Chutiyam Sulphate

So the plan was to form a huuuge gang, make a zazzy entry to a janta theatre and then "be at our rowdiest best" as the movie totally deserved it.

Only five of us turned up for the movie, it was a decent theatre and there were much more rowdy people than the five of us.However, the movie was almost as spectacular and interesting as we imagined it to be.

Ishqiya: Starring Nasseruddin Shah, Arshad Warsi and Vidya Balan

The dialect is interesting. Super pure Hindi with burst of "bhojpuri". It coins various interesting gaalis and words, the biggest and best of which is Chutiyam Sulphate (Others: Sutli Bomb, Desi Tamancha) The movie has been shot at some interesting locations of UP and the main part is based in Gorakhpur. The overall casting of the movie is awesome. 10/10 to the casting director!

If I have to distribute prizes for acting, then I guess there would be a tie amongst Naseer, Arshad n Vidya for the second prize! They all outperform each other. Vidya Balan has never looked more gorgeous before and her characters is wonderfully layered and very interesting. Arshad Warsi is a fire-cracker, fun and frolic. My personal favourite, ofcourse, is Naseer. I think it would be really stupid to even state that he has acted brilliantly. As that is a truth universally acknowledged now. He is just sooooo cute in the movie. My heart completely goes out to him when Vidya "cheats" on him with Arshad. He plays the "hotel heartbreak" part with complete elan. I love him.

So now coming to the first prize. Nandu is the clear contender for it, according to my judging system. He just brought extra mega watts of electricity to the screen with his barely 10 minutes performance. Brilliant character, brilliant actor!

The ending is slightly disappointing! Just leaves you wanting for more crackle!

Watch it!

Undiscovered City- Chor Bazar

Well, it is not exactly an undiscovered part of the city. However, it is not a highly frequented place either and I was surprised to know that lot of Mumbai natives had not been here, like two of the three friends who accompanied me on the trip. After a hearty lunch a Café Churchill at Colaba and a lousy cup of coffee at Café Samovar (Jehangir Gallery), we headed to the main reason for our Saturday town trip, Chor Bazar.

Maze-is how I would describe the geography of the place. Colorful maze rather! Full of interesting snippets including a goat drinking water out of a municipal tap booth and cars, scooters being dissected and each and every part of them being dismantled!

The shops have variety of unique stuff like rusty car number plates and sign boards and old tattered old movie posters. I just felt that these were quite overpriced (Around Rs 400-500 for car number plate!). My favorite shop would have to be the Victoria style clocks shop. Now that would be something worth buying, really beautiful! Other fun stuff was antique chandeliers and lovely alcohol bottles.

You can easily spend an hour meandering through the place or may be even a little more than that if you are not impatient and lazy like me! So go check it out, if you still haven’t.

Undiscovered City-Walkeshwar

This was one of those jobless (literally) days when I decided to come put of my lazy slumber and explore atleast one great place, hitherto undiscovered by me, in the city. I had vaguely heard about Walkeshwar and it just seemed the like the kind of place that I wanted to spend my evening at. So I requested my dear friend Dirts (Arundhati Mishra) to lend me her camera so that I could fully garb myself as a hoity-toity tourist!

I took a train till Grant Road and then a cab to reach my final destination. The cab guy dropped me outside a rather busy road which, as I peeped in, looked like a heavenly labyrinth. I walked through the zig-zag lane which had a set of steps everywhere after certain distance. I had beginning to fall in love with the place already! People were busy doing their own daily chores and as I had thought, it was a small world residing in that lane.

After crossing the final set of steps, I reached Banganga, which is basically a pond of not that clean water surrounded with really wide staircases from all four sides. At the cost of sounding really cliché, I really felt serenity as I sat down for a bit and observed the really sweet mayhem around me.

One side was full of ducks. Some really white and pretty, some could do with some soap and a dip in fresh water! There were people bathing, few “natives” were just chilling and were really happy to pose for me! I decided to skip the Walkeshwar temple which is a one minute walk away from Banganga and then headed back, satisfied!!!

