Cool Pool

XO

Mental State - FURIOUS!

Opponent: TG
Game1:
Result: Won 15-11
The good: hit some good shots; overhead smash from back wall to corner worked well.
The bad: was up 14-6 before losing 5 points in a row to some good serves.
Extraneous factors: none
Mental note: Watch the serves carefully; try to keep him in the rear left corner; work harder towards the end to finish off games.

Game 2:
Result: Lost 15-6
The good: none
The bad: very bad shots; shots from back wall went into the ground a lot; complete lack of concentration; trembling arms
Extraneous factors: Energy level took a deep dive at end of game 1.
Mental note: Eat bananas half hour before leaving, not earlier; don't go over 10 minutes in cardio


Hopefully the new racquet will help.

Drool Quotient - High

Journey of a few strings

Ordered a racquetball racquet and shoes recently. Being a cheapskate who believes that shipping charges should be made illegal, I opted for free ground shipping which takes FIVE BUSINESS DAYS to arrive!! While I wait for the package hoping that the contents would automagically elevate my game to atleast a C minus from the ZZ minus minus level natural talent that pitaji has proudly passed onto betaji, here is its journey so far...


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I Spy

I think I'm an idealist, and a very stupid one at that
Tall women freak me out; I find short women endearing
I've had the good fortune of having wonderful managers throughout my short career and I'm very grateful for it
I hate shampooing; it always reminds me that I'm losing hair
I love to sing and wish I was better at it
Whenever I get into a nice rhythm at work I take a break to watch a sitcom or read the news; this habit is proving to be very bad for my career
I wish I knew myself better
I'm always cold and I hate ceiling fans
I still think of myself as too young and immature; this sometimes prevents me from having an intelligent conversation with people
I am a comedy freak and love to watch sitcoms. I watch them over and over again until I know every dialogue from every episode from every season by heart
I'll be the quietest person in the room until the conversation shifts to politics or movies
I get emotionally attached to people and workplaces and this makes me take irrational decisions sometimes
I listen to a song I like over and over and over again until I can't listen to it anymore.
I wish I would get a chance to act in a play, but am too scared of doing anything about it
I think men are just better at driving than women
I get annoyed when people keep saying they will go back to India to settle but never do
I wish I was more organised
I think that I am in the wrong profession
I wish I could write better; I'm jealous of people who write interesting blogs
I avoid confrontation even if I'm convinced I'm right; this has led to some unwanted complications
I sometimes judge people too quickly
I spend 20 hours of my day in front of my laptop; I'm aware I need to get a life
I hate it that I keep postponing getting back into shape; I'm using the word 'back' liberally
I love New York and call it home even though people make fun of me for it
My favorite song is 'Chaiyya Chaiyya'. I have been listening to it atleast once a day since it released in 1998. That works out to approximately 3650 times so far
I don't subscribe to any religion; I don't like it when people automatically assume I'm a Hindu. I think its disrespectful to Hinduism
I think jokes based on race are hilarious
I did NOT like Swades. SRK ruined it for me
I was a huge SRK fan in the 90s; I have grown up since
I am very competitive and find it difficult to just 'take it easy'
I can come across as very cynical
I hate it when someone hijacks my conversation
I am stubborn, I refuse to conform and I don't listen. I want to do my own things, take my own time figuring the rights from wrongs and in the process discover myself. My life in the past few years has been a journey of self discovery and self realization, a journey at breakneck speed
I think I have a light skin fixation
I believe every person should read "My Experiments with Truth" by Gandhi atleast once. It changed my outlook and thinking for the better
I hate people who blame Gandhi for India's problems
I continue to await that phone call that will tell me that everything's ok with the world; I'll wait as long as I have to

Chha Gaya Mujhpe Jaadu!

A Rajasthani folk number from Dev D. Makes for very soothing listening on long drive. Enjoy in high quality!

