April 6th 2008
Or "The noise in Benares and how I felt after being exposed to it" :-).
Here are some delightful snippets from a book I am currently reading - Butter Chicken in Ludhiana : Travels in Small Town India by Pankaj Mishra :-
The most uniform and conspicuous feature of the towns and cities you travel through in North India, and also the most serious menace to civilized life in them, is noise. It accompanies you everywhere - in your hotel room, in the lobby, in the elevator, in the streets, in temples, mosques, gurdwaras, shops, restaurants, parks - chipping away at your nerves to the point where you feel breakdown to be imminent. It isn't just the ceaseless traffic, the pointless blaring of horns, the steady background roar that one finds in big cities. It is much worse: the electronics boom in India has made cassette players available to anyone with even moderate spending power. Cassettes too are cheap, especially if you buy pirated ones. People diminished by urban existence can now fill up the immense vacuum of their lives by a continuous production of sound.
Further along, Mishra writes about his difficult experience in Benares, the previous year, dealing with the aforementioned problem.
For, to be woken up at five in the morning by the devotional treacle of Anup Jalota, Hari Om Sharan and other confectioners, all of them simultaneously droning out from several different cassette players; to be relentlessly assaulted for the rest of the day and most of the night by the alternately over-earnest and insolent voices of Kumar Sanu, Alisha Chinoy, Baba Sehgal singing 'Sexy, Sexy, Sexy', 'Ladki Hai Kya Re Baba', 'Sarkaaye Liyo Khatiya' and other hideous songs; to have them insidiously leak into your memory and become moronic refrains running over and over in your mind; to have your environment polluted and your day destroyed in this way was to know a deepening rage, an impulse to murder, and, finally, a creeping fear at one's own dangerous level of derangement. It was to understand the perfectly sane people you read about in the papers, who suddenly explode into violence one fine day; it was to conceive a lasting hatred for the perpetrators, rich or poor, of these auditory atrocities.
The book was published in 1995. It describes Mishra's journeys through the smaller towns and cities of India during the post-liberalization period. He even visits Bangalore, which was then a "Pensioner's Paradise". I guess the best thing about his travels is that he had no fixed itinerary as such (reminds me of our trip to Pune quite sometime back :-). Thoroughly enjoying the book.
Tags :
A Bookworm's Diet
Posted by Rajat at 7:42 PM
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April 2nd 2008
A post which has been long overdue - the 'part 2' of my earlier post. I watched all these movies almost an year ago, but never got around to completing the draft which I had begun then. Today being the third anniversary of this blog, I decided that I should at least complete and post this to mark the occasion :-).
Omkara
Based on Shakespeare's Othello. Ajay Devgan is Omkara (Othello). Saif Ali Khan is just too good as the baddie, "Langda" Tyagi (Iago). Kareena Kapoor plays the role of Dolly (Desdemona) and she does it surprisingly well. Pukka North Indian accents and mannerisms all around, including the swearing. Vishal Bharadwaj's music and Gulzar's lyrics complement each other. Vishal does a great job as director too. Highly recommended.
Guru
Mani Ratnam and A R Rahman combo, which naturally implies good music. Shreya's Barso Re is the pick of the lot. Abhishek Bachchan takes the honours on the acting front. Mithunda does some good work too. Reminds one of his role in Agneepath for which he won the 1991 Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actor. Check out the Wikipedia article on Dhirubhai Ambani to see the "plot" similarities :-).
Gangster
Shiney Ahuja shines in the titular role. His expressions convey more emotions than the few lines which he is allotted. Superb music by Pritam. Kangana Ranaut essays the role of the gangster's moll.
Woh Lamhe
Shiney & Kangana again. Plot based on the relationship between Mahesh Bhatt and Parveen Babi. Pritam composes a winner again. Recommended.
Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi
Shiney (Vikram), Chitrangada Singh (Geeta) and Kay Kay Menon (Siddharth). A triangle of love, politics & business set in the 1970s. Sudhir Mishra at his best. Definitely a must-see.
