Posts By sudhishkamath
Things to do to "Be the change!"
A lot of idiots seem to think that this post is about RDB.
It’s not.
It’s about ‘Being the change,’ something which has also been discussed in the movie. These resolutions are not born out of the movie, nor did I undergo dramatic change after watching the movie as foolishly assumed by some in the comment section.
This post happened in the context of a conversation I had with a friend. This conversation might have happened because of the movie but that does not mean that the feelings you have towards your country did not exist before.
Warning: Smart asses, park elsewhere.
* * *
It totally depresses me when I see people, especially my buddies being indifferent to the system.
They only make the stereotype that today’s youth don’t care two hoots for the country look so true.
You know the lines the boys in RDB say before their transformation: “Nothing can change the system. The system will change you.”
But then, you also probably know the reply the movie provides to that: “No country is perfect. You have to make it better.” (through Madhavan and later, Siddharth)
“There are two ways to live life. One, tolerate whatever happens, quietly. Two, take upon the responsibility to change it.” (as Aamir later says)
What can we do, an IITian asked the cast and crew after the movie screening at the OAT. And Madhavan said: “Be the change.”
As I was discussing this with a few friends, some of them thought it looked and sounded good in a movie, but does not work in real life.
“Even if you change, the others are not going to,” said one, over chat.
“You are saying that hoping it will absolve you of your guilt,” I said.
He went on to argue how it’s just a movie and things you see in movies cannot be implemented.
Riding home at around 10 last night, I saw people jumping traffic signals. A classic case of what my friend said earlier in the day. I usually stop at the traffic signal no matter how late it is in the night… Of course, only till I see the speeding lorry behind me and get moving to make sure I dont get killed. Sometimes, I move over to the side of the road to wait at the signal.
Last night, I was probably so angry with everything that I decided not to budge. I stopped right in the centre of the road at the traffic signal. Soon enough a whole bunch of vehicles whizzed past. As I stood my ground watching out through the rear view mirror, I saw a huge lorry coming at 80 or 90 straight at me… “Kill me, you bastard,” I said, refusing to move. And it missed me by a whisker… I just felt a little more angry when that happened.
But soon, there was this share auto that screeched to a halt right next to me. “Idiots they are. Only you and me know the rules,” he said in Tamil, sounding a little drunk. I couldn’t help smiling. And before we knew it, there were more to follow the rules. Bikes, cars and even a lorry behind us. I was sooo kicked.
That’s when I decided I had to blog about this.
It’s simple things like this that we can do to be the change.
They do not cost us anything. It’s just a simple change in attitude. Here’s a list of things I can do to be the change, irrespective of how many people will do it… Unconditionally.
1. Stop at traffic signals, no matter what time it is.
2. Stick to lanes, not overspeed, not break No Entry rules.
3. Not litter, not spit and learn to use the bin.
4. Not drink and drive.
5. Wear a helmet.
6. Earn in rupees (Madhavan said that at IIT the other night). Or even if you don’t, invest in rupees.
7. Spend a week during a year with a non government organisation. Either seven off days or 2 days once in two months, however. Or if you do not have the time, donate money. If you have both, do both.
8. Encourage movies like RDB. Because even if they do not change you, they are probably making a few other people wake up to their responsibility towards the nation. And even going by the logic that they leave an impact that lasts just a month, there will be more movies that will come to help them keep the faith.
9. Buy Indian brands (Something I’m gonna personally start doing!)
10. Pay taxes.
11. Vote. Even if its a protest vote (void vote).
Well, these are just things I have resolved to do. I would like to tag each and every one of you reading this to resolve whatever you can do to be the change.
It does not have to be all of this but just a sincere list of things you think you can do. Cuz, it probably will open my eyes to more things I can do.
And let’s only resolve those things we can truly follow.
