Starting from Zuk

"I'm running towards a cliff, running really hard. I can see it. There's a blood river flowing beneath. So I'm running towards it and... Shit!"

"What, you fell in?"

"You tripped me man"

"I tripped you? Like, put my foot out and tripped you?"

"No... No, not exactly. You put your hand out across my neck, like a clothesline. Then I fell in and starting swimming and going with the flow..."

"If I put my hand out across your neck, how are you still swimming? Wouldn't you be unconscious or something?"

"No... your hand just cut my neck. So now it's bleeding. That's why it's a blood river, see? You've done this to a lot of other people before."

"Oh.... good funda."

"Heck, wolves man! There are wolves waiting on the shore, on the other shore. And now, sharks!"
* * * *

I get the feeling I'm beginning to get repetitive, you know, using the same thing with different people. I use the same coincidences with one person and then the other, and I always wonder when it will all catch up with me. Cos you know, I always feel like they're trying to test me, that between them they find out about the recycling. That's why I always think twice before replying, as it happened the other day, remember? That felt pretty scarily like a test.

* * * *
You know how he was to be cast even originally right? But then he came and the audition went so badly, so flatly, that he had no choice but to look for alternatives. But then he realized that this was a movie he simply had to do, so he came back for another audition, and did this. That's it, role was his. Then he wanted Madsen to do Vincent Vega. But Madsen was like, if we keep doing this same sort of movies with the same sort of roles, we'll get stereotyped. And we don't want that, not Tarantino to get stereotyped. So he asked him to suggest someone for the role, and he said "Travolta".

Update:

Credits: The Doors, David Lynch, Dev D and Dayman ;)

Millineer

No, the title is not a very-clever nod to the two most popular ways by which alcohol is referred to in Tamil. Milli (which is more of a measure, but clearly, one does not drink milk in millis. Ask Dhoni). And neer. Which means water. Which means thanni. You get the idea.

For the more discerning amongst you, the reference to a recently-release, massively-overrated movie would have been inescapable. And funnily enough my post on Overrated Things is just the previous post on this blog (that is to say, I thought I had written reams and reams of unimaginably funny prose after that, that this post would have gone deep into the December archives. It is still in the December archives. It's the only one there. There isn't even a January archive). Coming back to the point, I only regret that I couldn't title that post Slumdog Millionaire. Would have been so much more appropriate.

I will not talk about the sudden English-knowledge gaining of the slumdogs. I will not talk about the Chaiwala answering Call Centre calls (now you see why there's all those complaints about foreign callers being rude to our poor hard-working call centre people? Would you like the tea boy to clarify what the 2.03% additional charge on your credit-card bill is?). I will not talk about a random love story which starts when the kids are 5 (Oh pleeeease!!). I will not talk about the total lack of premise of the host wanting to trip up the upstart (It's not even his bloody money!) or his downright rudeness. I will not talk about the sacrilege about a movie with Anil Kapoor being ranked above A Clockwork Orange (and so many others). On top of it all, I will not talk about the Danny Boyle level-drop (Yes, today is my say-everything-in-brackets day. And hyphens)

I will talk about the background score. Quite lifting and racy, it's the one part of the film which deserves all the noise surrounding it (pun totally unintended). I will talk about the screenplay, because it takes quite an effort to stitch together what is basically a non-existent story into some sort of coherence. Though the premise that is provided for why he knows some of the answers is really quite well-tried (also known as 'acha koshish' in Tamil). I will talk about the kids, and their awesome bonding, after whose exit, you really can close your eyes and just tap your feet to the music alone. I will talk about... gosh, I really am out of other things worth mentioning.

It's not like I have an inherent problem with movies signifying 'hope' and 'spirit' and all that. I like movies with spirit. Like, Devadas, so much spirit in that (reference to title, my, I'm on a roll). It's just so crass an attempt to reach out to the 1.1-Billion market that India is in these times of recession . Once this becomes the basic idea, there simply had to be so much artificiality to just make it happen - an English film about India. There's no reason the movie can't be set in any of the Latin American countries and be called Millonario del tugurioperro. Spanish is quite popular in the US as well. For that matter, if it's supposed to be a stretched-reality movie, for those who don't want to call it fantasy, might as well have made an animated version of it. and released it with a PG rating. At least that way we're spared Dev Patel and Anil Kapoor staring at each other confused about who the villain is and who the hero.

