticos including Alberto de Stefano from Argentina and Puskas from Hungary.

There rivalry has been nothing short of Army interventions, World War II, Spanish Civil War (incidentally Cataln Barca’s home ground was base for one army and Bernebau for another during Civil War). I saw a nice enough documentary on their rivalry courtesy History Channel. Wish I could see it again. Though nothing has brought it up to notice of World anything like Football.

I support Real today much more because I don’t quite like Barca. Especially Ronaldinhio and their stupid kit. But I like Rjjkard, quite simply because when I was watching my first ever football tournament. (I became crazy around 99 ManUtd season but Euro 2000 was it) he was coaching the then good Dutch side. So I quite liked the fellow and his team that time. They lost in semis though.

Anyway today it’s going to be fun. Home for Diwali and relaxing and seeing the matches. Why one should work. Work is Crap.

Lets hope Real wins tonight.

Friday, October 20, 2006

Don Mast Hai...!!!

Not the Nayi one but the Purani one...

Just saw it, was coming on some Hindi Movie channel. Was just wondering can Priyanka be as good as Zeenat. I hope she can be. Helen's role quite small but Kareena getting loads of attention as Kamini.

Pran was great as JJ, Arjun Rampal quite a thanda choice for the role. I mean the Voice just too much for him to do over. Though I fully agree with role of Anita. Isha Koppikar is as Thandi as the girl who came in the first Don.

Boman will be cool as DSP though, Iftikar though earned his bread-butter doing that role adding even Jam to it after toasting it. Malik is Om Puri. First it was Om Shiv Puri.

“ab to bhagwaan ne bhi apna naam khich liya”

Hehe...Arre is sab main whereas Shahrukh. No point in talking about Amitabh vs him. He can't do the "Khaike Pan" number even 1% like him. It's impossible. They can't find the bhangwaala’s as they were in the original. Priyanaka cant be as sexy as Zeenat. Songs don’t have that Orchestra stuff classic 70’s format me pointing too.

OMG Why have they made the movie?

Good that I can't see it this week.

Next week after back to Bangalore in my fav 35 Rs waala hall maybe.

Anyone reading this plz tell me the name of the actress who played Anita though, real pathetic actress she.


P.S.-Post edited after Naresh reminding me of something. Thnq Naresh.

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Bollywood Celebrates With Don And Jaan-e-Mann

Like every year holiday season is back. Other than the country celebrating Diwali and Eid nowadays it’s about the big movies releasing on this weekend, and this year its Don and Jaan-e-Mann.

The Diwali/Eid release syndrome can be traced back to “Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (1994)” A movie that brought back the Family audiences back to theatres after more than a decade long of overdoses of Action or silly college style romances. From then the last few years have created a long list of movies releasing and getting successful on Diwali/Eid weekend.

It’s more than being auspicious for the release. Like some good lessons learnt by Bollywood in marketing movies, this is another thing that they have executed to some perfection. Last year saw average enough movies like Garam Masala and Shaadi no.1 doing well. Obviously with the sheer numbers involved it’s always a safe bet.

Anyway coming back to releases this time. It’s a Khan tussle at the box office but surely both have their territories and fan groups earmarked out. And with everyone running off to see the movies surely both can be declared hits before hand. On one hand NRI audience, City going Multiplex audience and Families tend to bend towards Sharukh movies, Salman rocks at small cities and obviously with the big city audiences too.

Don is one of the movies in a long list of wanna-be remakes of classics from 70’s. This is will be a acid test and some good lesson for other movies following suit. The trailers point towards quite slick and stylish version of the original Amitabh starrer. Though I must say the “Khaike Pan Banaras” number seems to be a let down. Though Shahrukh traditionally not made for such kind of roles and he looking somewhat similar to the bad guy in Duplicate (remember it was a Mahesh Bhatt directed disaster) but I personally am a big fan of Farhan Akhtar and obviously Sharukh. Add to that Kareena and Priyanka and the movie wont be a let down for sure. Kareena in “Yeh Mera Dil” is something to watch out for.

Jaan-e-Mann on the look of it looks to be a love triangle. For figuring that out you definitely don’t need to be a Pythagoras. Whatever is the hatke thing in movie the look of Preity and New York is sadly quite repetitive. But good enough music, presence of Anupam Kher as a dwarf (something which hasn’t happened after Kamal Hasan’s classic Appu-Raja) and Salman-Akshay makes the movie promising. Akshay Kumar the most successful non-Khan actor in Bollywood definitely adds value to the movie in an effort to continue on his string of successes.

But it’s festive season so most of times it doesn’t even matter what you see, but still this Diwali and Eid should be lots of fun for movie-buffs like me.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Vicious Circle of Social Reforms

I came across this strange Geometrical figure in secondary school through an Ogden Nash poem on Visit to Dentist. These are the lines from the poem “It’s going to hurt just a little bit.”


And this, O Fate, is I think the most vicious circle that thou ever sentest,
That Man has to go continually to the dentist to keep his teeth in good
condition when the chief reason he wants his teeth in good condition
is so that he won't have to go to the dentist.

-OGDEN NASH.

The then figure became a reality for me when I visited one. Now my social ecosystem teaches me more about this bizarre figure.

Mostly Geometrical objects vary as a function of Space. This figure evolves around both space and time certainly being n-dimensional in nature. And it maps itself to everything it could this time for instance mapping itself to social reforms.

Child Labour ban couldn’t have come at a more appropriate place. The ban in hospitality and domestic work means 12 million kids between the age group of 5-14 get affected. No one can argue that the decision is wrong but India is prone to make decisions hastily and without thinking.