For those who still want to shirk off your responsibility, RDB has a wonderful couplet for its opening lines:
“Ab Bhi Jiska Khoon Na Khaula, Voh Khoon Nahin Voh Paani Hai,
Jo Des Ke Kaam Na Aaye, Voh Bekaar Jawaani Hai”
(If your blood still does not boil, it’s probably just water,
Those who come of no use to the nation, are just a complete waste of youth)
Twenty Nine!
What better way to turn 29 than cruising down East Coast Road around midnight at 100 kmph, with best buddies Bajaj and Abhishek.
Got to Mahabs a little past midnight to find all restaurants and eateries closed. Thankfully, the folks at Moonraker’s turned out to be good samaritans gave us a meal, opening their rooftop garden specially for us.
After some good conversation with buddies who called, my phone/battery died and we decided to head back Chennai around 2 in the morning, singing aloud, with the breeze greeting us from the front, the sea for company on one side and palm trees lit by moonlight on the other… Nothing like cruising down a smooth stretch of land and a rocking bike.
How can there be anything larger than life itself?
Thank you all for sharing it with me and making it ‘larger’.
I’m truly overwhelmed, you guys made my day. Especially when I did really need you… Like this morning.
Ai Saala
Abhi Abhi
Hua Yakeen
Ki Aag Hai
Dil Main Kahin
Hui Subah
Main Chal Gaya
Sooraj Ko Main
Nigal Gaya
Rooobaroooooooooooooooooo!!
Roshniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii… Hey!
Yes, I don’t know where I found courage for something I did later this morning.
But like the lines go in RDB: When you believe in something so strongly, when you’re heart is clear and your mind is without fear, you set out to do just that with new-found courage, knowing well that it’s the best thing to do, however difficult it may turn out to be. Doing that sets you free … liberates your soul!
(Anyone who remembers the exact Hindi lines, please send it to me!)
🙂 Thank you very much people, once again!
Review: Rang De Basanti
(Re-written again for the paper but at the end I realised it was too long for the paper to publish)
Long live the revolution
Cast: Aamir Khan, Alice Patten, Siddharth, Kunal Kapoor, Sharman Joshi, Atul Kulkarni, Soha Ali Khan, Madhavan
Director: Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra
Genre: Feel-good/Drama
Storyline: A British filmmaker who comes to India to make a film on young revolutionaries of yore finds a carefree, indifferent generation of rebels, who are destined to change during the making of the film.
Bottomline: It just cannot get better than this.
After a pleasant dream, you wake up smiling.
After a nightmare, you wake up sober — brooding, thinking, hoping it never comes true. And then, you probably smile.
When Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s alarm bell ‘Rang De Basanti,’ goes off, you will wake up to a bit of everything: the bitter and the sweet, the smile on your lips and the butterflies in your stomach, the food for thought and the cola to chill out.
Unlike anything we’ve seen in Hindi cinema before this, comes this light-hearted yet serious-minded, instant cult classic that could drill home a sense of nation and responsibility, into the collective conscious of the urban Indian youth.
A movie likely to get under that skin beneath the well worn-out denims and the matching carefree attitude of those who adorn it.
A film about modern day rebels without that elusive cause finding it and themselves in the process.
RDB would have been an incredibly difficult film to make or even conceive, salutes to Kamlesh Pandey for the script.
But to make a script like that come alive needs super-human sensitivity. Brave old Rakeysh Mehra is a super-talented filmmaker to achieve what he has.
Imagine his confidence if he uses an actor of Aamir’s calibre as just one of the guys in the movie. In fact, sometimes you wonder if Siddharth is its leading man.
But the truth is that everyone in this ensemble cast has something significant to do to the narrative.
They all shine.
If Aamir sweeps you with his charm throughout and has you under arrest in the scene where he breaks down, Alice bowls you over with her Hindi and presence.
Siddharth-reinvented is a revelation, the surprise package of the film. Kunal Kapoor scores with his understated performance and intensity. Sharman Joshi is instantly likeable and emotes like a veteran. Atul Kulkarni lends his soul to the role. And Madhavan and Soha make you fall in love with them and their pairing. So right from the casting, RDB seems to have got it all right.
