I want corruption fixed as much as the next person but why should my vote not count? Why are people who don’t represent me trying to get in the way of how I am being governed?

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.

Eliminating the sporadic ones, I see that all the posts fall into two bunches marking my most prolific phases. The first two seasons.

This post marks the beginning of the third.

There are two kinds of novice writers of prose. Those who start out as narcissists and those who are too aware of their narcissism, and smart enough to keep it out of their prose.

These smart folk never make it as writers. They wouldn’t be able to make it as writers even if they meant to. Prose can never have a life of its own, so the writer must put some of his own into it. Those who are too conscious and afraid of the judgment of others (audience?) shy away from it and their work is little more than dry wit and may be a few insights. Anything more than a few pages long will tire the reader out.

Ah, but then, isn’t it the job of the writer to be aware of how his work will be judged and evaluated and manipulate it? Yes. Awareness makes some people empowered and some others handicapped.

Then is it the other lot, the ones running wild and free with their self-indulgence, who make it as writers?

Well, some of them do. The ones who grow out of their own perspective. The ones who know how to see. The ones who know how other people see.

That’s the catch, isn’t it? Seeing is not enough. Seeing what other people can’t is not good enough either. Of all the things you see, you have to know which part is visible to everyone else and which part is not. This knowledge has not much to do with your ability to see. Growing out of your narcissism is the first criteria.

After that, this knowledge can come from anywhere. May be you are very smart. May be your empathy gives you the insight. Years of cultivated habit? Or pure force of reason (I like this one, because I can’t imagine how it could possibly work :)). May be, more often than not, it just comes to you and you don’t know how to account for it.

Oh, and if you keep writing for a long enough stretch of time, even if your writing doesn’t improve by as much as your overestimation, at least your narcissism loses its sting.

Then there are the poets.

Narcissism is an absolute most, I imagine. But as I speculated, if you can’t differentiate between what you see and what others see, you’ll be just wasting my time telling me the things I already know and can see.

That is what has prompted this spur-of-the-moment half-baked post. In the Sunday supplement of the local daily, I usually go through the humour column (I find its absurd exaggeration surprisingly sophisticate). But today I read a few poems (yes, I read Sunday supplements on Mondays) and I feel sick.

I feel sick of poetry and poems. I know this feeling will pass, but it’s exasperating while it’s there. Bad poetry is one thing, but pathetically repetitive lack of imagination can incite existential despair. Why am I reading this? What the fuck am I doing here right now reading this? Why the bloody fuck has my life come down to reading this? Why am I even alive? Fuck, I feel sick of poetry.

Dear reader, if you have persisted so far, you might as well go on and read Neruda’s “Walking Around,” which seems to sum up myself for the moment, even if in part. Yes, right now, I am sick of being myself (as opposed to being sick of myself, which is also a condition I sometimes attain).

Oh, I’ll just go on and smile.

:D

This one is actually a song, to be sung along the tunes of “I am a vampire” by Antsy Pants (Juno fans will remember this). Please note that it wasn’t supposed to be funny. And I am not saying it wasn’t supposed to be funny in order to cover up my theoretical and highly debatable crude sense of humour by an acute awareness of it.

I am a girl-stalker, I am a girl-stalker (2x)
I am a girl-stalker
Girl-stalker
I am a girl-stalker
I have lost my thing

So I’m sad
And I feel horny
So I cry
And I’m very angry
And I hate some girl lately
So I’m so no more sad
And ache yeah, yeah

I am a girl-stalker
And I am
Looking in the city
Pretty girls
Don’t look at me
Don’t look at me
Cause
I don’t have my thing
But I have lost
My thing

I am a girl-stalker
I am a girl-stalker
I have lost
My thing again
I am a girl-stalker
I am a girl-stalker
I have lost
My thing again

So I get bone
And I shred
So I fuck all
And I croon some place
And I sing
With my best looking
And I want
To play the guitar
But my guitar
Is out of tune
I am a girl-stalker
I am looking in the CD
And the musical
Don’t play with me
Don’t play with me

Because I don’t play
With my thing again
And I have lost
My mind again

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.

