Its that time of the month again folks, I am not talking about partying till wee hours of the morning time (though it’s the right time to air ur naphthalene smelling pashmina scarves and pin striped suits) what I am talking about is my Movie of the Week (or what I call MOTW) time, never mind the fact that the week sometimes stretches up to a month and a half, since it’s the time for resolutions and retrospection, lets go back to a time when the movies weren’t so compulsively audacious (Being John Malkovich, Magnolias) and obviously special effecty (do I even have to name anything???)When a filmmaker could actually fall back on his and his cast’s talent to see the film through (and not depend on some wiz kid from silicon valley to embellish his film with pancakey effects), when “big” meant a big cast and not mindbogglingly huge budget and a casting coup meant getting Richard Burton and Elizabeth together and not Will Smith and some computer generated virtual thing called I robot… lets go back to Come September (1961) ta da da da daaa daaa daaa daa da da
Wealthy industrialist Robert Talbot arrives early for his annual vacation at his luxurious Italian villa to find three problems lying in wait for him. Firstly, his long-time girlfriend Lisa Fellini has given up waiting for him to pop the question and has decided to marry another man. Secondly, the major domo of his villa, Maurice Clavell, has turned the estate into a posh hotel to make some easy money while the boss isn't around. And, finally, the current guests of the "hotel" are a group of young American girls trying to fend off a gang of oversexed boys, led by Tony, who are 'laying siege' at the outer walls of the villa. Talbot, to his own surprise, finds himself becoming an overprotective chaperone…Rock Hudson in his hudsony best and miss lollobrigida is well …lollobrigida …and who can forget the unforgettable soundtrack.

I am male. Wit and charm will only take me so far. What I need is to affirm my maleness. My primordial instinct demands it. A throwback from the time when men like me ruled the plains and hunted everything to near extinction. Fortunately, household chores are a perfect platform for this. So I seek out the big games in my house. Pursue the laundry. Stalk the dishes. Ambush the unmade beds. Corner the garbage bag. Prey on dust bunnies. And I do all these with such poise that it makes alpha male of every species green with envy…

Passport: An official government document that certifies one's identity and citizenship and permits a citizen to travel abroad.
ECNR: a confusing and bothersome procedure, which almost jeopardizes ur trip.
Kind and well trained ground staff: saves ur day …
Nasty and impatient ground staff: Jeopardizes the trip again .
Passport Office bara babu (Big Boss): Saves the day again.
High drama: A situation or succession of events in real life having the dramatic progression or emotional effect characteristic of a play.

More on it later

mormon dreams
a strange and ethereal vision awaits those who visit the bhubanseshwar station, platform no 4 at exactly 1.30 pm in the afternoon everyday, mormon missionaries descend from the skies to convert the most cynical of cyincs into dreamers...

Sugar also rises...

Sugar: Hope, u have to stop cutting me short with ur smart oneliners (and u know what they are not all that smart either), u do realise that whatever u say and do reflects on "us", and just because u get all the good lines i come across as "dumb". Why do people equate niceness with dumbness???

Hope: As long as i get the smart lines i am ok.

Sugar: Why am i not surprised , typical of u to be insensitive to other ppl's needs.

Hope: Sugar, Sugar , sweet Sugar, someday u will realise thats its all about me and it was never ever remotely about u.

Sugar: (sighs) well , my fault , i was foolish enough to think that we can have a decent mature conversation without u making everything about urself...

Hopefully Feminist!!!!
Hope: Train journies are fun , but they are particularly intresting when u have co passengers like a friend did, now this Bengali patriarch wasnt (or more alarmingly , was)aware that the petite looking girl next berth is one of the most fiercely independant souls he will ever come across in his unchallenged life, and he was discussing with his earnestly wannabe MCP crony , how he would rather choke on his ilish mach than work under a woman, then he went onto advice his mesmerised chela how to deal with errant daughters in law and nagging wives(a hotline to the divorce lawyer being the brilliant idea) ,my friend was having the time of her life , being subjected to such blatant and raw sexism , she did what any self respecting intelligent feminist would do, sit back and enjoy the show....

