Shantaram....

The name 'Shantaram' would put off a person of maharashtrian descent (no offense intended to the Shantarams of the world) due to its old world 'charm' (or the lack of new world charm...if you know what I mean) Having said that, I had been reading up on reviews of a book by the same name by an unknown author "Gregory David Roberts" (Coming to think about it...I like to go for unknown authors rather than the David Dhawan's of the book world...gives my bookshelf a more eclectic blend...and a stack of half read books....coz some of em are booooring) for quite some time....Finally I decided to take the plunge...(For those of you who don't know my reading habits...it takes me lot of thinking and maybe a bout of spontaneous impulse to pick up or order a book) and order this book.

So I got 'Shantaram' by UPS and the first thing that I noticed was "Man is this heavy or What?"..(suitably punished for not paying attention to the world hardcover)..Whats the second thing?...well "Holy Cow this is so Thickkk!!!"....It took me a while to finally pick it up from my shelf at 11 pm....and Guess what?...I still had it in my hands at 2 am.....(For those of you who can finish a book in a night....I don't sail in the same boat as u...bite me!!!...and besides this is the longest book that I have read in my career - barring the Engineering books I supposedly read of course)

Getting back on the saddle of the horse (cool phrase huh?)....Personally I prefer books which can paint the scene in front of the reader and the characters are enlivened into speaking the written word...As guessed from the fact that I am writing a blog about it, this book not only satisfies this requirement, but goes way beyond......rarely does one come across a book which has a good story which is well written and has words which are music to the ears...(whats that?)...phrases that compel the reader to backtrack them and say "Wow!!! Thats so cool or hot or groovy or whatever your buzz word is"...(I have read books wherein I have had to backtrack and say "Huh! whats that supposed to mean?"...Fury - Salman Rushdie being one of them...now you know I am a literary bumpkin)...My favorite would be the theory of evolution of the Universe...Don't wanna give it away...The book also poses a few introspective questions about human existence...It really puts you in the mind of the protagonist...(those imagining about games like Doom when u read this line...get outta hear!!!)...The one that I loved the most is "Whats better? Doing the right things for the wrong reasons? Or doing the wrong things for the right reasons?"...It takes you through the changes that the protagonist goes through and his psyche as it changes...the way he retrospects his own actions...comes up with some amazing comparisons when someone else makes a choice which is similar to his own in a completely disparate situation...I am short on words to say more....(and yet I have consumed so many words)

To write a review of Shantaram and not mention its main character would be criminal...I don't mean the protagonist which in this case is the author himself...I mean the city of Bombay or Mumbai...Being my hometown, I have not come across a better portrayal of the city in any other book as yet...(comments welcome if you have)...The author has quite literally captured the soul of the city...The reader would want to catch the next flight out to experience it in the flesh...(And for the record, I almost went to Leopolds some years ago and my next trip is gonna fulfill that...Go check out Cafe Mondegar as well...nice place)...The story of a foreigner who comes to Mumbai and makes it his home...well almost is biographical in a way...The different parts of this epic are amusing...thought-provoking and realistic...well realistic enough to keep the reader pondering as to what part of the book was fact and what part was fiction?

In addition to being a best seller, this book is soon going to be made into a major motion picture...with Johnny Depp playing the lead role and Helena Bonham Carter as the alluring Karla...though I would have preferred someone like Angelina Jolie to play Karla...(well I wud prefer her to play any role as long as she blazes the screen...what say?)..coz of her strength, sensuousness and again a sense of cynical heartless demeanor...well maybe not (any comments for Karla castings welcome!!!)...

Well what are you doin still reading this?...Go on pick up a copy....a paperback version of course.

Are you Smart or Are you Brave???