Digression to South

There is a remake of Bommarillu (Genelia plays another Miss Goody Two-Shoes Bimbo) in pipeline, and I’ll quit writing on this blog if the hero doesn’t pick up some pedestrian mannerisms from her in the course of the movie. The original in fact contains this very pedestrian way of drinking tea as depicted in Ghajini.

I am being a little harsh. This transference of pedestrian habits symbolises the hero loosening his tie and all that sort of thing, I know. My problem is, I want somebody to invent a different narrative technique to convey hair being let loose. I am tired of the same old shit being peddled around with upbeat music and sweeping camera movements. Audrey Hepburn blowing her nose into Peck’s handkerchief was funny fifty years back in Roman Holiday, but I am sorry if I don’t enjoy seeing it now after so many rehashes of it in just about every other average chick flick.

I want to see some imagination. Something inventive like Saawariya or Amelie. Content can wait. I want to see something inventive or just pretty.

Now back to Ghajini!

Ghajini is a formula movie in two parts. The formula is simple, but broken into non-linear (in time) pieces to interweave the two parts (which differ greatly in mood) in order to make the transition smooth. In fact, because the transitional difficulties have been dealt with by screenplay, it has allowed the director to exaggerate and contrast the moods of those two parts.

Romance and Revenge.

In the part of Romance, the boy falls in love with a girl who is faking to be his girl friend. It has been done with nice low key humour and perfectly romantic ambience. Something you can take your girl friend to!

And then the girl dies and in the Revenge part he goes on around trying to avenge her murder. The original stylised looks of action sequences have been retained. I have been thinking how they were done, and my guess is that they shot them with the usual jumpiness and jarrings and then smoothed the image progressions.

The Music

While the music is disappointing, the background score is actually good (particularly in emotional/ contemplative scenes). Guzarish had a great potential, but the music director seems to have run out of material and instead of sitting on the simple piano bar (which is what this song really is. it’s a very pretty piano bar stretched to fit some average piece of lyrics.) till it grew to be a decent song, he has attempted to make a song out of it! It reminds of his last movie, “Yuvraaj,” about which I have written elsewhere.

But I don’t blame him for making such a mess out of Tu Hi Meri Dost Hai (of Yuvraaj). Gulzar is solely responsible for that, because I can see that the original music Rehman must have had in his mind was twisted and contorted to fit Gulzar’s crappy pretentious lyrics. That movie is full of some of the worst lyrics ever written.

Moving on, Kaise Mujhe Tum Mil Gayi is a well crafted and well placed song. The high notes of the song might have been unsuitable to the occasion, but Aamir Khan’s portrayal of the emotion is striking and the song and the visuals together capture the mood very well and mark one of the high points of the movie. In fact, without the song and without Aamir Khan, I think the sequence would have been overtaken by its clichéd overdose of mush.

Aamir Khan and Asin

Needless to say, the movie rests on the shoulders of Aamir Khan, and he has some shoulders! I can’t stop gushing about his looks in the movie. For one thing, he has eight packs. But what I like best is the fact that he looks so cute in the songs in spite of all the beef. He looks incredibly cute in the songs, and I can’t help thinking how handsome he is.

And of course he has acted very well. In the romance part, he plays it with a lot of sensitivity which makes it plausible and convincing. But he plays the revenge part with subtle exaggeration which will capture the attention of every action buff. He plays the revenge part with murderous and blind rage. Blind rage overshadows the hatred that is supposed to drive him.

Which is how it should have been, now that I think about it. There is nothing that he can pin his hatred and frustration on. Without memory, there is no focus to his hatred. So it manifests itself as uncontrollable rage as he goes on around avenging the murder of the love his life. And I love the way Aamir Khan does it. It looks spectacular.

Asin turns out to be a decorative piece and bubbles and simpers (yes, she simpers. she tries to giggle but ends up simpering.) on the screen competently but with mediocrity. She doesn’t have a good figure (as yet?!) and is probably a little too fat for Bollywood! She doesn’t have hangups though, and may be she can act.

