kirukkal.com

June 14, 2005

Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi

I had no idea what Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi was until I watched it. Srihari had written a review which I comfortably forgot to read. I heard him comment elsewhere about HKA being a good film and hence I wanted to watch it. Turned out to be sweet.

Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi a.k.a Thousand Dreams Like These, has Che Guevara, Beatles, Bob Marley, naxal movement, sex, politics and love in widely varying proportions. All these described and experienced through three people who lived in the post-independent India during 70’s. HKA can just me defined as Sudhir Mishra’s tribute to the 70’s generation. With Subha Mudgal’s opening song and those explicit politically charged lines on screen, I was certainly suprised that it wasn’t the kind of film that I expected it to be from the DVD cover.

Delhi. St Stephen’s College. Three people who meet here as friends, with just their emotional attachment in a triangular fashion, see the extremes of life by living life they choose too. After a decade, their lives changed beyond recovery, their love undying. Delhi was intellectually charged up at 70’s. Voices in need of reformation ended up being naxal movements. Many rich class college yuppies were moved by idealistic ideas and moved to villages for reformation. Sidharth is one such. With the corrupt political cloud over Delhi, one could just talk his way-up the career. Check-out Vikram. Then we have the girl. For the 70’s she is the educated, independent but emotional Indian woman. So we have Geeta. They follow life and it’s dark corridors only to finally end up with thousand dreams like these.

Sudhir Mishra’s portrayal of India at the politically charged 70’s era is something that I couldn’t relate to. Not many movies have tried to tread this way. With the cry for true freedom, political imbalances and the times of emergency forms the canvas of HKA. Without harping too much on the political issues, Mishra takes a tight-rope walk. He wins. He wins first for his intriguing, non-boring and highly charged narattive of HKA. Then for his casting skills. Kay Kay Menon as Sidharth, Shiney Ahuja as Vikram and Chitrangada Singh as Geeta are great finds for theie respective roles. Chitrangada Singh looks and smiles like Smita Patil. The kind of dark beauty we see in Balu Mahendra’s flicks. Kay Kay has a role that needs downplay. He does that with grace. Shiney Ahuja as the vivacious Vikram out performs others. The talkative role adds up to the personality. If only Mishra would have mixed the english/hindi in proportion, it would have been a rational move. There was excessive english even after the characters live in the deepest villages of Bihar, for nearly a decade. Could have been handled better.

Yet another gem among the heap of half-baked nonsensical hindi films made these days. If you get some leisure movie-watching time, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi is a good watch.

BTW, I also wanted to comment on Madhur Bhandrarkar PAGE 3 which was dubbed as a rare film of the year. All I wanted to say is that Page 3 is one among the heap that is mentioned in previous paragraph. It should have been directed by Shobha De. She has probably lived and written more about Page 3 people of Bollywood than anyone. What starts as good idea ends up as a pretentious movie that canont convert the original idea on-screen. The whole movie is sprinkled with skin-deep characterisation, party clips, neon lighted dance floors and low/no hip culture of the ‘happening’ bollywood. Madhur Bhandarkar’s earlier flick Chandini Bar was laudable. He should probably be highlighting Chandini Bar in his filmography. Page 3 is yet another sample of hazaaron bad films aisi.
June 12, 2005

Movable Type ya Blogger whine – Redux

The flow of spam comments keep increasing even I keep a blacklist and also make sure the ones that escape blacklist filter gets deleted. This takes a good half hour during weekends. To cut this maintenance time, I finally decided to cut the HTML in comments which would discourage spammers from leaving a comment. I’ve done that and am happy the last few days spam comments have reduced by half.

The recent fad is to move to WordPress and many known bloggers have moved out of MT and Blogger. I am contemplating to do this but the only thing that stops me from doing are these spammers. The spam issues that I’m facing with MT wouldn’t be resolved with WP too and hence moving out would re-energise me psychologically but would leave me doing the same blog maintenance during weekends. As rambled before, one thing that I want to do is to switch back to blogger. I’ve even written emails to the blogger team asking them to include the import entries option in blogger. They seem to be doing everything else except this. They even have AJAX technology for their commenting system but an import from other blogging tool is yet to be fixed. Huh !!

My instinct says that google in the coming year, might hugely invest in Blogger and would probably come-up with a tool like Picasa which can be downloaded to the client machine and run blogs from there. If they could pad a host of other utilities by studying the competing blogging products, blogger will continue to be the most successful blogging tool.

P.S – I’ve also tweaked my commenting system in the blog. The comments which were appearing old-to-new for the last few weeks, will continue to appear ~~new-to-old in descending order~~ as such.
June 12, 2005

Blogger’s Park

Blogger’s Park is probably the first no-URL-wrongly-spelled column in the main stream media. Ramya‘s acquaintance with the Indian bloggers has reflected well in the article that details blogger meets. It was truly suprising to know about the two bloggers who got married after meeting in a blogger meet.

