For a very long time I had made no effort to understand Shakespeare, owing principally to my belief that he was overrated. Then I saw Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet (even though I couldn’t stand Leonardo those days), which used the original text of the play without modifications (except for omissions and rearrangements).
The Baboon is finally back.
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.
– spoilers ahead –
Some Philosophy
Murder, in all its glorious mystery, can not be the story (mark the word - story, not subject) of a movie any more. The focus must lie elsewhere, in the lives of the characters, their interactions, their crisis, their interpretation of the world around them, so that when a clue is quietly slipped into a scene, the viewers’ll either miss it, or interpret it differently (reminds me of Ram Gopal Verma’s Kaun), like we all have done in the best of Agatha Christie novels. This is how Bhool Bhulaiyaa fails. It has no story. Its characters have no life (except Akshay Kumar, may be). That is also why in the end, when the mystery is over, one fails to sympathise with the emotional difficulties of the characters.
I got this picture in a forwarded mail, but it was so funny that I just had to put it here.
Read the rest »
Well, honestly, there is nothing I have to say on the tantalising victory of India over Pakistan in the final. The feeling of joy is too primitive and pure at the moment to be delved into. It will take a couple of days to settle down and it is only in retrospect that I will find something to say, which someone must have said somewhere already.
Suddenly last week, very much against my wishes, I had to go to one of the places I have least wanted to visit in all my life. I was packed off with my bags in the name of holidays, and I knew I was damned if I was going to enjoy a minute of it. This is the draft I had planned to put up before I was thrown out of my room with my Nokia 6300 and a ticket to an epidemic ridden rainy patch of land that was supposed to be beautiful.
Unfortunately, we in India don’t have free speech. We have a nice illusion of it but reasonable free speech in India doesn’t exist. Poorly implemented unclear laws and a thriving and ever increasing number of self-appointed culture polices don’t help the situation much.
Note 1: This is the official sequel to The Mail that Launched a Thousand Spams.
Note 2: To those who received the drafts - The reference to Robert Kolker was incorrect, which I discovered after going painstalkingly through his mammoth book again in an effort to quote him exactly (it contains the whole of GRE word list many times over). That would explain the delay. He said some nice insightful things though.
Note 3: This story, and its prequel, are officially declared to be ficticious accounts incorporating no characters inspired by anyone living or dead.
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