My Photo blog

Guys I just started a photo blog...

Am planning to update it atleast once in a week. Let's see ;)
Click http://jonpics.blogspot.com

CASA BIANCA

[Sorry last pic was removed to protect individual privacy :( ]

So many Idiots

My friends in metros across India tell me that going for a movie will cost you cool 300-500-1000 bucks. Unmistakably almost all the Indian films today concentrate on the upper middle, its market. Out of every 100-200 movie made in B-wood each year only 1-2 movies are worth its over-priced ticket. But if you have got a date and if he/she is hot enough to show off or if you are quite sure that experiences in the dark cinema halls are going to be worth it, then may be the price of ticket and pop-corn is going to be worth it.

I didn’t mean to say that 3 idiots is a worthless movie. In fact I am not going to write about 3Is at all. I am going to write about someone who came to watch the movie and someone who didn’t.

I met Geri during the most colourful years of my life. 18 is the age when everything around seems beautiful. Your relationship with a girl balances precariously on sisterhood, friendship and love. 18 is the age when you dare to cross the boundaries your dad sets. You dare to take a different stand on sexuality, morality, faith and religion. To be a rebel is to be cool and T-shirts of Che fills up your wardrobe.

Geri was undoubtedly the most beautiful girl in our engineering class. Except long hair she had all the qualities of a ‘dream-girl’- hour glass figure, fair skin, a certain level of sensuality. Guys stood in queue to woo her. Stories spread that she was already someone else’s. I being a shameless, self-confessed flirt praised her looks, her white salwar kameez and her big, steel coloured ear-rings. Anyways someone else took the courage to propose and got dumped immediately.

She was one among the rare specimen of women who has the combination of brain and beauty. She got selected into a company in a field close to her engineering specialization.
I was seeing her for the first time after graduation. The matinee show of 3 Idiots was about to start. Her hour glass figure become curvier and she still retains the sensuality. I asked her what she was doing.

To my surprise she got into Tata Institute of Social Sciences and had been selected into Coco Cola.

Ron was a typical geek. He never watched TV. He never knew what went around in the world. His only dealings were with physics, chemistry and mathematics. He got into one of the most prestigious institutions in the country. He got into L&T as a mechanical engineer. Last heard he resigned the job and is preparing for IAS.

When Geri said she is into Cola I was surprised. I had no doubts about her academic capabilities. But it’s still a pleasant surprise to hear that someone you knew made it big. I told this to my friend VR. He is a socialist with lush beard.
‘So after 4 years of Engineering she starts selling soft drinks’. It struck me that it was true.


The current Indian graduates, including me, have made the exercise called graduation a waste of four years of our life, huge waste of someone else’s hard earned money and waste of public resources. We have no clue about what we are studying for, for whom we are studying and the ultimate goal we aim to achieve.

At the end of four years we realize we are not made up for it and ultimately end up selling mobile phones, soft drinks, movie tickets etc. Yes, there will be a hefty pay packet and fancy job positions but ultimately that is the job you do at the end of the day.
And should a person qualify into administrative positions in the country simply because he is academically brilliant? It’s just a food for thought.

The 99% of seats in prestigious professional institutions are cornered by well to do family members. So ultimately opportunities of less fortunate people are denied.
And do they switch from job to job or from one specialization to other or go for ‘higher studies’ in some unknown college for the passion of it. No it’s because of the insecurity felt when some friend of yours earns a couple of bucks more.

Yes my dear friend, money is the only material that motivates us.

A better gift...

So a Friday comes again. Like any other 'simple minded' professional I love Fridays. I cruise through Fridays with the hope that I will get to spend my weekends in 100% pure, unadulterated fun.

Doing laundries are the only spoilers to these two days. My colleagues wouldn't take it kindly if I wear unwashed and unkempt shirts to the office. So a weekend without laundries is an unrealistic dream.

I was emptying the laundries into the washing machine when this beautiful scent knocked me off my senses. For a moment I wondered the reason behind the beautiful scent from the sweaty clothes. Then it hit me.

