Ra.One - The raving review that wasn't

Ok, so this one would hold no interest for those who do not watch Bollywood flicks. I say that with so much conviction, like anyone was interested in reading what I have written before but then if a lot of movies being made, irrespective of the their geographical origin, have viewers, my writing would be a relief sent from heaven for such.
Anyhow, coming back to why I am writing this entry, I happened to watch the extravagantly expensive production made by none other than the one called SRK (if you are confused on who that is....well you definitely don't have any idea of Bollywood)called Ra.One. Now, Ra.One could just have been called Raavan (remember that dude with the 10 heads and a mean streak who while being a King resorted to kidnapping other people's wives himself, serious lack of Human Resources planning in that kingdom) except a movie by that name came out not long ago and which starred Abhishek Bachchan, and now need I say about how it fared?
Ra.One it seems was Shahrukh's dream project and he really wanted to make it for his kids as he claimed, yet the first two minutes in, the dialogues were so double meaning that a majority of parents would have cringed in their seats not knowing if they should cover their kid's ears or eyes or just make their way to the exit, the last not being such a feasible option as there would have been a mad rush to exit at that point of time anyways.
Now we could do the whole what went wrong with the flick, that was to re-define the way Bollywood made movies and that super-heroes were not just confined to the self-confessed saviours of the world - the Americans, and could be better off going on to the what went right with it. So here is my list of what I thought was the positives from Ra.One
Getting Akon to sing Chammak Challo, now none of us and I mean none of us saw this
coming and did Akon (and the rest of the Ra.One team) pull it off. The song in
hindsight would be nothing as good as it is.

The whole video game concept, yes it was different although how it was handled here
is a totally different conversation.

The whole pixelated distortion of the faces when punched and otherwise looked
pretty good, to me at least.

Chitti (Rajnikanth)

Did I mention the song Chammak Challo?

That was about all I could find in a movie that ran for 2 hours and 45 minutes, a movie that was publicised in any and all avenues possible and SRK went on a marketing madness to pull the crowd to the cinemas yet he forgot the very basic thing that would have made this a truly re-defining way to make cinema in India - a proper STORY. The team of Ra.One went with the whole Good vs. Evil way in the same as the rest, heck Raavan had a much tighter storyline than this. The movie borrows a lot and when I say a lot I mean a lot of plots from the various super-hero flicks which could be another reason it leaves the audience leaving confused and wanting to see some rational although most of us went looking for none. The dialogues are so clichéd it makes you cringe in your seat and wonder if just some of that money spent on production could have be better utilised in getting a someone who could pen some proper lines. The whole Kareena making up words for abuse was good in the Golmaal series as it was different and new, whereas it was just used and abused in Ra.One. Some of the scenes were stretched longer than the value for money chewing gums and became rather annoying than awe-inspiring.
Overall, Ra.One is the present age Roop Ki Rani Chooron Ka Raja (don't remember that one? Had Anil Kapoor and Sridevi and was one of the most expensive movies made by Boney Kapoor, and had left him out of the business for a long time too) and although it may make its money and not see the same fate as the later the only difference that lies between the two is the larger than life appeal SRK has over his fans.
This one is only for the SRK fans and am sure they would be loving the flick, the rest of us have endured the pain and moved on for now.

A Touch of Life

There was a time when things were simple, life was about living, television was for entertainment and a phone for talking to people. Now however, its all changed, the phone is used as a phone, organiser, radio/MP3 player, alarm clock, web browser and what not; television is to fill in the void when we actually get time to pull ourselves away from that very phone and life a stress filled, heart attack ticking bomb waiting to blow any second that is if some other disease doesn't kill you first.
The human life has been entangled in a web so complex that the more we try to wrangle free of it the more complicated it gets. We have started relying so much on technology and gadgets that we have forgotten how that in-built super machine - the brain works. We can't have a proper debate or discussion without one of us opening up Google to actually verify the answer, sometimes even before anyone has had a chance to speak up. Back in school, we were discouraged to use the calculator while learning maths so we could rely on our ability to think and solve the problem instead of plugging numbers on the calculator and getting the answer, now kids don't even have to bother with a calculator as everything is present "on the internet". The whole concept of imagination seems to be the thing of the past with people now asking to see the animate of concepts before it can be conceived. We now have gadgets where we can just order it to do our work and while it may seem that this would make our lives better we find better ways to complicate it and add more stress. We try to look for answers on life but then there is only so much Google can provide and the answer to one's life somehow just doesn't appear on its radar, it could however find someone else's life for you to read.
Life is short or so they say, however in order to avoid the disappointment, slow down to smell the roses, enjoy the sunshine, feel the wind, dance in the rain - live a bit of your life before the curtain comes down.