Ever wondered what its like to put all your eggs in one basket? Well traditionally speaking....its not a good idea right?...Well lets analyze that hypothesis a bit...Having a plan B or a safety net is great as against risking it all on plan A and push yourself to make Plan A to work like there is no tomorrow.
The smart people always have a plan B....they know, what they are doing, does not have a 100% chance to succeed...And they have a hedge fund kinda concept going for them. So if the attempt does not go through, they can say "Well whatever!!! I always had plan B if this did not work out. I am so smart that I am always prepared for the worst!" Hmmm...well thats a good way of looking at it.
Lets look at the other side now...The Brave people put all their eggs in one basket...They kinda risk it all on that one chance they got....And they are not prepared for the worst....They always keep saying to themselves "This has got to work...else I am totally screwed!!!" So they are audacious enough to not think about protecting themselves from failure!!!
Lets dig a little deeper in the Smart person psyche and the Brave person psyche shall we? The Smart person starts his attempt to get plan A working....Well he runs the first 50% of the task really well...Now as he approaches the last leg, the pressure is almost wilting and knocking the day lights outta him....Now he must fight that pressure off and become a stronger person and try and win plan A...Guess what...his sub-conscious takes over and he begins to think..."What the hell? I have plan B!!! So whatever happens, I am gonna be just ok!"...And before the person knows it....Well he has lost his perspective on plan A and now he is all about plan B....In the process it may so happen that he fails to make that last stretch and fails by just a small amount. Now lets look at the Brave person...He starts off just like the smart one...After 50% of the task is done...He realizes "Geez man! I got a lot of stuff riding on this baby!!! I better get this done".....So he starts running harder towards the finishing line....and as he gets closer to the line...he gets faster coz he knows theres no second chance....
The Brave ones are the ethereal optimists and the Smart ones are somewhat optimistically pessimistic. The third kinds "pessimistic ones" are not considered at all...Coz there is no way in hell they can win. So do you really make that decision to be smart or brave? Or does it depend on the circumstances? Well I would say its a mix of both. Having said that Circumstances do tend to influence your choice. It all depends on what you may have to lose if it you don't succeed. More often than not situations in which you have 'nothing to lose' or you have 'everything to lose' have a way of invoking the braveness of a person. It is when you have something to lose that it becomes grey....Coz then you have a choice to let plan A take as much as you are willing to lose or a little more than that. This little more that a person gives up is a really difficult mix to achieve...if it is too much it jeopardizes plan B and if it is too little...well bye bye plan A....So ppl who have too little to lose in the first place tend to bank on plan A....ppl who have everything to lose put everything behind plan A coz its just about enough to get them thru.....Its when you have choice between either plan A or plan B to succeed that the smart guys chicken out and go for plan B.
So Tell me something? Are you the smart one with the "Hope for the Best. Be prepared for the worst" attitude? Or are you the brave one with the "Be prepared for the Best. Get screwed lest the Worst" attitude? Waiting for your comments...(Ain't this blog very unlike me?...Well I am inspired to write inspirational stuff once in a while!!! What inspired me you ask....I ll get back to it in my next blog!)

My Style of writing

For those of you who have been reading my blog a lot....(hmmm...so I am a self confessed apotheosis of immodesty...bite me) must like this for my style of writing. Well let me give you a background of why it is so!!! As you may already know, I take a lot of inspiration from movies and television (read my other blogs if you don't know...grrr)...This is no different...I have been a fan of Sitcoms all my life....But to tell you the truth...the ones that appeal to me the most are not the ones with laughter track on them....My favorite shows would have 2 most notable ones...Ally McBeal and Scrubs.....Why so?...The striking resemblance between the 2 is to deliver a serious or somewhat sane message without having to be serious or sane about them....For starters the protagonists Ally and Dr. Dorian are always guided by their own voices...Not just that these inner selves think of the most whacky things at times completely opposite to the happenings....they are insane at sane times and sane at insane times....and if you really analyze this is something I identify with a bit.....So getting back to my style of writing....you will always notice something written in brackets which if ignored don't impair the relevance of the written matter (But make it B-OR-I-N-G) and gives you a mirthful third person view on what I am writing. Heres looking forward to a lot more whacky stuff from yours truly....