There are many blog sites listed on the article which would probably open up many readers to the blogs. Have to appreciate Ramya, the journo bloggers and Hindu for spreading the blogging magic with well researched article.
June 11, 2005

Sujatha, Mani Ratnam and Ponniyin Selvan

Sujatha, in this week’s vikatan column, lists out practical stumbling blocks of making Kalki’s Ponniyin Selvan into a movie and how Mani Ratnam had etched a neat script which encompasses all the five volumes of the novel in just eighty scenes. The stumbling blocks included popularity of the novel over 5 decades, budget and ofcourse a bunch of producers who wanted to make Ponniyin Selvan for small screen. All this and more made Mani Ratnam/Sujatha drop Ponniyin Selvan in it’s intial stages.

More to it he also underlines the possible means to make Mani Ratnam’s script come alive on-screen. He lists his dream-team that would make Ponniyin Selvan happen and interestingly he introduces interesting combinations of Mani Ratnam-Shankar, Rajini-Kamal and Illayaraja-Rahman. While it sounds utopian at a concept level, it makes me wish that it should happen.

Making Ponniyin Selvan, into a film, is a herculean task. While I am sure the movie cannot convey the depth of the book, I am sure they can make a better attempt at it. Especially when Sujatha appreciates the script of Mani Ratnam, I’m hoping it must be a well-conceived script. Before going into the details, wait a second. Is this a curtain raiser for Mani Ratnam’s next venture??

Update – Have removed the snapshot of Vikatan column much to the delight the copyright puritans. More on this to continue.
June 8, 2005

Book Taggin’

For starters, there is a meme that’s rolling in the Indian Blogosphere which intends to make bloggers list their acquaintance with books. It was Chenthil who tagged me. So here is my list.

Total Number of Books I Own : Must be close to 200. This excludes the book that I gave off to cousins at various points in time.

Last Book I Bought : I imported Collection of Sujatha’s Shortstories Part II through a friend in India recently. Bought J D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye last week, for my personal collection.

Last Book I Read : Best American Shortstories 2004, Fred Moody’s Seattle and the Demons of Ambition, Ashokamithran’s Thaneer and Jumpha Lahiri’s The Namesake. Actually I tend to read around 3-4 books at a time, being lazy !!. One before bed, one/two during commute, one in the bathroom. There are 30 books that I’ve booked in the library and I’ve no idea when I will read them.

Five Books That Mean a Lot to Me : I’m going against the meme. Who cares !!. I can’t get just 5 books listed. No way.

In Tamil –

Sujatha’s Nilla Nizhal. I read this during my teens and it made me fall in love with tamil fiction. Though this wasn’t the first story of Sujatha that I read it was my breaking point. The protagonist Mukundan is partly me and partly you. While I read it today, I don’t see why I loved this book so much but at that point, it reflected my teenage thinking towards various things in life. Include 24 Rubaai Theevu also in this category.

Sujatha‘s Shortstory Collection and Guru Prasadin Kadaisi Dhinam. Read them to agree with me. Guru Prasadin Kadaisi Dhinam is arguably Sujatha’s best small-big story.

Aadhavan‘s Enn Peyar Ramaseshan. I only wished Aathavan lived to write more stories like this and enthrall us.

Kalki’s Parthiban Kanavu. Though Ponniyin Selvan is also hugely inspiring, as you read Parthiban Kanavu, one could directly feel a virtual movie screen opening up before you. A perfect historical thriller. Kalki is probably the most inspiring writer after Bharathi.

Ashokamithran‘s Pathinettaavadhu Atchakkodu and Thaneer. Pathinettaavadhu Atchakkodu explains why Ashokamithran is Ashokamithran.

G Nagarajan’s Naalai Matrumoru Naaley. An unknown classic.

In English –

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Basic Writings and Nausea. A good friend of mine introduced me to Sartre. It was Krishna who first spoke about Existentialism and Karma in Bhagavat Gita. Then it was Sartre.

Dostoevsky’s Demons. A Russian classic and often compared to the George Orwell’s best.

R K Narayan‘s Swami and Friends. The simple yet classy style of writing of RK Narayan is something that many of us yearn for. It was with Swami and Friends, the world of Malgudi was uncovered to the world. An classic forerunner to Harry Potter and Hogwarts adventures.

George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman. The king of sarcasm with wits unlimited and philosophy topped.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Made into a movie by Stanley Kubrick, Lolita was a true classic of it’s times. I saw the movie first and then I went back to read the book. Unlike the general opinion, I liked the rather long, descriptive and romantic version of Nabokov’s Lolita as a book than the movie. Thought the movie by itself was fun, in my personal opinion, the true work of Nabokov wasn’t reflected in the movie.

Mark Twain’s Tom of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Jules Verne’s Passepartout of Around the World in Eighty Days and the Dickensian pathos of Oliver Twist had great impact in me during my early teens.

Tag five people and have them do this on their blogs:

Desikan, Kinglsey, Anand, Latha, Ragu and Ramesh.

Thought the last three don’t have blogs and they are my offline friends, I will send this across to them on email to see if they can fill this up. Anyone who reads this and is interested, please pick it up.

Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi

Movable Type ya Blogger whine – Redux

Blogger’s Park

Sujatha, Mani Ratnam and Ponniyin Selvan

Book Taggin’