Oh Dear God (Kamal)

Thank you for being born in this world as an actor. You are one of the world’s best acting universities. To stop kindergarten children from writing big essays about your worth in your latest movie, I suggest you implement the following 5 commandments in your movies going forward.

• Please do not do complex subjects based on stuff such as chaos theory, butterfly effect, existence of God, weapons of mass destruction, etc. Most of our audience may not understand such stuff, and the movie ends before the average film-goer realizes the various nuances and how you have tied all loose ends up.
• Don’t bother to do your roles to such perfection. The problem that arises out of it is that people think that it is 10 different people who are doing these roles, and then, the film becomes bland. In an era where people can’t make double roles look different from each other, doing it 10 roles with such precision to detail may make people think it cannot be the same person.
• Subtle humor it seems is not the order of the day. If you keep doing Panchatantiram and Sathi Leelavathi type of movies, people start expecting Crazy Mohan type dialogues even in Anbe Sivam maybe.
• Please use well-done songs (and a lot of them) in the most meaningless of places in the movie to help disrupt the flow of the movie. It seems that underplayed songs that merge with the story are not the order of the day.
• Do not use computer graphics in your movies – people will start comparing you to Hollywood graphics. They don’t understand that such movies are made with budgets ranging typically in the Rs. 200 Crores range. They won’t compare you with other Tamil movies where nothing else in the same scale was ever done.

Last but not the least, on a serious note, I do hope that your next film will not see you in any make-up since the expressions on your face go for a toss with all the make-up involved.

All Rash Abuses

God, it was a really bad day for me.

I started the morning very late. Hence I could not even take a bath. Unshaven, I took the bus to office. It was crowded and hence I was sweating and smelling bad. I reached office and immediately caught a very bad cold. I was not able to breathe properly and started making puffing and panting sounds that one may consider irritating even if they were the ones contributing to them! The guy sitting in the next cubicle had a hard time, hence he was mumbling something to himself – I was already pretty irritated. I made faces at him and asked him to politely go and attend to other freaking duties. The effect of the missed bath had started spreading to my various areas and I had started itching bad. One hand on my nose, another hand on different parts of the body, a vaguely sounding voice and a twitching face - In utter desperation, I uttered to myself “Oh God! Please give me Than ki shakti, Man ki shakti to bear this pain”…

I returned home and slept thinking that the worst was over, until I came back to office the next day.

My company sued me on 6 counts of racism towards Andrew Symonds and I am now facing so many law suits…

When I go to office tomorrow, I fear they will pull my hair, remove my badge and sing farewell to me…

Best wishes for a great new year

Wishes to one and all for a great new year. Here's my new year creation with my usual sense of pathetic rhyme :-) Enjoy!

Two thousand seven, for some it was heaven,
for others a demon, its time to enliven...
Time to rewind, and look back at the grind,
request you to be kind, the silly rhyme you should not mind...

Saurav back, World Cup whack, T20 hack, Dravid sack...
Modi win, BJP grin, Karat din, Manmohan sin...
Sivaji hit, OSO fit, Saawariya bit, RGV ki Aag $hit...
Stocks boom, retail dhoom, IT gloom, dollar doom...

Time to look ahead, Forget what was said,
Just wake up from your bed, lead your life in good stead...
Two thousand eight, let there be splendid fate,
With results first rate, enjoy it well mate...

P.S: I have a long list of 2008 resolutions. I know resolutions are there to break the next day! Let me see how long the blogging regularly resolutions lasts!

If ever there is a GPhone, I would want...

Over the last two to three weeks, there has been increasing coverage of the various moves being unleashed by Google, Microsoft, Facebook and the likes. One of those that clearly stand out in this is the new “Android” API that Google has introduced for all cell phone operators and application developers to develop seamless applications on the mobile platform. That effectively meant that there would not be a GPhone as hoped by many.

I just imagined what I could have got if only there was a GPhone in the offing. Imagination was curtailed to the extent that I did not think about too many fancy applications like these…