Salaam-e-Ishq
Pure, unadulterated torture. I took nearly a week to finish this one. Extremely silly, lots of overacting, bad direction, the list of cons goes on and on. Supposedly based on Love Actually to some extent. Music by Shankar, Ehsaan & Loy is reasonably good.
Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man's Chest
The second movie in the trilogy. It has its moments, but isn't as good as the first one.
A Beautiful Mind
I had read the book by Sylvia Nasar around 3 years ago. The movie skips over a lot of the stuff from the book. Nevertheless it is a pretty good adaptation. Jennifer Connelly won the Oscar (Best Actress in a Supporting Role) for her role as John Nash's wife.
Blood Diamond
Loved it. DiCaprio is great. So is Djimon Hounsou. Jennifer Connelly looks jaded though.
The Prestige
One of my favourites. Christopher Nolan directs Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine & Scarlett Johansson. Bale is superb as usual. The climactic revelation is "magical", to say the least. Based on the book by the same name.
Nishabd
Will be remembered for its focus on Jiah Khan's legs and pout. And of course, the opposition by various parties to the 'immoral' content in the movie - people were seemingly afraid that it would give 'ideas' to older men and 'corrupt' them :-). Whatever. Decent acting, music and direction.
The Departed
Another good one. Strong cast, good story. And Martin Scorsese finally got his long overdue Best Director Oscar.
Spider-Man 3
Spidey gets in touch with his emotional side and other assorted crap. Boring.
Bas Ek Pal
A good story (probably based on Pedro Almodóvar's Carne Trémula, which in turn is loosely based on Ruth Rendell's book Live Flesh). Music by Mithoon is pretty good, especially the title song.
Life in a Metro
Hummable tunes by Pritam. Irfan Khan and Konkona Sen Sharma are good.
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Movies
Posted by Rajat at 2:30 AM
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March 19th 2008
When you open a mail in your Inbox, the view looks like this :
When you open your Spam folder, what you see is this :
Notice the order of the buttons for deleting and marking a mail as spam/not spam - they are interchanged in these two views. I am used to hitting the Delete button on the right side in my Inbox (though of late, I prefer to use the shortcut - 'Shift' + '#'). The same tendency persists when I am in the Spam folder too. But thanks to the reversed order, I keep hitting the Not Spam button even for mails which graciously offer to help me overcome my 'insecurities'. Aaarghhh!!!
What's that? Why do I even bother deleting mails from my Inbox when I have so much space? Well, I prefer to think of it this way - just because you have a big house doesn't mean that you don't need to throw out your trash regularly. Now why do I check my Spam folder at all? You can't tell if an important mail has been incorrectly sent to the Spam folder if you don't keep checking it regularly. Morever checking the Spam folder in Gmail is hardly a chore - the spam filters in Gmail are very efficient and I hardly get any spam messages.
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The Binary Files
Posted by Rajat at 4:37 PM
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December 19th 2007
Is Friday the 13th really unlucky? Is there a scientific explanation for the superstition? Here's an old article by Atul Gawande which talks about these questions and more.
Some of Atul's other articles are interesting too - check out his website for more links.
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Miscellaneous
Posted by Rajat at 6:19 AM
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August 3rd 2007
Of late, I have been on a book coupon redemption spree :-). I bought One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez using the Premier bookshop coupon I got for being a finalist in The Second Ruckus Tangdi Quiz conducted by the KQA in April. Other than that, I used up a set of Landmark coupons (gifted to me by my thoughtful colleagues) to buy the following :-
- Samskara - A Rite for a Dead Man by U R Anantha Murthy (translated from Kannada by A K Ramanujan)
- Ice-Candy-Man by Bapsi Sidhwa
- Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
- A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon
- Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
- The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh
- In Xanadu : A Quest by William Dalrymple
- Butter Chicken in Ludhiana by Pankaj Mishra
- Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra (900 odd pages of hardbound reading)
- Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
- 2001 : A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke
I had read In Xanadu when I was in college (delightful book, of course). Anyway, one book down won't make much of a difference to my reading backlog ;-).
Tags :
A Bookworm's Diet, Quizzing
Posted by Rajat at 6:23 PM
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