'Jumbo' - Good Fun

Whhoa!! I just saw a typical masala Hindi movie which is so cute and so much fun!

'Jumbo'! There are some loose points in the script - like why Jumbo sets out on a mission to find his father is not very convincing and the elephant fight where Jumbo gets to know about his father is executed similar to the one in Ice Age.

There are, however, several cute things about the film which makes it very entertaining. The characters are very fairytale-ish. The scenes where the dacoits ask for grains from the villagers bring back memories of 'Sholay'. The animation is super! The climax is not breathtaking, entertaining nevertheless.

The 'everything's gonna be alright' line is good as a song and all that, but I don't think it holds much relevance as far as the film is concerned.

The film on the whole is good fun!!

I'm watching

You are pretending not to look at me. As you try hard to use the fork and knife to eat your dosa, I let out a smirk. I see your cheeks go pink. You know I am watching...

When you get ready for a party, you spend a lot of time on your hair gel. You don't seem to be satisfied. I nod my head. You are set for the party. You knew I was watching...

You may pretend to not look at me when you are smoking that cigarette - or sneaking the chit with the answers written on it before an exam.

You may assume I am not looking at your cell-phone screen when you are keeping your girlfriend's call on hold and writing a sms to another. I don't need to peep in to get a look.

I am your conscience.

I am watching. Every single moment. From every angle...

Dear Santa

Note : Like all the other posts, an original piece of work.

Dear Santa,

Dad came home that evening with his face pale. Mummy had been sitting numb before television watching the news. She holds my hand firmly before she leaves for work.

Sonia miss does not come to school. They say her husband was killed in the attacks at the Taj...

What has happened to my people Santa? What is wrong with them?

I want no chocolates...

I want no dolls...

I want no sugar-coated candies...

I want the smile on my Daddy's face back...

I want to see the relaxed expression in my mom's eyes again...

I want my Mumbai back this X'mas Santa...

Love,
Pooja,
Std. Vth - A

Face or the guise

"Ho ho ho!", the audience goes into an uproar as Amitabh Bachhan appears on the screen. Dressed in a red cap, Amitabh with his grey beard looks like the most adorable Santa.

For the next three hours, Amitabh has the audience in splits.

What do we love? Our stars or the role they play?

******

In fact, with so many people and so many faces of theirs, what we do in face love? The face or the guise?

Is it because that the guise is distracting that it is called a dis-guise?

Characters alive

Disclaimer: Completely fictitious

The magic dust casts its spell on the books in your bookshelf and the characters come alive.

Here you are at a party, a first for you, with these characters around you. You see a Monk who parked his Ferrari outside just before coming in. He had sold his Ferrari - but brought it back from the money he earned after the whooping sales of the book. ( * grin *) There is Harry Potter and his band of friends and foes. The call center employees, Vroom and company are making a lot of noise arguing with the bartender over drinks. There are two Afghan men, tall and well-built standing in a corner sipping on some iced tea. They are step-brothers.

The party is on. You are standing amidst people who you've seen yet not seen. You are among people you have, at some point in time, come across while many of them are strangers.

As the characters in the books come alive and sway their hips around you, you watch... awe-struck.. overwhelmed...

Maybe they should've stayed in the books. Or perhaps, it was time they came alive - their lives, their lessons mixed with yours...


References made in the post are to characters from 'Monk who sold..', 'Harry Potter', 'One night @ Call center', 'Kite runner'.

Placement is blind

Disclaimer: Dedicated to all who were / will be placed through campus placement drives. Some jokes are made up.


"Love is blind and so is placement." said one jovially intelligent Abhijeet Padhye, a senior at IIT-B and gave me the push for a new blogpost. With rightful thanks to him, let me begin this post which I believe would be in a rather light mood...

Go to youtube and check out any amateur video on engineering college. All of them have a definite track. And an important element in this track that all vids follow is - placements. A lazy loving shortform for 'campus placement drives' - where some companies come driving in in a truck and move out only when they have a truckful of 'placed' candidates.