Sunday Outing: All About Women

There were only 50 tickets left, so me and my friend Nasar decided to zoom in to Prithvi Theatre asap. To our slight dismay, the tickets were priced at Rs 300 (instead of the usual 200).We picked up the tickets hoping that the play better be good! After killing three hours drinking Sulemani chai at Prithvi Cafe, browsing books at Landmark and smoking, we stood in the queue excitedly to enter the theatre and started our usual session about movies, plays n books. One of the aunties in the queue intervened to talk about 'All About My Mother' (based on the Almodovar's movie)play which she had just seen and told us how terrific it was. And as we showed some interest in her opinion, she went on to give us gyaan on post-colonialism and feminism, interspersed with "err, why was I telling you this?" to which we really had no answer!

As soon as we settled down, the announcer dude announced that the cellphones need to be switched on because the actors get distracted if the cellphones dont ring during the staging of the play. Nice, I thought. Tickled my funny bone. Now about the play? Awesome. Great performances. Its basically five sort-of interconnected stories about women and the only part that men got to play here was to arrange the stuff in between the scene, which they did rather charmingly. The stories were interesting, just a bit too emotional towards the end. Great humour throughout, otherwise. Loved the old age part. It was simply lovely and so motivating to see 81 year old have a fun crush!

Do catch it if you can. Good fun! And definitely worth a watch!

There is some sort of pleasure in being weak
Leaving yourself to mercy
Soft, to be molded harshly, badly
The air keeps wrecking the skin
Making it so dry that it collapses at once
You challenge the rain
Knowing that it will never be sufficient to drown you
The point is to reach the threshold
Which is so dark, so dark
That there can be nothing but light beyond that
You die and die and die some more
You think that is to live better tomorrow
Tomorrow cheats you, slaps you in the face
And then you want to deceive the fucking time itself
Go back, forward, left, right
Don’t you have a twisted desire today
To feel weak, really weak
To lose yourself in a web of desire
Far away from yourself

Bohemian Rhapsody

Credits for the title:Something just reminded me of this awesome song by Queen. More than I like the song, I love the title…Bohemian Rhapsody..There is something inherently interesting and intriguing about it. So I decided to use it for this post that I have wanted to write. Here goes.

Intro:I have always been very conscious about what I put up on my blog when it comes to prose. Verse is too personal but it is layered so I guess that’s ok. This post is sort of a personal diary entry but, how shall I put it, quite universal in nature.And a sort of personal New Year Resolution.

Body Copy:After 20, one of the central themes, especially of girls’ lives, is love. Now love is a highly subjective term. All of us are looking for different kinds of relationships/non-relationships in life. As I traversed the first half of my twenties, I had all kinds of chic friends. Some who have been in relationships, some who broke up and patched up again, some who have been in relationships since donkey’s years and some who have not been in relationship for the major part of twenties and are perpetually looking for that someone they can relate to. Now obviously, zeroing in on something as gigantic as that involves a lot of experiments. Some feel that they are perpetually “unlucky” in “love”.

I realized that more than guys, this is the most important part of women’s lives (and this drastically increases post 25). They are just so obsessed with finding that someone special. While, it is important and nice to look out for this amazing person but what disheartens me is that sometimes and in some cases it becomes the be-all and end-all of existence.

I have seen really cool, super-intelligent, super-talented, super-independent women also falling into this trap. And it is just so terrible. And I am not getting into any sort of feminism zone here. It can be the same with guys. It is just that guys as a specie don’t really reveal their emotions much (for some weird idiotic reason) so I am not in a position to comment on that.

I just feel that this is just a part of life and there is just so much beyond this. Being single is highly under-rated. Ok honestly, I am not a big fan of the 'Sex and the City' sitcom (HONESTLY..hehe) but there is this one scene which I really like. This is where Carrie says that people always celebrate your relationships with other people. There is no gift/occasion for celebrating the fact that you are single and that’s because you didn’t marry the wrong guy and fucked your life!

Closing Lines:

It would be great when you find that someone but till then there is just soooo much more to explore!