Chakravyuh - Provoking Thoughts

Prakash Jha has gone a few notches higher than his already respectable standards in film making with his latest production, Chakravyuh. The movie is very well conceived and executed. It deals with the issue of growing Naxal terror in India. It throws light on the prevailing situation of Naxal activities and also gives a background of the entire movement. Chakravyuh is a tight knit movie and crisply covers a wide range of incidents, including the macabre episode of Dantewada, to give the audience a holistic view of the entire issue.

The movie boldly portrays the flaws in the system that gave rise to the movement in the first place and shows how the greed and malice of the politicos and businessmen have created a Brobdingnagian monstrosity that threatens the internal peace and order of our country. It is a classic example of a homegrown tumour which is growing at unbelievable pace. The story is so boldly told,  I'm surprised how the movie made it past the bureaucracy of the Censor Board.

The dialogues, screenplay and locations are near perfect. Abhay Deol clearly steals the show. Anjali Patil plays a convincing Naxal Area Commander. Manoj Bajpai and Om Puri have rather cut down, yet significant, roles as compared to their previous contributions to Jha's movies. Arjun Rampal and Esha Gupta, though not very great actors, are pivotal characters in the story and definitely add the glamour factor, which was not really a requisite in this movie; Arjun Rampal, however, looks as mesmerising as a Greek God.

What is most noteworthy about Chakravyuh is that it places forth the bare facts from the perspectives of all parties involved. To a thinking mind, it gives enough food for thought. This movie will not be a box office success as most sensible movies are not, but personally I'd call it a must watch. A laudable job by Prakash Jha and the cast & crew.

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Navrai Majhi

If I get a chance to prepare the playlist for somebody's wedding sangeet, one sure entry would be Navrai Majhi - the English Vinglish rendition. I have taken some fancy to that track. I like the way it is composed. It retains the traditional feeling with the Marathi lyrics and granny's voice; and blends in smoothly the modern touch that the Hindi lyrics and the accented verse give it. The shehnai and dhol in between bring in the complete wedding feeling. The words are meaningful and create a kaleidoscope of emotions - a father's sentiments at the thought of seeing off his daughter, the excitement during a wedding, the blessings, the speculations, the hopes, and the expectations. All of this so nicely contained in four and a half minutes.

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Escalator Antics

I went to watch a movie the other day with my mother and sister. On our way out, I spotted an interesting dessert counter placed very strategically. It was meant to attract everybody's attention as they walked out of the theatre, and so it did mine too. My sweet tooth got the better of me and we all sat down on a bench nearby to savour kulfis. After I was done, I behaved like a brat and insisted on having another one. I felt like a complete brat when my sister went and got me another kulfi. I'm the elder sibling, hello! Nevertheless, I am glad I sat there for another round of kulfi. For if I hadn't, I'd have missed a very amusing set of incidents.

Now visualise this. The bench I sat on, faced the escalators. A couple of bites into the kulfi I spot a man ascending the escalator with his toddler. The child was a replica of the father, only with a ridiculous amount of very curly hair on his head. The father's hairline had long receded. While I fixated on the similarity of the child with his father and imagined how he'd look when he grew up with all that hair the duo reached the landing. The father walked nonchalantly and his son even more. As if he had come up with a plan, the child promptly turned towards the descending escalator and moved on. The father kept walking till a few seconds and then casually glanced around only to find his son on his way down the escalator. All his nonchalance evaporated into thin air as he ran panic stricken after his child. A couple of seconds later I spot a boy in housekeeping uniform bent over the moving railing following the father and son. He had bent over with a duster and by virtue of the automatic movement was cleaning the sides and in-betweens of the railings. He looked like a corpse taking a ride up and down.

Halfway through my kulfi I see a couple ascending the escalators, again with a toddler! The couple was engrossed in some discussion. The child was on his own. He seemed to be enjoying the tow. Children seem to enjoy just about anything anyway. As the trio reached the floor, the parents were still in the midst of a discussion that seemed to be of utmost importance to the future of the world. Involuntarily they stepped off the escalator but forgot about their son. He did not know the tricks involved in using these devices of modern world, and is he to be blamed? So he just kept moving with the escalator belt and got launched off it on to the floor when it was time. It seemed as if he had been shot out of a cannon. The amazing thing was that he landed safely, and the garrulous parents, oblivious of the stunt, went on. As I turned my attention to my kulfi again, the housekeeping boy was back; still bent over, but coming upwards this time. It was a task for me not to guffaw! I finished the kulfi quickly and we finally went down. The housekeeping boy crossed us on the other escalator for a second, this time bent over on the other side with his duster. 