Ok so the boy at nearby Chai Gulla or the girl working at your home will get released from the perils of child labour, but where do they go? Boy gets into drug peddling or goes join some small pick pocketing gang. Girl gets sold to join world’s oldest profession. And what happens to their families many of whom depend on the kids directly or indirectly for support. For some sections of the society still producing kids is a means of survival for the family. So another small circle lies there. What we get is Ring whose sphere of evil is not less than anything which was being practiced. This is a circle which pushes them from one profession into another defeating the cause of removing them from a profession in the first place.

What happened last year when the so called immoral Bar Girl dancers in Mumbai (75,000) of them lost jobs? Most of them got into World’s Oldest Profession. Does that mean that the city became more MORAL? Everything good to remove the bad has loads of ugly to go with it. So what’s needed sometimes is to go along with the bad also as to suppress the ugly.

So what do we do, let’s keep the kids working is what I am saying? Definitely not. As we all know rehabilitation package for a small bomb blast take years to get distributed so what are we expecting in case of 1.2 million kids involved. This is a circle of solving one problem and then not following up with the problem and taking it to the end. Something similar to distributing BT cotton and then keep the farmers dieing in Vidarbha due to production cost increase due to supplements involved and in turns losses- Of money and most of times LIFE.

We as a society can’t expect to change so quickly everything. We should realize that in India still we are producing kids at a rate which is much handsome than BRIC countries growth prospects. Human Resources (uff that word reminds me of a person who syncs with nonsense, someone heading it) is something which can be nurtured for something better in future. So rather than imposing a country wide ban chucking states from child labour one by one and then carrying the model on a larger level would have helped.

Anyway no Child Labour is near to impossible, just imagine someone saying you to go off your job one day and say that you are not allowed to work. It’s a job for them and if they don’t work who works? Social reforms leading to cutting down of working population…hmm. Then price of everything goes up and our circle takes a new path of inflation there. Already I and everyone sane enough are quite sick of growing prices.

Finally I think I am just moving in a circle, usually I say a statement X and then follow it with negation of X. So let’s wiggle our heads to cut the circle and find the path out of this maze.

As of now though we will keep orbiting…

Monday, October 09, 2006

Sholay - ab naye pack main !!!

Sholay is back. I will write about it later. Lots to write. I have been thinking about it. For now me a bit busy. So just the posters as of now.

first the original one,

And now the new one.



Bollywood publicity is is becoming much more stylish. But hand drawn posters were great. I have studied posters in quite some detail. More on that later...


Monday, October 02, 2006

Hrishikesh Mukherjee - Simple movies, Simple life

This one appeared in my company's mag sometime last month...Ok one, I mean atleast it was much shorter than my previous one on football. I have to try keeping things shorter.I go on blabbering for much longer than required. So here it is,
_______________________________________________

Hrishikesh Mukherjee - Simple movies, Simple life.

****
pays a tribute to the doyen of Indian cinema, Hrishikesh Mukherjee whose ‘simple’ film-making style made a lasting impact on generations of movie-goers.

It is very simple to be difficult, but it is very difficult to be simple.”- Bawarchi (1975)

Once, back in college, one of my professors introduced me to Occam’s Razor, which states that all the externalities being shaved off the simplest theory is always true. No one made this much more evident than our own Cinematic Occam Hrishikesh Mukherjee.

With a career spanning across five decades simple stories about simple people became his trademark. Hrishikesh Mukherjee had his mentors in Bimal Roy and Raj Kapoor. Truly, he found a golden mean between both the film makers and created a style which was refreshingly his own and yet amazingly simple.

In the times when the genre of Lost and Found, ‘Social’ movies, Amitabh’s regular ‘masala stuff’ and a world of parallel cinema dominated, Hrishida’s cinema, somehow, was a misfit. Presenting general characters in their ‘Equated to Life’ roles was a challenge- cinematically and financially. Overcoming it was achieved though, by putting audiences through an experience that was a close reflection of their life, which was, nevertheless entertaining.

The movies which Hrishida will always be remembered for, will be Anand, Golmaal, Chupke Chupke, Abhimaan, Satyakam, Anupama, Guddi, Mili and many more. What I mean is - Hrishida will be remembered for every one of his movies, but these are what strike your mind at once. My personal favourite is Anand, though it’s difficult to tell why, with so many good movies around. It is the fighting spirit of Anand and the realistic portrayal of a man who knows his death is near, a movie which could otherwise have been overtoned with doses of dramatization, that really wins your heart.

The continuous improvisation of switching from comedy (in Golmaal) to a genre like suspense (in Buddha Mil Gaya), to a take on truth and its importance (in Satyakaam) reflects the skills of a great storyteller. Apart from being a ‘thinking director’ he was an editor too and edited most of his movies by himself. Incidentally, Hrishida began his career as an editor under Bimal Roy and went on to become his assistant director.

Hrishida’s movies rank among my personal favourites and the factor that has influenced me the most remains– Simplicity.

It’s really fascinating sometimes, how simple things lead us to eventualities which we try to achieve by complex measures. A question which puzzles me is why we resort to unconventional methods of solving problems, when just thinking simply can be much better than thinking laterally. Obviously de bono would disagree but rather than looking for things out of the box, first we should try to scan the box. The scope is much limited and thus there are better chances of success.

Again this whole article could have been put in a simpler way by just discussing Hrishida’s cinema. But now it’s a habit for me and people like me to fall prey to this habit of deviating from the simple. It’s easy to blame someone to be bourgeois by being too simple but again try applying it on yourselves and you will see.