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The Chennaites crib of not being able to watch the Best of Hollywood from being in Chennai. Cinema Paradiso and Tik Tak are two good stores that I know which rent DVDs. Sadly they both are located at Abiramapuram. I am not sure it there is a better shop somewhere at Adyar or Egmore.

They may not supply all of the best but its a good start. When they opened up they charged more than 100 bucks as a single DVD’s rent. Seems like they have reduced the rental since then and they have also expanded to Hyderabad and Bangalore. I am not sure of what prompted them to expand in Calcutta instead of Mumbai where they might get some good market.

Santhosh, the guy who, alongwith Vaan Nila Tharum fame Richard started Cinema Paradiso talks to The Telegraph on their recent expansion to Calcutta and also drops few names here and there. From the interview –

“Kamal Haasan, (A.R.) Rahman and I used to exchange DVDs, before I started off my parlour with just 300 titles from a tiny place in Chennai’s Alwarpet in 2003 along with my partner Richard,” recalls the 32-year-old software engineer from Trichy.

Collecting DVDs went hand-in-hand with his camera cameos, first during a stint with Mani Ratnam’s cinematographer P.C. Shriram, and then with Hungarian lens ace Vilmos Zsigmond, who had worked with Spielberg in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. “I collaborated with Zsigmond in Rush Hour in Hollywood and then also worked in Playing by Heart, starring Sean Connery and directed by Willard Carrol,” says Santhosh, who is set to return with his camera to the Ratnam stable soon. Cinema Paradiso has remained a parallel passion, though.

With DVDs rental lowering down to Rs.50, I am happy chennaites would crib too much and Nilu doesn’t have to travel so far to watch Mulholland Dr.

The show is all set. The tickets are on sale for the Bangalore venue. Click on the image above for a bigger version of the poster and ticket details. If you are in need of tickets, there have a bunch of Rahmaniacs from bangalore co-ordinating the effort. Email Radha for tickets and you can rock to Rahman‘s Humma Humma.

[Pic – Amazon

First Off, I haven’t read this book. Infact, the book itself hasn’t released yet. So you know this is no book review of The Physics of Superheroes.

I heard James Kakalios‘ interview on NPR and got instantly interested. Being a huge comics addict during my teens[except for archie and jughead], anything on comic heroes puts on the interests. Just like how The Unbreakable and Incredibles used super heroes to explore deeper into the human mind, seems like this book explains theories of phyiscs using super heroes and their nifty equipments/tricks.

Pretty Impressive way to explain physics. If only my physics madam[classy dressed with a bob cut hair] at school tried to teach physics this way, I would have been writing like James Kakalios by now. Anyway, I hope she still teaches how to experiment ohm’s law in the lab. It would never work for me especially on the day of final examination at school. Physics, huh !!