Some dress on the window of some shop had caught our attention, so we decided to browse a little. As I looked through a shelf of garments I suddenly realised that the shop had glass walls and I was facing THOSE escalators again; and before I knew what was going on, I see a little girl - bringing in some gender diversity in the prevalent madness - walking up an escalator that was moving downward. She did this in a very systematic way and looked like a pro. The next second I see a little boy doing the exact opposite on the next escalator. They seem to have worked up a synchronisation and as they reached the same spot on their respective escalators they began to chat. They probably had a script ready too. There was no adult in sight. Their parents seem to have abandoned them or perhaps these children had abandoned them - which could be a greater possibility given their smartness and theatrics. By the time we came out of the store the escalator kids had moved on to a different level in their game. They were now leaning on the railings and moving upward or downward sideways. They also kept changing sides very often to keep the game interesting enough. The only obstruction in their game was the housekeeping boy who was relentlessly bent over, still.

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(nir)Aadhaar

Yesterday I spent around an hour and a half just to complete the enrollment formalities - iris scan, finger print scans, photograph etc. - in order to initiate the process of obtaining an Aadhaar card for myself. There is a makeshift Aadhaar centre set up in the club of my apartment for the residents' convenience. Given that I had no distance to travel, no incomplete forms, no missing documents and, most importantly, only 4 people in the queue ahead of me, just what explains the hour and a half spent for something that ideally should take not more than 5-7 minutes?

The delay was caused because of a series of events. There was an elderly lady in the queue when I reached the counter. She was being made to place her fingertips to record her fingerprints. The machine records the percentage of clarity, and a minimum something is essential for the record to be valid. After several attempts, the lady had to finally give up and her application was processed with just 5 or 6 fingers' prints. There was some similar problem during her iris scan. The scanners were so talked about before the Aadhaar movement had begun. Unfortunately, they are not sophisticated enough and thus not sensitive enough to scan the prints of those whose bodies have borne the wear and tear of time. The gentleman just ahead of me was mocking all this, saying the lady's old age had wiped off her finger prints and made her iris un-scan-able. It was annoying after a while but it was no point asking him to stop and think if this happened to his own mother, because the lady was, in fact, his mother.

The Aadhaar process is infested with numerous loop holes which can be easily amended and eventually make the process flawless and much less time consuming. To begin with, the software that has been designed to record data is not compatible with Indian names and titles. One can type one's name correctly in English, but be prepared to find it distorted or misspelled in Hindi. My surname will appear in a way that I myself will not be able to pronounce. I can, in fact, type in Devanagari script without any difficulty here on my blog. Why was it such a huge task to design a proper software, I fail to fathom. Besides, my surname is not something which is unheard of that it becomes so difficult to type correctly. I'm not so miffed just because it was my surname in question. A lady named Amrita spent 15 minutes trying to get her name spelled correctly in Hindi. This is neither an understandable nor excusable error in India. The enrollment form that we fill out initially is not required at all. We might as well feed in all pertinent data online and then verify it at the time of processing alongwith our identity proof. It is a sheer waste of paper. The receipt that we get is printed on normal A4 sheets and then torn in half manually; one is retained by the enrollment in-charge and the other given to you. Why couldn't they be provided with perforated sheets? The enrollment in-charge struggles with a foot ruler to tear of the receipts in two halves. The finger print and iris scanner are not too sensitive, as illustrated by the elderly lady's case. The photograph is taken just for the heck of it. You may not look like yourself at all. The icing on the cake is the fact that will take anything from 3-10 months or probably more for the card to arrive. 

I am not too sure what purpose the card will solve. I felt a surge of insecurity creeping in as my bio metrics were recorded. I wouldn't know if someone misused them. I have not got my bank account synchronised with it. From a much hyped programme with a humungous fund earmarked for it, that had the likes of Nandan Nilekani and Wipro Technologies associated with it, I expected something better.

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Doctor Calling!

This one goes out to all those people who believe in self medication, and/or not going to the doctor at all in order to seek remedies for common or uncommon maladies. There is a reason why medicine is a separate and dense branch of study, which further breaks out into multiple sub-branches so as to cover, in detail, every aspect of the human anatomy. We may have a lot granny's homemade cures for a lot of things, and they are effective too. The trouble begins when we start experimenting with medicines instead of kitchen ingredients.

I do not place blind faith any medical practitioner per se, and it is always a wise thing to take a second, probably even a  third opinion regarding a given medical condition; but self medication is a very unsafe practice. Sadly, a very common one too. I have known a few instances where people have adopted this fallacy, and eventually said goodbye to the world. Makes me wonder, was it really worth it? Life is a precious gift. Do not treat it so callously. A lot of people take it as a strike on their ego to have to visit a doctor for something which is not life threatening. The fatal consequences of self medication arise out of inappropriate drugs administered for seemingly harmless issues.

