Monthly Archives: December 2005

A Birthday Story

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Late night. A glass of rum-coke by my side. Surfing the net when all of a sudden my ICQ window pops up. There’s a message:

From BirthdayBoy_at_20: Hi. I know this sounds kind of weird. I am you ,when you were 20. I just wanted to see if you are online….had some questions to ask you.

Yeah right. This has got to be a practical joke. A few of my friends—the very few I have know its my 30th birthday on the 30th of December and this must be their idea of a joke. Very funny.

I type back. Yes BirthdayBoy_at_20 , this is BirthdayBoy_at_30. Nice joke. Now which clown is this?

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2005—The Bong's Selection (Part 2)

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After my last post on “The Best movies of 2005” , here I am with the second installment, the flip side–the Worst Movies of 2005. A word of clarification: My definition of “worst” is based on the magnitude of the difference between perceived quality (hype, laudatory reviews) and actual merit (ie my evaluation).

For example, “Veer Zara” would have been my worst movie of 2004 even though it was nominally better than “Mirchi—Its Hot” simply because “Veer Zara” promised so much and delivered so little.

So here goes. “Neel n Nikkie”, “Maine Shaadi Kyon Kia”, “Kyon Ki”…and many other possible candidates don’t make the list because I have still not gotten around to seeing them. And hope not to.

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Bhojpuri Bituwas

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Ever since I watched “Namak Halal” and Amitabh’s “I can talk Ingliss I can walk Ingliss. and I can laugh Ingliss…Ingliss is a varry phunnny language…Bhairon becomes Byron because their minds are very narrow” I knew that there was a Bhojpuri movie hidden somewhere there just waiting to come out.

And so it has —Namak Halal has been dubbed into Bhojpuri and released as “Babua Khiladi Dadua Anari” —inspired by “Main Khiladi Tu Anari”, one of Bollywood’s rare movies with a subtly gay subtext (or so people claim).

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V-Girl (TM)

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“Hey big boy ! Lonely? Girls turn you down? Afraid of more rejection? Fear not big boy….. V-girl (TM) , your virtual girlfriend, is here.” (Link via Samantha Burns)

“Wait, wait” you say. “What’s so new about this? All of us guys have installed this Virtual girl thingie on our desktop at some point of time or the other—-the busty lady who dances at the bottom right hand of the screen and secretly loads our machine with spyware like Bonzaibuddy, Gator, Websearch and other such digital scum —all the time swaying to and fro sensuously.”

“Well big boy, you are wrong. That was then. This is now.”

I shall let V-girl speak.

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Classic Dance of Love—the Review

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The movie of the year. Hands down. Not just this year, the movie in question might very well rank among the top Indian celluloid classics ever made—maybe just a tad below Kanti Shah’s Tarantino-esque epic “Gunda” but then again just a tad.

The movie’s name is “Classic Dance of Love” which brings together the trinity of creativity, the last survivors of the Nouvelle Vague (that’s Francais for New Wave—-not “vague” as in English) cinema that was originated by Truffaut, Goddard et al—–the trinity being B.Subhash, Bappi Lahiri and the Supreme Lord and God of all things—-Mithun Chakraborty. Just like Bhamha, Vishnu and Maheshwar’s creative forces led to the creation of Durga, so it is with “Classic Dance of Love”.

It is very difficult to write a review for this movie. How can one review the Mona Lisa or Beethoven’s seventh symphony or one’s first kiss? It’s just not possible but I am going to give it a try—taking the aid of pictures and text.

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Confusion And "I Told You So"

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It may be because I am, what my patriotic, un-parochial section of readers (the same kind who gloated in the previous post when Sourav was dropped—-which shows that not all of us belong to their concept of India) call an oxymoron. (Yes at least one of them in a comment on a post started calling me that and soon my other “Indian” friends picked it up. Of course that’s because my “Indian” friend understands that oxymoron means someone who is more than a moron—an oxygenated moron or a cross between an ox and a moron).

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Operation Duryodhana

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One more sting operation. This time targeted against representatives of the people. Aaj Taak and some organization called Cobrapost (Tehelka, Cobrapost—what’s with these sensational names?) went undercover and busted a few of our MPs for taking bribes to table questions in Parliament.

Now I ask —so what? Sure you get some publicity (kudos to Aaj Taak and Cobrapost ), some heads roll, people act shocked—-but what then? What these out-to-create-news-at-any-cost people do not understand is that their actions ruin the greatest currency we have in this world.

Not Euros. Not yen. Certainly not dollars.

Trust.

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Censor ! Censor !

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I reacted with shock and awe on reading about an initiative to spread the love of God—a 2006 calendar ” with 12 staged photos depicting erotic scenes from the Bible.”

“There’s a whole range of biblical scriptures simply bursting with eroticism,” said Stefan Wiest, the 32-year-old photographer who took the titillating pictures.

Not being an expert on the Bible, I cannot vouch for the above assertion.

But what bothers me is what if, in an age where people are shamelessly aping the West, we also did something similar to our epics ?

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