I Banged a Pole

Before you get any ideas from the title....take the literal meaning of it....Oh no...not that literal meaning....I mean the other literal meaning....hmm...let me explain....I was walking while reading a newspaper (or maybe I was reading while walking on the footpath...neways) and I failed to notice a Steel pole right in front of me...and sure enough I banged right into it with my legs on either side of the pole....Fortunately my hands took the brunt of the clash....I didn't bang my head and I am sure I will be able to start a family...(toungue in cheek)
Well has this happened before?...hell yeah...with so many disastrous (hyperbole intended) consequences...you just need to start talking to my mom and half my stories (btw if my mom starts narrating 'funny to you horrific to me' tales...you gotta keep in mind that anything before the age of 10 will be said as if it happened yesterday and any amount of denial from my part will only result to more publicity to the alleged incident) would reflect such acts of absent-minded behavior....and that is all that I have to say about that....(Sorry Forrest...couldn't resist copying that one from you)

Guru says 'I Am Bani yeah'

Its 2 am and I just got back from a screening of 'Guru'. What compelled me to write this blog at this late hour?....Well I just told you I saw Guru.....Well if I yap abt the stellar performances of the lead and support actors in the film...then I would be aping what every newspaper reviewer has done or what any other amateur blogger has done (well I am confident I am not an amateur any more....a confidence I drew from Gurukant Desai) .... So instead of doing the usual routine, I would like to say how well the book 'The Polyester Prince' has been adapted for big screen keeping all lead characters intact. If you haven't read it...well you are missing out on a piece of history u ought to know about.
The film delves into a lot of jargon..well not a lot of it (non-convertible debentures and all)...which could have been avoided or explained better considering you are making a mainstream movie....u say its not mainstream???...well what was the future Mrs. Desai doing dancing at the start of the film or Mr. Desai in the middle of the film. What such roadblocks of musical boredom did was consume precious film reel...taking away a chance to film some more insightful scenes into the success of Gurukant Desai....which has a few chapters...90% of them showing some kind of manipulation....
So what could have made the movie interesting?...Lets see how about a common mans life change during the course of the film due to his investments in Guru's company?....Hmm that would have made the film an account of a Hero...in the cliched bollywood sense.....maybe......The episode of the protagonist against the cartel of bears in the stock market would have been a really good and easily understandable part of the original protagonist's growth...Unfortunately this is not one of the episodes covered.....The remark about needing a license was sharp, witty and yet I believe went unnoticed by a generation which knows nothing about the post independence era from conventional sources of education....So a small anecdote or insight into the license era would have been welcome.....The scene between Guru and the newly appointed prime minister...oops i meant minister was not sinister enough and did not suggest the kind of pressure it put on the minister...they should have stuck to the bag containing the bribe being returned to the minister...as that was the unofficial scene between u knw who and u already knw who.....And that was too sensational for the book too.....Hmm well these are some of my opinions and I don't expect Mani Ratnam to follow them....(as if....)
All in all the philosophy of the real life person or the character come through right in the last few scenes where he challenges the way business was carried out before he came along....And that is one of the scenes which really touches the viewers...Most other scenes though brilliant just don't tug at your heart....
Last words...Heres looking forward to some great future work from Mithunda and of course 'Abhishek Amitabh Bacchan' (poora naam haaaiin)