It is important to understand that there are some people out there who have dedicated their life to study the complexities that reside within our body. They are not just qualified on paper, but have also been thoroughly trained and have gained experience throughout the course of their work to treat what is not right in the human body. If you have any regard for yourself or for your near and dear ones, value your life. Do not self-medicate, and dissuade others who may do it. Also, do not let anybody prescribe medicines off hand to you. Nothing infuriates me more than people who impose their unqualified prescriptions on every one they set their eyes on. Every disease and ailment, and thus every medicine correpsonds differently to a set of symptoms and also affects different people differently. The after effects too differ in nature and magnitude. Just because you or someone you know were treated for some disease with a lot of exposure to various drugs, you do not qualify as a medical practitioner of any sort.

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At Home

Spontaneity seems to be the new permanent thing in my life. That explains a trip back home planned out of nowhere. This was an unusual week where I had almost no classes, so without a second thought I flew home. I was in time for the Navami Darshan, after two years. I have never been to Calcutta during pujo, or otherwise. From what I have heard and seen on TV, the city assumes an amazing form. However, for me, Bombay during Navratri is very special. Dandiya and Garba are more popular here than Durga Puja, but the city lights up brilliantly and it is a wonderful span of 9 days. Being Navami, the last day of the navratras, it seemed that the entire city was out on the roads. It took me nearly an hour to get home, which is double of what it takes usually.

Telepathy is a strange thing. My son - to the world he may be my pet dog, to me he is my child and much much more - had sensed something, as he does every time I return home. He had not left the sight of the door since the time I had left from my campus in Nagpur. After crawling through the traffic for so long, and in the meantime having fought thrice and laughed like a maniac all through the way with my kid sister in the car, I finally reached home. He could not wait for the door to be opened. If he could, he would have darted straight out of it. As my mother struggled with him to open the door, he came rushing straight into me and I also spotted our resident cat hopping with little concealed enthusiasm. She would never openly confess, though, that she was happy at my arrival. The next thing I knew was that my son was talking animatedly to me in his own language, which I justifiably claim to completely understand, and we were on the floor, face to face. I couldn't help welling up a little when my sister said that this was the happiest they'd seen him in a very long time. I just stood there and watched him going ballistic with our cat who also was in the prime of her excitement with all the activity. I had to sneak out a brief second to wish my mother who was beaming at the chaos. It was the best homecoming, as it is every time.
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A-maddening Spiderman

For the first time ever I walked out of a movie - midway - today. Amazing Spiderman was screened tonight on my campus. A lot of people, including me, were quite upbeat about it. We planned to finish all our meetings before the screening began - yes, we have late night meetings here. That's our way of acting all important in a B-school (kidding!). Anyway, so dinner and meetings were hurried away and then began the much awaited movie. I had heard some trash reviews about it but I thought just how much could somebody spoil a Spiderman story. Guess it was too early to have my hopes pinned up optimistically. No surprise then that they fell flat on their faces!

After what seemed to be an hour and a half, I checked my watch and realised the nuances of the Theory of Relativity. Only 45 minutes had passed, and the movie seemed to slower down with each passing frame. In another minute I was told that the run time was 140 minutes. It is not in my basic nature to walk out of a movie in between. So I persuaded myself to sit through a little longer. In another six and a half minutes my patience gave way. The amateur special effects, the juvenile antics of the so-called Amazing Spiderman, and an absolutely disgusting lizard monster made it impossible for me to take it any more. Another annoying thing, Irrfan Khan (extra R inexplicable) stars in the movie as a villain. He added the comic factor. I do not know who directed that movie, I'm not even going to find out. But he did a wonderful job messing it up. Marvel should adopt a more thorough procedure before handing out the rights. They can surely do better.

I'd consider this movie, perhaps, at par with Saawariya. I had slept off in less than 15 minutes into that outlandish piece of motion art that Sanjay Leela Bhansali insisted on calling a masterpiece. I don't think I can handle the multiple nightmares. It's taken me an hour of crazy banter and three bars of ice cream to get over the trauma. I'm just glad I did not pay for it.

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Something Bookish

When I am old, I think, children of the neighbourhood will call me the crazy book lady. I cannot figure how and why I find myself in the possession of so many books all the time. By the time I get to being the crazy old book lady I do not know how exactly book-wealthy I will be; but I know for sure that the heir to my books - I will explicitly give them away in my will - will be one hell of a lucky person. At the moment I am in a very makeshift phase in my life where I am living in one small room in a hostel. Yet, you have to see to believe how many non-academic books I have stacked up here. The academic ones are no less though. I do not have a book shelf to fit them all in, so I have turned the window sill into a  make-do bookshelf.

