Rabindranath Tagore
I guess everyone likes to think they have good taste most of the time, I realized long time ago that people who know how to have fun don’t take themselves or their pleasures so seriously.
On a tired Saturday night, feeling mucky with a horrible cold and nagging restlessness of a bad flu bug, I watch the most ridiculous Hindi movie I have seen in a long time, Housefull.
Even for a Hindi movie, Housefull is at its best compliment, improv comedy, its impossible to believe something so utterly nonsensical could be scripted with a pen and then produced —- seriously. This has to be completely ad-hoc comedy in which case all the characters deserve a round of applause.
The fact is that hubby and I laughed, heartily, and there are few genuine LMAO moments and the rest of it well, you almost chuckle at the most obvious, forced comic set-ups because you have already salvaged any claim to taste you may have exhibited after the first few shake-head, cover-the-mouth chortles. It just seems better to throw in the towel and well become the paisa-vasool crowd in the atthani seat.
Maybe it was the cocktail of the antibiotics and Tylenol. But Housefull is not a good movie and there were parts that drag devoid of humor and we forwarded those happily (versus being annoyed and just turning the damn thing off).
But when we laughed, it was loudly and that’s got to be worth at least 2 stars when you are so miserably sick.
For those of you still interested in hearing a straight-forward review, there is no plot. The basic premise is that Bollywood’s Khiladi and Casanova is Housefull’s Loser, with a capital L. Full disclosure, I think Akshay is just all manly, best-in-the-desi-style-sizzle and he plays a supremely competent idiot, he does it so well, you can’t quite believe he is all that awkward, clumsy, and jinxy to carry it off. He needed to be more Steve Martin and less Dean Martin, to bring in a Hollywood analogy, he is just too perfect of a loser to be a, well, loser.
But he is “hero” and we kind of know it despite the fact that we are to believe he is so much bad luck that a casino has hired him to work as a bad luck charm for its patrons. When customers start winning, a quick walk on the floors by Akshay has the winning streak all but disappearing. The celestial stars for Arush (aka Akshay) say if he finds true love his bad luck will turn good forever.
The rest of story is all about how Akshay finds his real true love and he is just not able to shake his bad luck with misunderstandings and coincidences which like I said before must be improv comedy.
Logic, even Hindi movie logic, has nothing to do with this movie. There is tons of annoying slap stick and what-has-now-become-standard gay jokes, most of it not really that funny.
Until you hit the ones that really just make you throw your hands up in the air, give up and laugh.
We never really find out if Akshay’s success in love results in a kismet change so don’t expect to have any loose ends tied. Maybe I enjoyed the movie because I was highly medicated but I am almost positive the producers of this debacle were also inhaling something when they green-lighted this movie.
My advice: watch it, if you must, preferably with a DVD remote with fresh batteries and some pain-killers. You might even have fun, surrender, if you can, to your bad taste, it might just challenge you to not take yourself so seriously.
Hands down the most upbeat break up song I have ever heard from Hindi movie Love Aaj Kal which I found quite meh for a love story (scroll down for review). But I did think the storyline had uber potential, a young, ambitious couple breaking up (versus getting married in typical Bollywood style) figuring out life while questioning their remaining attachment for each other along the way. The lyrics are a good reminder to those recently departed that while it may suck to lose someone you still may love, if it was all that great —it wouldn’t have ended. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
jadoo
जिस जुनून से इश्क़ करते है जादू से कम नहीं
पलकें झूकाके हम तो ज़र्रे को खुदा बनाते है,
तू तो फिर भी तू है
झपकती पलकों से नज़र तो मिलाओ
हमारी दोस्ती किस बुलंदी पे तुम्हे ले जाती है
We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under.
The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public.
The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. They are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. This happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. People in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need.
Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark.
And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.
Milan Kundera.
“Baby I should hold on just a moment and be sure it’s not for vanity, Look me in the eye and tell me love is never based upon insanity,”
India: Ram Prabodh Yadav (b. 1970) is sub-inspector (deputy inspector) of police in Maner Block, Patna district, State of Bihar. Monthly salary: 10,000 rupees ($220).
The Open Society Institute’s latest documentary photography show, the most improbably delightful has to be “Bureaucratics,” by the Dutch photographer Jan Banning. “It started with the most horrible assignment I ever had,” Banning told me when when he dropped by our office yesterday. The job was in Mozambique; Banning’s editor had asked him to shoot pictures for a story on the decentralization of the administration of Dutch development aid. “That’s not something that makes your heart beat faster as a photographer,” he noted. To make it interesting for himself, he decided to shoot portraits of the bureaucrats themselves. Little did he know that this would be merely the first leg on an absurd odyssey that would take him through thousands of government offices, a world tour of what he calls “the shop windows of the state.” New Yorker
“If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.”
Sam Singh, a USA citizen, retired from Dupont as an engineer w/a dream to make a difference in India. Maybe start a school in rural India. His family thought he was nuts. People discouraged him from social work in rural India from reasons related to red tape, ignorance, corruption. Sam Singh had been a fool for lesser things. Singh invested his ENTIRE life savings into building a girls school on his ancestral property. He created an incentive for locals to send their daughters to school. He paid each girl 10RS/day to attend school set up in a bank account in the girl and her mother’s name. The money could only be withdrawn after successfully completing 10th grade. The school provides academic education but also vocational training in textiles plus money management, social & confidence building skills and education of legal rights, music and arts education. The school also provides 3 meals a day and a bus or bicycle as transportation; At the end of their education, girls who have attended most days usually have 30,000RS. savings, a vocational skill, and assistance in placement for higher studies or jobs. Tip of the hat to Mr. Sam Singh, changing lives in rural India, one girl at a time.
Wheat Ladoos
2 cups wheat flour
1 cup ghee (clarified butter)
1.5 cup powdered sugar
1/2 cup almond meal
2 tablespoon ground cardamom
broken pieces of cashew nuts.
½ tsp. ginger powder
Method.
1. Melt the ghee in a heavy bottom pan and add wheat flour to it and on a medium fire and stir for about 20 minutes, a roasted, buttery aromatic smell is a signal that the atta is well roasted.
2 After ghee and wheat flour mixture is well roasted, transfer the mixture to a bowl and allow it to cool thoroughly. The mixture should be soft and sticky.
3. After cooling, add almond meal, ground cardamom, cashew nuts, sugar, and ginger powder. Roll into small bowls.
Makes 28 Ladoos.
love the movie, love the ghazal. both movie and song are about requited yet unfulfilled love, two people breathlessly stuck without melancholy and despair, it fills me with awe.