Devdas learns to Rock

Woke up one fine morning and did the first thing that I do each day - open up timesofindia.com. Scrolling down to bottom left, I saw that the review of Dev D was posted. I had high expectations from this movie, considering it was made by Anurag Kashyap and had Abhay Deol in it. I had just finished watching Oye Lucky Lucky Oye a few days back and was very impressed by the guy. So I click on the review and to my utter surprise, Dev D got 5 stars. The last time a movie got 5 stars in the Times was Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. This was 10 years back. I follow reviews by the Times religiously. They are very close to my taste. I especially like the fact that they are generous in their ratings, and, like me, appreciate the hard work that goes in making a movie. Even crappy run-of-the-mill movies get atleast 2 stars, unlike Rajeev Masand who is very mean. Anyways, after the review, Dev D was a movie that I was NOT gonna miss for anything in the world.

After waiting for about a month, I finally got a chance to watch the movie, and that too in a theatre. Was really excited.

Now for the review - long story short, the movie deserves 5 stars. Fantastic movie, brilliant acting, awesome music, and a happy ending! There is not a single thing more I could ask from a movie. The movie falls in the musical category with not less than 18 songs in it. But relax, they are not your typical song and dance routines. Instead they are playing in the background most of time time, and fit in really really well in the movie. My favorite song incidentally is Dhol Yaara Dhol, which is also very well picturised on the pretty Mahie Gill. Ok, coming to Mahie Gill - what a find! This woman can seriously act. She is very attractive, has good screen presence, and is confident. She oozes this raw sexuality without wearing any revealing clothes or mouthing explicit lines. Abhay Deol is turning out to be the poster-boy of alternative/multiplex cinema. The guy can act, likes to take risks, and does it all without seeming to have to try very hard. He plays the modern day Devdas better than anyone else could have. Kalki Koechlin does an awesome job as well. The movie is written to perfection. Looks trippy to perfection. It avoids cinematic pitfalls and shows perhaps the most honest version of Devdas so far. Some scenes that stand out are the ......ok I don't think I'm doing enough justice to how good this film really is. So here is a review that I really liked and says everything that the writer in me wanted to say -

I've always thought Devdas could only be told in black and white. For it is a bunch of flabbergastingly unidimensional characters -- drunkard, pining lover, courtesan -- that populate Sarat Chandra Chatterjee's essentially simplistic story, remarkable only for its wonderfully amoral, irredeemable titular protagonist.

Ushering colour into these monochromatic silhouettes has proved to be disastrous thus far, but Anurag Kashyap trailblazes in with a defiant new version that has only one aim, that to make your jaw drop.

Coolth drips from every frame, but we already knew this director as a man of extreme visual flair, and with trusted cinematographer Rajeev Ravi by his side, there was never any doubt that a film about a drugged-up Dev would look trippy beyond belief.

Kashyap's real surprise lies in the way he makes the story work, about how he avoids cinematic pitfalls and makes perhaps the most honest version of the character. In Dev D, Abhay Deol isn't charming like Dilip Kumar or melodramatically tragic like Shah Rukh Khan, but he is the character as he should be: the scumbag.

Nine minutes into Dev D, you realise that the director isn't aiming at an emotional connect with the hero, but instead trying to alienate you from him entirely. Gulping down that fact (with Thums Up or Coke, as you prefer) helps you kick back and revel in this utterly unconventional, marvellously immodest film.

Look, it's not as if you don't connect with any of them -- both the women traverse extreme character graphs -- but Dev himself is a wastrel you're really just meant to feel sorry for, and kinda sidle away from if he tries to borrow fifty bucks off you.

On seeing raunchy JPEGs of Paro on his computer, Dev breaks into a grin and Anurag stealthily switches languages, having his hero say 'Paro, main aa raha hoon' instead of its English, inevitably innuendo'd counterpart. Vile and violent are both muted and amplified unpredictably in the film, and a dialogue-switch like the one above shows us a director not just confident of his script, but trusting enough that his audience get the line without actually saying it and making them wince.

Enough such behind-the-obvious cleverness abounds in the film, and while there are many that might cringe at the film's three-hour running length, the best way to consume this long tall glass of cinema is by staying chilled. Dev D's real hero is responsible for this, and despite what the posters might tell you, that isn't Abhay Deol but the film's musicman, the astonishing Amit Trivedi who constantly juggles angst and allusion, profanity and pensiveness to make an awesomely heady cocktail that elevates the film itself to another level. The film's 18-song soundtrack is the narrative, really, bestowing the film with depth and nudging us, as viewers, in the right emotive direction even when the actors and lines themselves fail to get the job done. He's a master, this Trivedi, and the way Kashyap's used his songs is wonderfully appropriate, especially the rock version of Emotional Atyachaar.

