I remember jotting down a couple of lines on this blog about Christmas last year – my first one at Wimwi. Coming to think of it, that was also my first Christmas away from home, and although Onam is a grander festival at home, I have missed the latter many more times. Perhaps because Christmas falls in what is typically accepted as holiday season. Of course, Wimwi follows it own rule with regard to holiday seasons (if they exist at all, that is), and no eyebrows are raised here when classes are held on New Year Day.

Thankfully, the day of Christmas is a holiday even here, and this time too the celebration was memorable, thanks to generous and enthusiastic friends who also tolerate vegetarianism well!

On the occasion of the Ahmedabad Mirror completing 1000 days, a special report was published on October 2, 2010. I had penned some thoughts on life in Ahmedabad. So here goes…

Bold and Beautiful Ahmedabad

A city with a unique spirit that straddles the modern and the traditional, the high-tech and the simple, the high-rises and the pols, the fast and the slow, the future and the past – this is Ahmedabad! Let me explain.

It is a bright morning in June 2009, and I am just about to set foot on the city where I am to spend nearly two years. The railway station is reassuring in a way that only Indian railway stations can be – dirty, congested, but full of life. Tucked into the car that would take me to the IIMA campus, I notice that driving on the roads would take sheer audacity, for it is a complete free-for-all. But the first sight of the campus is satisfying – the red-brick architecture looks better than what the photographs promised!

Soon the days passed, and the restaurants of Ahmedabad became familiar haunts. Be it midnight buffets at Pride, birthday celebrations at E-scoops, treats at Mirch Masala, or pani-puris at a roadside stall, Ahmedabad eateries quickly earned their rightful places in our lives. In fact, Gujju delicacies such as fafda jalebi and bakharwadi immediately come to mind when I am asked about food in Ahmedabad.

As for the people of Ahmedabad, their bold business spirit still continues to amaze me. In fact, this business-driven mentality of the typical Amdavadi is perhaps the reason why India’s first business school came to be founded right here. And yet, children here are the same innocent, frolicking ones, as I found out while volunteering with Prayaas, an IIMA initiative that helps less privileged children!

Travelling around the city, one cannot help but notice the contrasts. On one side of the Sabarmati are the malls and modern buildings, and on the other, the traditional settlements, with their bird-feeders and narrow lanes. While well-known business brands originate and establish base in Ahmedabad, the city is also seeped in history. Indeed, visiting the Gandhi Ashram was an awe-inspiring experience by itself. All the history lessons that once seemed a burden to learn resonated again with a nostalgia that no other place could have triggered.

Having travelled and stayed in different cities in North and South India, I can confidently say that Ahmedabad is one city that gives space for both modernity and historical tradition in its own unique manner. Where else will you find an extremely well-oiled BRTS system peacefully co-existing with camels ambling down the road?

(This article is available at the following link:

http://www.ahmedabadmirror.com/article/68/2010100320101003114218902ae4a09a4/City-of-the-bold-and-beautiful.html)

Unlike a typical movie review which starts with a suspense-spoiler-alert, this one needs a suspenselessness-spoiler-alert. But then, the title of the post has already given away the fact that the movie has no original plot after all.

Shuffling into our seats five minutes late, mumbling apologies, secretly glad that our sheepish faces couldn’t be seen, we didn’t know what we had missed. Later, a helpful friend mentioned that a song, a mind-boggling leap worth watching and a kidnapping had all taken place in those critical initial minutes. Well, this is yet to be verified. But, given that any school-going kid knows the story of Ramayana, we could imagine not only what we had missed, but also whatever we were yet to watch. (A moment of pause: the new generation of kids who know Potter and Bond better than good old Rama and Arjuna might be forgiven for thinking that the injury-kidnap-revenge saga is a modern invention.)

