Hazaron khwahishen aisi

Mid week movie marathon last night. This movie has been in my netflix q for a few months now and in my head for almost an year. Finally decided to see it last evening when hubby was in a call. (Warning - some spoilers ahead)

At the outset let me say that I have a lot of respect for Sudhir Mishra as a director, he has done a brilliant job in this movie too. The whole setting of the movie, the essence of late 60's and 70's has been captured well. Old delhi always brings a smile to my face. Every small details from the songs of that genre to the cotton sarees to the vintage cars effuse attention to detail on the directors part.

As always its nice to see actors who are articulate in english when you make a movie thats predominantly in english. It would have been a disaster if you had people who had to make that effort to speak in english like a local dialect. But it did make me wonder why he chose to make the main characters speak in english so much, was it for the global appeal?
I mean, it could just as well be in Hindi, would not have mattered so much except perhaps made it more aligned to mainstream movies.

Now, coming to the story line itself- I think its an out and out love story, even a triangle if you must. With politics, fundamentalism and idealism as the background canvas. Its a beautiful movie for most parts.

The first half of the movie is so awesome that it makes you crave for more. The chemistry between the central characters is brilliant.

A confused girl educated in London but trying to adapt herself to normal student life in Delhi. She is dangerously fascinated by the revolutionary. You can see hesitation and even a sense of disinterest in her eyes when they talk about protests and strikes. At the same time you can feel the adulation and that young 'but I want you' look in her eyes. Chitrangada Singh is a very good actress, brilliant screen presence.

A young revolutionary, comes from an upscale and privileged background. On the surface you wonder why does he need to be so rebellious, where is so much angst coming from? But I am guessing the spark signifies post independent newly emerging face of india and the youth of india. There is so much energy and enthusiasm that you see in the character, the will to make a difference and the optimism that they can bring about a revolution. I could probably not have imagined anybody other than KK for this role. But then its probably because he is so talented that every time you see him on the screen you don't see KK but the character he is playing.

Another young man, a typical guy next door. He is from a typical middle class family in a small town who dreams big and wants big. In his own words-"You upper class people are trying to get out while people like me are trying to get in". He wants to be somebody, nothing wrong with it. He even wants to bend rules a bit to get what he wants. Cocky and confident. His only weakness is Gita. No matter where he is, who he is, that is one person who will bring him down to his knees. In her presence, he is devoid of any pretenses, any cloaks and you see him for exactly what he is. Completely smitten.

As the story progresses, you can see the characters evolving into completely different personalities in a span of less than 10 years. Almost goes to say how the 20's are really the formative years of your life. The final results are almost paradoxical :)

The confused girl goes from being an outsider to being completely involved in the betterment of a small village. She also redeems herself from the ghosts of her past and most importantly rids herself of the absolutely consuming relationship with Siddharth. Although, it may not have been a voluntary action on her behalf, she does come to realize who she is and what she really wants.
The so called revolutionary goes from being the hot blooded youth to the man caught in the throes of corrupt politics and a certain helplessness towards understanding what he really stands for. He begins with the notion that sometimes a strong stance, even violence may be required for a revolution but is quickly caught in the quagmire when he realizes that he is surrounded by the absolutely disinterested officials who are bigger and better at violence. To see him go back to his roots is almost satirical.
Perhaps Shiney Ahuja's character is the most unchanging in the whole story, you see him as a determined youth humbled by his love for Gita and the movie almost ends on that note.

But.. yes there is a but, the movie completely falters in the second half. I mean, I was confused and I think Sudhir was too. He should have left the politics and fundamentalism as a backdrop and not bring it so much to surface.

Post interval, you begin to question so many things that it almost negates the whole first half of the movie. After about 2 hours, you want to ask yourself, where is he going with this? There is too much unnecessary stuff in the movie e.g. the final accident scene, the wrong doings in the police station and of course the penultimate scene where Shiney gets beaten up.

There was a point when i wanted to scream out loud- Where the hell did Saurabh Shukla come into the picture???? I mean, his character almost didn't exist for 2 hrs!! In the end you almost feel that Sudhir wanted to reach the final scene by any means. He knew his destination so he was just steering blindly towards it. It just becomes a huge mess.

If there was one aspect that I want to be picky about, I think its a certain sensitivity thats almost missing when it comes to sketching a female protagonist. Gita is a strong woman, she is an intelligent woman. I give that much to the writer/director. But if you are going to add components like cheating, birth of a child, rape and separation of a child, at least get to know a female psyche before doing that. Don't just paint the picture black and white.