Invariably sensory as the overall experience is, the film has its share of drawbacks. Stopping well short of revealing little scenes and details the joy of which should ideally be experienced first hand, I must wholeheartedly recommend you going to see this movie before pointing out its warts. Flaws hide in occasional lines, snatches of dialogue that seem forced, especially in a film that stays so close to the ground.

It's a stylistically arched world and not the one you and I live in, granted, but this is exactly why any deviation into filminess jars so painfully on the nerves. Let us not forget the film's Chanda, Kalki Koechlin and her strained dialogue delivery, responsible for the film's weakest moments, and even though she grows on you in the second half when bouncing off Abhay, she does let the film down.

Mahie Gill, on the other hand, is absolutely super. As Paro (short for Parminder), she creates a character to connect with and admire, a ballsy free-spirit well in touch with her sexuality and delightfully unbridled of tongue. Naive at first, her Paro goes from eagerly laying mattresses in fields to giving Dev the cruellest of verbal spankings. Utterly befuddled here stands Dev, a broken man helplessly in love with a married woman, and Deol plays this reasonably well. Reasonably, we say, because the man truly does not have much to do. Abhay takes on an admittedly brave role and does it adequately, but save for a couple of scenes -- watch out for a particularly priceless moment with a bus ticket -- all he has is substance-abuse, chewing gum and, well, gham.

Greatness in terms of character-building, however, lies in the delectably smarmy pimp, played by Dibyendu Bhattacharya, a man who hands Dev his drugs and literally carries him to the courtesan's fuchsia bed. Chunni, they call him, and the character is the coolest analogy the film draws alongside the original text.

Hubris dominates the overall proceedings -- remember, this is not a bad thing by default -- but while Kashyap excels when he's going all-out, there are sequences when he decides to slow down, to explain, to simplify. Evidently he gives the audience credit but not quite enough, and looking at his track record, it's easy to see why.

Even so, this is a rather radical project, a film that could well have done more but accomplishes far more than enough, and I think the only reason we expect even greater things is that it really, really whets our appetite.

Randomness happens often in our newly-experimental cinema, but it's always great to see a film where no detail is an accident, where the director gets to execute his vision exactly as he wants -- and this seems pretty darned close.

See Dev D once, get bombed, see it again.

Yes. I will see it again. Soon.

Uncalled-for Personal Attacks

A distinct trait shown mostly by 'desis' is their habit of converting any discussion into a personal attack. I was looking around for a good example of this before writing anything just to see whether it was just a personal feeling or whether it is actually happening to people all around.

So this friend of mine writes a blog about how she liked (loved) Delhi-6 and Saawariya, two movies that haven't found favor with the critics or the audiences alike. A friend of hers (her?) reads the blog, and leaves a comment which starts with the words "Have you gone mad??" Now I really don't get why an opinion about a movie should be turned into a question about whether the person is mentally stable or not. The movies were not that bad (I loved both the movies quite frankly, and agree with the writer's reviews), but even if they were, the fact that the person loves the movies does not in any way reflect on the 'madness' of her mind. (the two may be best friends in real life, and I'm not trying to make a statement about their relationship at all. This is just a social observation).

When you discuss politics with another desi, it invariably turns into a yelling contest. Its the law of the jungle out there when you meet someone with different political views than yours. A harmless discussion about a current affairs topic will, in most cases, turn into a personal attacks contest ranging from "tum saale pseudo-secular log", to "tum logon ko gulami ki aadat pad chuki hai", to other colorful ones which will not be printed.

I have learnt, after years of being put down because of my taste in music, movies, sitcoms, political views, world views, hairstyle, dressing style, affections, posture, cooking etc. that its best to keep your opinions to yourself. Its rare to find people who will not stray from the topic, and not take a personal offense to anything and everything that comes out of you. I am fortunate to have a few friends like this in my life, and its a pleasure talking to them and having light hearted banter with them, and then going out for tandoori chicken afterwards. With the others, I follow the policy of non-confrontation, and non-discussion.

10 years on...

This goes out to you -

Tum ho to, hai sab haasil,
Tum nahi, to kya hai yahan,
Tum ho to hai sapnon ke jaisa haseen ek samaa