I must digress here to mention Rani Mukherjee’s character in Chori Chori. It was not a particularly remarkable movie, and I think it didn’t even get a theatrical release because of delays, but it features what I like to call a piece of vintage Rani Mukherjee! She plays an orphan who pretends to be the fiancée of a man in love with another woman and plays her part with incredible nonchalance and helplessness and sweetness. I love her in that movie.

Unique Selling Points

It’s a short movie, well paced and well acted.
Decent depiction of romance and action sequences. Southie style, but still decent.
Aamir Khan.

That makes it three stars out of five!

The Godfather (An obvious digression!)

Before the sun sets on a lonely Aamir Khan on a lonely bench, we see that he sees Asin next to him as he unwraps the gift. This scene has a point. It is expected to magnify and drive home his poignancy and his sense of loss by depicting what life could have been without the bitter unnecessary tragedies. They usually end movies about such dramatic loss with scenes with brief and imaginary happy union, but here it was more useful because it was necessary to show that in spite of his loss of memory, he is acutely aware of what he has lost in life.

It reminded me of the last scene of God Father 3. Every God Father movie ended with a brief scene which somehow managed to capture the essence of what was going on, but it was only after the last scene of God Father 3 was over that I understood and felt the bitterness of Michael’s loss of every woman that he had ever loved. That loss was what had underlined his entire life. Ignoring the thriller plots, the first movie is about his transition, the second about confirmation and the third one about resignation. The point is, the resignation doesn’t come till the very end. He had been working towards that resignation all his life, and it is accentuated in the difference between the way his father died and the way he himself died.

He never got a chance to be happy with the women he had loved (the two wives and the daughter). And the last scene was indeed about what it could have been instead of the last dramatic loss, but they choose to show another man who had not known the pain of losing at his happiest hour.

This is well past midnight and I have started blabbering. I just feel very sad for him when he dies alone in a dusty corner on a dusty chair silently and I realise that he had lost all the women he had ever loved.

Happy birthday to me! :)

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.

I imagine people do some particular thing they get fixated on to find solace when they feel lovesick. I eat pizzas. I had just ordered my pizzas when Rainbow called me up to announce his arrival in town. So I packed up my order and went to his house. His folks were away, and we agreed that a late night movie date would not be out of order.

We caught up with our lives over the pizzas and salads, and he proposed me for marriage. Again! To be turned down. Again! He knows I am seeing someone now, and we talked a bit about that too. The pizzas duly finished, we dusted his museum-piece of a scooter and took it for a ride, yelling songs into the night and the cold breeze. Eventually we set out for a movie armed with junk foods to round the night up with.

We went to see Yuvvraaj. I did ask him if we couldn’t go see something else, but he said he wanted to see Yuvvraaj. I was also interested in the movie because from the promos it looked like Anil Kapoor had turned in an over the top performance and I wanted to watch it, and we went in together.

I don’t remember what happened in the following two hours very clearly. My doctor tells me that it’ll be a while before the trauma subsides and I can start to remember the events after I went into shock, and he clarifies that the complete memories of the night might never come back.

But I do remember a few distorted and blurred images of what had transpired before I lost my consciousness to the criminal attacks made on my senses by the movie. I remember people rushing in to lift me from the floor and I remember the long journey from there to the ambulance. I also remember the bright red bulb on the door of the operation theatre, and I have some recollection of the time in ICU afterwards. I don’t remember anything from the movie though, and my report asserts in no uncertain terms that the merest encounter with anything from that movie in the rest of my life time might drive me a raving lunatic.

But above all I remember that one glance Rainbow and I exchanged before we slumped unconscious into our respective seats. No matter how we are going to pretend to each other, we knew that we had reached the point where we couldn’t turn our back on the tragedy of having watched Yuvvraaj together and pretend as if everything was the same as ever.

I guess all good things come to an end. Rainbow has been my oldest friend through thick and thin, through rain and sun, through dangling genitalia to spotted underwears. As I write this now, he is still common-senseless in the hospital. It has often been observed that he didn’t have a lot of common sense to start with, but the movie Yuvvraaj introduces new depths to the meaning of imbecility. Rainbow’s brain damage might be irreversible.

