Almost Famous!

It’s that time of the year again. The time to evaluate the year gone by and wait in anticipation of the coming year. As I sat down to complete the meaningless exercise, I realized this was not a normal year. I just turned 25 this year, a quarter of a century, and from what I experienced this time passed in ‘no time’. It is then my mind realized the importance of the day; the frightful day.

This is a particularly frightful day that comes in the life of everyone of us. The day when we realize than potentially everyone who is famous is younger than us. It is that day it dawns upon us that life might become frightfully common for us. The acceptance speeches that we had prepared for the Grammys, the Oscar, the carefully maintained shelf we kept for all the Man of the Match awards all bite the dust, and we woefully start the preparation for a quite journey ahead. The journey where everyday would be the same, the day where the similar faces would surround us for the rest of our lives. We would get up at 7:30 in the morning, our wives would serve us coffee (which would be too hot or too cold for consumption), we would enter the bathroom only to realize that the geyser is still to be repaired and would finally ramp up the morning proceedings with a light breakfast; a breakfast full of nutrients to prolong our ‘wonderful life’ to eternity. The day would be full of files and reports; quietly laughing at us; after-all they never took themselves as seriously as we did. Finally after a day full of keyboard punches and random ramblings, we will reach home en-route cursing traffic nineteen to the dozen. Oh! I almost forgot the vegetables. Anyway once we’d reach home, we’ll look at our wife, throw a painful smile at her and before we can even sit, Mr. Sharma from the neighborhood would come and complain about our wonder kid who has slapped his son. After flipping the zillion channels endlessly for an hour, we’d head to the place where we’ll lie motionless for the last 1/3rd of the day.

Wow! I just defined the most horrible life I can ever think of living. The life, where we wait for the weekdays to speed, endlessly enduring Mondays through Fridays, just for the prized weekend. The weekend, which of-course would be spent worrying about the looming Monday.



But before I could put my pen down in frustration, my mind conjured up the images of an everyday man saving the life of 10 odd people in The Taj. Extraordinary, methinks comes in an ordinary package. Perhaps, life gives everyone a chance to break the ordinary, to perform the divine duty that we ought to perform, if only we would dig deeper into ourselves. Perhaps, we in the garb of the ‘Common-man’ can still break the shackles and redeem ourselves. May be we don’t need the media to tell us that we are extraordinary. A quarter of century can never summarize one life. Still a long journey to cover, still a long life to live.

May be there is another achievement in the pipeline. Nobel Prize anyone!

Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free!!

For some strange reasons today, this fine line from arguably one of the finest movies ever made constantly reverberates in my head. Fear it seems does strange things to you. It stifles your senses and takes away every last ounce of confidence that you have. The fear of failure, it seems is the first one to hit. Every small failure adds to its monstrous power, till we are no longer willing to take risk, till every step of ours feels like one step away from fall. We wait for life to offer us an anti-dote. We wail and wait for the defining moment when we would be able to control our lives again. And then hope sets in. We are able to see clearly again. We tell ourselves for the umpteenth time that things would be fine, we rise. We are no more afraid to fall; there is a quite confidence, a clear vision. We are no more bounded by fear; hope has just unraveled the knot. Life is good again. A reason for living, a hope for redemption.

P.S. Did you know if you type ‘reject’ on your phone in the dictionary mode, it spells ‘select’. Probably Nokia knew it better.

Why we love India!