Who ate my Planet

It should not come as a shock to many of us, unless you have been a hermit, that mother nature is not really impressed with us lately. The quakes, floods, droughts and just plain wild weather is surely a clear indication that everything is not right. The whole Global Warming debate has become a thing of yesterday yet the effects of the warming are still reeling out in front of us. Sustainability is what is has come to today, we need to ensure we at least maintain what we have today so that we can have a tomorrow.
Sustainability has become the for the present what the Hippie movement was for the 60s....considering they did the whole tree hugging it does seem apt. Any how, after years of pumping out matters from the core of the earth, creating holes in the ozone, manufacturing creative chemicals and spreading that in the atmosphere, we have finally realised that we may have hollowed out the very land we stand on, exposed all sorts of radiations which was filtered by the nature and created toxins which we inhale everyday to ensure we evolve the diseases which in turn requires us to create more chemicals to counter the effects.
Its probably past the point of time to bring back any semblance back to normalcy yet as we go ahead we need to decide whether its time to give a bit of love back to mother earth and detox the nature along with our lives which we fill with baseless, useless toxic junks to fill in the hole we have created by our consumeristic (yes, I did create that word and there is no meaning for it in the dictionary but you get the point)way of life.

Tale of the Fractured Minds

So it has been some time, I admit I haven't been in the mindset to write about much as I was in the reading space. I have to add that this hiatus was in a way intended as I could not gather my thoughts in a collective manner. Now don't get me wrong, when I say that I do not mean I am going to stop being random. That is probably only going to happen when the world freezes over. I have always wanted to slip that line in and again the randomness of the situation helps me in accomplishing it.
Well so what's happened in all this time you may ask, probably not but well as this is my forum of speech and if you are reading all this till now, chances are you have nothing better to do and you might get an insight of my brilliant life and.....yeah ookkkk that is not happening either. The funny thing is in the past few months a few friends of mine came to know about my blog and the their first comment was "I really want to read it to see what really goes on in your head!". This always makes me laugh because I think, yes I do that sometimes and its a pretty exhaustive exercise, I am pretty easy to read and understand, I am probably the iPhone version of the humans (I would have likened myself to Windows but I really don't crash that often and hence that would have been a lie) and come with no extra fuss* (*terms and conditions apply. Item once sold cannot be subjected to refund and dumping criteria applies. Please refer agreement terms before purchase). So the whole notion of people gauging my state of mind from the words typed on a web log where the world is my canvas and I am the Da Vinci is pretty much futile.
So now that we have wasted at least 5-10 minutes of the precious time we can conclude this session with the following lessons learnt:

- You have more time than actual purpose to be wasting your time reading gibberish.

- You are more bored than I was while I nicely typed away all the random words that
came to my head and in a miracle no less than turning water into wine, those words
actually made sentences. (I did keep the example of the miracle in check and didn't
use the parting of the Nile when I borrowed I went into religious histories and the
miracles bestowed)

- You really need some help, probably professional even, to get to this line and not
wondering about the state of your mind.

- You are probably wondering why I haven't used numbers to list these and if there is
a catch.......well not really I am not really measuring your insanity, merely
stating it as a fact so I don't require numbers. :)

Till next time my insane subject....Peace Out!

IQ to IE...Where do you stand?

So dumb people use Internet Explorer, how can that be a shocking eye opener is what I am wondering. Let's be honest here, it comes as part of the windows operating system and doesn't involve downloading and installing it.
What I am perplexed about and to me, anyways, seems a no-brainer is what prompted someone to go and do a research on this. Did someone, at a Geek party, getting bored of what the others were discussing, suddenly think "This party is soooo boring, I need to bring in some zest, some fun.....how should I do this? Oh Yeah I know....lets start with Microsoft products, they are always fun to make fun of." and hence started the great debate of which web browser is the best leading to the demographics of the user?
Or did some noob watching TV get bored of watching Harbhajan Singh and Saif Ali Khan constantly annoying him/her asking the question "Have I made it large?" get curious as to what web browser these people used and if their IQ had actually made it large?
Whatever it was, someone (more likely to be more than one) somewhere had to be really really bored to go through with it and not only did they (I use "they" as this could not have been a one mind scam err...I mean scheme) break it down to different web browsers, they actually went ahead comparing the IQ levels of users using different versions of IE and how the gradual updates in the version led to the increase in the IQ levels. So there we go, while you might not be a total fool while using IE9, you still have some way to come up the IQ ratings by using more sophisticated browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Camino.
So the next time you see someone using Internet Explorer, try not to snigger and judge, just remember the wise word uttered a long time ago by Confucius - "Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change".