Every new book I read adds value to my life. However, quite sadly, I have been very irregular with my reading lately. I've been so unjust to MacLean. It's taken me weeks and I am still not through his Puppet on a Chain. Princess Diana's biography by Sarah Bradford also beckons me. I wish I could have a job where all I had to do was to read, and watch movies, and sitcoms too.

It was my birthday last week, and thanks to my dear friends it rained books on me. I will, thus, get to my favourite task in sometime - signing my name, the date I got the book on and the place where I got it at, on the first page. This only brings my books closer to me. I have received more than half a dozen titles as presents. Makes it slightly easy for the one who is gifting. Not that I resent this. I would prefer a good book over a typically girly gift any day. I could live in a library for all it's worth. When I am at home, it is pretty much like that though. There is seriously no count of the number of books in my house. The trouble will arise when I it's time for me to move back. My parents, sister and I have our individual book collections. We have our own shelves, but now we find each other trying to sneak a book here and another there in various nooks and crannies on each other's shelves because we are so out of space. When I get  withhome a huge carton of books, it is a possibility that I may have to camp in the lobby just so that my books have a shelter above them. Exaggeration, of course! Everything said and done, there are two must-haves in life. Books, and friends who gift you books!

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Latest on Loop

Now here is one song that I cannot seem to get enough of. It is a beautiful blend of meaningful lyrics and soothing music (it is definitely 'inspired', but nevertheless). KK's melodious voice carries the song along very well. There is another rendition where Shreya Ghoshal get to sing a verse. I do not really like that one as much as KK's version. But good work.

Though I feel somewhere that 'technology' interferes too much with the final presentation of music these days. It refines the output to an artificial perfection. The music that we got until a few years back too used technology for enhancement, but somewhere a raw originality was retained, and it definitely added charm to the song.

Nothing else about the movie interests me, but Abhi Abhi from Jism 2 continues to play on loop in my room. Either my neighbours also like the track or my speakers aren't doing a good enough job of disturbing them at this time of the night.

 

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I Have Arrived

This one comes a tad too late, but better late than never. It was day zero and the most prestigious job on campus awaited its claimant. My feet flurried along with the swarm of hundreds of others that morning towards the auditorium. I had been very anxious the night before and was too on the D-day, but all through it was a strangely positive disquiet.

It was one of those amazingly 'right' days, where everything just falls in place. Carrying nothing but eerie aplomb, I gave it my best shot and left the rest to the guide who was directing the show all along. After a  few hours - that seemed like ages - of restless waiting, I finally heard what I had wanted to. I had achieved what is perhaps the most awaited milestone of a student's life. My first job. Additionally, this one came with a lot of frills. Hello Asian Paints! 

Glad and satisfied as I may be, this was made possible by a bunch of people who are in various parts of the world right now; a bunch of people who came into my life at various stages and have made a major contribution towards what makes me what I am today. I am not taking any names here, but I owe this to my family, teachers, mentors and some friends - all the people who have touched my life and  made a difference. I thank them for having faith in me, and giving me all that they did. And of course, the innumerable hand shakes and the laudations I received will always be cherished. With my confidence in myself reinstated and sang froid intact, I will now enjoy the last lap of my student life. And 26th Spetember, 2012 you are one date I am going to remember.

(the picture above, courtesy : Harshad Lunavat, batchmate at IMT-N. Brilliantly done for Sankalp and I, after we made it to AP. Thanks!)

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For F.R.I.E.N.D.S.

If we were living in the sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S, it'd be Ross Geller's 45th birthday today. What a strange co-incidence that I just watched the last episode of the final season of one of the most loved sitcoms of all times. It took me less than a month to complete the entire 10 seasons, and I am just so sad it had to end. Like a good friend, F.R.I.E.N.D.S was my perennial companion all this while. I have lost count of the number of nights I've fallen asleep to an episode playing in the background.

All good things come to an end. Not always to make way for something better though. It is true that life goes on, no matter what. And there are some things in life that nothing can replace. The wonderful times, memories, tears and laughs stay with you. F.R.I.E.N.D.S is one such thing for me. I never knew I could get so attached to a bunch of fictional characters in this way, especially those that are not in a book. The only gang on celluloid that comes as close as this in my radar of affection is Sheldon Cooper and friends from the Big Bang Theory.

Even though I know I can just pick out any episode and watch it whenever I want, thanks to the technological advancement of modern age, I have a strange feeling in my stomach. The kinds one gets when you lose something, and especially after I know how it ends. Nevertheless, splendid job David Crane and Marta Kauffman. Thank you!

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