1. I don’t want a GPhone, I want a GEM – OK. Let me explain better. A Gem stands for a Google emblem. And phone may / may not be just a part of it. Think something like an iPhone / SideKick / Blackberry. But not just limited to what Apple decides to put into their iPhone. It should be a truly democratic phone and there should be an ability to add on stuff (explained in the next point). Features that certainly should be supported right from beta include the basic phone, net browsing, camera, mp3 player, video, Bluetooth, gaming controls, qwerty keyboard, trackball, expandable memory, radio etc. with a couple of USB ports.
2. I want a configurable Gem – Now comes the interesting part. I want to be able to choose what I want in my Gem. Currently even though I may not want a camera as part of my phone, I am forced to buy my phone with it since only such phones have the additional features I need. I want to be able to just plug and play these devices and configure my own phone. So if I need a camera, I will go for it and plug that in. If I need audio / video capabilities, I will plug that in and pay more for it. It is similar in case of a qwerty keyboard / net browsing capability etc. This is surely possible for the brilliant Google designers and engineers!
3. I want complete mobility – EDGE / UMTS / ABCDE etc. Oh God I don’t want to hear any more technical jargons on what a phone supports and what not. Majority of the more than 2 billion that may probably own a phone don’t care about that. They may just may want internet browsing for example. And the Gem should certainly provide that feature irrespective of what the network supports or what a physical location supports (as long as it supports something!). Speeds may vary but the feature should be there and should not be insanely expensive as it is right now with better support and usage.
4. I want to do things that can be done on a small screen– I don’t want to read an entire newspaper on my phone. I just want the summary of the news. Similarly, I don’t really want to play fast action games on such a small screen but I may want to play some classic games from the N32/64/Sega or Carmen Sandiego/Mario era. And I don’t want to keep downloading them from a million sites. I just want one place or better still, let them come by default maybe at some price. Google should start certainly looking at a better conduit for small-screen related content instead of just exposing the not so literate user to the big wide world from Google search results and sponsored links! Search can be considered a digression and I dont want to be searching all the time through a small screen device.
5. I want my Gem to be the God of all things – In the long term, I would look at my Gem to be the all in one device to just connect to my monitor and look at the whole thing on a bigger screen (and the OS senses that and fine-tunes the display). I don’t need any operating system if I am in this mode, all the apps that I need – mail, docs, spreadsheets, browser, media player, messenger are already there inside the phone. In a similar fashion, you can expect the Gem to be the controlling device for your TV to get cable, satellite and internet videos all delivered. You can even look at your TV as a large screen device to play bigger and better games off your Gem. The Gem should also connect to maybe Bose speakers to play crystal clear music. The Gem becomes the all in one device with its connectivity and expandable memory. Other devices just connect and amplify!

Google’s motto is to “Don't be evil”. Hence I am implicitly assuming that connectivity across multiple systems such as live / yahoo as well as various different social networks like facebook / myspace / bebo etc. are all covered in addition to whatever I have mentioned above… Given the Google push, the Android platform will obviously provide choices for web browsers / other applications and the likes and it would be survival of the fittest then for sure – so the best would win.

It certainly is worth waiting for this Gem of a device, if and when it arrives…

O(h) So Much Hype...

On Saturday, I went and watched the most hyped film of our times – Om Shanti Om. I can now stand up and shout out to the world with my 1.5 pack paunch that it is the biggest and brightest film ever made in our country.

All the actors have put in their best performances to date for this movie. Special mention must go to Arjun Rampal, who has done one of his best roles of his career as a villain. Credit must go to the director Farah Khan for the way she has mastered her resources – including the tons of superstars, each of whom have made their presence felt. Comedy is awesome and this movie will make you keep laughing all the way. Of course, the movie has good doses of action, romance and sentiment as well to make it one solid pot-boiler for all ages to enjoy. Last but not the least, Shah Rukh is the king of the Indian cinema and his six pack abs and his humdinger of a performance proves that he is our No. 1 superstar.

Oops. Just because of the hype surrounding the movie and its reviews elsewhere, I got a bit carried away. Let me cut the crap and talk about ground reality…

The film is a completely ordinary effort. As regards the story, I am not even getting into any discussion on logic – you really cannot hope to have one where the movie starts with reincarnation and goes on to end as a ghost story. Just a couple of twists does not make an engaging storyline. Arjun Rampal has maintained his same expressionless dead face throughout the movie – the biggest advantage that he has here is that he is playing the villain and is thus able to pass off as a great performance. As regards Farah, there is absolutely no single point in the movie that has the stand-out touch of the director – it is just too normal and usual in everything. As for the tons of stars, they all could get their dancing parts long enough thanks to the super-long song in the second half that just went on and on. Except for the Sonu Nigam song, all other songs have been picturized and choreographed in an extremely ordinary manner – something that you might have thought could be one stand-out feature of such a big movie, being directed by a renowned dancer. The main climax song is not even worth humming and hence loses its complete tempo. There are three isolated pieces of good comedy – the 70s spoof and the fight sequence in the first half and the awards in the second half but that’s about it. Rest of it hardly has anything close to comedy. Action, sentiment and romance are non-existent in the movie. As for Shah Rukh, for the star he is supposed to be, there is hardly a single scene that is enterprising or brings out the star in him. Acting-wise, I am sure he did not move a muscle. It is good that his hamming has reduced – that may be because there were probably not too many scenes where he needed to; wherever he did need to, he made people believe that over-acting was part and parcel of this role.

All things said – it is still a reasonable time-pass of a movie. It can be watched once. And I certainly did like the red carpet welcome once again for all of the technicians behind the screen. Deepika, Shreyas and Kiron Kher have provided good performances – Deepika and Shreyas’s being measured ones as lover and friend respectively, while Kiron’s being the over-the-top cinematic mother. However, this movie is nowhere near the ratings and the hype created by the producers and the media’s so called critical reviewers. Even in terms of repeat value, probably a Main Hoon Na would fare better than this one on each and every single count – good songs, fast action, persistent comedy, true sentiment, rich locales, attractive choreo, eye-soothing cinematography or a fitting storyline that merges all pieces together…

One fact is proved - Marketing and hype do certainly work to make something ordinary look really amazing. Six-pack abs and the likes of seeing Zayed Khan, Aftab and Sunil Shetty in a song captures the attention of all viewers! One fails to however understand as to how it has b(r)ought into the minds of the so called great reviewers…