Let us admit we all love India. We love it despite all its follies, the roads, the lack of amenities, and whatever reasons any NRI can come up with. We are patriotic in our own sweet way. We believe only Indians have the right to say anything against India. It is our birth-right and no one can take that away from us. Yesterday I was having a long animated discussion with my cousin (living outside India) . Clearly he wasn't impressed with the way we Indians (notice how casually he forgot that he was an Indian)struggle for survival. He, completely on a hyperbole ride, mentioned how people in India are fire-fighting creating one invention after the other to sustain, to lead a good life. Ironically, it made me love India even more.These are a few reasons why I love India, the list is in no way exhaustive, but hopefully can get the point across:
a)Hope: We can lose our wallet, our degree, our business, our land, but we never lose hope. Hope keeps us going, hope keeps us afloat when the chips are down. The hope of a better tomorrow, the hope of redemption, the hope of having our own dreamland.
b)Parents:Given a choice an average Indian would love to stay with his/her parents, to still get his/her pocket money, to still get scolded if he/she injures himself/herself. This is our way of knowing that there is someone who cares. Someone who stands by us, no matter what, someone who would never leave us, even if we were born ugly, fat and with single hand and feet.
c)Customs & Tradition: Ever been to an Indian wedding? It's a experience that lasts for days and leaves an impression for life. Whether its the Ladies Sangeet, or the haldi or the tradition of stealing the groom's shoes, the Indian weddings are full of life, warmth and happiness. I love the Indian traditions, whether it's touching an elder's feet or welcoming guests at any hour or the family getting together on festivals.
d)IIT, IIM : The IIT and IIMs are perhaps the greatest institutes in the world, simply because they have the ability to fulfill 'The great Indian dream', in a way no institute can. One can literally see students getting transformed into future leaders. The tag is one thing that stays, even though it may precede you at times, but for whatever the institute has given you, it's worth it.
e)Siblings: In India, we do not love our siblings in an "I do because I have to" kind of way. Siblings in India share a bond which goes much deeper than can be explained. Whether you hate it or love it, blood is indeed thicker than water.
f)Indian Film Industry: No list on India can be complete without the mention of Indian film industry. They call it Bollywood, though it's clearly offensive. We have created our own niche, that is there to stay.We Indians are sucker for movies, the song and dance routine, the one Sunny Deol Vs Rest of the world fares. Rajnikanth, Mithun da, Amitabh Bachchan would be there etched in our memories forever, and no Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt can change that!

I know everyone has a lot to add to the list, probably the list can never be complete, but the fact is India rocks. A billion people can give a billion reasons for that.

A critique of critcs

The other day I was having a discussion with one of my friends about why we watch movies. Whether they serve any purpose other than entertainment? The animated discussion reached its crescendo when she suggested that OSO (Om Shanti Om for the uninitiated) was stupid and over-the-top, to which my reply was that, it was the first movie in a long time that was blatant on your face entertainment. So what really is the purpose of cinema? We hear so much banter about movies being realistic, reflecting life in all its purity. If realism is what we are looking for then why were the doordarshan documentaries boring?
If we look at movies from the eyes of critics, then we will see them using all sorts of superlatives for movies which imitate life, but are very critical in heaping praise on movies which offer nothing more than pure unadulterated entertainment.
The blog being a critique of critics, I would now like to introduce two very able (??) but very different critics. So ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Raja Sen (Rediff) and Taran Adarsh(IndiaFM)

Raja Sen: Raja Sen writes regularly for rediff, but is very selective in choosing the films he would review. Often made to eat his own words as the movies he shredded to bits become blockbuster. Over-analytical, over-critical, he has a reputation of being quite anti-bollywood. His reviews are a must read for CAT aspirants as he carefully chooses his words and logically tries to analyze every scene, every camera angle. But his predictions are woefully short. He is the second most hated critic, just falling short of a gentleman to be introduced shortly. Still I would say he knows cinema. I end up envying his knowledge, though I fail to understand that why as a critic he fails to understand his audience. Why would he mix and match a bollywood movie and a Hollywood taste. He came closest with his reviews of Jaane-tu and Singh is King, where rather than analyzing the follies, he rightly pointed that the movies do strike a chord, which is kind of the whole point. But I have to admit his reviews are a lot of fun to read, they are a bible in absolutist reviews.