Gita's reactions to certain aspects in the movie is almost like a Man's and I am not being derogatory mind you. I just think there is more to it than what has been portrayed. A woman's ideologies are not so stark and trudging unidirectionally. Its almost a myopic vision and I found it jarring.

If you ask me, the movie should have stuck at its core being just a love story without getting any political, fundamentalist indian issues in the foreground.
But obviously no one is asking me :p.

That aside an extremely watchable movie for at least 90 minutes :)

hazaaron Khvaahishen aisii ki har Khvaaish pe dam nikale
bahut nikale mere armaaN lekin phir bhii kam nikale

nikalanaa Khuld se aadam kaa sunate aaye hain lekin
bahut beaabaruu hokar tere kuuche se ham nikale

muhabbat men nahiin hai farq jiine aur marane kaa
usii ko dekh kar jiite hain jis kaafir pe dam nikale

Khudaa ke vaaste pardaa na kaabe se uThaa zaalim
Kahiin aisaa na ho yaaN bhii vahii kaafir sanam nikale

KahaaN maiKhaane ka daravaazaa 'Ghalib' aur kahaaN vaaiz
par itanaa jaanate hain kal vo jaataa thaa ke ham nikale

Old one

But I like this girl.. Really..

Best wishes and congrats on the upcoming wedding gal!!

Totally worth it !

http://pointblank2006.blogspot.com/

Grrrrrr

After reading the write up by RJA here, decided to head towards it. Like some other counterparts, this one needs the reader to register before reading anything off the site. I personally find that very annoying.
If you are posting editorials and public posts, why insist on gathering just about every damn information about your reader (including the slabs on household income) before letting them read anything. And making 70% of the fields mandatory does not help at all!

So, anyways, considering that during mid afternoon I do have a certain lethargy and lotsa time, i venture into registration.

As soon as I register and want to log back in, this is what I get:
















So, i retry and the same error.

After much deliberation and mind you I dont' do this often, I want to send them an email or leave a feedback.

I have to say I did not find a feedback section but a 'Contact us' instead. So assuming thats the way to go, i land at the contact page and guess what. Somehow they are presumptuous enough to not have a technical feedback section. I admit for any editorial, newspaper like website, you need a content based feedback.

But hello, in this techy world, when you are so heavily relying on the platform like the web to render your content how can you not enable yourself to receive technical feedbacks?
















Personally very annoying this is.. Mind you, this is not an attempt to tech review the website. Its an observation (although would not mind reviewing it too). But for now, this has put me off.

So, anyways, I had these screen shots and i load my picasa to blog the pictures and guess what!














Guess its just not my day !!! grrrrr

Blip.

Do you have times in your life when you are not sure if its the mind or the heart which makes you do things? I do. And I am at a loss to understand which one. You would think that its the heart, coz thats the fickle one, but I am not so sure. Somehow there is a more intelligent mechanism behind it. All signs point to the so called stable, intelligent thing, aka the mind. Its the mind that shelves and maintains those partitions of your thought processes, memories and moments.

Almost like this huge RDBMS where all you need is a random trigger or a key of a thought. (Sorry, geeko that i am!) Ram wrote once about emotional triggers and such. I agree with it so much. But i think there are times when that rapid time traversing in your mind does not even need a trigger.

The heart is a very inexplicable thing. It really is the most unscientific working object that you will come across. Absolutely without any rhyme or reason, it makes the mind to race between all those partitions you have in your head.

Absolutely no reason...

TOI

There are many an issues I have with TOI and the way it has shaped itself over the last decade or so.

But.. sitting so far away, trying to clutch at whatever semblance I see of home country, to feel being a part of the bigger scheme, to take pride in being a fraction of what can only be seen as a significant phase for the country..I find myself putting up this link.

First language

Convo with my 8 years old cousin last year:

Me: Ok Anju , whats your mother tongue (yes, I have weird convos like this, my way of keeping the kiddos entertained :p)

Anju: English

Me: ??

Me: (What ? How ? ) Why do you say that pappu ?

Anju: Thats what we speak na Radhika didi.

Me: Ya (and realizing that it is true and I was speaking to her in english).. hmm .. ok do you know what a mother tongue is ?

Anju: No (:) Shez only 8, give her a break!)

Me: Ok, its the language you speak at home.

Anju: So thats english na Radhika didi.

Me: What? How? (slowly feeling like the dumb one in this conversation) You don't speak in english with mummy and papa.

Anju: Yes, I do. Everyday.

Me: Umm. Ok let me put it this way, mother tongue is what your mummy speaks in. So what does you mummy speak in..