The first half of the movie is where Rakeysh scores in his experiment: delivering the tricolour to those lost in denim. Armed with plenty of stylish techniques, the director nourishes his under-fed young audience with spoonfuls of concentrated genuine nationalism spiked with cola, just for the flavour and the after-taste.
Imagine well-orchestrated sequences of freedom struggle beautifully captured in sepia tone and set to funky rock music! Truly inventive. Binod Pradhan is likely to sweep the best Cinematographer awards for the year and this movie might just be this year’s India’s entry to the Oscars.
The reason: RDB alternates between genres, moods, sensibilities and yet manages to keep its twin narratives cohesive and seamless.
So, MTV-meets-BBC as Rakeysh tells us two parallel stories: one about the rebels-without-a-cause of today and the other about the revolutionaries who died for one.
Towards the later half of the movie, the plot-points in both these narratives merge as the aimless youth find their purpose. It is exactly at this point that RDB begins to fumble.
But to give Rakeysh due credit, it is difficult to marry a realistically subtle ‘Dil Chahta Hai’-sensibility to a surrealistic ‘Dil Se’ sensibility or a docu-dramatic ‘Hey Ram’ or a ‘Gandhi’ sensibility, all within one movie.
So it does seems like a laboured effort when you force the laidback narrative with every day simplicities into a catacylsmic, dramatic plot-point, just to make the subsequent transformation of the heroes of the film, seem poetic.
You begin relating to the movie at a realistic level. Halfway through, it turns surreal when the characters plunge to their lows and later even “unreal,” as a character keeps repeating towards the end. But, despite the inherent inconsistency in the intended feel, the directors works hard to keep the plausibility intact.
Rahman’s songs turn out to be a neat alienation device but the pace slackens. But when the music is what anthems are made of and lines so deep and visuals that enslave your soul, why would you complain?
The movie demands three hours of devoted attention because there is so much to savour, absorb and relish. It’s a feast: visually, intellectually and emotionally rich. There is passion written over every single frame of the movie, little details to make you admire its maker and moments that stay with you long after you’ve left the hall.
The interplay between the characters throughout is so well-crafted that despite its slow pace, the screenplay remains tight. Every shot makes a statement, every pause speaks and every bit little strain of music punctuates the proceedings.
The pace is intentionally slow because a theme like needs to be served carefully, and little by little, as subtly as possible. Like Anupam Kher says in the movie: “SMS generation. Char line kya bol diya, lecture samajne lagtey hai.” (“Speak four lines and the SMS generation thinks you’re giving them a lecture”).
The only big flaw: Though it seems like a fascinating idea to replace imperialistic villains of yesterday with the fascist politicians of today, the context is not quite the same or that simplistic. It is that political context that makes RDB a little weak.
The solutions available today are many and the incident on which the movie borrows from, is testimony to that fact. Modern-day democracy, increasing literacy rates and an active competitive media ensuring political transparency, provides rebels of today far more solutions than the ones available to the revolutionaries of yore.
As a result, ‘Rang De Basanti’ is great cinema but not effective as mass communication or politically-correct cinema.
Unlike ‘Yuva’ that ended tamely with just a promise, waking you up before you can live the fantasy, RDB goes all the way. But here, instead of making you fantasise about what heroes of today can do, it turns all that activism into a really bad dream just so that the parallel lines between the two narratives remain intact.
But again, consider: a dream makes you go back to sleep with a smile. A nightmare … wakes you up!
Review: Mere Jeevan Saathi
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Karisma Kapoor, Amisha Patel
Director: Suneel Darshan
Genre: Love triangle
Storyline: Vicky likes Anjali. Anjali likes Vicky. Natasha also likes
Vicky. Only one of them dies, contrary to your desires.
Bottomline: In one line, it’s a death-sentence.
There are two kinds of bad movies.
First, bad movies you can laugh at. They work as spoofs, for you love it when poorly directed bad actors ham like there’s no tomorrow.