I realized I had made the right choice.

I never knew buying a gift for a girl was this difficult. She mentioned her birthday during a casual chat a long time back. I was determined to surprise her with something as beautiful as her.

So I looked out for some expert advice. I boast of a gang of male friends who are losers equaling me regarding feminine matters. The only exception being Vattu who had fleeting romances with number of girls and in the end got his balls almost eaten up (altogether a different story). So I turned for advice to a handful of female friends. Teddy bears seemed to be the most popular gift in market nowadays.

I set out to a popular mall nearby a few days before her birthday. Christmas was drawing near. The mall was crowded with the Christmas crowd hustling to buy gifts for their loved ones.

I roamed around the gifts section. The racks were filled with all kind of fancy items- functionally useless, beautiful to look at and coming with a heavy price tag. I hated gifts that had no much use except to be displayed as a show case item. That is why I was reluctant about Teddies too. There were ladies purses, birthday cards, coffee mugs with good inscriptions, fancy jewellery etc. She loves fancy jewellery and she wore not-so-expensive but aesthetically fabulous stuff. But soon I realized I am sure to make a pathetic choice. I should have brought along an expert. Years down the line I do not want her laughing at a stupid piece of jewellery which turned into an antique piece of furniture. Coffee mugs are for college kids and ladies purses were too expensive.

The gift shopping which was supposed to last for a few minutes dragged on for hours with me roaming aimlessly around in the mall. I went to the arts section. The paintings were not that of a good taste and not fit for a birthday girl. The sculptures looked too formal. I moved on to the music section. Since there were no exotic items, I moved on.

I came on to the cosmetic section. She doesn't wear much cosmetics and looks beautiful without. Then the thought struck me about perfumes. The Sales girl was more than eager to help. Her mannerism suggested desperation to sell. She gave me a few sample scents to smell.

Seeing my unruly hair and dirty dress, she asked me how costly I expected the perfumes to be.

Unusual questions confuses me. '350 bucks'.

She looked around helplessly. 'The prices starts from 650, sir'.

I stood, more confused. She didn't stop. She came up with more offers like 'Buy one, get one free'

Prices are not coming down. I told her that I will back in a minute and made an escape to the Teddy bear section again. I was determined to pick out a teddy bear.

I stood there and scrutinized the teddies. It seems all the teddy bears are from the same family. No much difference expect in the outfits they wear. And the prices are too inflated. Teddy bears are trend of the season I think.

Seeing no point in buying a gift half heartedly I rushed back to perfume section and picked out a perfume that had a blue covering. Its scent was slightly heavy. But since it was priced right I went ahead and brought it. There was a slight apprehension that whether the quality and price would match.

I went ahead to the cards section. The guy there was a contradiction. He didn't seem to be interested if the customers needed any help. I was running short of time. The good cards looked old with dog ears. Luckily I got one that looked awesome with a handmade look.

I got them to wrap the gift in shining red wrapper after making double sure that price tag was torn off.

So the morning of birthday I presented her the gift and waited eagerly for the feedback. I got it in evening when she took it out and perfumed my cuffs.

Even after days of mixing with other sweaty shirts the scent hasn't worn off. So my friends, sweet friends spreads your life with sweetness even when the situations around gets bitter. So I guess perfumes are a good choice of gifts for a sweet person.

The name of the perfume was NIKE. I believe it's the Greek goddess of Love.

Afterword: I rechecked and found out it's goddess of victory....sigh!!

My New year resolutions

Tapping from keyboards, mouse clicking away and animated discussions- I am witnessing the usual scenes again. But these sounds are driving me deeper and deeper into frustration. Does anyone care about me, sinking deeper and deeper into the black hole? Everything’s fine as long as you get the dough credited at the end of the month.

It seems that guy sitting next to me do nothing except work. Never saw him go for lunch or tea. Does he use the loo? The question I hate to ask him ‘How did your weekend go dude?’. Obviously he would have spent the quality time in his cubicle.