So dear blog readers, pray for my friend’s soul, if not for his life. And as I have often said, the night is the darkest just before the electricity goes out.

—

Note: Unedited. Pestered with exams and no time to edit! Written over a seminar on Quantum Cryptography of which I did not understand one bit (I arrived half an hour late and spent the next one scribbling this one :)). But the one on Boolean Functions was interesting, if you really insist on being told!

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!

There are some books that you want to read for their sheer beauty, and Lolita is one of them. As you move into the book, you find the language is slightly dated (my next complete reading will be from an annotated edition), but the beauty holds on to you even though you don’t understand the word. And the book gives expressions to some of the things I have always wanted to articulate.

I remember taking refuge in Lolita twice before. When I read the first few pages of Bridges of Madison County (and then put it down. It doesn’t deserve to be called a book in the sense of a work of fiction. I could have written it when I was a teenager and didn’t know how to portray intimacy between two people. Though you could say I still don’t know it! :)), I felt so awful when the nameless woman tells the hero that there is something mysterious about him that she can’t seem to grasp, that I had to read two other books to get over the nausea of having read such a thing.

I read Lolita and An Equal Music. From Lolita I read the account of Humber Humbert’s loneliness and his perversion. From “An Equal Music” I read the depressing account of Michael waking up into her student’s pink room.

I don’t share his sickness of pink, but then I am not a middle aged depressed musician who can’t get over the love he pushed away with his own hands. My room is all pink, though probably my mom is to be blamed for that.

Anyway. Books are sometimes important that way. For years I had been looking for a substitute for the expression functionally incapable. I had to come up with that almost five years back when I had to speak in English for the first time to explain my agnostic stand against God! I kept looking for a better expression, and last year I found it in two books within the same week! I read The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld and Kundera’s Laughable Loves back to back, and both the books had the expression constitutionally incapable. :)

Exams are on and they keep me busy these days. Among other things, I took a different route to the park for the evening walk and came right across a marble (or at least stone that looks like marble derivative) statue of a naked woman with thoughtful welcoming gestures which highlights her firm round breasts and erect nipples! And this one is supposedly a family park! How hypocritical are we as a society?!

I like my life at this point of time. Exams I don’t have to worry about. Decent food that I like to eat. Time to work on things I like. Books all around and discovering some new music. Movies every once in a while when I make the effort. A girl friend who won’t let me pay the bills! What else could I ask for?! :D

I couldn’t agree more! And then I said that love seems like bipolar disorder, to sum up everything that he didn’t sum up. :)

Everyone who learns that I’m “open” to seeing a girl (not everyone is as well informed as my blog readers :)) has advice to offer, and more often than not, it is useless and weird.

My brother thought I was dating a guy until very recently.

The only male cousin who had to know told me this – “No matter what girls will tell you, in the end they want to be taken care of. They want to be dominated. So make sure she is always under your control!!!” If any of what he said is at all true, then I have to admit that I have completely botched up my job. :(

When my sister first learnt of it, she stayed conspicuously silent, declining to be happy, unhappy, obnoxious, excited or disappointed by the idea. That was not a reaction I understood. A few days later, I confronted her, and she told me that it was my life, and I could do whatever I wanted to, but this was going to break my mom’s heart!

Turns out that she thought I was dating a 30 year old divorced woman from Boston with two kids. And there was actually a valid excuse for that wrong impression! After she was set right in that regard, she told me that after the kind of attitude I have lived with so far, I don’t deserve to fall in love with anyone.

That reminds me of The Wise One, who happens to be the closest person to me in the last five years. He said that he believed that I would never get into a relationship, but hoped that he was wrong. Two years back, once while taking a walk next to CrossWord, he had said that given how romantic I am, usually, I would definitely fall in love with someone some time all my ideas not withstanding, but then I was too much of a closed book, so falling in love would take finding a girl who would have the patience to chase me. Well, all I know is, love or not, closed book or not, I am the one chasing the girl now! Like that crazy lady says at the dinner table in “The Happening,” someone always has to chase the other!