A Raja Sen sample:

Movie: Jaane Tu
Rating: 4/5

Taran Adarsh: The most hated critic of this generation and beyond, his reviews are very helpful, you just have to replace all his adjectives with their antonyms to get the perfect review for the movie. So while Musafir is a 4 star movie, Swades is 1.5, DCH is 2 stars. I have yet to see a person so condescending that he feels that the audience are almost always dumb, looking for cheap titillations. To use a modified Godfather quote “he insults our collective intelligence”. Has a very very limited vocabulary, and freely uses the words/phrases hoi-polloi, old wine in a new bottle, leave your brains at home etal. His reviews, cease to be reviews but turn into futile exercise to predict a movies’ performance based on star-power, director, glitz and gloss. He is notoriously known to apologize for his negative reviews for movies which eventually turn out to be hits (case in point Chak De). Needless to mention his reviews are almost always off-track. And yes, every stars’ latest performance turns out to be the best in his career, whether it is Anil Kapoor in Musafir (now really?) or Amitabh Bachchan in Bhootnath (what can I say?). They say he is the most famous critic, this in itself is an insult to the ‘aam janta’. Let’s hope some better sense prevails and we are relieved of his stupid, inane, wannabe analysis. But I must point out I love reading his reviews, they almost always make me laugh, and as for the rating just subtract his rating from 5 to get the actual rating for the movie. It’s all about the math you see; the most useless piece becomes useful. Oh ya I almost forgot, some of his most memorable lines are “cut the gyan, cut the crap!!” Amazing way to start a review!

Taran Adarsh samples:

Movie: Dhoom 2
Rating: 4.5/5

Movie: DCH
Rating:2/5

I now finally get back to the same basic question. What purpose does cinema serve? My view is simple, if a movie is able to make even one person forget his/her worries and make him/her laugh, cry or dance then it has achieved its purpose. So personally I may hate a movie but if makes my grandmother laugh for even half an hour it is praise-worthy cinema, because it is not about you or me, it is about whoever can appreciate it.
So let us all laugh, cry and dance and enjoy the wonderful medium of cinema to enter into the make-belief world, where we can dance under traffic lights, where good always wins over evil, where the movie never ends till everyone is happy. Let us all decide for our own-selves what suits us the best. A review after all is just a personal opinion and no more.

Go Roger!

The world needs its champion. Men need greater men to resurrect them. The world needs Roger Federer. There is a strange, almost divine connection I feel with him. Somewhere he motivates me to stand up and deliver, to maintain a dignified silence when cynics question me. There isn't another champion quite like him. One can see a Zen like calmness to his demeanor. So while we have the world writing him off after a dreadful season (really??)(2 finals, 1 semi-finals, 1 Olympic gold), he quite effortlessly scripts history with a win at the US Open. The way he does it, makes him special. As he himself mentioned he has created a demon for himself, where he is expected to win every tournament. It's quite cruel, how the world eagerly waits to see a champion fall. It’s the ideal blockbuster movie, meteoric rise and a great fall. It's easy to see great men crumble under such pressure, and then some men, rise like phoenix. The world cheers again for it's something they never expected, it's a story they've never seen. Naysayers have their pens out, waiting for a fresh new fall. It is then Roger Federer arrives forcing people to eat their own words, not because he has a point to prove, not because he his competing against anyone, but because he competes against himself. Because for him success is not defined by numbers but by commitment to one’s craft, by tenacity and by the ability to surprise everyone but HIMSELF with his achievements.
The short blog is my salute to a great champion, a great player and a fabulous human-being. Go Roger, the world is your oyster!

Is it back to square one?

So I'm back. The last few weeks have been quite eventful. Finally got to spend a lot of time with my parents.Played a lot of badminton. Took the GMAT on July 19th and am here at the crossroads again. What next? Well of course it seems easy, apply to the Best B-Schools and if I'm fortunate enough to be accepted then take the next flight. But is this as simple. No introspection, no thought, just apply. Which brings me to the more fundamental question. Why MBA, how does it relate to my career goals. Most of us have been quite clueless all our life about what do we want. We've walked the well trodden path, sleep walking through our lives. Our parents decided what subjects we chose, which was again a function of how well we did academically. It all sounded fantastic: go to IIT, then to Harvard, and then to Wall Street, drive a Merc, own a rolex,talk on a vertu blah blah.Is that being ambitious? I believe if all you want out of life is a big house and a merc, you're not ambitious. So while wanting to be loved all your life is being ambitious, wanting to be respected by one and all is ambitious, wanting pots of gold is not. How we decide our careers is by finding out what we can do well (say add,subtract or paint)and then trying to map it to the most profitable career option, if there is a fit, good and our parents clap, if there isn't then we try to fit ourselves to the other side. The most profitable career option stays and we try to fit ourselves into it. Result: Adjustment, compromise and a screwed up life with lots of money. So is MBA another adjustment for me? Thankfully not. It is something I have dreamt of, for reasons other than money. For networking with smart people, for polishing my otherwise raw personality and to reach where I want to. MBA is important to my goals and thankfully for the first time I am aware of what I am doing at every point of time, aware of the reason why I am doing it and aware of where it might take me. So it's application time folks. I hope I can be as forthright in front of my interviewers as well. All the best Shashwat. God Bless!

