Maybe…it is only those of us who have no eyes that can see through the lure of maya, and glimpse reality for what it is.
- Kanai, the blind minstrel in Nine Lives, p.246

A few days back, we got William Dalrymple’s well received book Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India from our local library.

The book is a collection of nine essays, each covering one life, i.e. the story of one individual.

Each essay addresses a different subject but two common threads run through the Nine Lives:

* The setting of the subject matter – they’re all located in the small towns and villages or what Dalrymple describes as “the places suspended between modernity and tradition.”

* All the essays look at the impact of the frenetic pace of development and change currently underway in India on the different religious traditions.

In Dalrymple’s own words:

Each life is intended to act as a keyhole into the way that each specific religious vocation has been caught and transformed in the vortex of India’s metamorphosis during this rapid period of transition, while revealing the extraordinary persistence of faith and ritual in a fast-changing landscape.

It’s a strange universe some of the ‘Lives” inhabit, practicing what may seem to the average eye to be bizarre customs and rituals.

If bizarre and odd are what turn you on, read the story of Manisha Ma Bhairavi in the The lady Twilight and follow it up with The Song of the Blind Ministrel. Tantric sadhanas, cremation ground rituals, drinking from human skulls,  animal sacrifices, unusual sexual practices et al should certainly give you a high.

Stepmom Review – Can B’Wood Apes Match This?

Folks, our hopes have been dashed on the altar of Bollywood’s  incompetence.

Here we were fondly hoping that this weekend would be a joyous affair but, alas, man proposes, Bollywood disposes.

Several Indian critics have buggered the latest Karan Johar production We are Family (directed by Sidharth Malhotra).

Shallow, Stay Away, Yawn-Inducing, Disappointing Tearjerker are only some of the missiles critics have hurled at this Kajol-Kareena Kapoor starrer.

Of course, the critics may have a good thing or two to say about the movie but the bottom line -We are Family is We are Garbage.

By the way, We are Family is a remake of the Hollywood flick Stepmom (Susan Sarandon, Julia Roberts).

Read what a sample of critics had to say about We are Family:

Rediff

We Are Family begins on a note of confusion. As the film progresses, the sense of confusion increases leaving the viewer disoriented. At the end of two hours, debut director Sidharth Malhotra’s film — which is intended to be a sob story — did leave the audience in tears. Of boredom.

….Stepmom fans, please keep away. Don’t even watch the trailer. Actually, the same advice is valid even for those who haven’t seen Stepmom.

Continue reading »

Pleaaaasseee Clooney.

Hell, the only reason we went to the opening show of the new Hollywood film The American which released in U.S. theaters today is George ‘Acme of Charm‘ Clooney.

Hell, no other reason is necessary when you got Clooney.

Syriana, Michael Clayton, Up in the Air and still we can’t get enough of George Clooney.

Nice Crime Thriller
By the standards of the schizophrenic Bourne franchise, The American is a sedate, almost sedentary thriller.

But then a sedentary Clooney provides us infinitely more pleasure in 1 hour-42 minutes than the hyper-kinetic Matt Damon could in a thousand Bourne films.

The American begins in snow-clad Sweden and ends by a brook in the Abruzzo region of Italy.

Playing an assassin whose name we’re unsure of (is it Jack, Edward or the quaint Mr.Butterfly?), Clooney is ordered to go to a quiet village in the mountainous Abruzzo area of Italy, not far from Rome, and lie low after an ambush attempt on his life in Dalarna, Sweden leaves three people dead in the snow.

Since it’s Clooney we’re dealing with, y’all know who killed the three people in the snowy fields of Sweden, right?

We are Family is We are Garbage, Say Critics

Listen, Baby, ain’t no mountain high
Ain’t no valley low, ain’t no river wide enough, Baby.
If you need me, call me, no matter where you are
No matter how far. Don’t worry, Baby
Just call my name, I’ll be there in a hurry
You don’t have to worry.

- Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell’s hit song featured in Stepmom (1998)

Oh, no. Oh, no.

Listen schmucks, we’re not going to prejudge the quality of the upcoming Bollywood movie We Are Family (a remake of the 1998 Hollywood film Stepmom).

No, we’re not gonna pre-judge the movie before the movie’s release this Friday.