So here I am sitting desperately crawling to see light at the end of tunnel. I pick up my mobile and SMS my distress friend, Zara.
Yes, she is there and I pour out my frustration. No, she is not any Ms. Agony Aunt. But she is good at dwelling on the brighter side of life. How stupid and inconsiderate of me to tell her about the travails of a professional life when she has got no job of her own.

As usual she expertly steered the topic to things we would have loved to do- writing, reading, more movies…
Out of the blue came the question ‘So, what is your new year resolutions?’.

Wow!! What about that? I have never done a resolution except during the school years. And I made sure that resolutions were forgotten after a couple of months.
But this time around I desperately need to make some resolutions if it gives me some directions. I want these resolutions to make 2010 livable and lovable.

The big question in front of me is- should I be part of the crowd or should I stick out? I look around me to find softies doing their certifications, attending trainings, burning their midnight oil in front of their computer. May be I should develop a fear for pink slip. I come late to the office, browse through all the unblocked sport sites, blog, leave early, spend hours for lunch, nap after lunch, phone friends, give a shit about the technical junk and worst of all stare shamelessly at the married and committed women. But I am pretty happy here.
So here goes the resolutions I am going to make

a. From the beginning I had this feeling that I have been misplaced here. Find out the things you are passionate about and chase your passions no matter what the cost.
It’s not that easy to do considering that you are not sure about your passions. So I am rephrasing my statement.

Find out your true passion

b. I don’t know exactly what made me take up blogging. It must be a potent mixture of boredom, faint hope that I will be able to write well. Besides it is very easy to start a blog in blogger.

Another one of my resolution is to graduate from blogger to writer. Do not blog for comments. Do not blog for followers. Maintain the quality each time, every time.

c. May be it’s the absence of camera in our home that made me crazy about photographs. I used to stare at the photos appearing in magazines. Photos have the ability to tell a story by themselves. So as soon as I could afford it I went ahead and brought a camera.

Now there is lot of hard work to be done. I want to be good with the angles and lights. I will have to be fast with my camera (moments never wait). I will have to travel places and get the best snaps. By the end of 2010 I will be looking forward to owning an SLR.

d. One of the best gifts my folks gave (indirectly) was the habit of reading. My dad is averse to cable channels and movies. So the only time-pass I could choose was reading. To tell the truth my dad has a poor taste for books. So I had to sneak most of my books in. As soon as I finished my school I literally fought with my folks to get a membership in the public library. I was looking forward to the Famous Five, Secret Seven kind of stuff. Seeing the red and green bound books stacked on the shelf neatly piled opened a new world to me. I shifted from detective novels to good works in literature, history. Recently, because of a sweet friend of mine, I started out into the golden age of Malayalam literature. During my college years I paid a visit to a friend of mine. He is a softie too with a 6 figure salary and his main hobby is to collect books and DVDs (only originals- no pirated no Indian editions). Seeing his huge collection of books I promised myself that I will buy myself a collection.
The first thing I learnt when I began the book collection was that never judge a book by its cover. After some initial blunders my book collection is progressing with low cost good ones. The biggest blunder was getting ‘The argumentative Indian’. I realize I haven’t grown up to Amartya Sen yet.

So the next resolution is to keep up the collection and keep reading good books consistently.

e. After a brief encounter with religious authorities Bheemapally is back with their pirated movies. The sad part is there are no pornos anymore.
Watch some good movies, classics and some bad ones too.

f. Learn the guitar and strum out the John Denver songs. The main purpose is to woo good looking girls.

g. Date some hot girl.

h. Build a hot and attractive physique (Farhan Akhthar is my role model).

i. Last but not the least- Find another job

So these are the New Year resolutions I came up with. The list can be subjected to further scrutiny and modifications
God help me to see the list come true.

J

Who am I? What am I? Are we spiritual beings which comes into the world with human body attached to it?

We are so acquainted with our bodies right from our birth. We identify ourselves with our physical body. People are ready to spend anything on their body to preserve it and keep it safe.

What if I wake up one day with a part of me missing? Or what if some part of me refuses to obey my commands? I can't imagine myself there.