26 Heart Wrenching Facts!

I call myself an incorrigible optimist. But there are a lot of things that frustrate even the most positive of us. You feel stupid, dejected, disappointed and sometimes just quietly laugh at God’s sense of humor. It is said that ‘If fate doesn’t make you laugh then you just don’t get the joke’. I just happen to be in a mood where I feel like collating what I have over the years observed and felt helpless at. Today I have a sense of humor to laugh at these. I am sure we all have a lot to add to this, I just kept it to 26, because it’s like the A-Z of what I wanted to say. You might be inclined to call me a whiner and generally insane to come up with a list like this. But I liked my effort; it helped me know what I really hated. So here I go:

A) No matter how hard you try people never change
B) The only person you can change is you; all the elements in you are against this change
C) The more successful you become, the lesser friends you have
D) You are where you deserve to be; otherwise you would have been in a better place.
E) No matter what people say, you are judged by your looks
F) The more fun you are having the faster the clock ticks
G) There is always a trade-off to be made
H) Nobody really wants to listen to your problems, and nobody is not a person.
I) No matter how hard you try, you will be misunderstood
J) Things will never be just perfect; all your attempts towards making it perfect will fail.
K) You will never be happy with your current state
L) No matter how well you earn, you will always think that your past was better.
M) Your mind and heart will never concur on anything.
N) No matter how easy the job, you will make mistakes
O) You ego will almost always dominate your senses.
P) You are being observed, watched for all your mistakes.
Q) Nobody really cares if you are in trouble.
R) The traffic always moves faster on the other side of the road.
S) You are slowly becoming the person you’ve always hated.
T) One relation always dominates all the current relationships at any point in time.
U) In the bigger picture, nothing really matters.
V) The only acceptable answer to “How are you?” is I am good.
W) A friend’s phone is always switched off or not reachable when you need him/her the most.
X) You never express your love to the person you love the most
Y) We are increasingly becoming unaware of what we are doing
Z) We never realize when we are living our happiest moment.

Confessions of a serial womanizer!

Warning : Based on a fictitious character. Any resemblance is purely coincidental

Ok, let me confess I love women. They have a very endearing ability of making every small problem big and every big problem very small. So you’ll see them cribbing about how you should go to a doctor if all you have is common cold, on the other hand they’ll ask you to relax every time you flunk an exam, lose your latest gadget or your job. Women bring a certain quality to the conversation which makes it very smooth. They compliment men and complete us in a way no man dog or horse can. They calm us; help us realize that money is not always the answer, that relationships are important, that love can solve every problem. It is very important to have women in your life. None of us can imagine our life without our mother, and our sisters. But once we grow up we feel the need to go out and explore the world, we are no longer comfortable sharing our views, our thoughts with our mother or sister. So we look out for friends, friends who can understand listen or care for us in the same way as our mother or sister did. The relation is not the same, it may be on an absolutely different level but the need is the same. The only glitch is like there is no perfect man, there is no perfect woman, consequently one can never find all the qualities in one woman, so I talk to a different one every week. I find my answers through different women. One might complete my need to be heard, while one might complete me physically. Have we ever complained about having more than one sister, or more than one uncle or aunt? It’s because each of them understands us at a different level. We need each one of them to feel complete, to be fully understood at all levels. One might think that I take advantage of them and do what suits my convenience, but the truth is that if we think that a woman doesn’t understand a man’s intention we are insulting her intelligence. They understand us much better than we understand them, and one can never establish any relationship with them, without their permission. It’s like a gift they have. So stop thinking of women as some stupid species that all and sundry take advantage of. They are much more intelligent that we give them credit for.
So please people I beg of you, let me live in peace and enjoy the wonderfulness of the company of a woman

Life, death and other ramblings!

