Maussijee Suicide

I love Sholay. My cousins and I had the cassette of Sholay which we used to play over a dozen time on our VCR during summer vacations. We had almost made a routine. Play after dinner, forward the star cast in the beginning, rewind when parents came to join us after they finished their dinner, curse the cousin for over rewinding, take the remote control, forward the songs and forward the above scene. Why? Because it's boring. Yes, even those with no source of entertainment but continually watching Sholay find suicides boring. I almost wished someone made suicides interesting. And recently, you just did. You just crossed the boundaries of real life drama. You "blogged" a suicide note and how! May be my opinion is prejudiced because I know you personally but you made us think about something that we thought was the last resort of only the sentimentally deluded. People talked. Made jokes probably. You trended. So we talked and thought and made analysis and may be even concluded but all our talks and thoughts and analyses are like looking at it from above downwards, superficial and most of all, irrelevant. There's no credibility. So the only one to present an honest account of the situation is the one who caused it in the first place. But where's the credibility even in that? Why? Because there are benefits of everything. One may even wonder if you think (carefully not using "realizes") that the social media PR agencies might take it up as a case study. Why, a thought must've crossed your mind about the extent to which this would constructively affect your popularity. I'm not saying it is a play where the trick of any publicity is good publicity can be put to use or that you will now hammer the heated iron, because I know you and I know you won't. But I am hinting that any discussion on whether this would provide you with a bigger platform is redundant, because it would. And not for any reason but because you can handle the elevated status craftily enough. I am hinting that this is also a discussion of an entirely new way to generate pecuniary PR. I mean, @dharmeshG closed his account by mistake and when he came back he became what he is. What you have done might make the aforementioned act look like an A3 size poster in your college canteen. So if I happened to write a book about any depressing topic (like the one you read last), the best way to get myself published would be to join twitter, be funny for a month or two (not without a hint of packaged "issues"), write a suicide note, come back as a hero who fought post suicidal trauma, give a few interviews, articles in newspapers and BAM! Now wait for the publishers to pounce on me like hungry hounds. I exaggerate of course, but we cannot deny the fair possibility, yes, keeping in mind that all this is just too good to be true. So anyway, why would you want to kill yourself? "Being alone enough to not consider yourself a human enough to love is an issue" you say, and all I read is "I was bored". Is not being able to understand James Joyce an issue? Is failing to make your party good enough for my super sweet 16 an issue? Sure, boredom sucks. But this is not the age to be bored. This is not the time to be bored. There's a new wave out there. You know it more than I do. You're at the peak of this wave. Create your own fear and loathing, be unsure, be enraged, be eccentric, be stubborn, break someone's head, but seriously, do something. Don't let people write preachy letters like this one. You have it in you to ride the wave. Look, you even made "suicide" interesting.

Relax machan

When we talk about parallel universes, essentially rules being weirder than exceptions, we seldom consider the peculiarities of this world. We forget how all the parallels and all the obscurities can be and most certainly will be found in this very universe. Why am I talking like this? Because I am mind fucked. I am shocked at the way people behave. And this is not a late reaction to Justin Bieber’s albums hitting platinum. It’s just that recently the people running this country have been acting like a bunch of pussies. The whole Jaipur Literature Festival thing, Taslima Nasreen again getting something to talk about, many other such embarrassing news feeds and now the fact that there could actually be an “issue” carved out of the whole ‘porn in assembly’ thing. Sorry, I refuse to call it porngate. But politicians have always behaved like spineless, greedy wolves, always pointing their cannons in the wrong direction. It’s the citizens, you and I that have pissed me off. We devote all our attentions where none is required and we display absolute lack of energy where any level of speaking up for a cause is needed.