Anju: (confused for a while) Malayalam

Me: (Oh no!)

Me: Well .. with some people, but what she talk to your papa in? (My aunt is from malluland, can't blame the kid!)

Anju: Tamil

Me: Seee (with a sense of accomplishment) Thats what I mean, she speaks in tamil with everybody right?

Anju: Ya but she talks to me in English na Radhika didi.

Me: (Stumped)

This was a while ago and I should have got the message. English is fast replacing all our local languages even at home. All these kids who go to private or convent schools are taught to speak in English thru out the day. And they bring the same back home with them, either due to just being used to talking like that during the day or to impress folks at home. And impressed we are, every time we hear a kid talking ever so nicely in english we are so impressed. Ah new words, new sentences, all so impressive..

Slowly the language creeps into every conversation with every member of the family.

And this phenomenon is not prevalent only among the kids (tho it is more scary that the future generation is oriented that way). We all are falling in that category where English is not the first language just in schools anymore, its rapidly becoming our first language anywhere.

In most metropolitan/cosmopolitan cities, the companies we work for demand that we speak in English. I know I can't generalize it, I still see people talking in local languages in many cities and believe me I am the first one to get pissed about it! Its quite unprofessional too if you ask me, essentially because a workplace especially in IT is an amalgamation of people from different parts of the country and most of who do not speak the local language.

In this situation, its quite unprofessional (and irritating) to talk in local languages.

Which reminds me of an episode about 5-6 years ago when I was in this project which had this one guy who was ever so quiet. He was generally soft spoken and quiet so when he chose to be like that even during our team meetings and all the name calling meetings (:p), we just thought maybe thats how he is. After about 8 months, the project gets over and we have this gala project closure lunch at a restaurant.

We: So S, are you always so quiet, you hardly speak during the meetings?

S: Oh, thats because I don't understand what you people are saying, you all talk in Hindi and I don't understand Hindi.

We: ????

This was 8 whole months of a project mind you! I must admit, that by some quirk of fate, we were all Hindi speaking people in that project so talking in Hindi I guess became natural (not that I endorse that). But imagine this poor south Indian guy who went thru 8 months of really not understanding completely what the rest of the gang was saying!!! I was quite appalled...

Anyways, i digress.

What we also do not realize that we are at work for most part of our day anything ranging from 8-10 hrs. And things like the language we speak for 10 hrs a day tends to seep into our personal lives whether we like it or not.

I find that hubby and me talk in English more often than not, its really not like we cannot both talk in Tamil. But we talk in English... Somehow its becoming the most convenient language that we can communicate in.. Soon we will really forget how to form sentences in our respective mother tongues I am sure..(yes, we have a couple of languages we consider to be mother tongues :P)

I remember when my family moved to Bangalore from Delhi and we were living with my grand parents, thatha wud rap me on my head everytime he would find me speaking with my bro in Hindi. But we just couldn't help it, speaking in hindi was/is second nature to us. In fact till date, i dont think I ahve ever spoken to my bro in tamil, we always always talk in Hindi. Its weird, I know.

But the point is, after a while, thatha gave up and said you guys are useless.

Now, I find that happening with English. I am sure very soon 2 generations from now, kids especially from nuclear families will have very little linguistic skills in their respective mother tongues (so called)

As for my children, I can only feel sorry for them, they will get telugu from the dad, tamil from my mum, hindi from me, kannada from the school (its become a mandatory language in primary schools), mallu from the rest of my family and of course english from.. hmmmm just the air I guess :)

Can women have it all..

A thought I have been chewing upon for a while now, nicely put across by soumya here. There are reasons i didn't put across anything out there. More than anything i think it was the mental block of not being able to get into the shoes of the working or non working mums out there. And its a valid point because, no matter what i think or say, there could always be someone who will step up to say, you know what- you cannot know what we go thru because you cannot relate to it. And I agree, I don't relate to it because I am not a mum and I am not in that predicament really.

But, does not mean, I cannot empathize..

As a woman, I believe, these are issues that you always tend to think about with or without having children. Any woman who is also a professional has had this thought process at some point or other in her life.

And its a very very pertinent chain of thoughts because they help deciding how your family will shape in the future. And I think thats huge !

Not many know that every working mother out there is guilt ridden, there is and always will be a small 'what if's' kinda conversation that she will have in her head at some point of time. I know.. my mother has worked all her life. When I was growing up, I guess i never really talked to her about it but now I think she is more comfortable in sharing those thoughts with me.