I had some reservations watching a Tamil movie because I was certain that it would be sub-titled in English, and for a compulsive reader, sub-titles are profoundly distracting. In hindsight, I am glad to have watched the Tamil version and not the Hindi one firstly because the cast is better in Tamil (not everyone has what I would term the screen presence required for a villain who is allotted the screen time normally reserved for a hero)  and secondly because the dialogues and songs are better too. Of course, this is a moot point…

Coming to the story. There is a boat, a guy who could be the hero or the villain, a girl and some others. Since the girl is bound and gagged, and the guy seems quite proud of it, you guess that he must be the villain. Veera and Ragini have made their entry! By the way, for the uninitiated: when I say “boat”, please don’t get the idea of a blue-coloured plastic-bodied motorised dinghy.  Instead imagine a wooden structure, completely bio-degradable, in tune with all the mind-blowing greenery in the movie.

Let me confess that, since I had not done any prior googling, at this point it had not struck me that Raavanan was purported to be an interpretation of Ramayana. I had imagined that the reference to one of world’s oldest villains was purely symbolic and that the setting would be a modern city or at least a village. So, when Dev, the inspector, encounters the drunkard on the way to the forest, I naively wonder at the audacity of the latter. But when he swings across tree-branches, there is a moment of epiphany – so this is Hanuman, which means that is Rama, and those were Ravana (to use the usual English spelling) and Sita. Now some things have fallen into place. Although mildly disappointed that the story has become predictable, I tell myself that a landmark movie like Jurassic Park would have been only slightly less enjoyable even if I had read the book.

Jatayu, the discarded pushpaka vimana and other indispensables of Ramayana follow in quick progression. Before the audience gets engrossed in predicting which scene of Ramayana comes next, songs make their way in. A. R. Rehman and Karthik have done a decent job in ‘usure pogudhey’. There are some other songs as well, at appropriate places. (Of course, there rarely is an appropriate place for a song except perhaps as a background score. Indian movie directors irrespective of the language seem to think the exact opposite.)

The acting is reasonable if expectations are kept reasonably low. Clearly, that is not the selling factor of the movie anyway. The camera-work is far more impressive. In a variation from the usual sequential narration, images are superimposed to show what happened just minutes ago as Dev follows the trail of Veera. Also, there are scenes where the comical and the serious are juxtaposed. But instead of reinforcing the gravity, the comical aspect dilutes the seriousness; the “demon in a king’s palace” dialogue by Veera is one instance that comes to mind. There are also other striking dialogues that act as saving graces at times. For example, Veera asks how he could have killed someone with no fear of death in her eyes.

Towards the end when Dev casts aspersions on Ragini, it comes as a discordant note. Bringing in the lie-detector idea was unnecessary and incongruous. And once the train of improbable scenes has begun, there is no turning back. So Dev does nothing when his wife alights from the train in the middle of a forest. (It goes without saying that everything in the movie happens in forest settings.) Ok, Dev did nothing because has a purpose – he wants to settle more scores with Veera. And he can be mindlessly cruel when he is desperate. But what about the guard and the conductor of the train? It is not very pleasant to imagine that if you pull the chain, stop the train and get off, you can walk away, no questions asked, as if you were on a bus! But then, once you accept whatever has happened in the movie till then, this is a negligibly small leap of faith.

On a less criticising note, the movie has some merits as well – the skill with which the greenery has been captured (the backdrop of the climactic good vs evil battle which becomes a white vs black fist-fight), the attention with which natural beauty has been depicted (remember the dragonfly?), and the vibrant display of colours (the wedding of Veera’s sister). But here again I cannot help asking: weren’t some of the colours a little too rich? Somehow I don’t seem to have noticed such rich colours in a real forest or wedding!

Bottomline: I have always felt that hype is almost never worth it. And nothing in the movie has changed this feeling.

<Personal opinion disclaimer applies.>

Talk to friends about movies, and the discussion veers round to ‘3 Idiots’. (These days it quickly moves on to ‘Badmaash Company’ and ‘Kites’, and from there to gossip about the lives of movie stars if you happen to be in the conducive kind of company.)