Some companies, on the other hand, come with a scoop. They like to say 'we are taking only a select few', but all they are doing is thrust the scoop into the volume of candidates and pull out whatever they get.


The placements are a funny affair where some of us go blind - companies as well as candidates.

In the beginning, the candidates are blind - about their future. Jokes like, "Mere ko job nahi mili toh main papad-pickle ka cottage industry kholega" are abundant. (With due respect to the ones who run their livelihood on this.) So, the candidates are blind as the placements start. Blind, because they leave back all their areas of interest and appear for any company that arrives on campus. (It's something like a carpenter who specializes in cutting wood takes up the job of a butcher at the end.)

Then come the aptitude tests. When you know there's no negative marking, you again go blind. You go on marking answers left and right. I know one person who read the instructions on one such aptitude test. When he read that it said, "No negative marking. One or more options may be correct ", he blindly checked both the boxes along the gender column and thought proudly, "Oye tukka lag gaya toh achha hi hai!"

When the interviews/GDs are undertaken, many times the most unpredictable results come out. Like a person who's never been interested in networking get placed in a networking firm and all of a sudden networks seem to be the most happening field to them.


The bottomline is, you can never say when/how/ who will fall in love with whom. The case is similar with placement. You can never say when which company will fall for you or when you would fall for which company and its products. You can never say when an open-sourcewallah will go gaga over the products of the company where he was just been placed.

Love and placement are both blind...

Interpretation of the story of Moses

Disclaimer: The post is completely original. It is my small way of interpreting a story. I do not intend to offend anyone.

Image source: Wikimedia commons (An open-source repository for multimedia elements)

Moses was a religious leader who finds his mention in Christianity, Islam and several other lines of religious beliefs. 

As a child, I had heard about this incident in the life of Moses. One fine day, while I am on way back home with two heavy bags on me, I remember the incident out of the blue and in a flash I get a way to interpret the story too. Human mind IS certainly amazing.

The story in short goes as follows: "Moses and the Hebrew community were going to leave the city they had grown up in. They were trying to cross the Red Sea. Moses raised his staff and the water of the sea parted. The sea split into two halves as they walked and they crossed the sea easily."

My interpretation:

The Mind is like the sea - vast and deep. At the surface of the sea is water and the waves. At the surface of the mind are the superficial desires. The dissatisfaction from not being able to achieve these materialistic desires, causes ripples in the mind - they are very similar to the waves on the surface of the sea. 

The waves in the sea and the disturbing ripples in the mind are only at the surface. As we continue to explore our mind deeper, we realize that there is indeed a lot of calmness within.

Below the water of the sea lies a clear stable sea floor. Below the depths of desires, lies the pure mind - devoid of disturbance.

When the Hebrews had to leave their city, they must have been distressed. Moses calmed them down and helped them go deeper into their mind - to know, realize and accept what their minds wanted and needed.

When the desires and the waves moved past, Moses led his people through.

Only when we remove our desires and hang-ups are we able to see the clear floor of our minds and go through it.

Rab ne Bana Di Jodi-Movie Review

When I first saw the promos, I wasn't too impressed. It looked like a deliberate attempt to do something different. ('Main Prem ki diwani hoon' was a deliberate attempt by Sooraj Barjatya to try his hand at a 'young n hip' love story. We all know how interesting the movie was.) 

This movie RNBDJ, however, ROCKS! 

There is a continuous sweet and innocent undercurrent that one experiences in the characters, their antics and the situations. This is what makes the movie extremely lovable.

The japanese wrestler fight, the bike race and the golguppa-biryani scene are sure to bring the house down. 

The newcomer actress has done an OK job. Shahrukh Khan makes an extremely interesting watch. He behaves like Jassi (of the TV show) at times, but then that's ok since the character is very adorable. SRK proves why he is THE SRK. Hams in parts, but that's, as I just said, ok.