Sugar: But you have to take into consideration his socio economical condition , blah, blah, blah , blah....

Hope:Whatever!!

Its goodbye for some time folks…
For goodbyes are never forever

Sugar: Since I will be traveling for pretty much the whole of this month, posts will be few and far between, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be posting at all, in fact for all you know I might be more prolific than ever…

Hope: As if anybody cares, get a life loser…

Sugar: Hmmmmph!!!

Hope: You know u have hit the rock bottom when u listen to Veer Zaara songs all afternoon and actually weep to them!!!

Sugar: What’s wrong with Veer Zaara? I though it dealt with an important issue and addressed it effectively, blah, blah, blah…

Hope: Yaa right (makes a face and walks away)…

Sugar: (Sings)Tere liye hum hain jiye…..

Hope and a little Sugar

Ok Guys its time for me to unleash my blogonas (blog personae)on you…meet Hope (Hope wobbles up to the stage and takes a lazy bow) and Sugar (Sugar rushes up to the stage looks around excitedly and almost stoops to the floor).

Hope:
Yo!!
They call me Hope
But all I do is Mope
Most of the time
People think I am on dope…

Sugar:
Hey Sugar, Sugar
Call me Sugar
I am your Candy girl
Let me make your life for you…

Now as you can see Hope and Sugar are quite not alike, they seem to be diametrically opposite to each other, and yes they don’t see eye to eye in most matters, but that doesn’t mean they are mutually exclusive, as a matter of fact they cannot exist without each other…After all what’s hope without a little sugar…
More on them Later.

This time tomorrow: will hopefully be halfway through Bhalla’s assignment (ok lets not get too ambitious, would have started on it), both of the Film Analysis assignments being submitted.

This time next week: will be home having muri and shingara with steaming cups of tea with my family, indulgently watching my one and a half year old nephews antics.

This time next month: will be in my sister’s place in Dubai, ideally working as a waiter in Big Macs (making some moolah in hols), but eventually ending up window-shopping.

This time next year: hopefully will be in my plush office fiddling with my super cool laptop contemplating my next groundbreaking expose (for I want to be an investigative journalist), realistically will be in the damp and ugly TOI office in Wellington, Kolkata, running after some know it all prick who is a senior just by the virtue of joining the blasted establishment a year before me.

This time ten years from now: Will be walking into my beautiful apartment in New York and will be at peace with myself mainly because i have apartments in all the major cities of the world(yes i am shallow and materialistic and a true product of capitalism), will have at least a Pulitzer for journalism under my belt and would have visited all the places I always wanted to-Forbidden City (China), Angkor Vat (Cambodia),the pyramids (Egypt) …
And hopefully there won’t be any gaps between hopes and their realizations….

This time in an hour: Madhav beckons…

As I was watching a Chinese movie (yaa that’s what I do, watch movies all day) the other day something in the corner of the frame caught my eye…a peach tree in full bloom, and I was overcome with this intense feeling of loss (which most people call nostalgia), for winters in Nagaland meant peach blossoms, and star shaped paper lanterns and Christmas carols and soft hand knitted sweaters, and milky sweet tea with sticky rice, and warm kitchens with beautiful clay ovens, and cold red noses, and potted begonia plants, and big drums of water with sheets of ice on the top …I hate romanticizing memories and places but some parts of ones life seem so perfect that one cant help but feel that every moment of ones present life is a punishment for having once lived too perfect a life.

Oppression : The act of oppressing; arbitrary and cruel exercise of power: “There can be no really pervasive system of oppression... without the consent of the oppressed” (Florynce R. Kennedy).
Jashomati (Soha Ali Khan) and Mahamaya (Rupa Ganguly) are as much a part of the nexus of exploitation, as they are the victims. They try to manipulate their way into a more wholesome state of being only to realize in a decadent society of twisted morals each and every aspiration of theirs is to be thwarted. As victims they too are besmeared and therefore corrupted.