That wouldn’t be right, wouldn’t be fair, would it?

So what if Kareena Kapoor can’t recognize acting if it stung a deep incision into her size-zero derriere or if producer Karan ‘pansy‘ Johar’s previous movies are crappy pieces of shit or if mom-to-be Kajol is a shrieking witch way past her prime. As for Arjun Rampal, let’s all just agree that a log of wood would emote better.

Ain’t no way we’re gonna pre-judge We are Family.

Stepmom – Decent Tearjerker
A short while ago, we watched the Susan Sarandon-Julia Roberts film Stepmom and while the 12-year-old movie certainly is no masterpiece that’ll have you gushing all over it, the film is decent.

A paisa vasool, as you dolts in India would describe it.

The film is rescued from the run-of-the-mill castoffs by superior acting from Susan Sarandon and young Liam Aikey, who plays her little son Ben in the film, acceptable performances from Julia Roberts and Ed Harris and sparkling dialogs.

Sure Julia ‘Pretty Woman‘ Roberts, she with the bewitching smile that leaves a wet stain on the front of your trousers, is alright but she doesn’t jolt the screen like Susan Sarandon does. Ed Harris is in a supporting role, as the fella often is. This time, as the husband/ex-husband Luke Harrison.

Reversal of Roles – Engaging Film
Obviously, even you non-Mensaites have recognized by now that this movie has something to do with a step-mom, right?

For the last couple of days, we’ve been playing with NDTV 2.0, an upgrade to the eponymous Indian TV news channel’s application for the iPhone 4.

NDTV2.0 Live TV on iPhone 4 Review - Mediocre Application

We weren’t too happy with the previous 1.1 version of the NDTV app and hoped the upgrade would have fixed some of the shortcomings.

Also, the new Live TV feature in the NDTV upgrade caught our attention.

Hell, who wouldn’t want to watch a leading Indian news channel live, right?

And at 99-cents a month the pricing sounded right to these cheapo desis.

So we quickly hit the subscribe button for NDTV 24×7 , the English news channel, even though we were – and still are – unclear as to how we’d be charged (whether by our iPhone carrier AT&T or by Apple iTunes).

Still Work in Progress
Like its predecessor, NDTV 2.0 too is work in progress.

This time, our main interest was the Live TV feature and so this review focuses on that aspect.

We tried Live TV on both WiFi and 3G.

On WiFi, the application works mostly but crashes on a few occasion.

A few years back, one of our friends from Chennai got us a bunch of DVDs including one featuring three Rajnikanth films Thillu Mullu, Ranga and Moondru Mugam.

For some reason, the DVD wouldn’t play in our Panasonic home-theater.

So we kept it aside and completely forgot about it until we recently got an Acer Revo PC.

At a loose end this morning, we hooked up the Acer Revo PC to our Samsung HDTV via the HDMI port and then hooked up an external Asus DVD player to the Revo PC.

We then popped the Rajnikanth DVD into the Asus DVD player and, voila, it worked.

Alas, unfortunately it worked.

Total Nonsense
What a misfortune, what a horrid trial the sordid movie turned out to be.

* A film like Moondru Mugam can only be made in a land bereft of all aesthetic sense. A nation, where art and fart are synonyms.

* A film like Moondru Mugam can only be watched and reviewed after we’re fortified with a quadruple dose of gin in our system as we currently are.

* A film like Moondru Mugam can only receive high accolades in a benighted country like India (Rajni got the Tamil Nadu government award for this garbage) where movie-goers are for the most part still two rungs below Homo Sapiens in the evolution ladder.

From the opening scene when Arun (Rajnikanth #1)  dressed in a saint’s saffron robe descends the steps of the aircraft to the final moments after the weird fights on the ship, Moondru Mugam is a movie that screams its amateur status to the world in one unendurable frame after another.

Oh, we forgot. Rajnikanth has a triple role in the movie. Each one vying to be more unimpressive, more irritating than the other.

Bizarrely Asinine Story
The story, if you schmucks insist on the summary, is of twins separated at birth, one Arun growing up in a rich family, recently returned from the U.S. after 10 years of studies there and the other an ex-jailbird Johnny (Rajnikanth #2) living with his poor aunt Mary and given to boozing and petty crimes.