And I think The Wise One’s description of me as romantic is slightly misplaced too. I usually feel so damn romantic (and happy, and sad, and aroused, among many other things) listening to songs or just walking on roads (books and movies only ever make me sad). The point is, I have always felt romantic by myself. Introduce a girl (or a guy, for that matter :)) in the picture, and you have spoiled everything. I am always somebody else with people. :(

Which is something I wish I could have stayed as. I seem to get sillier by the day. The last time we chatted, at one point of time, I felt so awfully fond of her that I told her that I love her pimples too, and then I started listing all the pimples on her face (not that she has many, and I am probably responsible for most of those! :)).

Ah, but then I might be deluding myself. :)

And given how much books and people can influence me, no wonder I have acquired a new way of writing, thanks to hours of chatting. Now I use “like,” “as in,” smilies, “stuff,” “thing,” incomplete sentences, brackets, uncapitalised first letters and god knows what else! More informal and more relaxed, though I still spend hours trying to think up the right words to express exactly what I mean.

Which is another lesson I have learnt. No matter how precisely I try to put myself across, people will interpret me in terms of their lives, and the meanings will never be the same. So I might as well go for the most interesting expression instead of the most precise expression. But to unlearn myself’ll take time. I’ll quote Wilde – In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing.

I updated my orkut profile after about two years, but now I am going to remove it all, going back to the nihilistic motif of my profile :), so I thought I’ll put the stuff here, now that I treat BL like a personal scrapbook!

I actually remember the last time I updated the profile, because I didn’t update the profile! I asked someone who is really great with women (he has a serious girlfriend now, and I have no idea if he would like his name mentioned, and anyway he didn’t appreciate being termed a womaniser in the farewell speech (I was the guy in charge of writing things for such occasions)!) to “train” me on how to go about chatting up women! So we sat down one day and (he) gave my profile to a very nice, respectable and stable makeover (though I like going crazy talking about me, we didn’t think it would win any brownie points with girls! so I told him what I liked and what I didn’t and he put it nicely there with the target audience on mind), and in general looked up some sensible girls, browsed through their blogs etc, and made some intelligent, sane and friendly comments.

(But how can I talk about that guy not mentioning that he is one of the best poets I know. not someone to write a nice poem or two once in a while, but someone who captures something of his life, and hence of all our lives, when he writes. he is there on the BL blogroll.)

I kept logging into Orkut for the next day. But those days I was more into Cecilia, and though I didn’t get to spend much time with her with so many in the crowd, we were always in touch, be it making the odd movies or playing games. (Cecilia was Anshul’s comp, and she took away many fond memories and a lot of important stuff, including my directorial and acting début, when she died :(. I don’t know how Anshul coped.). I forgot to log into Orkut for two months after that day and thus ruined the careful efforts of my poet friend.

Left to myself, I would go to people’s scrapbooks and post offending and sometimes disgusting limericks, though nothing as extreme as Achal’s crazy limericks. :)

In fact, that is how I met the girl I am seeing now! More about that in the next post.

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).

My name was the last item in the final chart, thanks to the newly introduced AC coaches. They have beautiful wood panelling, thoughtfully provided reading lights for those who can’t sleep at night, and most importantly, three (as opposed to the conventional two) berths next to the corridor.

Being the incorrigible romantic that I am, I have always wished to be pleasantly surprised to find some pretty girl next to me. My journeys have always been so long, and it is a tough task to spend them by listening to the polite and content-less chatter of strangers. I am not very partial to talking myself, particularly in a group or to strangers, which are exactly what you get inside a train. So I have always wished for something to see rather than something to listen to. Besides, I have not yet grown out of liking pretty girls.

Anyway, what could be more romantic than being seated next to a girl, face to face, next to one of those corridor windows now skilfully designed to be crowded enough so that the people occupying the opposite seats can not help but feel like being on each other’s face. As the TTI was finally leading me to my finalised berth, I wondered if I was going to be placed next to that nice girl at the lonely end of the coach next to a corridor window. That was as much as I could wonder about before I had to say hello as she moved to make room for me.

