thumbs down again

I must say I am disappointed that the last post fetched not one comment in a whole week.

That's one reason I don't write about books and movies too often - I have found out the hard way that either people are uninterested, or they have nothing to say.

And this made me thank my lucky stars once again that I don't have to depend on writing for a living: even writing light-hearted stuff. The very thought makes my flesh creep... in this country, it's much safer to lance ulcers or patch up boilers in a power plant, or even count notes in a bank. You might go back to the post titled "Ten thousand visits" which I wrote back in May 2010.

Fun movie

Just watched a newly released offbeat satirical-comedy movie titled Phas gaya re Obama. The story-line can be found here. NRI businessman loses everything in the 2008 American economic meltdown, desperate to raise money quickly, comes home to sell off his ancestral haveli, has qualms of conscience about throwing out a lot of dependants, then kidnapped by a series of increasingly more menacing roughnecks who are all slavering over the imagined ransom he would fetch – ending up with a powerful state minister who is aspiring to be CM – and using his wits to get out of their clutches, while simultaneously getting them to pay over all the money he needs to save his house back in New Jersey, then taking the first flight back, presumably forever.

It’s no great shakes, but I liked the movie for a number of reasons. It does not depend on a star cast and big-yawn ‘item numbers’, it avoids sleaze almost entirely, it ruthlessly mocks the cow belt political class as well as the now-ancient Indian obsession with Umrica and big bucks (one young man has an epiphanic moment near the end), as well as the way we (including our so-called English teachers!) are mangling the English language beyond recognition in our mad bid to get smart, it uses wit of fairly good quality (by which I mean something better than slapstick) effectively, it portrays Neha Dhupia as someone who can sometimes rise to things better than being a modeling bimbo (here, a female Gabbar Singh), it manages to convey danger and fear without resorting to crude and bloody violence on-screen, it depicts low-level goons as rather sympathetic, or at least pitiable creatures (everybody is down at heel thanks to the recession, even kidnappers!), and it lets Rajat Kapoor play the finest role I’ve seen him in since Bheja Fry: a basically good man though he is a businessman, who, floundering in an alien and hostile environment, is nevertheless ready to fight tooth and nail with everything he’s got to save himself and his family when put into a nearly hopeless situation, but who never gets greedy, never seeks vengeance, and even discovers imaandaari among his tormentors, and pays back in the same coin. Also, the use of Barack Obama’s now-famous ‘Yes, we can’ speech as the background leitmotif is both clever and entertaining. No matter what the box-office figures might tell you, it’s worth watching.

Without comment

This is The Telegraph's Valentine's Day special for Durgapur.

What do my readers feel about it?

yeesh!

I just heard that a very 'successful' and 'modern-minded' couple - husband a CA/MBA and senior executive in a large MNC, wife an engineer - arranged for a lavish Saraswati puja at home because their child, apparently, has been running from pillar to post to get a scholarship to some undergraduate course in the USA but has been unsuccessful so far. 

Just wanted my readers to know.

Humbugs

Wielding his pen dipped in vitriol and still going strong at 96, Khushwant Singh in today's newspaper remarks on the strange contradiction of a nation that boasts of Gandhi as its greatest icon and also takes great pride in showing off its military muscle in public pageants (as on Republic Day in New Delhi). He sums up by saying that 'India is not the land of Gandhi, it is the land of humbuggery'. 

Which reminded me of a schoolboy who recently told me his teachers had taken away the offer to let him speak before the assembly because he had demurred at needlessly buttering up an ex-principal by calling him a 'great' man ( though it is common knowledge that the teachers and the entire student body almost without exception privately despise the man in question, and in any case he has not left any significant achievement behind). 

Not only are we humbugs, we elders as teachers and parents insist that the children in our charge must grow into humbugs too! Otherwise, our 'glorious civilization' will be in danger...