Assume ‘3 Idiots’ (3I from now on) is a campus movie. In Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu, I have watched better campus movies. And even in Hindi, there are better ones. ‘Nammal’ (translated as ‘We’ which simply does not capture the sense of togetherness embodied by the Malayalam word) is a story that seamlessly brings together a vast range of feelings – the mother’s love, the orphan’s sense of loss, the lover’s sweet musings, the father’s caring seriousness, the friend’s joviality, the senior’s rashness, and the campus’s thrills. All of this, woven around a story worth acting and worth watching. (That the movie was shot in the college where I studied is only an added incentive. I would have watched it countless times even otherwise.)

‘Classmates’, another Malayalam campus movie, is perhaps more comparable to 3I since it too involves a batch reunion several years after graduation. But there the similarity ends. ‘Classmates’ is sensitive, and wonderfully acted. And the story – which is a story and not a prop for everything but – engages with the audience.

Of course, unlike 3I, ‘Classmates’ does not make feeble attempts at slapstick comedy, especially of the kind where the story has to leave its natural track to go and fetch the comedy that seems to have vanished like a naughty kid. Now, if 3I is a comedy movie, set in a campus, to what genre will genuine campus comedy movies like ‘Munnabhai MBBS’ belong? The latter was one Bollywood movie that did not have to rely on superstars or glitz or unreal romance to bring home the point or the money. And it is worth one watch. Even when Munnabhai becomes overly sentimental, the critic in you has enjoyed the movie till then so much that you excuse some lapses.

‘Happy Days’ in Telugu is sugary-sweet and childishly optimistic. But it too manages to tap some corner in the hearts of engineers who have spent four years in a roller coaster of common subjects like graphical drawing, common concerns like grades/marks, common troubles like hostel life, common worries like placements and of course, campus life with its inevitable romance. The movie does not pretend to be what it is not. It is a simple narrative of the lives of  a few engineering students, with a few songs and dialogues.

A stronger story is present in ‘Boyz’ – that superhit Tamil movie with its hit songs. (Anyone who has heard Karthik’s rendition of “paal poley…” would agree.) It brings in all the usual campus movie elements – friendship, love, loss, a drive to do well, and so on, along with some bold takes on issues such as parental pressure to perform. The acting was not too memorable but the freshness of portrayal did not go unnoticed.

But not so with 3I.

The characters are all, without exception, caricatures. Take Rancho – the super-successful charismatic intelligent class-bunker who still bags the first rank. (Come on, do you want to ratto-fy and get the rank, or do you want to bunk classes and become a five point someone? Because the system still has not evolved to the point where you can be both. Even an Einstein will get the first rank only if he writes the right answers in exams, not if he makes remote-controlled toy helicopters.) Then there are two of Rancho’s admirers-cum-sidekicks who have no existence if not for Rancho (the evidence for this is right here: I am unable to recall the names of the duo). And what would the movie be without Chatur – the studious nerd, who too revolves around Rancho? The list doesn’t stop here. The principal of the college acts just like you would expect his caricature to, and his daughter is just as disappointing. And don’t even bother to consider minor roles like the daughter’s fiance.

If the characters are poor, can the story be far behind? So you have the stereotyped damsel on the bike, and vacuum cleaners and car batteries put to the one of the most uncreative (no pun intended) purposes possible. You have hostel scenes that should put any decent guy to shame. Ultimately, suicides and suicidal attempts have to save the show through sensationalism.

Yes, 3I has its vocal supporters, who laughed through the repeated obscenities in Chatur’s Teachers’ Day speech and rotfl-ed watching the same speech again on YouTube. But not me. Give me ‘Nammal’ any day. So that I won’t have to laugh at the pathetic attempts at comedy.

<Personal opinion disclaimer applies.>

IIMA Placement Chairperson Prof. Saral Mukherjee says “Media must end fixation with salaries”. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/5674000.cms

What Calvin has to say on running a business. Rings very true in today’s corporate scenario! From http://www.marcellosendos.ch/comics/ch/1992/02/199202.html