Example: Movies like ‘Kisna,’ ‘Kyon Ki,’ and ‘Family.’
Second, bad movies that are so terribly forgettable that they offer no entertainment value whatsover, not even by accident. Example: Movies like ‘Mere Jeevan Saathi.’
The sort of movies talented actors like Gulshan Grover and Ashish Vidyarthi do only because they get paid obscene amounts of money.
Yes, ‘Mere Jeevan Saathi’ is the sort of movie you wouldn’t watch even at gun-point, a movie that could be seriously recommended as an alternative to capital punishment.
So forgettable that one had to take notes in the movie hall for the review.
Amisha Patel sporting mini-skirts stolen from a kiddie section makes Mallika Sherawat a class act. She plays Anjali, who has nothing else to do throughout the movie but keep mouthing cornball I-love-yous and I-miss-yous to her childhood sweetheart Vicky.
Vicky (Akshay Kumar) is an emerging popstar who is shown spending most of his time romancing the saccharine-oozing Anjali. By the way, Suneel Darshan’s idea of romance is letting the lovers roll around a park, one over the other and having them share an ice-cream with the camera zooming in for a close-up of that disgusting sight.
Vicky then goes to America for a show, during which he sleeps with his promoter Natasha (Karisma Kapoor), by “mistake”. Given that it happens during a song, you first think it’s just the obsessed Natasha’s fantasy. But only when you realise that it did actually happen that you realise what a bad movie ‘Mere Jeevan Saathi’ really is.
Then it turns out that Natasha had actually liked Vicky from the good old days in college when he used to sing songs like ‘Dil Kare Ding Dong,’ strumming his guitar with serious intensity, so what if the song does not have a lead guitar sound in it. No wonder that the judges boo him out. As he’s sitting in the canteen wondering what went wrong about the show, he gets an anonymous letter (written by Natasha
of course) asking him to use better lines and probably asking him not to play the chords only when the song has guitaring in it. Next thing you know, Vicky is an instant hit with the ‘Mere Jeevan Saathi’ song and wins the competition. He then wants to thank the mystery woman (Natasha) who almost shows up for the meeting but for the news that her Dad is dead.
When you see Natasha switching her table lamp on and off, you realise the flashback is over. Natasha is now obsessed with Vicky, follows him back to India, slashes her wrist and does other assorted psycho-thingies like dancing on broken glass before the predictably stale climax follows.
With an age-old triangle for a plot and hackneyed scenes recreated from the regressive cinema of the nineties, there is absolutely nothing about ‘Mere Jeevan Saathi’ that makes it worth your time, let alone money. Why would then anyone produce this trash?
Awwwww! Sooooo cuweet….. Burp!
She fluttered her eyelashes at him seductively, pulled him by the collar and whispered into his ear, the words he had been longing to hear in a long long time: “Let’s have a baby.”
And they had their lil’ snack.
Review: Exorcism of Emily Rose
Scares. Without a doubt.
Cast: Laura Linney, Tom Wilkinson, Campbell Scott, Jennifer Carpenter
Director: Scott Derrickson
Genre: Horror/Thriller
Storyline: Did the devout 19-year old Emily Rose die because of
demonic possession or because she stopped medical treatment?
Bottomline: The perfect date movie
For every two dozen attempts Hollywood makes in manufacturing horror, it succeeds once or twice every year. ‘Exorcism of Emily Rose’ is among the rare horror flicks that succeed in spooking you out, even if it’s just a little.
Though based on the true story of Anneliese Michel, the epileptic German girl who died in 1976 believing she was possessed by demons, the movie dramatises and even heavily fictionalises incidents that, at least, momentarily make you believe that evil exists.
While the Church had declared that Anneliese was not really possessed as she believed, here the writer-director goes the extra yard to convince you about the supernatural.
But what is most fascinating about this horror yarn, apart from its super slick technical brilliance, is the intellectual content that’s rather hard to find in the genre.