What is life, a journey, a celebration, a treat to savour?And what is death, the inevitable, the loss of consciousness, the destination? What if one day suddenly the fine line between life and death gets blurred to such an extent that we are not sure which side are we in. This is not another sci-fi movie in the making but an actual event in the life of a friend. So let me introduce you to the lovely Gabriela and let her relate her own story.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
She was sitting in a restaurant overlooking the Ganges, holding a glass of greenish beverage. She felt quite comfortable up there, positioning her face in gentle breeze. The drink had a rather delicate taste and was tapped with a cap of white smooth spume. Her unconscious mind was however already getting aware that the burnt-like odor she smelt was coming from the burning bodies piled at the river’s bank; and that the sweet-like aroma in that very breeze was nothing else but moldiness. Actually, the musty smell was coming from the crowded lanes right below, lanes that have been running for centuries from the Ganges’ banks, full of filth, rats and feces; and have trapped her mind already earlier in the afternoon.

Without any warning sign from above, the buried gloomy feelings at a sudden shot out, turning bottom-up her perception of life and death. Was it an explosion in her mind or somewhere in the bowels of the building? She didn’t have the answers. She had just several confused ideas, her lifeless body tossed over a bed, surrounded by extremely pink walls. Was she dead? Most probably. Was she in heaven? Certainly not.

She was not surprised that she died - or that she didn’t get to heaven. She was expecting the moment of death instinctively all her life. She was much more astonished that a part of her conscious was still alive. How could she be so silly during her lifetime to doubt the after-life? And also - and more importantly – the concept of time completely crashed in pieces. She remembered most of the facts of her life but was unable to chain them down on a time line. All of them jumbled together, arising in her mind one by one but disarranged, without any chronology. She recalled the stories about sequences of pictures from the lifetime running in the head when dying – another sign that she was just leaving this world, if not done already. Besides, she started to feel hot sensation spreading slowly from the feet up her body. Are they already burning her at the Ganges? Without her mom and dad saying good-bye to her? She remembered their lovely faces with a deep sorrow. Her heart became beating so fast that even if she still wasn’t dead, she would definitely die from a heart attack sooner or later. Her conscious was not tied in her head any longer but was floating freely in the space instead. It was like if she could grasp another dimension of the cosmos in its eternity; her mind following different system, not bounded by the limits and rules of her physique envelope.

One point was very clear to her however. She knew she couldn’t stay trapped in there, wherever she was. It had to come to an end. Where will she wake up next morning? With a scream, all covered in blood from a new birth, her mind blank again? She didn’t want to forget. There were so many great people and things worth remembering. The next day, she woke up in the same room. Just the walls weren’t that pink anymore. She felt a burnt scar on her soul, wondering what a queer corner of her mind she just visited.

Life's biggest lessons!

I am no expert on how to live life, neither do I claim to know anything about anything, heck I am just 24. But these are just a few lessons I learnt from some of the successful people I have met. So here I go:
a) Be the most optimistic person you know.
b) It is very important to start Monday on a good note, it defines your whole week.
c) Learn something you will be proud of when you grow old.
d) Write, even if it means nobody understands it or appreciates it.
e) Have a sense of humour, develop the ability to laugh at yourself.
f) Ask out a girl/boy at least once. It's amazing the confidence it requires.
g) Run. Just take a day off and run, run fast, run away from the madness.
h) Make sure you always hug your parents.
i) Dress smartly, it reflects where you belong.
j) Have great friends, invest in the relationship.
k) Measure your success in terms of the number of happy moments you've had.
l) Try everything at least once.
m) Don't compare, try and synergise.
n) Marry only for love.
o) Try and learn from every mistake of yours.
p) Invest in a good suit.
q) Buy a cheap car but invest in the best house you can afford.
r) Be sporting, accept defeat.
s) Never allow yourself to indulge in self-pity.
t) Go on long walks and reflect on your day.
u) Laugh and then laugh some more.
v) Always greet everyone with a smile it is the warmest gesture you can show.
w) Be genuinely interested in people.
x) Think big, make sure you understand the bigger picture.
y) Take calculated risks, you never know when your idea will click!
z) Respect everyone, neither do you have the power to change the world nor do they.
and the last one which I feel was the most important lesson i learned is:
Enjoy everything, life isn't supposed to be this serious!
God bless everyone!!!!

