Baboon Logic

I have a long list of posts to put in here -

the books I was gifted in my last birthday (all of which were subsequently read, and hence the post!),

Victor’s attempt to dissuade me from my attempts at explaining my email id to a shopgirl who had wondered about it aloud,

reviews of Billu Barber and Chandni Chauk to China,

the cool ruby script I wrote to make gchat-like conversations from all the smses in my phone,

the bug I discovered in ubuntu-gnome with multiple mice (mouses sounds better, and the bug is probably a feature anyway! :))

- the list goes on.

All that will await the completion of my ongoing exams, however, and here are a couple of pictures from Holi this year.

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Disclaimers:
1) Before my boredom takes over, I want to make clear that Ghajini is a decent time pass (I’ll list the USPs at the end of this post).
2) This contains a rough overview of the plot that can spoil the movie for you. There are some specifics of some scenes too.

Putting Ghajini into a genre

Ghajini is not Memento. Ghajini is the boy-meets-girl (and falls in love) story followed by boy-avenges-girl’s death rant. The non-linear unfolding of the narrative is superfluous because there is no surprise in the story and because it doesn’t serve any purpose except for tightening the pace. It’s a different movie altogether, with a different focus and a different niche, and it is entirely unnecessary to keep Memento in mind when thinking of it.

Ghajini is not Bollywood either. It has been reworked to Mumbai, but the screenplay wouldn’t have made much sense without its Southie (I think it’s called Kollywood!) motifs. For example, Asin plays the typical innocent bubbly girl with attractive simplicity (real life bimbo made larger than life on screen!). Obviously this is a character done to death in Bollywood, but they do it with a different kind of sensibility in South which you can see in this movie. The Goody Two-Shoes-ness of Asin might thus be a little jarring to the rest of India, but I am sure they will enjoy the bit where Aamir Khan subconsciously learns to drink tea in a pedestrian manner from her.

Ghajini is Kollywood in Bollywood clothes with the addition of Aamir Khan. It’s almost a scene by scene remake of the original except for a better paced and politically correct (or may be I should say cinematically correct!) ending.

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At the onset of his madness, Philip K Dick remarks on the protagonist of his loosely autobiographical novel VALIS (a novel that is at once brilliant and tedious, capturing the essence of Dick’s madness) that he could be happy only because he was perpetually occluded to what was to come, to his own future and to the consequences of his own actions!

That is how I see myself now. I am at the brink of losing my oldest friend. Even if he survives this, the severe strain our friendship has suffered will resolve itself to some terrible conclusion over time, and I can find happiness for the time being only in my incapacity to see ahead into the bleak future.

We can barely look at each other now in the guilty knowledge of what we have done together, and yet, that fateful evening began in the most promising manner.

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Finally I own a copy of Lolita.

When we were buying books for the Library in Chennai, I had looked around for a cheap edition of Lolita. We bought one for the library, of course, but I had wanted one for myself, but there were no cheap Indian editions.

Today waiting for someone, I decided to browse a book store I frequent, a book store now which I like more because it was a very small part of the only lunch date I have ever been to, and there I spotted an edition of Lolita by Penguin. Don’t imagine the ones with glossy covers. This one has the classical green and white Penguin cover and cheap brownish paper inside. But it’s worth it. The typeface is good with sharp contrast between the text and background paper and is something I would not mind looking often at.

Only yesterday I had to borrow two short phrases from the book and had wished I could sink into the first few pages of it. Today I have the book, but the mood is not there! This is what having a girl friend does to you. It replaces your lousy loser of a world full of all sorts of abstract crap with real life experiences so that you don’t have to turn to books to feel that you are alive!

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Today, we went to visit the construction site, which is in a very beautiful but weird place.

I don’t really like the tropical green in general, and indeed I was thinking how ugly all the bushes next to the road side looked, when suddenly a miniature version of the Great Wall of China came interrupting the wild growth. It turned out that the institute is going to be inside the infamous reserve famous for its wild, renegade and usually angry horde of stampeding elephants who frequent the nearby villages and have unwittingly claimed human lives before (hence the walls to stop them). This means even though I might one day fall in love with The Pretty Girl and might want to walk under the moonlight in misty nights with my arm on her waist (with a passionate kiss or two in the offing), an elephant’s bone might prove to be too big a haddi in the Kebab to be overcome.

When we arrived, I was surprised when I noticed that I could hear the birds chirp and flutter.

The Director showed us the construction plans, and The Pretty Girl (she has got dimples) asked him if the academic block was modelled after the first letter of his name (the chic of it!). With a polite laugh, he then went on to explain, “No. You see, these are two spirals, and this end of this spiral here …”

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The day before yesterday we went out for a dinner in the evening.

I was depressed. The night before, I had watched this funky little movie called My Sassy Girl, which, too exaggerated to be interpreted even literally (it’s a bad old habit of mine, interpreting movies metaphorically, which once led me to state, to the great disapproval of my friends, that Gangster, King Kong and Silence of the Lambs shared the same thematic attraction dressed up differently), made me contemplative about my life nonetheless, and any time I think about my life, I get depressed.

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My frantic and tedious journey ended about two weeks back, but I had been either too tired or too busy with coding and gaming to take up blogging.

I got really pissed off in the mathematics camp I was attending (I would have written about that, but the place was ten kilometres away from civilisation in every direction and a computer with a decent internet connection was hard to find). I sent an SOS to Anshul, who said that I could finally come over and start my internship. I made a last minute booking and got on the first train available (it wasn’t actually available, but I got on it anyway, praying for a conformation).

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Sau Crore (1991) is directed by Dev Anand, and I don’t think any fan of Bollywood will need a longer introduction to the movie. I wouldn’t really have watched the movie, except that Naseeruddin Shah was in the lead, and Sunil Gavaskar was to make a special appearance along with his team.

Obviously I didn’t expect much from the movie, but it managed to surprise me. In spite of being devoid of any artistic merits, it offended my aesthetics. The movie can be seen as a forerunner to a whole generation of comedy bums that Bollywood is producing now.

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