Rock Star

The movie I felt failed to capture the spirit that drives a rockstar. May be it had got to do with the expectations that you have about a sterotype rockstart..passionate, headbanging, coke snorting, suicidal drunkard. More than that I was disappointed with the unreasonableness of the plot - Why does he get thrown out of his house? Pathetic attempts at humor where he tries to act heart broken because good songs are born out of pain? Or simply his unwavering response to all situations that he finds himself in... Walk away with a serious expression on his face.. Is that his reaction to everyone and everything?? Why does the police beat him up time and again for no reason?

Among the new breed of bollywood actors Ranbir has been a little more versatile not only in the choice of his roles but his performances as well. But this was the first movie where I felt he did not do justice to his role. I felt that the director surely lacked the vision to carry on a rockstar movie. The movie started with a very good premise for a rockstar's life - " Meet me beyond the boundaries of what is right and wrong". He was supposed to carry that forward. Instead all we found was "Junglee javani" recurring again and again and again. It was fun the first time but the same theme repeatedly starts getting on your nerves. This rockstar's life seemed to be driven only by his emptiness and may be that is why the film seemed empty to me.

Putting aside the fact that it was a very lengthy movie for a movie with no plot/story, I was disappointed with the presentation as well. The non-linear movie narrative style could have worked for this movie if only people didn't get confused which timeframe is the scene based in. There seemed to be a present, a middle present, a past present and a past. I mean frankly it did not need so many back and forths.

The only saving grace for the movie seemed to be Rahman's music. But as with all his music, the first time is always a tad disappointing but overtime you learn to like it. The music grows on you. The movie is definitely not worth three hours of your life!!

The Long journey back home!!


They say "Home is where heart is". After a point in time, it is no longer at your parent's place. While you will always feel its home but you know in your heart that this feeling will pass and you will have to go back to your real home - the place where you live day in day out. You may not love it but you will always crave to be back to routine.

This time when I was travelling back to hyderabad from a short trip to Vijayawada, I had a booked an A/C sleeper at 11:30 PM in the hope of spending more time with my parents. Dad came to drop me off at the bus. The first look of the bus gave me jitters. When I had reserved an A/C sleeper, this was not what I had in mind. This was a refitted normal bus which had been converted into A/C. I had lost hope of making it early home and catching up on sleep but had no clue of what was in store.

The ride was bumpy to say the least. The A/C switched off after the first hour and not even a blower in the vicinity. Being tired I managed to fall asleep but not for long. I kept tossing in the bed wondering what was happening until I could see day light. Not bad I told myself. I was in rush for the loo and was hoping the bus would pull up at some point and slowly made my way to the driver's seat. The bus jerked a little and started making weird noises. The driver stopped momentarily and I dashed out into the green trees. I had come back relaxed only to realize that the problem was much bigger. The driver said that the fan belt was broken and he needs to get a mechanic to fix it. The signs were looking ominous. It was 7:15 in the morning.We were still 2 hrs away from Hyderabad and it usually took two more hours from the outskirts. I was beginning to get worried.

The cleaner informed us that we would be shifted to the bus from vizag. The driver set out in search of a mechanic. The clock kept ticking away. People started making frantic calls to the travel office to see if any alternate arrangement can be made. Kids and ladies were getting nervous. The more adventurous folks started taking hikes in lorries destined for Hyderabad. I knew there would come a day when I would have to travel by lorry but I was hoping today wasn't the day. Even getting into the lorry with the luggage seemed an ominous task. There were no signs of the driver. People started losing patience. It was 8 AM now and no signs of improvement.

I had made up my mind that if nothing happens in the next 15 minutes, I should get going if I had to have any hopes of making it office before lunch. Dropped a quick sms to my boss and checked with folks around as to where we were. People started talking and I got to know that we already had to stop for 2 hrs midnight because of a tyre change. I was informed by other knowledgeable passengers that we were 7-8 kms from a place called choutuppal. I didn't even know such a place existed. I got my luggage down told the cleaner not to look from me when the bus eventually got fixed. Most of my co-passenger were not so lucky to take such chances since they were travelling with kids.

I started flagging lorries to see if one of them would give me a lift till Hyderabad. After a few misses, one taxi guy stopped and asked me to get in. There was no discussion, I immediately got in with no second thoughts. I asked him where he was headed. He told me that he was going till Choutuappal and I could catch a shared auto from there. It was 8:15 AM in the morning. Not bad I told myself. Finally my travel woes seem to come to an end. But the journey was not over yet.

The driver told me that I was lucky enough that the bus stopped near a town and not near Hyderabad since it would have been next to impossible to find something. I wasn't sure what he meant but he sounded convincing. Finally he dropped in choutuppal, charged me 25 bucks for 5 kms but I was relieved that I could see people around. For a moment there I felt like I was in Hyderabad. I got into a shared auto and dropped in luggage behind the seat. The driver cramped the 9 seater with 14 members and started to move. I wasn't complaining, given the choice between a truck and the 9 seater, I told myself I was doing pretty good. It took me an hour to reach LB Nagar cross roads. I knew home was easily two hours away. I quickly checked into a city bus which took me further 1.5 hrs to reach ESI from where I hopped into another bus bound for KPHB. It was 11:30 AM by the time I set foot in my house.

It had taken me exactly 12 hrs to cover a distance, that in normal course would take not more than 6 to 6.5 hrs. But this was no normal day. The experience though not enjoyable was new for me. All in All, It was one long journey back Home - the kind I would hope not to repeat in the future. 