If Robert Zemeckis’ ‘Contact’ was about the conflict of science versus religion, Derrickson’s tale here attempts to be a more balanced conflict between doubt and belief. Unlike Eleanor Arroway (Jodie Foster in Contact) who was an atheist, Erin Bruner (Laura Linney) here
is agnostic.
So when you see the whole story of Emily Rose through the eyes of an agnostic, you tend to get involved in the tale with the right mix of doubt and logic. You begin reading up on the true story of the ‘Exorcism of Anneliese Michel’. And, you begin to think of the possibilities. That is where ‘Exorcism of Emily Rose’ succeeds.
Apart from the doses of intrigue, there are moments guaranteed to scare you. College girls shrieked, held each other tightly and giggled at every jolt of horror unleashed upon them. The others tried hard to laugh out loud just to ensure that they don’t get sucked into the tale. The fake laugh in the audience is evidence that the movie does have a pretty neat scare quotient.
With the neat blend of horror, science, logic, scares and thrills, the movie is perfect for the date.
Watch her hold you tight. Put your arms around and enjoy.
(That last line was chopped at the desk because apparently, when I said ‘Enjoy,’ they thought I was talking about the girl … I meant the movie!)
Two terrible to endure!
I guess I’ve been away so long that I haven’t even posted my reviews online. Just dropped in to link my reviews of Zinda and Family, that appeared two Fridays ago.
Talking of which, I still can’t get over the idea of someone making a career of flicking flicks, frame to frame, line by line.
In fact, for the first half of the film, you can simply download the English subtitles for the Korean film Oldboy and watch them along with Zinda and they would perfectly sync in. The only reason he couldn’t reproduce it to that precision in the second half of the movie is because Oldboy involves incest.
A friend of mine tried justifying Gupta’s effort saying that the source (without the permission or consent of the original creator) does not matter as long as the end product is watchable.
That to me is like is stealing someone’s baby and claiming adoption. Nothing wrong with it at all, but do not say it is your baby — that’s insulting the kid and hiding your inability to produce one yourself.
(The above para has been altered to avoid more comments from my ‘holier-than-Thou’ readers)
Watch Oldboy, and you ll see why I say that Sanjay Gupta is a fucking thief.
The biggest assault on my senses was also having to watch Family during the same week. Strictly only for the producer Keshu Ramsay and his immediate family.
Done!
Yesterday was really special. Super special.
It marked the end of a journey that’s taken over six years. I would like to believe I’m done shooting for That Four Letter Word.
Yes, yesterday was the last day of shoot. Now I think I have every bit of footage I need (of course given the constraints of budget) to finish the movie.
I wanted to post a long, elaborate thanksgiving note but I guess I’ll save that for later. Too tired and maybe a little too early considering that we still need to finish the final cut of the edit and wrap up dubbing by the end of the month. Looks like I’ll have a movie on my hands by mid-February. And once its done, I might have to write a bible if I were to mention every single person who has contributed to get us here. I hope to do that too post premiere.
For now, I got to get back to work on the movie.
Just wanted to share my relief and happiness at having completed the entire shoot, including patch work this time.
Finally! 🙂
Done
Yesterday was really special. Super special.
It marked the end of a journey that’s taken over six years. I would like to believe I’m done shooting for That Four Letter Word.
Yes, yesterday was the last day of shoot. Now I think I have every bit of footage I need (of course given the constraints of budget) to finish the movie.
I wanted to post a long, elaborate thanksgiving note but I guess I’ll save that for later. Too tired and maybe a little too early considering that we still need to finish the final cut of the edit and wrap up dubbing by the end of the month. Looks like I’ll have a movie on my hands by mid-February. And once its done, I might have to write a bible if I were to mention every single person who has contributed to get us here. I hope to do that too post premiere.
For now, I got to get back to work on the movie.
Just wanted to share my relief and happiness at having completed the entire shoot, including patch work this time.
Finally! 🙂
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MADRAS INK. 