Thanks to Anshul for his editorial help. Thanks to Sourasis for his awesome one liner.

Watch out, Hitler has a lot more to say on Cricket.

A week or two more while we tidy up the site, and then we’ll open up for another season starting from the 1st of this March.

Do remember to come back.

But as the movie progresses, the hints of a Shakespearean tragedy disappears. With such an original beginning (for an Indian movie), Chopra soon gives way to all sorts of cliches that we in the Bollywood specialize in. However, in one of his better performances yet, Amitabh manages to breath life into the character (and the movie) which seems to have been written with him in mind.

For example, when Amitabh stands in front of the chest in his room, we know instinctively that he is going to pull out that scarf Rani Sahiba had dropped a few scenes back. Then, since he wants to express his anguish over his failure, what better (and more cinematic) way to destroy a piece of cloth than burn it? But at the hands of Amitabh, this tedious and predictable scene (it should be borne in mind that the scene doesn’t make much sense in the first place unless we stretch the point) becomes one of the key scenes for his character.

Looking closely, however, we discover that the character of Eklavya has no real substance, and has to depend on the tried and tested formulas to get the point across. His character is well sketched, but lacks depth. Just like “Black,” the character works only because it is
Amitabh playing it.

In comparison, Boman Irani’s character was much more real, and could have been made frightening in its helpless frustration and resignation. Looking at him one thinks that he is not much unlike Antonio Salieri, and lo! He whips out a plan for his ownAmadeus.

Jackie Shroff and Jimmi Shergil are more than adequate in their short roles. Raima Sen felt like a surprise discovery in this movie. She had some real acting talents after all!

Sanjay Dutt’s character of a dalit DSP is a stitch up job to hold the script together. He is completely miscast in the character, though he does a decent job. He has acted so seriously that it is hard not to like him.

Vidya Balan looks as lovely as ever, and the fleeting moments of her romance with Saif Ali Khan remind us very strongly of “Parineeta.” One wonders why she made such an elaborate preparation (reading books on Rajasthan and other local researches! she mentioned them in an
interview) for such a short role that hardly required Rajasthani sensibilities (of which she showed none). She has been wasted in yet another movie.

(Note: I didn’t mean to imply that Vidya did badly in the movie by discussing how lovely she looks. It’s just that I am so smitten! She was her usual best in the movie, and one couldn’t have asked more.)

Saif just about holds his character. The problem is that the audience is asked to relate to the emotions of characters like the young Rana (Saif Ali Khan) with the briefest of introductions and the corniest of dialogues. Since the script did not allow for much character development, Chopra should have gone for the actions and mannerisms rather than the words. May be a bit longer movie would have been a good idea.

The brilliant cinematography and camera-work fail to hide the lack of a story as the movie fast progresses towards its predictable end. The director manages to keep the atmosphere intact till the very end, almost making the movie worth watching. But what the hell, one would be entirely justified for sitting through the movie just for the first ten fifteen minutes.

Chopra stops short of being gimmicky and tries to concentrate on the story once in a while, but the attempt (pressure?) to fit a commercial conclusion to the movie leaves an unsympathetic impression. The script could have been tighter without many of the sentimental false notes.
The commendable restraint in explaining plot details, however, was one bright point, except for the chemistry between Sanjay Dutt and Amitabh.

The background score and the sound tracks are competent, and they complement the movie well, sometimes touching a tender nerve, and sometimes depicting the acute agony of the characters.

In spite of the appearance, Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s “Eklavya” is not a murder mystery. It is not a love story, either. The way it ends does remind me of the Indian soap operas, but that would be an unkind comparison and the movie is good enough not to be dismissed that blandly.

All in all, Vidhu Vinod Chopra disappoints somewhat, though not probably as a director. The sheer originality behind the form of the movie stands out and puts it above the rest of the pack. With passage of time, I am sure this movie will be seen as an important commentary on Indian Cinema as a reflection of our growing consciousness about the technical aspects of movie-making in the frontier of our industry.

One of my problems with the movie was that I failed to relate to it. None of the issues or sentiments portrayed in the movie have any relevance to me, so I was pretty much detached from it all the while. However, some of the scenes were just terrific.

But the movie had a great start, and could be watched solely for the brilliant performance by Amitabh Bachan, not to mention the excellent cinematography. I give this movie a 2.5/5.

You are sitting next to her. Her fragrance reaches you, and you can tell there is some exotic scent on. You are explaining to her some dumb Newtonian equation the solution to which you think she knows already. She is all smiles and excited. You can notice each vibration in her voluptuous body, and perhaps she can in yours too.

