Monthly Archive for May, 2006

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Mithun Impossible 3

Published on May 14, 2006 in Mithunda and Reviews. 68 Comments

Mithun-da’s “Agniputra” had a climactic scene in which Mithun-da’s mother rises from the funeral pyre and dispatches the gloating villains to kingdom come with amazing shaolin moves, then takes off her “mask” and reveals herself to be actually Mithun-da himself.

Thus was born the central thesis of the “Mission Impossible” series of movies where one can seamlessly transition from one person to another by just wearing a mask—Mithunda can become Mithun-da’s mother (everything other than the face is obviously the same), Tom Cruise can become Phillip Seymour Hoffman (an act of modification as sensational as the one from Mithun-da to his mother) and hopefully I can become Hrittik Roshan.

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Bhairi Phunny Language

Published on May 11, 2006 in Comedy and Media. 58 Comments

I know you are a busy person. But no matter how busy you are—-boss standing over your shoulder, wife breathing down your neck, three deadlines at 12 tonight, a baby in a burning building: put everything down and sit back.

And read this(Wild, Wetty Dreams) (link via India Uncut) [Update: the article has since been edited with wetty being replaced by witty. Some samples of the original are below. For the original unedited version, (which was up on Hindustan Times Tabloid): please go here] [Update 2: The HT link is now dead--but thankfully the original unedited version is still available. ]

Yes sirs and madams, it has finally happened. The cataclysm we had all been anticipating. The Ingliss language (Indian English) that originated from the love poems of the famous Bangladeshi (yes don’t point out the contradiction please) brothers Horizon and Verizon on Bangla bulletin boards, gathered steam with “May I do fransip with you?” on orkut scrap books and Yahoo messenger, and then spilled out onto Shaadi.com matrimonials has finally made it to the main stream media.

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Buddha Bar

Published on May 9, 2006 in Calcutta and Politics. 179 Comments

As expected, the Communist Party of India Marxist is slated to win again the state elections in Bengal—increasing its hold upto a possible 3/4 majority. When you consider that this is the same party which has held sway for 30 odd years now, that is some feat in a democratic society.

Many readers of RTDM, on different occasions, have expressed their amazement as to why and how the CPM has remained in power for so many years without opposition of any sort, impervious to anti-incumbency, sympathy waves and other political opinion sweepers that have remoulded the landscape everywhere else.

Now may be a good time to look at that.

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Rang De Basanti–A Deliberately Late Post

Published on May 3, 2006 in India and Reviews. 290 Comments

During the last Washington DC blogmeet, there was a question as to what my next post would be.

I said “A post on Rang De Basanti”.

When I briefly said (in one line) what I thought of the movie, I was told that, based on the experience of certain bloggers who had expressed similar sentiments, such opinion, publicly expressed, would lead to a deluge of vituperative remarks in the comments section.

Since I was, at the time, already in the middle of a heated exchange on some other topic, I was reticent to open up the Western front on opinion shrapnel. Hence I decided to delay the post—-at least till the “Be The Change—I just saw Rang De Basanti” hysteria died down.

However since quite a few months have passed since then, I think the time has now come to gingerly put my head on the chopping block.

“Rang De Basanti” is an over-hyped piece of tripe.

Yes I said it then. And I say it now.

And here is my explanation. [Spoilers ahead for people who have yet to see the movie]
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United 93

Published on May 1, 2006 in Reviews. 32 Comments

I had talked about a story a long time ago on this blog.

What totally confounded me was an item a TV channel ran after 9/11. One of the unfortunate people who had been trapped inside the Twin Towers sent a voice message (which his family later got) on their answering machine in which he basically says goodbye to them.

I was intensely moved by the storyâ€”â€”â€“but I also wondered why did the family give the TV channel these tapes? Weren’t the last words of a father and a husband something private meant for his wife and daughter ONLY? Why were his wife and daughter on TV allowing themselves to be subject to the questions of an intrusive reporter who kept on asking them how they felt knowing that Mr so-and-so would never come back? I understand the reporter was looking to increase the channelâ€™s TRPs by playing on the grief of this bereavement but why was the family letting their genuine grief be made a public spectacle of ?

Sharing relieves grief. Accepted. But does it really help to do it in this very public, voyeuristic fashion?

I had similar misgivings when I went to see “United 93″, a movie about the last few hours of United 93, one of the ill-fated four flights that got hijacked on September 11, 2001.

Was this going to be another commercial venture seeking to make a quick buck by peddling human misery?

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