She was nice, polite, non defensive and pretty. She looked like she had spent the day all by herself, lonely and bored. I liked her, but I was feeling pissed off at my prof at the mathematics camp and though I would have liked talking to her, because I haven’t grown out of feeling like talking to pretty girls either, I wasn’t sure if I could handle it with good humour if she threw something incredibly stupid at me. Pretty or not, I don’t like to be not nice to people, because that spares me getting involved with them. I shouldn’t have minded that, except that I hate people.

So we stayed awake deep into the night trying to completely ignore each other in spite of the close confinement, at which I think we succeeded admirably. The atmosphere was charged with the typical contrast between sexual tension (of the naive kind) and its social denunciation, and as Agatha Christie described in one of her better novels, atmospheres exactly like these provide with excellent opportunities for murder. But the prof at the mathematics camp was a long distance away, and it was hard to find another candidate for murder at such a sort notice.

One of my usual policies is to ignore the usual hints and subtleties which people engage in their hypocritical politeness. I do not read between the lines, and it has almost always spared me the necessity of meaningful interaction with human beings. That probably sounds awfully self congratulatory to the point of pretentiousness, but I am dead tired of meaningful conversations and relationships. I am tired of human beings. Sometimes I think Darwin was wrong. I can not conceive of a way in which I could have evolved from men.

Coming back to that night, well, I went on reading my book and resisting her indirect hints that I might want to go to sleep (I had the upper berth). In the end she had to just ask me right out. I slept on for the next 16 hours. I sleep an awful lot when I travel by trains (I also don’t take any solid food) to avoid having to talk to fellow passengers. My usual strategy is – read through the night, sleep through the day.

The next evening, I got down at Dadar and after a short encounter with a paaji who wanted to rob me with thrice the usual taxi fare, I hired another taxi and went to Anshul’s place. Tired and messed up as I was, Anshul took me right away to a pub where most of us got dunk while I politely tried to look the part with a couple of Breezers for sometime, eventually falling back to good old Sprite. As night moved on, we danced (if you know me, you know that I didn’t dance), ate, drank, watched some uninteresting eurocup match, and in general sang at the top of our voices (if you know me, you know that I sang like a madman). Well, I didn’t sing like a madman, because I was nervous, but I tore my lungs apart nonetheless. The DJ played a lot of the usual classics towards the end, muting in between in order to let us fill up the smallish room with our songs of buoyant drunken uplift, where we all briefly thought we understood what the artist had wanted his music to meant.

Afterwards, it was a bit of a struggle and a bit of a fun to find auto-rickshaws in the incessant rain of Mumbai at two in the night and get drenched in spite of it all. It was my first rain this summer and I wanted to get wet, except that I had only one underwear left dry.

Then I slept.

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.

The movie is a blatant screen adaptation of O Henry’s One Thousand Dollars (Sau Crore means One Thousand Million), with the requisite plot overheads and song-and-dance routines and the dumbing down for the masses. Stripped off of the sensibility of the original, it couldn’t have provoked me, but the movie goes on and does the exact opposite of what the story did.

While not Kafkaesque itself, One Thousand Dollars is one of the very few stories of O Henry with a Kafkaesque premise. But the story is more human, in that it substitutes the irony typical of Kafka with a dash of irreconcilable tragedy.

Kafka is fond of taking a joke, turning it inside out and then looking at it from the insider’s point of view (the insider who is now an outsider. almost all of Kafka’s stories are described from an outsider’s point of view.). Then it is no more a joke, it is an irony at varying levels of surreality. But it is never tragic, because that perspective inside the joke from which Kafka looks out is not human at all.

That is where One Thousand Dollars is different. It is human. It is a tragedy. May be I am wrong, but I have come to think of tragedy as a very human perspective.

That is why Sau Crore fails. It takes Henry’s rather whimsical interrogation into human beings and tries to look at it from the outside, making a bad joke out of it that it is.

And none of this is conscious. From the movie, it is very clear that Dev Anand doesn’t appreciate enough the pathos of the story to stop from making such a mockery of it.

Considering all the crap that gets thrown at me, I know I am overreacting. But then, why shouldn’t I?