But that is not the point, because you are looking at her face, at her steep nose, flushed cheeks and beautiful mouth (and you notice her lower lip in particular). You keep avoiding her eyes, and eventually you look down to her lovely bosoms, and you suddenly look away, or into the book, or at the end of the pencil that you are chewing. You don’t want her to catch you looking there.

God knows where she has been looking at!

You spend the next few minutes talking about the laws of motion, and now you look up at her. She looks back at you, drinking every word you say. You love it. You love her too. You love her rosy cheeks and lovely bosoms and you love her lips too, but you can’t tell her because she is supposed to be in love with one of your friends, or so they say, or so she should be.

You shrug off and tell her all about definite integration, though you think it is pointless. She suddenly coughs. You look up and and catch a glimpse of her nipples through her blouse and you look up and find her looking at you. You struggle with yourself to decide if you saw a hint of invitation in her eyes. You believe you did, but you are afraid of being rejected and you think you are too young for that.

She coughs again. You find yourself wondering if you could know what is going inside her mind. You stand up to leave and hope that there will be a better tomorrow.

But the tomorrow you have been waiting for all these evenings doesn’t come. She doesn’t ask you to come again the next day.

And you spend your nights undressing her in your dreams.

Take 2

You two talk for a long time. She loves telling you all about her life, though she never mentions Jay.

The windows are open and the lights have been switched off. The few rays that manage to come in get lost behind her hair and you have difficulty in figuring out the details of her face. You are lost. Everybody around has forgotten you and you are lost.

There are a million thoughts in you mind and you can’t concentrate because you are listening to her. May be she doesn’t want you to think of anything. May be she doesn’t want you to think of anything else.

You kiss her cheeks. She doesn’t stop talking about her boring friends. You kiss her neck where you feel her skin to be the warmest, and she doesn’t stop talking about her teachers. You touch her lips. She still doesn’t stop talking about the stupid girl next door. Then you kiss her eyes, and everything stops abruptly. You feel the warmth of her body spreading through your own body and reaching your guts. She is tender and soft.

In that forgotten room surrounded by silence and light and darkness and a few human beings in the next room who never knew what it is to be young and kiss a girl, you believe you have been kissing her for ages and yet when overcome by the silence you remove your lips, you know it must have been for a few seconds, so touched you are by her unexpected silence. She resumes talking about that stupid bitch in her class at once.

You take a stroll on the roof together. It rains.

You feel there is something that needs to be said, or done, and you don’t know what it is. Perhaps it is something she wants you to do. You feel worried.

In the meantime, she wonders what are you going to do to her that night.

She wants you to see her new dress, a pink one. She is happy being there with you. You take her hand in your hands and look at her unusually long fingers.

Long after she ceased loving, and long after you ceased knowing what it is to be young and kiss a girl, you know the both of you’ll share an intimacy the reason for which she will not remember.

You feel sad and you look at her. She is so beautiful. You imagine what it would be like to hold her soft and tender little breasts in your hands.

You keep undressing her in your dreams but you are frustrated because you don’t know what to do next. You want to know if sex means holding her breasts in you hands, but you are too shy to ask.

Then, one day, you discover all by yourself that you can do a lot more than just fiddling with her breasts, and you feel you have grown up.

Take 3

She is in her pink dress and she is sitting next to her mother who is sitting next to you. But you do have some space behind her mother (who is leaning forward so that she could talk to your parents who are sitting at the front) where you can talk to each other. You are headed for a marriage party. You are glad to be back after such a long time in spite of the frivolous pretext.

You look at the back of her ugly fat mother and wonder how somebody so beautiful could be born to someone so unbecoming. You look at the revolting flabs hanging at the back of her mother and you can’t help feeling disgusted. But then, you look at her eyes and then feel her warm breath on your cheek and you loose track of everything else.

You draw yourself still closer to her and in the meantime check if you can see your parents. You can’t, and there is no way her fat mother can turn back without the two of you back in your seats first.

You look back at her. She has large brown eyes and she is giggling and saying something that you don’t hear. She loves your attentive silence and you love her torrent of words which you don’t listen to. You reach her and take out the hairbands so that her curly hair falls on her face. And then, you kiss her on the lips.

You pull back the moment after because you are afraid of being caught. Your heart is beating very fast. You can’t think straight for the next few minutes. But something tells you that you mustn’t think and before you could calm down, you are kissing her again.

You think it is wonderful.

You are feeling her lower lip in your mouth and you want to feel as much of it as you can. You feel intoxicated by the smell of orange on her lips. You are trying very hard and she suddenly pulls away.

