Monthly Archives: May 2008

Stamp of Class

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Forget the Telgi stamp paper scandal.

The Tiwari stamp “locha” is “herewa”.

A few months ago, the state of Bihar rejoiced in the achievement of Manoj Tiwari, the great Bhojpuri singer and the host of “Chak De Bacche” (Michael Jackson’s favorite program), for being the first living Indian to be honored with an international stamp from the government of Netherlands.

Yes the same Manoj Tiwari who was covered here at RTDM for his Bihar pride song: “Hum Bihari dil baante bhola bhala, Humre ke neta sabke nachawe walah.”

And now it is Tiwari jo sabko nacha raahe hain.

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Caesarian Section

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Noida Police Makes Arrests In Murder of Julius Ceasar

By a staff reporter:

Noida police (the world’s foremost investigating agency famous for cracking the Aarushi  Talwar murder case in mere hours), who had been called in to solve the sensational murder of Julius Caesar, the Roman emperor, made their first arrest today. In a sensational early morning swoop in front of television cameras, Julius Caesar’s wife Calpurnia Pisonis was taken into custody by the Noida police.

Sardar Stroke Singh, supremo of the Special Task Force, in front of a packed press conference revealed that Calpurnia Pisonis had been having an affair with Ceasar’s trusted lieutenant, Mark Anthony. And that Caesar had been murdered because he had come to know of this scandalous secret. Earlier the police had said that this murder could only have been done by a doctor, a butcher or a wife.

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IPL Roundup

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[Warning: long post]

With the month-long IPL coming to a conclusion, if not a climax (and some would say many days too late) it is time to take a look back at the weeks gone by and ask ourselves: “Have we learnt anything about the mechanics of this newest incarnation of cricket after so many “Citi moments of success” and Arun Lalisms? Or are we as clueless as we were before?

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Jimmy—the Review

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“Yeh jo human body hain na, iske bardasht karne ka ek limit hote hain.”

–Jimmy (2008)

A dead girl has been found. The police investigator Rahul Dev tells Jimmy: “ladki ki mutthi main paayi gaaye hain tumhare baal”. As we all know, when a girl’s dead body is unearthed that too with a man’s “baal” in her hand and with his driving license right next to her, the case seems to be pretty clear and shut. The final nail in the coffin is when Jimmy, an automotive engineer (Matlab Simulink guru) during day and DJ (Dancing Joker) at night, confesses to the heinous crime with a “khoon kiya hain maine” that echoes for effect.

The final nail did I say?

Wrong !

The real drama is only just beginning.

Cause in “Jimmy”, by far the year’s best “zero level” movie till now, nothing is as it seems.

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Moonshine Forever

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[Long post warning]

[Figure 1: Clip with sub-titles from the movie "Bow Barracks Forever"]

In the long list of grouses (the marginalization of Subhash Bose in the Indian national Congress, the policy of freight equalization, lack of funding for Bakreshwar power plant, Sourav Ganguly’s treatment at the hands of the BCCI, Soumitro Chatterjee being overlooked for the Dadasaheb Phalke Award and “Ami Kolkattar Rosogolla” not being made the national anthem being some of them) that we Bengalis have nurtured over the years like festering wounds that refuse to heal, nothing perhaps rankles more than the fact that Moonmoon Sen was never given the iconic status in Bollywood that she so richly deserved.

People who closely follow Bengali movies noted amazing flashes of brilliance in her performance in “Baidurya Rahasya “where she played a no-nonsense lethal detective who goes undercover as a sexy Vaishnavite priestess with a craving for fish (her famous line “Mamu ami maach bhaja khamu” [Uncle, I want to eat fried fish]) still gives me the shivers whenever I hear it). Soon her flawless pronunciation, unaffected manner of speaking, acting prowess [video] and her overdone femininity (called “nyakamo” in Bengali) had made her the darling of what Taran Adarsh calls the “classes and the masses”.

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The Usual

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The standard sequence of events—-

1. Bomb blasts happen in a crowded area of an Indian city X bringing death and destruction in its wake.

2. Startling revelations are made by the administration within a few hours, bringing to light facts no-one could have guessed.

“Obviously, it’s a terrorist plot,” A.S. Gill, the police chief of Rajasthan, said hours after the attack. “The way it has been done, the attempt was to cause the maximum damage to human life.”

God damn those terrorists. Just when we think that they would do things in a way so as to cause the minimum damage to human life, they go ahead and do something totally unexpected.

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Akhtar Akhtar

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Oh what drama doth cricket produce.

A meager 133 runs to defend. The most successful opening pair of the tournament at the crease.

And running into bowl is a man rejected by his country as too undisciplined, too over-the-hill and just too wacko to warrant selection, a man out of competitive cricket for months and barely match-fit, written off and lampooned by most (and that includes me).

What happens next?

Magic.

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Bangalore Royally Challenged

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[Photo credits: the Mangalorean]

Welcome to India’s latest reality show—-”Will You Go Tomorrow, Tick Tick Tick Tick” (inspired by the iconic “If you come tomorrow”) presented by the same guys who brought you “Kamzor Kuri Kaun”, “Kaun Banega Laxmipati” and “Jeeto Thappad Marke”. For those of you who haven’t tuned in before, in every show, we kick out, based on popular opinion, one member of the Bangalore Royal Challengers team.

A quick recap. Yesterday the team member who lost his job was Charu Sharma, the CEO of the franchise. Yes the same Charu Sharma who sat to the left of Mandira Bedi in Extraa Innings, the host with a penchant for talking a lot about “nothing at all”, a man whose bald pate sometimes out-glistened in its smoothy roundness the things that Mandira Bedi brought to the table.

Well to be exact Charu Sharma was not really “fired”. According to the official version, Charu Sharma left for personal reasons—-reasons that were so personal even the person himself didn’t know what they were.

And today with yet another embarassing loss to a team also scraping the bottom of the IPL barrel, it is time for the Bengaluru Boys to lose one more item of clothing.

So which one will it be?

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Tashan—the Review

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“Yeh hain aasli Bhaiyyaji” shouts Anil Kapoor playing the role of don Bhaiyyaji as he rips open his shirt, in the process revealing a plot twist I can honestly say I never saw coming.

The twist in question being that, perhaps in keeping with today’s “chikna” aesthetics, someone had shaven Anil Kapoor’s legendary mane of chest hair (which was, as far as I know, one of the world’s last natural rain forests) exposing in the process Mr. Jhakaas’s mannaries (man-mammaries) and his “One Two Ka Four, Four Two Ka One” packs.  [Explicative picture to left]

Which leads me to once again acknowledge the wisdom of that immortal line spoken by Khulbushan Kharbandha in Gupt :

“Kuch baatein gupt raheni chahiye” (Some things are best kept hidden).

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