'Phir Milenge Chalte Chalte' may be yet another 'multistarrer special appearance' song but it is remembered for the unique difference in its filming. SRK-Kajol are a pleasure to watch together (for a couple of minutes in the song.)

The best part of the movie is the climax. There are thankfully no long speeches (I remember 'Mohabbatein'. Its climax looked like it had been hit by recession - where they could not afford twenty actors and so gave all their dialogues to Amitabh Bachhan alone. Long speeches you know.) and the scenes unfold in a very logical and sensible way.

----

I cannot resist myself from comparing the film with DDLJ - a masterpiece.

DDLJ was DDLJ because of Raj and Simran both. The area where RNBDJ lacks is the fact that you tend to remember, like and appreciate Surinder more than Taani. (the two central characters of the movie) They somehow do not stand out as a jodi. 

I would've loved to see Kajol playing the role of Taani. Sigh.

Nevertheless, a great watch! Very entertaining indeed.

Shoonya

Disclaimer: An original post like all others in this blog. This one's, however, VERY vague. After writing the post, I just realized that it had become a mini-research paper.

'Shoonya' (Zero) is what India boasts of having given the world. And rightly so.

The concept of 'Shoonya' in itself is very profound. I am trying to explore it here in my own small way.

The digits 1..9 are cardinal numbers that help us count items. 'Shoonya' counts items in a different way - it counts absence of items!

How did the world live without a zero?

Now this one is a guess. Here, I am trying to explain why the people before 'Shoonya' were satisfied with what they had. (numbers 1..9 for counting.)

The counting system must have essentially been based on the weighing balance. In a weighing balance, the two plates are loaded with things and the balance is brought to an equilibrium.

The situation above is essentially what we call an 'equation' (a mathematical equation, perhaps.) In the weighing balance situation, people were never required to 'equate to zero' - they never had to keep stuff in one plate of the balance and perform some comparison with the other plate of the balance empty.

This is why the world was Ok with no zero because they had not thought of using it for calculations at all. The comparison with nothing must have been an unexplored concept.


How did Shoonya revolutionize things?

'Shoonya' is a symbol that represents absence. Shoonya indicates the 'presence of nothing'. Now this is a very contradicting statement yet Shoonya ably takes the responsibility of indicating 'nothing'.

It is not surprising at all to see how Shoonya appears in all scientific and mathematical calculations.

While my accountant friends try to get all numerical figures to a shoonya when they work on balance-sheets, my engineer colleagues come up with new equations and values all thanks to the equations which heavily use this Shoonya.



In introspection...

Count anything from apples to stars, from the number of times you've been to a restaurant to the number of days you have lived. The counting always starts with a shoonya.

When the equations and multiple numbers are balanced, what we get again at the end is a shoonya.

Shoonya aka absence, as we see, is the beginning and the end.

This means... Absence lies at the beginning and the end of existence...

If that's the case, if everything comes and ends with a zero, where does it come from? Where does it go?

Strength is a weakness

We believe a person - say our mother, our friend, our partner is our strength. We believe a thing - a ring, a lucky pen, a lucky shirt is our strength.

Is our strength really our strength?

If we depend on our strength to be successful, isn't it our weakness?

Standing Tall

(The picture is of a church in Goa that I have clicked.)

Religion is what stands tall. Or what should stand tall. Like a tower. Like this tower, it will give you a bird's eye view of the terrain around you. Like a lighthouse, it will show you the way in dark and turbulent times.

Religion encompasses all the answers that one could be looking for. It makes you taller. In fact, it also gives you the vision to look at people from a higher perspective.

No religion will ask you to stoop low. Something that asks you to go low is not religion at all...

Where Love blossoms and ripens

Goa is indeed a romantic place. Love blossoms and ripens at Goa.