Fast paced book....lack of content

Reading 'One night @ Call center' was a been there done that for me...The accomplishment was reading a complete book in a single day...Well for some this would sound absurd coz.....I know ppl who can finish a 500 page novel in a matter of hours.....But given that I have a penchant for dragging a book for months...this was quite an accomplishment. The earlier record was 3 days for 'Five point Someone' by the same author.
Lets get to the book now.....'1 nite...' has been on my shelf for a couple of months now. Finally I decided to get it over with. Given the fact that Five point someone is one of my favorite books ( I agree with ppl when they say its too amateurish...but I do like independent low budget films as much as a like a Spielberg epic)...I had a lot of expectations from this baby.....and maybe I expected Shamita Shetty to be as ravishing as Shilpa Shetty...(I suck at metaphors don't I? Couldn't think of another one if not a better one)...It was not to be though......The book has a few great things about it...The best thing is the way Chetan Bhagat creates a scene with elaborate dialogues and settings....You actually feel like you are watching a movie with the characters as real as real can be.....The next would be the message put across...which is to follow your heart always....Last but not the least the crisp editing....Editing??? A Book???...Well I have come to realize, Chetan does not write books....they are more of screenplays....coz if I made a movie out of his books...(I wish I could make a movie....) I would not change the scene placement one bit...Its a pre-edited version.....
Now onto the sad part....the perception of a call center job is completely one sided...well of course there are better jobs than a call center....But then again....a voice BPO was just the beginning for the bigger and better KPO (Knowledge process outsourcing...go look that up wikipedia...duh)...It was the same as the Indian software industry which started with fixing a '00' to a '2000' when Y2K struck.....as years went by, it climbed the value chain and are doing cutting edge stuff now.....Last but not the least....there are subtle ways of saying things and keeping points of view against a group of ppl. and these are always better than brash ways of demeaning a particular group.....the book opts for the latter on the pretext of sounding patriotic...a bit on the lines of Gadar's Sunny paaji.....All in all, it maintains the tempo set by the earlier book and is certainly a 'cantputitdowner'..(hey i actually came up with a new word)

Deja Vu meets Signs

One Confusing movie meets another and becomes the story of my day this New year....Confused? Well for starters..deja vu is something repeating itself..(also a confusing, stretch to your imaginations movie starring Denzel W.)......and Signs is the M Night Shyamalan movie stressing on the fact that everything happens for a reason.
Well over the yrs since my school days, I have had the penchant for losing things. Flashback arnd 17-18 yrs ago...my first school picnic was an auspicious start to being a loser..(don't mistake it with the noun loser...grrr)....I mean at the art of losing....I was arnd 6-7 yrs old and was packed to board the school bus with a bag filled with a bottle, tifin and the works.....well I came back with all my stuff barring me myself being in the lost and found dept....The above happenings recurred many a times over the next few yrs...of course with a few disparities.....Umbrellas was a rare commodity for me to use (more so to own)...coz I lost the umbrella of all my family members...(ok rephrased all male family members....I ain't gonna carry a red umbrella to school...I wasn't my metro-sexual self yet...that word wasn't even born then)...The usual place of occurrence was a rickshaw. As usual I 'd keep it at my side and forget it after i paid the fare and then run after the rickshaw, hoping against hope itself. This led me to completely avoid carrying an umbrella in my college days..unless it was pouring outside of course....that gave me a responsible image too...(not coz of the 'not carrying umbrella' thing...the 'not losing an umbrella' thing)...well you cant drown if u don't swim rt....or do u drown coz u don't swim?...u got what i wanna say!!! Thats the deja vu part...
Well what abt the 'Signs' part of the blog u ask?.....Well here they are

1. After around a yr of not having to sit in a cab...I started using em regularly...Well someday I had to lose something....strike 1
   
2. It was the New year weekend and I saw a really good leather jacket sale....An inner voice said 'Get it dude!!!'...but for once the angel in me decided to save up.....hmmm the sale was a sign dude...don't u listen...buy one...u can keep an extra jacket???...Strike 2
   
3. I was about to leave my apt with an inexpensive jacket...but it was cold....and I decided to take my expensive leather jacket instead....duh!!!...Strike 3
   
4. At the airport, before getting into the cab, I decided against wearing the jacket..coz its so hot....and then when I alighted....the rain had stopped too...giving me no reason to look for my jacket.....Strike 4...You are out.....(I know its out on Strike 3 u snobbish baseball fans)

Well as you may have guessed I am hoping against hope again for the cab driver to be an angel and get the jacket back to me....nope...Ok I ll hope for the sale to still be available...thats a safer bet