“Sex is the most effective weapon of them all, for it gives you power.”

A repressed Mahamaya flashes her body parts to the lascivious priest ,(who devises different ingenious methods to wriggle his way into the Antarmahal )not to seduce him but to intimidate him.
As the priest chants slokas meant to be heard by Jashomati (who is being forcibly inseminated and not even raped, by her husband Bhubaneshwar) every once in a while he sneaks a peek at the spectacle.
Jashomati makes all her demands and requests to Bhubaneshwar just before he climbs onto her, for as Mahamaya says “take the snake just before he strikes, that’s when he is most vulnerable.”

Catalyst: One that precipitates a process or event, especially without being involved in or changed by the consequences.

Brijmohan (Abhishek Bachchan ) is just a smouldering presence, a scantily clad body, a metaphor for male sexuality…Mahamaya and Jashomati are, lets say, affected.

ANTARMAHAL the inner chamber …
More on it later.

All those who fear
That it’s now not so little Titu’s turn to jeer,
Remember that the tears that he has swallowed
The scorn that he has shunned
Has cut his heart into two
A part of which is bitter and the other part has learned to love
The last time you saw him
You had blood on your face
And he had blood in his eyes,
And yet the bind of blood
Hardly ever ties…

Big men would smile, big men would jeer, and big men would leer
Little Titu wouldn’t understand and cry a lonely tear
Big men smile, big men jeer and big men leer
Not so little Titu smiles a snobbish smile
And holds back a lonely tear.

In the beginning when the sun was breathing sulphurous flames and the oceans were raging a battle of their own , people had two set of arms and two set of legs and two sets of heads so that they could read when they talked and would indulge in discourses which would question God’s action , now this angered the Gods and an angry Zeus used a sharp lightning to separate these people…that very lightning cut me into halves and all my life I have been looking for my other part or my ‘Other’ , my Other who will complete me , my Other who is not like me, my Other who has the looks, my Other who has the moves…

On September 3 1973 a blue fly capable of flapping 70 beats a minute landed on St.Vincent Street in Montmartre. At that moment, on a restaurant terrace nearby the wind magically made two glasses dance unseen on a table cloth. Meanwhile, in a 5th floor flat on Avenue Trudaine, Paris 9 returning from his fiend’s funeral Eugene Colere erased him from his address book. At the same moment, a sperm with one X chromosome belonging to Raphael Poulain made a dash for an egg in his wife Amandine. Nine months later Amelie Poulain was born …Amelie who likes looking back at people’s faces in the dark in the cinema …Amelie who likes noticing details that no one does …Amelie who cultivates a taste for small pleasures like dipping her hand in a sack of grain (cold and grainy) cracking crème brulee with a teaspoon (the blob sound is so satisfying)…Amelie who wonders how many people are having an orgasm at this very moment (72... on second thoughts make that 36).
On honeyed afternoons when the world seems to be bathed in the most cheerful of yellows I try and invoke the Amelie in me…
Amelie is my Movie of the Week.

In about seven days I will make a journey …from a state of despair to that of hope, from a state of desolation to that of cheerfulness, from a world of abstraction to that of concrete familiarity….in about seven days things will make more sense...in about seven days things that concern and affect me today will seem inconsequential ...in about seven days i will have the luxury of the hindsight...in about seven days i will be HOME!!!

For about a week now I have been obsessed with a new discovery…online puzzle games !!! I know it may seem incredibly lame to some people and passé for some too but I am always late to catch on with most trends, now this new preoccupation of mine keeps me preoccupied for most of the day (lokhi chondro,madhob ,bholla Roshna can go screw themselves I am so beyond their miserable,shitty,crappy courses)And after like five hundred hours of intense computer screen staring I kinda see the world in jigsaw puzzle pieces and its really not funny or maybe it is …maybe jigsaw puzzle pieces are like life’s experiences , individually they may not make sense , but they are all connected and when you put them together they make a beautiful picture….