Signs of Ageing


The New Age Miracle ads would have you believe that dark spots, wrinkles etc are signs of ageing. But if you ask me, here are some real signs of ageing:

(1) You become a man of method rather than instinct. No longer are you a man who can follow his whims and yet not care about the outcome
(2) Discipline and timetable sort of become a way of your life. No longer can you allow yourself the luxury of random events. One slight disturbance can throw the whole day off.
(3) You need your 6 hours of sleep or end up being agitated all day long till you make up for the lost sleep,
(4) No longer do you have space for one more ice cream. You should be happy if you can eat one without worrying about the calories.
(5) Youngsters start telling you that by the time you completed your engineering they were still in school.
(6) TODO lists start becoming the order of the day. You can no longer leave office at will but have to submit yourself to the tenets of a good employee and fulfill your responsibilities even if it means being up at 12:30 in the night to attend some stupid conference calls.
(7) Everyday you enter the gym saying to yourself - "Why God Why? Do I really have to run on the treadmill?? Can't I just skip it this once??" . The next day is the same story.
(8) You are no longer sure whether your hair would turn grey first or you become bald first.
(9) You no longer have friends to hang out with.. Most of them are either married or are seeing someone.
(10) Watching late night movies is no longer an option since it will throw the entire next day schedule off.
(11) Your facebook friends hardly post any updates. Even whey they do its about an exotic location they toured this year for their honeymoon or yearly trips.
(12) Saturdays and Sundays are filled with boredom and you start inventing new hobbies to feel that you are not wasting away your life.
(13) Reading/Watching news is a must. Its on par with brushing your teeth.

All in all, if any of the above signs start manifesting then be assured that you no longer are a youngster :)

George Orwell Quotes

All Animals are Equal but some animals are more equal than others

-Animal Farm

It is not less bitter because it is perhaps one's own fault, to see onself drifting, rotting, in dishonour and horrible futility, and all the while knowing that somewhere within one there is the possiblity of a decent human being.

Oh Well, God save us from self-pity!!

-Burmese Days

Men....

Contrary to popular opinion, a man can shut out love if he so desires. However, to do so, he must free himself not only from the woman who has bewitched him but from the third person in the story : the ghost who has put tempation in his way.

-Snow by Orhan Pamuk

Love.... Must Read

Quoting Verbatim from Neil Gaiman..infact copying straight out of someone's blog :)

Have you even been in love? Horrible, isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…

You give them a piece of you. They don’t ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like “maybe we should just be friends” or “how very perceptive” turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.

Why don't I blog?

I have wondered about this question for long. The first answer that comes to my mind is I am simply lazy. That's the easy part. The other part is I am a form guy not class (for the uninitiated - read those who never watched cricket in their life) form is temporary while class is permanent). So when I am in mood I am tempted to write infact write quite a bit but in off times I behave like a guy who has nothing to do with blogging. When i try to drill own, the deeper answer lies in the fact that i wait for earth shattering events (read something out of the ordinary) something eventful/meaningful/funny etc rather than the mundane events of my existence. I can't think of anything important happening in my life for the past 6 months. May be such events don't occur that frequently after all and i have to be content and relish the little nuances of life. Simple facts such finally i am going to reignite my old passion. Well before you are off to imagine something, i am talking about resuming my tennis lessons. This was one game I was passionate about learning so passionate that i remember playing five set matches from 11 pm to 2:30 am when i could barely keep the ball in the court (with an equally talented opponent :) ). Hopefully this would be a longer affair than just a fling.

Coming back to the more important issue, may be I should write something rather than waiting for something special to happen. In fact this arose from a conversation I had with an aquaintance who confided in me that she gets excited by even small things in life that at times it renders her speechless which reminded me of my own inability to feel excited in life. I realized that I am more of a stable/inert gas which would need a really high amount of energy to get its electrons excited. Is this really how life should be led? They say life is not measured by the moments that you live but by the moments that take your breath away. You might wait all your life but those moments could be few and far in between. So I say try to make every moment count!!

On a completely unrelated topic, I have been reading quite a few blogs of late. Not an ardent follower but a follower neverthless. In fact my current form in reading habits is quite good. I completed reading Oliver Twist a few weeks back. It has been one of those which has always intrigued me but haven't been able to lay my hands on it. I like Dickens writing. In fact his slow pace is pleasant and the length to which to goes to describe the era often makes me wonder if he lived in all those places to capture such details. He goes into great length to establish his characters. I have read that he creates some of his characters from real life acquaintances which makes me appreaciate the effort further because he has taken a real human being and fitted parts of it into figments of his imagination.

The next book was "The kite Runner". I have had this book for close to an year but never dared to open it. How can someone title a book "The Kite runner"? I had no clue what it meant. But the narrative was good. I would not say gripping but it was poignant enough to keep me binded. It was like an old movie where one hardship follows the other. But the Hero in the book is falliable, vulnerable and nothing hero like. You will be able to identify with his fears. For not everyone in life is meant to be a hero. I thought he could have ended the story at different points. In some ways the ending in a larger sense is predictable and cliched but the twist towards the end felt a little overboard. But I liked the phrase - "for you a thousand times over". The first time when he uses it does not have same kind of effect. But when you read it towards the end, it makes all the sense. The next in the list is the "Sea of Poppies":. It definitely looks from a different genre and hopefully will help me maintain my form.

I now look over my pillow and watch Benjanim Graham's "The Intelligent investor" which is sort of questioning me when will i have my due. In due course is all I can say.