Love blossoms. On a recliner sofa in a pub, two of them look deep into each others' eyes. Lost in thoughts that seem to be running parallel in their minds without any expression. In fact, words are immaterial and unnecessary when the rhythm of breath speaks in co-ordination that is more musical than a complete orchestra. He takes a spoon and pushes it into a slab of ice cream placed in a bowl neatly on the glass table. He then brings the spoon close to her mouth.

Her lips open and a slender pink tongue comes out. He feeds her the ice cream. A minute later, ice cream is melting in this mouth. The spoon is on the floor. She is moving her slender long fingers over his lips and chin. She is wiping the ice cream that spilled on his chin while she was feeding her the ice cream the way he did.

Look elsewhere and you see a long road.

Love ripens. As they walk together holding a heavy rexin bag, his silver hair shining in the hot sun. She has pulled up an end of the pallu of her sari over her head. The two are carrying the burden of their duties in the scorching heat. They are walking down the long road. Together, they share whatever they have. There's no 'one', it's only 'two'.

Love is when the age disappears, the place disappears. When love blossoms and ripens, love appears. When love appears, everything else vanishes…

Don't work when no one's watching

'Dance like no one's watching' they say; Ramesh, a all-positive-adjectives-here friend and my big-bad-world guru enlightened me with this new quote 'Don't work when no one's watching.'

Gone are the days of 'My work will automatically get me noticed'. It's the era of 'look at me, this is what I can do.'

It is, hence, essential to constantly inform your superiors of the work you are doing. This does not necessarily mean illusive/delusive projection of one's work. Doing the right projection in the right way at the right time in front of the right people is a necessity of today's times and is very much an art.

The quicker you learn, the faster you ascend...

An Ambitious Agarbatti

Disclaimer:  I was tempted to use the english parallel 'incense stick' for agarbatti in this post. Then I thought that the alliteration that the title generated was very poetic.

Image Source: Wikimedia commons (An open source repository for multimedia elements)

The lady placed the agarbatti in the praying area every day. Today, she placed it at the window.

The agarbatti looked out of the window. It saw buildings, lots of them - so many that it could not look at them any longer.

The agarbatti looked as high as it could and it saw the blue sky that was clogged with fluffy white clouds. 

Like the small dot of light on its tip, an idea flashed in the agarbatti's mind.

"So what if I am small and the sky is far far away, I want to create clouds with the fragrant smoke that emerges from my surface! The world will then see the clouds that I have created and know that I existed!", the agarbatti thought.

It began pumping out as much smoke as it could. It wanted the smoke to reach the sky and form clouds that would bear its identity before the world.

-----

We all are incense sticks - with dreams that touch the sky.

The agarbatti unfortunately could not create clouds in the sky. It, however, filled the room with the aroma of its smoke.

The agarbatti had made its presence felt.

Its ambition was the source of its life as it went on emitting smoke. Its ambition was the source of its death as it slowly burnt down into a pinchful of ash.

This is ambition. Reason enough to live with and reason enough to die for...

The spell of hibernation

Disclaimer: COMPLETELY fictitious. The post and not this disclaimer.

He had had a bad day. He retired on his armchair as his tired eyelids closed shivering like the dry leaves on the trees.

It was winter. The season of ice-cold dormancy.

For him, the winters repeated a pattern. He remembered a similar winter three years ago when he and his best friend had a spat. He remembered another winter when he broke off with this girlfriend of his.

Certain things repeat. In this spell of hibernation, he had on occasions more than one experienced breaking of relationships...

.. With the hope of forming new ones.

Resilient or shameless

When crisis strikes, one often wonders what to brand oneself as.

Resilient enough to take any blow that comes our way.

Or shameless to be stripped of one's ego staring at the adversity stark naked. And smiling - because you think you are brave.

When a failure struck me, I did not feel anything more than a jolt. Was it resilience? My strength to absorb shock? Or was it just that I had become shameless? Oblivious and indolent to things that should otherwise affect me?


I am Aaditya. I am Mumbai.

Both of us are trying to figure out what we are - resilient or shameless.