Passion Inc.

Ever wondered why we lag behind so much in spite of all the talent we have? Why do in a country of over a billion people we have a few medals,a solitary world cup, a FIFA rank of 144, a tennis player ranked 31. Why is that countries irrespective of their economic condition or size continue to dazzle while we happily cheer our mediocrity? The answer is that we lack passion, the passion to perform, the passion to excel, the passion to win. We ask too less of ourselves, one moment of glory lasts us a life-time.They say that O'Eight is gonna be a big year, Sania aims at top 20 (while the Serbs and Russians of the world start at that) , Indian cricket team is finally winning overseas against major opponents, the salaries at IIMs are sky-rocketing, economy is booming. It's all hogwash .The truth is we're still the same, happy doing what we do the best, bask in the glory of our half baked achievements. So what is passion? Passion is what makes Janko Tipsarevic think he can beat Federer, passion is what India showed when it won the T20 World Cup, Passion is what helps one beat a better opponent, Passion is what flows through your veins every time you compete. If you've ever wondered why your half talented friend is at a better place then you, the answer is because he/she is more afraid of loosing than you are. Unless we do something about our innate desire to sleepwalk through our roles, to do everything just as we are expected, unless we start challenging our self a little more, we would never get where we deserve. India would continue to be a factory producing surprisingly similar people capable of random moments of glory, which will be too spaced to be remembered beyond the next failure. After all you never win a silver, you loose the gold!

Obsession!

Roughly translated obsession means a persistent idea dominating a person's mind. On closer observation we can notice it sounds like recession and borders on regression. Yet even though we know what there is to it, we still obsess. From our hair cut, to our salaries, to the colour of our undergarments, we obsess about something or the other. What drives this madness, is there any method to it? Psychologically obsession can most certainly be classified as a disease, you can't seem to get out of a particular thought, it seems to control your actions, and occupies almost every inch of your head. Though the description will be oversimplifying the emotion which is so strong that it makes you weak. Obsession can take many forms. The most common type of obsession is 'obsessive love'. This is accompanied by a negative feeling and low self esteem, where you find yourself dependent on the other. The irony is that it pushes the other person away. He/She is repelled because he/she cannot understand the love, to him/her it is madness. So how does love transform to obsession. It is when we cease to separate the other person from our self, it is when we forget that the other person has a life, an idea of living which he/she has conceptualized. It is when we think that the other person has to like us because we like ourselves, when we believe that our looks, our certificates or at least our salary can win us love. Obsession blurs love, and throws it into oblivion. What is left is madness, the madness to win, the madness to control, the madness to get everything we desire. Unfortunately this is the end, a sorry end, where so much of love is wasted, where emotions get overboard and where every one looses!!

Brevity is the soul of wit

We speak too much. Every time anybody asks us any question we answer in the most complicated manner, we fill it with so many words that the other person ceases to understand the logic. Is it true, that simple means common and complex means esoteric? We all read, understand and appreciate quotes. They have so much to say, in so little words, yet when it comes to expressing ourselves we rely on endless gibberish. The most witty, crisp yet penetrating comments are always short. The other day I was reading a man’s review on Saawariya, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s magnum opus. It summed up everything in just one line “ Sanjay Bhansali did the impossible, he made a boring ‘blue’ film”. I thought the effect this had on me was much more than thousand word reviews written by other critics. Why is it that we believe in complicating things? Writers of the yore used to believe in writing for the masses. Never did they use complicated words, yet they brought out the emotions beautifully, the characters were understated yet effective.
Pretense has become the order of the day, we have all sorts of rules with fancy names, pyramid rule, the five point theory , et al , essentially what they say is simple but of course they are garnished with the fanciest words and logic. Both students and teachers alike dig at them.
What the end result of all this is that people who know the art of simplicity are lost amidst all the chaos in the name of the complex. They are considered dumb, or plainly stupid, while self assuming Einstein(s) of the world enjoy endless admiration from dumb witted people who have no clue of what they heard or read.
One can only hope that some sanity is restored, the content is given its importance, and that people recognize substance over style. I hope against hope. May be some day the world will again be simple, we’ll again learn to smile and laugh freely, not have any pretensions. May be just may be…!