There is a small ‘pop’ but it is drowned by the roaring engine amongst the noises around you. You are so much lost inside your mind that you take a few moments before you could register that noise as conversation. She is saying something to your parents about her academic plans. They turn to look at you and ask some empty question that you don’t understand. You just nod your head. They are used to it.

You look at her lips and notice the dark flushed red they have become. You become aware of your own lips which she had been kissing a few moments back and you feel frustrated.

She turns back at you. You lean towards her but you don’t say anything to her. You are looking away at the moon through the window and she also doesn’t say anything for the next half of an hour.

You are not thinking of anything. You try to avoid all thoughts but by the time you turn your gaze from the window back to her again, You have already been through all those moments you lived a short while back.

Before you become conscious of anything else, you find yourself kissing her again and this time you are careful to be soft, taking turns at her upper and lower lips. They are so soft and you have never felt anything like this before. You can feel her tongue around your own lips. The harder she squeezes, the better you like it. You try to feel the inside of her mouth with your own tongues.

And it never ends.

I must make it clear at this point that the entire blame for this story does not lie with me. After many of my attempts at a more mature subject were repeatedly turned down by other members of this collaboration, I decided to write one of those dreadful love stories that we see so many blogs full of. I came up with this one. This also will record for posterity the compelling circumstances under which I was destined to be immortalised by my contributions towards the most unproductive and hence highly prized artistic occupation ever known to human mind since the invention of Chess, namely the Internet Blog.

However, this is not a typical love story. The Kuch Kuch Hota Hai kind of love is not fashionable anymore in India, not after Tum Bin became a hit. I am sure anybody who has seen Tum Bin will agree that it is better, or at least much more romantic and emotionally satisfying, to suffer and writhe and feel pity for ourselves than confront the unromantic (and usually unpleasant) truths about our romantic attachments. But since not everyone is wise enough to ascertain the nature of love, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with, the true story of the author has been presented in order to avoid the possible contradictory complications of unrealistic fabrication.

Nobody is quite sure of the precise moment when this story began. Many say that it must have been one of those trips to the IITs where Rangin fell in love with Kiran. Others think that it was some project that they were in together. Madhu, who still thinks that she was the first one to know about it, says that she always knew it would happen. Rangin would say, of course, that he had forever been destined to fall in love with her. I think this story is about what Kiran has to say about it, though I am not quite sure.

The fact is, I have never talked to Kiran, or should I say she has never talked to me? She was one of those insensible girls in the sea of cheapness and silliness determined to uphold the torch of middle class morality. Naturally she and I never talked. There have been a few sweet conflicts between us, of course, which she might describe without those adjectives, but none of those dramatic things that they show in soap operas happened. Since girls consider everything unsettled as their victory, and since I couldnt settle issues with a fist fight because of her being a girl, and since I have known no way of settling issues other than a fist fight, I had given up all hope of ever making her understand the more subtle points and aesthetic aspects of my arguments. Then one day, Rangin, whom I had thought of as one of my best friends for years, walks in to tell me that he is in love with her.

In spite of all my apparent interest, I must say I was indifferent. The choice of the girl was surprising, yes, but that was a random choice anyway. Rangin had always been convinced, of course, that he would never fall in love. I myself was convinced that he must have watched a lot of Bollywood movies to have incurred such a lasting damage to his emotional integrity to such an extent. Everybody else was convinced that he was a fool.

I did not have the least doubt about my responsibilities and my duties towards my friend – the sooner I got him out of the mess, the better.

I started by monitoring both Rangin and Kiran.

And I had come mighty close to falling for Sraddha, the constant and the only companion of Kiran, by having to look at her for long hours. Her brilliant display of dignity woven with insecurity had me spellbound for weeks. But she was too obvious to be taken seriously. She was charming sometimes, girls of her age usually are, but the foolishness of her youth that showed in her face undid it all.

Then there was a sublime revelation one day in the college canteen soon after I had finished offering my usual sacrifices to the Pesticide God. I saw Sraddha elbowing Kiran and breaking into fits of laughter after whispering something in her ears. To my amusement, Kiran giggled too. I followed their eyes and discovered a simpering Rangin. I was surprised!

That I was surprised would be an understatement. When the full significance of what I had seen dawned upon me, I was appalled thinking of the possible outcomes of this disaster in the making. It was not the existence, but the depth of the matter at hand which had been unimaginable to me all these times. Even though it sounds unlikely for someone as popular as me, I had no other matter to address at that moment of more importance than the private lives of an incorrigible introvert and an adolescent boy scout.

