HOLIDAY POSTCARD 1

I am almost on a movie and books marathon as a part of my "big fat holiday" which began yesterday (in dire need of some good movies). For this particular holiday, I decided to stick to a friend's advice that the most important thing in life is to be comfortable and "happy" in one's own company and that is what I am trying to do ;)... Anyways, so I thought some observations should find their way to my blog.

Just some scattered ones; here and there.

1. I watched three movies yesterday: Sex and the City, Break-Up and Mumbai Meri Jaan. The movie which makes it to this post is Mumbai Meri Jaan. Not that it is a spectacular or a brilliant movie, but topicality always scores and the movie had some interesting screenplay moments (Yes! I have a thing for screenplays). The movie is based on the bomb blasts in Mumbai local trains couple of years back. It is a “tribute to the resilience of the city”. The whole point is that watching the movie after Mumbai has been through its second and the most gigantic tragedy, it all seemed a bit ironic to me...
The movie is predictable, ends on a predictable note. BUT there are some really interesting moments which are worth mentioning. There is a scene where reporter Soha Ali Khan (who worked for a channel called TV NEWS which has a logo similar to TIMES NOW!) has lost her fiancée in the train blasts and has her editor and colleague over to her place to plan a “story” around the whole incident with her as the protagonist... The moment that I am talking about is there is a shadow of Soha’s face on the ground on which the editor and the colleague stomp after presenting the script. I thought that was interesting. There is also an interesting chemistry between the Paresh Rawal who plays an old cop on the verge of retirement and who has lived all his life playing a “silent actor” in the whole drama and a young cop who is living in a massive greyscale trying to figure out if he wants to be the silent actor or play an actual role in the drama. The other character worth mentioning is Irrfan Khan who turns into a hoax bomb caller from being a simple buffoon of the society who gets kicked at everyone’s expense. So that’s about the movie. It ends, like I said, on a cliché scene where everyone in Mumbai is observing a two minute silence to pay a tribute to those who are dead. I might have not called it ironical, per say, if Mumbai hadn’t seen what it recently witnessed.

2. Just the other day, this friend of mine mentioned an article written by Vir Sanghvi where he compares the Joker of The Dark Knight to the terrorists that took Mumbai by storm recently. It’s an extremely wonderful article and a good observation. Read it here: http://www.livemint.com/Articles/2008/12/11223028/Why-the-Joker-is-the-terrorist.html

3. Was flipping through The Economist yesterday trying to find some interesting stories amongst the boring political stuff and luckily stumbled upon this small article on the poet Seamus Heaney (pictured). Here is some stuff he says which I could relate to! :

“Good poems are not willed into being but come from things remembered with a certain aura.”

“Poems can also be unpredictable and unbiddable creatures. They can arrive at all hours of the day and night, and woe unto the poet who is not ready to receive them.....But when a poem has come through, and has been tested to its limits by revision and repeated re-readings, it can seem as solid as an iron bar.”