You can see how the book would be nice (haven't read it though). The whole movie is made that way, flipping through page after page. That's ok in a book, the perceived screenplay in your head is the only screenplay. A movie with so much of the 'real deal' words used... really?

I think I would've actually liked the movie if it weren't for all this hype.

As it turns out, I think the only Indian movie that Danny Boyle can feel proud of as of now is Dev D. What. A. Totally. Unapologetic. Movie. Now that, is showing something no one knows, in a totally new, slightly psychedelic, new light. Since this is a post about Millineer, there shall be no further mention of Dev D. But, you know, it's brave. Absolutely brave. Too bad there's only a 'Special Thanks to Danny Boyle' in that. The man who made Trainspotting would've been proud of it. The man who sold out to make Slumdog, maybe not.

Overrated things

1. Life
2. Hope
3. Fairness
4. Derek Jeter
5. IIT-Madras
6. The World
7. Rear Window
8. Desire
9. Capability
10. Chetan Bhagat

This is a dynamic list. All additions within realms of reasonable accuracy shall be considered.

We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for your interest. Have a nice day.

Impropriety

The Beti* and the Babe
(Adapted from ye olde fairy tale, The Beauty and the Beast)

Once upon a time, since well before there were GTalk and Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, Flickr, Hi5, WAYN, LinkedIn (let’s call them Snow White and the Seven Fads), people got together in much more social ways than any of the current social networking sites promise to. It was pure and simple and quite efficient as it were. Since it necessitated that there be personal, face-to-face interactions, and that awareness of proximity and hence comfort be developed over a specific period of time, it ensured that all people involved in the social gatherings which eventually led to relationships of some sort being developed, knew beforehand what the score was. To cut a long story short, if both Adam and Eve hadn’t been hot, we would not be here.

But, with the advent of Snow White and the Seven Fads, it is now no longer paramount that the above conditions be met. This is markedly noticeable in the kind of interaction between opposite sexes, especially among the age group of 16-24, the period when all of the human species undergoes what is commonly known as Coupling. This background having been provided, we are now able to introduce the protagonists of our tale- the Beti* and even more importantly, the Babe.

The Beti, by very nature of his being, shouldn’t be able to occupy too much space by means of a description. And yet, in the classic manner of scientific paradoxes, where emptiness usually gets the most attention (Black Holes, Large Hadron Colliders, pretty girls’ heads**), so too shall we devote considerable time and effort into describing the Beti. Basically, every sentence begins with a Basically. But, basically, the Beti is that boy-next-door-but-you-wish-were-million-doors-away type you meet (or just encounter) who makes you realize why the world is so screwed up. Ideally, he wouldn’t be there, wasting the resources that would feed other poor families. But he very much is there, with his short shirt, faded jeans, decidedly tawdry sunglasses and pink sneakers. Sometimes the sneakers are brown, but that’s usually because it’s been raining heavily for the past week and the Beti has to ride through puddles at 60kmph, on his silencer-removed Pulsar. Or Gladiator or Karizma or Apache.

The Beti is someone you’d normally associate with the “Hiiii h r u?????” scraps on one of the seven fads mentioned above. These, it turns out, are not random shots thrown at the world but actually enquiries of well-being. Most of the times, the Betis have prodigiously long contact lists, developed carefully from school, college, classes at Alliance Francais (due apologies to those who actually went there to learn French) and general friends-of-friends and all such other six degrees of separation meetings. While most others with other things to pursue in life, wouldn’t be able to keep track of all the 473 friends gained from such experiences, the Beti, to his credit, does. (This is all the credit I’m going to give him, so there!). Eventually, all other conditions remaining favourable, one of the 473 friends (preferably one from the opposite sex) becomes interested enough in the Beti that they consent to find time to share a cup of a suitable beverage, depending on the average ages involved. This one interested being, is what has been referred to in the title, as The Babe.

The Babe is... well... a babe. All else is irrelevant.

And thus it is, while sharing this suitable beverage in a suitably public spot in the glare of so many other on-lookers, that the title of the fable becomes self-evident. As all passersby notice the distinct lack of a match of any kind between the two people sitting together, as the disharmony of the whole arrangement jars in one’s ear even in the quietest of places, there is only one constant though running through all their heads- “How did a Beti like him get something like that!”**

Well you know what they say, the World, isn’t fair.

*Beti – Short for Beti Ch*** (appropriate Hindi word that rhymes with clothe)
**Women’s Groups needn’t bother suing me. This girl, she took my heart and she took my money. So in a sense, you’ve already won.