A few days ago I mass emailed my work buddies. The subject of the email is irrelevant here. What is relevant is that I had intentionally added a few regional jokes in it. The thing is, when we were going through our training phase, we used to make fun of each others’ state. So the fact that my email had some semblance of racism, did not seem like a big deal that time. But apparently people were pissed off and I was informed about it by a display of clenched fists. Well, my email was very stupid. It was so insignificant that it shouldn't even have been read. The jokes were obviously stupid. And I obviously did not mean any of it. It was all in jest. But then why the hell is everyone reacting as if Jay Leno said something about the Golden Temple on television? Even that was supposed to be a joke. I understand why the government did what they did, but learned young minds, with future of the country in their hands, acting like a bunch of Bajrang Dal activists? It’s preposterous, to say the least, especially when they have no vote bank politics to take care of. And when what they’re outraging about, is absolute bull crap, then, especially then, this whole talk of moral indignation due to someone’s racism seems forced. It seems like an act of someone who is bored and was only waiting for something like this to happen, so he can prove his significance or rather, his existence in an act of such desperation. These moral naiveties and half cooked, confused sensibilities are exactly the kind of things Indian people and Indian culture has suffered from. Even if we forget about the political implications, this still is anti-free speech. So please, my fellow young Indians, let there be racial humor. Let there be cross cultural jokes. Let the priest be a pedophile and the Sardar a dumbass, at least for the sake of harmless comedy, because we all know these things don’t matter.

Fan-boy blabber: Agneepath (2012)

Before I don the self proclaimed movie reviewer's cloak, let me ramble in my who-am-i-to-review-and-shit guilt and say that if nothing, Agneepath has accomplished 2 very essential things as a Bollywood movie. First, it has shown everyone exactly how to do a remake, i.e. keep the strong aspects of the original intact but always add a few fresh notes so that it does not sound like the same old song. Thank you Karan Malhotra for not doing a bad job. Second thing is the way Agneepath despite being an overly dramatic typical Bollywood flick never comes off as that. Agneepath is a cult movie. Like it or not, it falls into the category of all the recent box office record breakers, in which the writers expected the audience to either keep their brains at home or not believe in the laws of Newtonian Physics. While creators of Agneepath do not ask for a theater full of cows, they do hope that the Indian people will be awed enough by the other cinematic qualities that they won't mind overlooking a few glitches in the plot. And do we get awed enough? Well, if you like some Masala in your movie, then yes.

So Agneepath is the much known revenge saga of our angry young man Vijay who watches his father get murdered by the same gaon walas, who he had spent a lifetime caring for. Ha! Predictable, inane and outmoded but for me, a perfect remake. There will definitely be two types of people in the theater. One, who would be waiting, fingers crossed for Hritik Roshan to deepen his voice and say "Vijay Dinanaath Chauhan" through entire course of the movie and the other, well, who won't be doing that. I was the former. And how does it feel when he actually says it? To be frank, it felt forced. Yet I loved the fact that he did it in his own way and did not even try for that matter to copy the original, which we all know is as imitable as the 'boy with a pipe' by Picasso.

Agneepath, from start to end, is intense. Intense action, intense characters, intense tension between the characters, intense drama and an intense item number. The director was gambling on the high dose of typical Bollywood drama coupled with fantastic acting performances and delightful song sequences with brilliant choreography.

As much as I want to talk about Hritik first, I cannot do that because the first position must go to our very own legend, Rishi Kapoor. I mean, wow. Like, wow. His performance alone should fetch Agneepath a few rating stars. And the best part is that it was a new character, absent in the original script. So kudos to the director or whoever thought of it. Rishi Kapoor did an incredible job as Rauf Lala, the kingpin of Mumbai's prostitute and drug market and the crime godfather of apna hero Vijay. It really was pleasurable to watch him perform. Hritik Roshan as always, looked prepared and because of his sharp facial features, flawless in his own version of Vijay. The only problem is that the guy is too good looking for the role. There, I said it. But don't call me gay already, because later I am going to be extolling the makeup artists as well. Sunjay Dutt, as expected, fit perfectly in the pants (or dhoti) of this nightmare on mandwa street. Priyanka Chopra, apart from desperately seeking screen space, was perfect in whatever little she was supposed to do, which basically was the role of heroines in the 80s/90s, i.e. add some glam-n-glitz and entertain, whenever the audience gets bored of watching the same angry faces all over the big screen.

So bhaiyon aur behno, if chikni chameli's pointlessness irritates you then may be try wanking off over the technicalities like Vijay's young sister shiksha actually looking her age; how the upper lip hair wasn't removed to let her be a school kid she was and not a pre-teen sex siren and how the sets and locations were really worked hard upon. Movie Nazis will always argue that these things are expected with a big budget film but if we never leave a chance to slam them then why not laud when they deserve it.

And to those who only ask one question, "Katrina hot hai ki nai?", I suggest you go in the second half. Agneepath is as tight as Bollywood can get. Watch it to revisit apna pehle wala Bollywood.