Taare Zameen Par!

As a critic I find it extremely difficult to write about movies which touch me, cause it is impossible to be detached. You tend to forget the follies and focus on how you loved the movie rather than providing a critique.In the same vein reviewing TZP is not easy, the topic is sensitive, the script quite powerful and the performances quite flawless. But after watching the movie I feel compelled to write about it. TZP is essentially about an 8 year old dreamer who is branded a looser by the big bad world obsessed with results. The story focuses on his plight and how hope in form of a teacher resurrects the kid. Essentially a very simple story, where Mr. Khan excels is the way he has treated the subject, the way everything looks so natural that we begin to laugh and cry with the characters.To lend such credibility to a story is indeed a herculean task. It helps that the songs are spot on and are almost poetic flowing seamlessly through the narrative. Performance wise Aamir Khan as Ram Shankar Nikhumb acts with full honesty and becomes the character with effortless ease. The scene where he looks moist eyed at the disabled is worth his weight in gold. The angst and the helplessness he shows through his eyes makes one feel claustrophobic and bound. Every time you feel SRK is improving Aamir Khan reinvents himself. With Shahrukh Khan you see Shahrukh Khan, with Aamir you see DJ, Ram Shankar Nikhumb or the numerous character he portrays.The show stealer is of course Darsheel Safary as Ishaan Nandkishore Awasthi. With Ishaan, he does a remarkable job in performing a very complex character so effortlessly, that one can't help but marvel. He speaks through his actions, he speaks through his eyes, he is always conveying something. Pain, anger, disgust. His ability to show twisted emotion of feeling the pain yet not wanting sympathy is something very rare to see in someone so raw. His presence is so overwhelming that other characters just serve as fillers. One can just hope that he doesn't randomly pick up movies. Darsheel has immortalized himself as Ishan Nandkishore Awasthi with this one performance.It will be a benchmark performance for years to come. Other characters are well etched and perform ably. The scripts has a few cliches like the painting competition and the final predictable victory but they don't put you off. You are addicted. You don't notice. You are blinded. Even after the movie ended I saw nobody moving, everyone was watching the end credits rolling silently. Almost everyone wiped a tear or two and silently walked out. They must have promised themselves to be a better person,better parents,to be more understanding, to be more human! Do yourself a favour watch Taare Zameen Par. Not tomorrow, but today, not later but NOW! Highly recommended!

Feeling Blue!!

01/01/08
As another new day dawns upon me I wonder what's so different about today. Why does it seem so different from yesterday. Why does eternity separate the two. Yesterday was beautiful, today is gloomy, yesterday was 2007 today is 2008, yesterday was anticipation, today is the day, yesterday was forests and wilderness today is a dingy compartment. So as I prepare myself for the journey called life, I want to answer the all important question, Why isn't the time after the meal as good as the wait. Why do we feel all kicked 'bout celebrating the new year but once it's on us we feel low. Why do we find it so hard to come to terms with the 'morrow. The reason is that we never expect the future to be as good as the past, we're scared of ageing, we feel something in us is killed every second. When I look outside the train I see life moving so fast and so away from me. Then there are stoppages asking me to relax and then the train speeds up again . Then one moment it'll stop and not move, it'll be the end of the journey, the so called destination and then eons later it will be time to board another train, may be as another being. Till then let us all find time to smell the flowers once in a while, look at the sky, the stars, the moon, let us not run so fast lest we reach the destiny too soon!!