Where Did My Money Go??

The great American Debt crisis, can't come as a shock to many of us for what more could we expect from the nation that gave us our greatest vice - Consumerism. Ah yes, buy stuff that we really didn't need with the money that we really didn't have. It basically took greed and covered it in a nice sugary flavour (or deep fried it in batter for those who don't like sweets) and presented it to us, with the notion that if we didn't spend money the world would come to an end or something to that effect. We got so used to it that we spent money on novelty items such as "Colour Changing LED Rose" or a "Designer Gnome" or a clock that doesn't resemble anything like a clock. We received catalogues for this in the mail, emails, newspapers, online ads. Yes, our emails were cluttered spam mails selling us everything from the novelty items to prescription drugs to pills that could work wonders yet could not be advertised on national television and then there were those emails from the African Royalty. Ah yes, now the African Princes did not want any money from you, in fact they wanted to share their enormous fortune that the silly Government of theirs was trying to steal from them. All they wanted was my bank account, and though it has been over 8-9 years and apart from the bank losing a chunk of my money I am sure the cheque is going to be in the mail any time now.
No, consumerism has not been put to death, its merely taking a bit of a nap right now and probably using the latest dreaming gadget churned out just before the recession hit. So as goes the line made more famous in the Will Smith starer "Independence Day" - It ain't over till the fat lady sings!

Captain Invincible and the Invisible Vaseline

Cricket is a gentleman's game or so we have been hearing ever since we started watching the game, which of course is pretty much since we were born. Now, I got into cricket pretty late when I was about 13 or maybe 14 since I grew up in a country obsessed with football (soccer to the folks who don't play it). However, with my country of origin it was just a matter of when not if, till I started to follow it religiously and ever since then the thing that comes up is the comment on how gentlemanly the game is. In the last decade give a few more years, the whole playing in the spirit of the game has made a lot of noise with a few teams trying push each other in a corner and win playing on the mind game than by actually playing the actual game. There has been a greater scrutiny of the umpiring and as the game has gone on to be more corporate than just be a sport the stress levels amongst the players and the officials have hit the roof.
Little would Douglas Jardine have known at the time that bowling the bodyline would have the spirit of the game linger on for the rest of the playing history as now everything that can't be controlled by the umpires goes back to the players and how much friendly spirit they show whilst playing.
Having said all that, do players really abide by the whole statement of the game being one of the gentlemen or the whole playing in the spirit of the game? Just a look at the present Test match going on between India and England has given us an indication of the extremities of the way things are played. Michael Vaughan, ex-captain of the English team recently tweeted that VVS Laxman might have applied vaseline to the bat to avoid being detected by the hotspot on the nick that may have been. The fact that the bowler at that time checked the bat (again I suspect the gentlemanly conduct there) and confirmed there was no substance - vaseline, water or otherwise on the bat. The tweet brought a bit of condemnation from the Indian camp with the former captains wondering loudly if Vaughan really knew what he was talking about, only for Vaughan to retort with "where has the humour gone?" response. Now Mr. Vaughan, I might not have played any professional cricket but to accuse a person of cheating is no joke, in any sport or profession for that matter, unless you have some concrete evidence and what you have based it on was as slippery as that alleged vaseline which surprise surprise according to an English camper was mysteriously missing.
Next came an incident where Ian Bell in a world of his own started running amok the field to get to tea before the umpires had called for it and was run out, and from the rule books, it seems was really out. All of a sudden there was a huge discussion about how the dismissal would be in the spirit of the game and if the Indian fielders should have appealed. As, tea got over and the fielders came on the field, we suddenly saw Ian Bell walk out with his bat and it was obvious the appeal was reversed and the Indian camp thought better than to react a la Vaughan and probably allow the game not to be thrown into another controversy. The question that shall probably linger on, is that would England in a similar situation have done the same thing, and even Bell could not give a proper answer to that. Dhoni might have given away the top spot in the Test rankings but he certainly has left cricket a question to ponder whenever, if ever, a situation like this arises again. I would not be surprised to see at least one comment which would go like this "I wonder what Dhoni would have done in this situation". So, after the vaseline-gate there still is hope that Cricket might still have a few gentlemen left in the game and that the spirit of the game might still be going strong.

P.S: A few lines I wrote to share with my friends on facebook about the whole cricket saga from the last two days summed up.

Nasser Hussain : I can't believe the BCCI would have objections to the use of UDRS with Hawk Eye. That is just beyond reproach
Ravi Shastri : I think you are going beyond the boundaries of commenting Nasser.
Ian Bell : I don't care about the UDRS and the umpires any more, I want Dhoni to take decisions on every thing cricket going forward.
Strauss and Flower : Amen!