When i was a little boy,
i was taught that
there is just one way to heaven
and eight million ways to hell.
one way to love ,
a million way to stray.
There is just one hope
and everything else will lead to dismay.
Bless me oh God
so that i love, hope and stray...
and take the scenic route to hell.

Seen it guys ...the very first show possible...its official ...Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is the best adaptation of them all...cant be objective about the movie , still reeling under its effect,but boy am i impressed,Mr.Newell ur next Butterbeer is on me...and the incredibly attractive cast has me and my friends drooling hours after the last images flickered off the screen.

An 11 year old perfectly formed boy walks into the world of a broke 30 something writer in a train and the publishing world was never the same again...a 12 something boy is noticed by a casting agent in a football match and a phenomenon gets a face...of all the magical tales of our times the Harry potter success story is the most enchanting because its about a world we can never be a part of ,but it talks about emotions which each and everyone of us can relate to...for all his achievements and heroisms , Harry is after all an orphaned teen negotiating adolesence...
And on the eve of the worldwide release of one of the most eagerly (more so because the novel itself was so cinematic) awaited movies of the year, i can only pray that it lives up to our impossible expectations.wishin and hopin and hopin and wishin....

While sharing a samosa with a good friend in the canteen today i somehow went back to my schooldays where a samosa was just not a smosa but a way to make a life long friend , buying food for friends was the ultimate testimony to friendship ... "so and so is a verygood friend of mine ... we buy each other food" , in retrospection i realise my priorties and coins of judging ppl were sooooo not right or was it???...will i make a lifelong friend with a samosa today? No but a Ferrari would certainly clinch the deal....

I may not be a stud with a bike...

nor a super hero

neither am i the next De Niro...

But i m a man on the prowl

No i m no James Bond ,

No i dont like them shaken

but i am a man on the prowl...

Yes i like my shirts colourful,

Yes i think scratching crotch is awful...

but i am a man on the prowl

So dont call me a pretty boy

coz i m not gonna go all coy ,

Am a man on the prowl.

What a wonderful world it is ...

An unexpected smile...a few kind words ...all is well with the world...my loved ones love me, isnt that miraculous???

It is Juhi Chawla's 38th birthday today and over the years my fondness for her has grown into a habit...
Happy Birthday Juhi!!!

While i wallow here (wherever i am ) in self pity my friends and relatives in Kolkata will be happily hopping from Nandan (theatre) to Rabindra Sadan (theatre), feasting on what seems like a delightful spread of movies (the focus this year is on Africa and i have hardly seen any African films )from Aparna Sen's yet to be released 15 Park Avenue to Pedro Almodovar's hard to come across Dark Habits, its a veritable feast...and i am unwillingly fasting.

You know what ,life here (wherever i am ) is not half as bad as i make out to be, in fact it could very well have been worse, but for me to justify my abominable nature ,life here (wherever i am)has to represented in the poorest of light...i would like to believe that everyone hates me here (when actually they dissmiss me as callow and superficial or worse dont even know i exist) and i am a lone ranger fighting an increasingly difficult battle against those who oppose everything i stand for( which is basically nothing)...arent i pathetically, self depracatingly imaginative ???(there i go again eulogising myself).

