a) During today’s Seattle Pallavan journey, was catching up with a friend, who stays in the same community, about the weekend that went by. I have to say that we just met a month back, in the same bus. He was aware that I went to Mumbai Xpress and asked me about it. When I said it was OK but not as expected, he pointed out to various reviews on the net and said Chandramukhi wasn’t better than Mumbai Xpress. Cut here.

After few more minutes of discussion as to why Mumbai Xpress was only OK and not great, he dropped a surprise bomb. He remarked,”Even in lazygeek site ‘they’ said it was not that good“. Read again, ‘they’ said. I was stumped. Missing bails. Curiously I asked him how he got to ‘that’ site. He said he got through Google and was not a regular reader. He wasn’t aware of too many details which I had asked only to drive him to the fact that it was my blog. He wasn’t too sure and I left it there. I am sure he would read this in a day or two and then kick me up for the dig. Funny though.

b) It was Ram Ganesh who picked me up for Mumbai Xpress movie. But thats not the reason why I am writing this. I knew Ram Ganesh only through email that he sent me with regards to screenplays in tamil. He sent the mail long before I came to Seattle. He was also from Seattle. So when saw the note on the blog that I was at Seattle he sent an email asking if I needed some help to move around and some help. I did reply him back that the local bus is keeping me mobile. For a night show of Mumbai Xpress, he came over to pick me up. When co-ordinating for this, we sent a series of emails. One of his email, he sent me his blog address which he never sent before on his emails to me. It was his personal email address and it contained the blog address in his signature.

I was throughly impressed by his photo blog, Point and Shoot. They were full of realistic pictures with blurred backgrounds making his subject’s emotion being expressed very well. And while running through his lbog I found that he was the top finalist for the Grand Prize in the prestigious National Geographic Celebrate Photography Contest. This was my favorite picture. Much to my surprise he also passed me a PDF file containing a script. It was copyrighted with the Writers Guild of America and was a unique one. Could be made into a good 10 minute short film.

c) Balaji from Singapore was a stranger and became an acquaintance to me only through this blog. An ardent Kamal fan who would IM me in Yahoo messenger to find out about the Kamal movie/music review. We were chatting today on IM when we started discussing about European films and their sheer greatness when compared to Hollywood. As he works at Singapore, he gets to see a lot of them and made some worthy suggestions of European films which I have queued in my personal ‘must-see’ list. He also said European film had much superior screenplays which were atleast a decade ahead of these Hollywood ones.

From Malena to Facing Windows to 5*2 his list of European films kept growing.

Three different people, three different situtations and full of surprises. No yaps, just a joy.