I still don't know the reason why I connected with him so fast. May be it's the similarity in our names. I will call him by J. J was studying in the tenth standard when Cancer struck him. J's parents were doctors and they resigned their jobs and shifted to the capital for his treatment. I had never seen him and only knew him through his grandfather. A young kid developing blood cancer was bit tough for me to contemplate.

Taking a break from his studies J started his treatment. He seemed to be on the road to recovery when his doctors found out that the cancer started raising its tentacles yet again. The bad part was that his arm was in danger of amputation. A costly operation was done to save his arm. But fate was unkind yet again. They had to amputate his arm.

We had heard of and seen videos of brave people fighting back to life after really bad accidents. But when some kid we knew lost his arm, it sent out a shock wave in the community. The toughest challenge such a person would face is the community itself.

1. 'Good-hearted' people smothering them with sympathy. Sympathy is one of the useless emotions in English dictionary.
   
2. Judges who try to figure out why this malady happened. Irrespective of their facial expression or voice tone they will obviously be deriving secret pleasure from taunting others.
   
3. People staring at them as if they haven't seen such a specimen.
   

I saw him for the first time after the amputation. I had the picture of a scrawny kid. But he was well built (almost as tall as me). The hair was trimmed short. He looked healthy except for his arm. His physical appearance unsettled me since I was not prepared for that.

With some difficulty his folks got him admitted into a private school in the city. The authorities were hesitant at first. No one is sure if it was his fellow school mates who taunted him or if he couldn't adjust with the environment. In a class of 60 if you are the only one without an arm there will be some problem for obvious reasons. His conditions deteriorated. What started as a mental agony spread to his body. The supposedly dead cancer cells reappeared in his lungs.

One night I got a message that J passed away after a long struggle with cancer.

Palerimanickyam- A review

I was standing at the theatre complex proud at having made a choice of coming here (elated by the feeling that I am going to resurrect the Indian film industry from its shackles). There was this 'Rocket Singh' being shown in a different theatre in the same complex. Girls in skin tight outfits and ram-rod-straight hair were queuing up for their tickets. Needless to say, I was tempted to move on to the next queue. What if I got to sit near a beau? What if we start dating? But still with great resoluteness I didn't move from my queue. It's a great surprise to me that a production house with one flop after another manages to get the dates of the big stars, the prime spot in media and not the least the audience in the opening show.

The entire Indian film industry has fallen trap to laws of market. You produce only what the consumer needs. But sadly the need of the consumer is also decided by the producer. Maximum profits, that is the ultimate goal.

In the movie hall I searched for a seat far away from the college crowd. Thankfully I got one. Starting from the way credits appeared on the screen the movie promised to be different. There was an assortment of scenes showing a woman giving birth, a woman getting raped, a man being drowned. The opening simply captivated the entire hall. In fact the viewer picturise the big story in his mind within these few seconds. The method in which the entire exercise was depicted and the camera angles conveyed a big message in a short time. You will never feel such raw human passions with the minimum exposure. So my first set of applause to the cinematographer Manoj Pillai. In fact he is the star of the film.

Before going further let me give you the story in a capsule. It's about Haridas (Mammootty) who comes in to investigate the murder that happened in his village some 50 years ago. The murdered lady is Manickyam living in the village of Paleri- hence the name.

Mammootty appears in multiple roles and for the first time the main Mammootty appears as a 52 year old man with a broken family. (The real age almost)

The protagonist moves into investigate a crime that happened in the village the day he was born. He has got an assistant (cum girlfriend) with him. She too is a lady with broken marriage.

Although Haridas says he is drawn to the case by the nightmares haunting him, the viewer suspects that there is more to it than the bad dreams. So here Renjith pulls out the rabbit from his hat. If you are planning to watch a crime thriller you watch every other day, better change the plans. There is more to it than the crime. There are a lot of undercurrents in the movie. You will see the social, political, emotional and sexual scenarios of the 50's. The crime is interwoven with the dogmas of the society that day.