Since this is my personal space and I can obsess about al most any thing I will talk about this amazing contraption which has fascinated me for along long time now …ppl who find this post uninteresting and trivial can buzz off …
Mood rings were first seen as an extremely popular fad in the late 1970s, and they resurface regularly! The idea behind a mood ring is simple: Wear it on your finger and it will reflect the state of your emotions. The ring's stone should be dark blue if you're happy, and it supposedly turns black if you are anxious or stressed. While mood rings cannot reflect your mood with any real scientific accuracy, they actually are indicators of your body's involuntary physical reaction to your emotional state.
The stone in a mood ring is either a hollow glass shell filled with thermotropic liquid crystals, or a clear glass stone sitting on top of a thin sheet of liquid crystals . These liquid crystal molecules are very sensitive; they change position, or twist, according to changes in temperature. This change in molecular structure affects the wavelengths of light that are absorbed or reflected by the liquid crystals, resulting in an apparent change in the color of the stone. For example, as the temperature increases, the liquid crystal molecules twist slightly in one direction. This twist causes the liquid crystal substance to absorb more of the red and green portions of the visible light, and reflect the blue part. This causes the stone to appear dark blue. When the temperature decreases, the molecules begin to twist in the other direction, and reflect a different portion of the spectrum.
The inside of the ring conducts heat from your finger to the liquid crystals in the "stone." The color green, which signifies "average" on the mood ring color scale, is calibrated to the surface temperature of a typical person, approximately 82 degrees Fahrenheit (28 degrees Celsius). If your surface temperature varies far enough from the norm, then the liquid crystals in the stone alter enough to cause a change in the color reflected. And if you take a mood ring off, it will normally change to black unless the ambient temperature is very high.
Take a look at the Mood Ring colors listed below, and what "mood" they represent. The colors are listed according to the change in temperature they represent, with dark blue being the warmest and black the coolest.
Dark blue: Happy, romantic or passionate
Blue: Calm or relaxed
Blue-green: Somewhat relaxed
Green: Normal or average
Amber: A little nervous or anxious
Gray: Very nervous or anxious
Black: Stressed, tense or feeling harried
If you take a moment to think about the moods represented by the colors, you'll see a definite correlation between your body's surface temperature and the color of the liquid crystal. When you are in a passionate mood, your skin is usually flushed. This is a physical reaction to an emotion, causing the capillaries to move closer to the surface of the skin and release heat. This brings about a slight change in the surface temperature of your body. When you are nervous or stressed, your skin may feel clammy. This physical reaction to your emotional state causes the capillaries to move deeper into your skin, causing the surface temperature to drop.

One cold wintry night (one of those nights which u never remember and bypass in retrospetion coz they never stand for anything), nothing lifechangingly important happened to me except that i let go...let go of all the anger , negativity,angst, everything that i had nurtured so obstinately hoping that it will give me the passion to live life as it should be led , recklessly...and it felt strangely empty and not liberating...suddenly there were no ideologies to oppose , no causes to fight for and no reason to be nasty to ppl...and i am not sure that i am ok with such a state of existence...but if that is the case did i really let go in the first place???

3 days to go…









Sangeet and Skyline these r the places to be in Hyderabad(baaaaah) and if you are in Kolkata rush to New Empire, Priya, Inox (Elgin Road, Salt Lake) 89 Cinemas, Fame, Mini Jaya (Hindi version)

I HATE my blog its ugly pretentious and pointless!!!and i HATE myself for not being what i should be!!!!

...this is how I feel i am cold and i am ashamed lying naked on the floor...

Robot Dude thanx for bumping off the Neanderthal man...he was a menace to the society , an assault to the senses!!! Good riddance to bad rubbish.Robot Dude is my hero!!!













Robot-dude prepares to make a friendly visit to Neanderthal Man, who is also, incrediBULLY chavinistic, regressive, homophobic. A masculinity that makes you want to puke!!!

I watched Cinema Paradiso after some seven-eight years yesterday (I think I saw it first in the Kolkata Film Festival or was it ?? It hada to be coz i saw it in a big screen), and the experience of going back to a movie you liked (in this case, adored) is a surrealistic one, coz u just have this feeling of fondness for the movie left in you and when u rewatch the movie or in other words u rediscover it u are amazed by all its qualities ...Its like rediscovering an old friend and realising why u were friends in the first place.Giuseppe Tornatore's love letter to the movies is of course an eternal classic but what enthralls me most about the move is the nostalgic feeling of going back...Yes i am a sucker for emotions, a prisoner of passion(eww i do get carried away in the worst possible manner), i gush about almost every movie i watch (a friend says that i should never consider a career in film journalism coz i never criticise) , I guess i still cant get over the magical spectacle of moving images...the magic of moving pictures...the magic of movies.