So before I could allow myself to comprehend the absurdity and inconsistency of the human nature, and that of Rangin and Kiran in particular, due effort had to be made to make the incident forgotten and in due time rendered insignificant by the absence of dramatic outcomes for the sake of our collective happiness.

If I have not made it sufficiently clear already, well, Kiran’s selfish and authoritative air of being right made her self-inflicted incipient introversion incur intolerable intrusion into my idiotic and whimsical world in the most insensitive manner. And if anybody ever thought that I would put up with a sarcastic and unsympathetic woman for my friend’s sake, he must think again and again till he thinks otherwise. Not being able to abuse her in near future and having my evening tea made by her in the longer course practically meant the end of the world as I knew it. I could not allow my dear friend lost in the futile world of indiscretion without temptation, in the pointless pursuance of impulse without purpose in spite of his undeniable claims to stupidity.

I decided to turn all that was left between Kiran and myself to look like an inchoate romantic series of quarrels into the battles of the middle earth.

Incidentally, I forgot to mention that you could stay in Rangin’s house and have an affair with his wife and daughter, and he is the sort of chap who won’t even suspect. So it was not very difficult to plot against the love of his life using his resources. A lesser soul would have definitely been carried away. But my impeccable sense of duty towards my friend helped me survive the wonderful seduction of success against enemy. Anything that happens, happens.

And Kiran happened to have no clue to the true identity of the offender. I always thought she should have been grateful, for I was rescuing her from a first rate dumbass. But since I was wise enough to realize that she might take a less scrupulous view, I let things look the way they looked, that is, all the requests made by me were from Rangin. Anything that is happening causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.

I am sure the readers would like to know what exactly happened. However, since a lot of people don’t like the idea of being the means in a business whose end is not their business (i.e., being manipulated), I would refrain from publicly admitting all my spectacular achievements.

Eventually I was successful in securing the hostility of Kiran for my friend. Now all that remained was to do the reverse and bring things back to their previous peaceful harmony. But those who have known a love struck engineering student will tell you that it is not an easy thing to accomplish.

There are three broad categories of boys who fall in love. The first lot are the Tum Bin types, who will never tell anyone anything about their misfortune. They are merely pathetic self-pitying teenagers and don’t mean any harm. They are a pleasant lot to have around.

The second type start by telling the name of their crush first. This is where the innocent bystanders should get cautious, because a boy who tells you the name of his crush will tell you anything, and generally everything, even though you don’t want to hear it. Having told everything, they assume that you care for it as much as they do (it must be one of those prehistoric psychological tendencies we have inherited) and consider you as a close friend till they are out of love. They are just an unnecessary headache.

The third sort start by telling all about how they feel, or how they believe they feel, or how they would like to feel, or how they want others to believe they feel, or how they want others to believe that they believe they feel. They treat the name of the object of their affection with great secrecy because of some peculiar and interesting reasons. I have a great deal to say about it, but we’ll talk about that later.

Since Rangin happened to be a confused mixture of all three, I started by trying a few tricks from the movies and popular ads (ex-boyfriends, ex-pregnancy, unattractive underwear, no deodorants etc etc). I naturally failed. Anything that in happening causes itself to happen again, happens again.

They happened necessarily in the same order though.

The next trick was Freudian. I tried to describe Kiran in terms of her suppressed infantile sexualities in order to terrify him.

I was terrified myself.

Then I made him see ‘Titanic’ hoping that the cheap dialogues of the movie will make him realise the little worth of what are supposed to be the greatest assets of love. But he was full of all the follies of the youth, and none of the wisdom that innocence offered. Till this date, it eludes me how, he considers ‘Titanic’ to be one of the finest movies he ever saw. We have never been to another movie together since.

So far, the reader might have been led by their intuition to believe that I must have done something awfully clever to finally pull them apart. They have been led wisely. I simply directed Kiran towards a blog Rangin had started writing in one of those philosophical moods when a final year engineering student contemplates the futility of all love, and hence of all life, and ends up contemplating why this and why that and why not her? The ‘her’ happened to be Kiran.

Just like he had done a month before, Rangin again walked in another fine morning to tell me that he was out of love, and that he preferred writing blogs to dumb blondes anyway. The story ended as suddenly and as quietly as it had begun.

The awe with which this entire proceeding filled me with towards the great tradition of internet blogs made me realise the full potential of this idyllic occupation. And here I am finally – my first footstep in the greatest of all virtual worlds.

Dostoevsky might point out here that all good stories end in a marriage and that mine does not. But then, Sherlock Holmes didn’t exactly marry professor Moriarty, did he?

That is life.