My second set of applause to director and playwright Renjith. He has been proving himself again and again in the last few movies he has done. After a long time I felt that a director is the hero of his movie. Renjith has written his name along with the best in the field. The movie is totally unconventional with many ideas out of the box. The screenplay moves in a leisurely pace. There are no many gaps in the script. Unlike the rest, female part of the cast has got plum roles and the sexuality is beautifully and sensuously shown.

In fact never before had I experienced living through the period while watching a period movie. I felt the experience here (equal credits to cinematographer). The colour tone set for the 50's gave it the smell of olden times. So when the scenes moved from the 50's to the 2000's we felt the shift – from a village caught up in the dogmas to a fast developing mini town.

Kerala was moving in from the 'village ruled by landlord' system to the democratic governance when a woman was brutally raped and murdered. Mammootty dons the role of evil landlord. Hey, I had thought that like all the super hero movies he will turn good in the end. But it doesn't happen. My third set of applause for Mammootty who shows the courage to play an evil man (evil landlord Haaji) and does it superbly too.

We see the birth pangs of democracy here. The common man desperately needs a change but the inertia of tradition still holds it back.

There is the hope for a new tomorrow for a young barber. He dreams of a future where the proletariat will hold the keys of to its own future under the shadow of first communist government under EMS. But his dream gets shattered on seeing the alleged nexus between the party leaders and the evil landlord, Haaji.

Here is a social set up in which the landlords are gods for the tenants. The reason why I used 'God' is because the landlord decides the entire course of the tenant's life right from the birth The profession he should choose, the wages he has to work with, the woman he should marry are all decided by his god, the landlord. In fact he will have to present his own wife if the landlord fantasizes her. Seeing the movie I felt a relief that we are living in a different era. But still couldn't help noticing the similarity with our times when people with money has the power to decide the lives of people with little money.

Male domination over the fairer sex is shown realistically. My fourth set of applause for Swetha. I had the view that she is just a sex doll. But the way she did the character of old village prostitute proves way beyond doubt her acting prowess.

Women are supposed to stay in the framework set to them by the society and if she strays out, she is labeled as an outcaste. Haaji uses Chiru for his pleasure and is thrown away later. She becomes the village prostitute with an idiot son. Later she has to marry off his son to another girl whom Haaji develops a fantasy on, knowing fully well that she will have to present her daughter-in-law to Haaji. Justice and equal rights are terms excluded from the dictionaries of these people.

The deterioration of socialist ideologies is the favorite subject of many directors nowadays. The teaming up with land owning class for the capital is shown in such a way that viewer has to take the stand rather than the director doing it for him. Like every other organization party needs capital to grow and the way it gets to the capital is a relevant issue even to this day.

'I am neither a communist nor a believer, just a barber', some dialogue that rings in our ears.

So much for the positives. Now what I didn't like about the movie.

The climax was something that entirely took away the beauty of the film. What was the need for Mammootty to be cast in a third role if the director was not confident of putting the same actor in two roles in a single frame. It could have been subtly done. The otherwise good technical film fails towards the climax part.

Mammootty who drew applause for the evil Haaji failed as the main character, Haridas. Mammootty could not sink into the role of Haridas. The man famous for voice modulation looked as if reading in Haridas' dialogues.

Malayalam has to look out for newer dubbing artistes. For every heroine who can't speak Malayalam, dubbing is done by a particular artiste in every movie (I don't know the name). The sad part is the dub is too good for the heroine who can barely act and the voice looks fake. This happened with the crime analyst. I think it would have been great if the dubbing artiste reduced the intensity keeping in mind the less talented actor.

The film was a great experiment. To say the story about an investigation of a crime that happened 50 years ago is a tough task. There were no characters from the period left alive to tell the story. No sudden twists in between. The 90% of story is narrated by Mammootty or Siddique. This can lead to boredom. But when thinking about it again, there is no other way for telling such a story.

May be someone else would find a better way to tell the story, but Renjith would forever be the brave one who tried this out. Way to go!!!