There is something i have been waiting for... and there are just 10 more days to go... and i m almost breathless with anticipation...Lets get into the Harry Potter groove guys

And so it is ...
just like you said it would be
Life goes easy on me most of the time
And so it is...
Shorter story no love no glory
No hero in my sky ...
I cant take my eyes off you
I cant take my eyes off you
I cant take my eyes off you
And so it is...
Lke you said it would be
We will both find love
But i cant take my mind off you
But I cant take my mind off you
But i cant take my mind off you

umm my college the bestest college in the world , even the Indian Post has "stamped" its approval!!!

My Kolkata...
its not about beating me to it ...its about being Kolkata , A.

My broher nikhil is important

The satisfaction of seeing something successfully through is something i rarely enjoy, I wont talk about what is it that i saw through but i will talk about how i feel about it...I feel happy and responsible...i am also happy about being mentioned in a friends blog(unisexzone's to be precise) but then u can always bully your friends into writing about you ( like i shamelessly did ) but here she was talkin about herself and her experience of a city i dont belong to as opposed to my feeling so alienated ... and its not about me but about her but yet its about us ...the genericity of it all is heartbreaking....!!!!

I have decided that i will have this regular column every week and i will call it "MOVIE OF THE WEEK", which would obviously be my favourite movie of the week ... corny but comforting ...
So here goes ...The MOTW(Movie of the week ) goes to ....
A Home at the end of the world(2002)
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Hours" comes a story that chronicles a dozen years in the lives of two best friends who couldn't be more different. From suburban Cleveland in the 60s, to New York City in the 80s, where they meet an older woman, the film charts a journey of trials, triumphs, loves and losses. Now the question is: can they navigate the unusual triangle they've created and hold their friendship together?

If my afternoon post sounded too pessimistic then well am not in a better mood now either, but i wonder why people find it so hard to have a decent conversation with me , what puts them off ??? Its definitely not bad breath for i have an official check done ( yes in a dental check up kiosk in a health fair , yes i do visit health fairs ,when u are in Kolkata you visit all kinds of fairs)... I am digressing ...this is meant to be my self interospection space...My sick Nephew btw is doing better and is back home...but that horrible feeling of anxiety has stayed on like a pile of shit in my stomach...To celebrate his homecoming i went to this i dont know what to call it ... a gathering and was there as a friend's guest ...she was of course the belle of the ball ... each and every hot blooded straight male and not so straight female in that gathering has had a crush on her at one point of time or the other and i wondered how it must feel like to be desired ... now that there is less than a month for me to leave for home i wonder if i will be really happier there ... yes there wont be so many ppl to be hated but there will be that sickening of losing out on things of letting life slip by... why am i never happy ???
Will a love life and a stable career translate into happiness , i have my doubts ... i always have the magical world of movies to fall back on...

With each passing day it sinks in ...that this is it ... that i have left behind the best years of my life , that all that the infinite possiblities of ones life remain just that ...possiblities... i will never be anything extraordinary ...I have been cursed to an exsistance of banality...

The infinitely irritating botheration of posting a comment on a blog is to start a blog of ones own , so an innocent posting of mine ends up in my own lil place in this verisimilitude of an universe.Am i happy about this well if my mood ring is to be believed (a mood ring is this amazing contraption which changes colour according to ones mood ) i am excited. hmmm... Well Diwali hasnt ever exactly been my favourite festival ( too many happy faces disorient me , crackers irritate me , and i feel sick after binging on badam barfis , rangoli is the only saving grace) but add to it the bad news of a sick and hospitalised two year old nephew and u have the perfect recipe for a disastrous day...Talking about festival blues did u guys know that the most cases of suicide happen in the christmas weekend ... the alienated urban man is not a very happy man is he... am i an alienated urban man ??? Maybe i m not ,maybe i am nothing but a drama queen who eulogises personal tragedies...Now that i have managed to somehow survive this horrible day and can go back to the specialness of normal days ( days when u arent expected to be happy and chirpy ) i realise i am sitting on a pile of assignments and projects, which means only two things i will either invest two excruciating hours of my life on them and produce infinitely(my favourite word of the day ) shoddy work or i will just abandon them ... not a very difficult choice actually .