I remember when I was in school, there was this mid afternoon radio chat show which wanted to talk to students with working mums and by some quirk of fate I was chosen. I was asked how it felt to have a mum who worked. And for some reason, they always make it sound like a drudge-y and quite a helpless situation. I begged to differ and said not every woman out there is working because she has to work. There are many who work because they like to, because they have a passion for what they do. I still think its an alien concept for the typical indian mentality to fathom that idea, The concept that a woman will chose to have a career, in fact chose a career despite the fact that she has a family to take care of. Its an alien concept that woman can successfully have both and if it comes down to it, can make her choices or priorities and stick to it.
Anyways, i proudly told the world in that radio show that I was proud to have a working mum and cited instances where i thought i was empowered to be independent and confident due to fact that mum was not around. My mum heard that show and burst into tears.

I was baffled. I wondered why she would break down like that. I insisted that I meant it in a good way, and i was really proud of her. She just looked at me and said, you know the thought that I am never around when you come back from school breaks my heart.
I didn't know what to say to her then, i was just 16 and not a very articulate person. I wish I had the maturity i have today to talk to her, I wish i had responded saying- You know what, no matter what, you made me a better person by just letting us fend for ourselves. I dont think I would be half this independent or capable of having and holding my own if not for you to look up to. You taught me that women could have it all and still raise children who are independent enough to make their life's decisions themselves and mature enough to be accountable for every decision whether it was right or wrong. That itself is a huge achievement any one person can hold a claim to.

At the threshold of settling down so to speak and start a family (in the distant future, with emphasis on distant), I find myself digesting all this and more.

Some insightful thoughts in Soumya's blog which talks about the lack of a support system, lack of men stepping up to part-take that raising children responsibility. But I think her blog is mostly about stay at home mums and working mums.
What do I aspire to be, you may ask.. I want to be a working mum who has the choice of staying at home if she so wishes.

Baffled? Well, i guess I mean professionally be able to work from home whenever I want to. I completely understand that this solution/proposition is not for women in all professional spheres. Its probably a choice that you see very seldom existing in this world, but by virtue of being in an IT world, its possible. And i think in some ways, I am working my butt off right now, so that I can enjoy that privilege when it comes to it. Some jobs, sorry most jobs do not allow people to work from home, some jobs are just not feasible.

Which is why I think a lot of corporates and organizations out there need to understand and respect a woman's choice to work and raise a family in parallel and more importantly in tandem with each other. I think working from home in a lot of ways may improve efficiency, less time wasted in travel, less office chit chats and most importantly the peace of mind to know that you are keeping an eye over your family. A quick trip to office maybe once a week or on need basis when you have an important meeting is not too much to ask for. I think many IT companies out there are beginning to encourage that and I think its a brilliant trend. A professional woman who goes on maternity leave or takes a break when she has a kid should not be looked upon as a potential gap to fill for the other male colleagues around her. And no, its not such an unimaginable thought, I see it happen all around me. No matter how much we progress I feel sad to say that some men in this world regress even as I type this.

There are men out there (fortunately not too many of them) who still think that they are more deserving on a job or a position simply because they are men and historically speaking they 'need' to work to support a family and a woman 'doesn't need to'. Its sad....I had this uncle in my street who was in a supervisor position at an educational institution and he told me this long ago- If a man and a woman come in to my office for a job, I would rather give it to that man even if he is less qualified because if he gets the job, the whole family is provided for. While, if I give it to the woman, I am just enabling a family to live a notch better.

Very insightful I must say, and he said it with a lot of conviction. We went into quite a bit of tangent after that debating about what if the woman was a single mother or about the choice which one must make depending on who is the most deserving and not the most needful. But anyways, I digress. The point was to emphasize on the fact that there is a certain frivolous tone associated with working women in our country.

Sad to say, I am not sure when we will overcome that. I think its easier to overcome demons who are physical manifestations of the degenerate thought system we have rather than the inner demons in our heads.

The support system that Soumya talks about for a mother, should not just remain a support system of friends and family. I think the society and the thereby the country needs to become that support system that we lack today.

The support system which enables a woman to make her life choices and not be riddled with guilt on the account of choosing one thing over another. Despite the fact that I personally think guilt is a hell-sent gift women are born with, and I think thats because nature intended them to be the nurturers no matter what. And when you divulge even .1% from being that, guilt ensues.

Feminism is not about a women competing with men in this patriarchal world, in fact its about the empowerment of a woman to be able to make her own life choices, without being subjected to prejudices or archaic notions, and co-exist as a partner with men.