Skip to main content

Tobey Maguire, Akshay Kumar and Mani Ratnam


If someone could write a code to find the frequently used word by me in the past few months, a word that would feature itself in top five would be Dahej. The place I look for reasons to get out of even if it means travelling forty kilometers to watch a film. In an overly crowded, fitting people in corners keeping the doors open travelling away from the ‘Mein aur Meri Tanhaayi’, that is the isolated experience of Dahej. Plugging in, listening to some Ed Sheeran- looking around and wondering, what am I doing here? As I try to adjust into my seat. The loud tracks of Badshah in the vans do distract me, the spits of pan do distract me but in this chaos of our lives, where I can’t even hear my voice- distraction is a routine, is a form of concentration. Then we arrive, to a land where Uber is only an app on your phone and not a reality. The weekend kicks off- Boss Baby. Easiest getaway from the world possible- The parallels it draws about being an adult from a baby’s perspective and about being a baby from an adult, the way it’s able to strike a thought in your head in the most subtle way possible. The imaginative scales it tries to explore in a mere one and half hours is just a spectacle, you cannot miss. When it ended like the way it did in an Imtiaz Ali film, I was totally wooed. The way he runs around, creating a ‘Tamasha’ in the corporate world, looks like that’s how I’ll get out of Dahej too. Then we walk out just to get another ticket of Naam Shabana. A spy film. Action Film. Good Film.South Indian Film. Surprised by Pruthviraj. Akshay Kumar, shows up. Not my kind of film. But a Good Film. And then the film, I actually had planned to see.

Kaatru Veliyidai, by Mani Ratnam- He creates art on screen, it’s like magic the way he takes you to Srinagar into the lives of the characters, he’s written. Their flaws, their habits, their stories that’s made them who they’re and the way it has led to the situations they’re in. The way the conversations flow, the way the barrier between them breaks even if it’s portrayed just using a door of a cupboard, the way they fly over the Himalayas and whisper to each other, in the dreading cold, in the heart of Ladakh- it’s all various strokes of colours that you witness in a celebration of all the emotions accompanied by the scores and melodies of AR Rahman. Exploring their journeys in the midst of war, the survival to see the one reason to live and love- whatever I’ve watched of Mani Ratnam’s filmography, I’ve been able to find a reason to love them all. Pallavi Anupallavi to Nayakan to Iruvar to O Kadhal Kanmani to the one I was just talking about. The reason for the love of the word Kadhal. It’s all about the journey. And then the journey back to Dahej in the darkness, pondering again in the bus back to where it all began.Tobey
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Batman and Bananas

Bananas- The fruit most of us love. We consume the good of it and dispose the peel. Something that we ignore to notice is the way the peel makes people fall down, if not disposed rightfully. After extracting the good, if you leave it on the streets to decompose, it’ll get back on the human race by making someone slip for someone else’s action. This sounds like the story of every grey character towards the black end we’ve known- the bad guys- or the villains that we’ve come across. So who are the good guys? Bananas??- Maybe. So let’s talk about Batman, the universe with a quite a lot of grey characters. Batman was trained by mercenaries who wanted him to destroy Gotham, become a ‘peel’ to Gotham slip it off its course of downfall and mark a growth of a new civilization. But he does become a symbol, a symbol of ‘right’ among all wrongs- he becomes the peel in the dustbin. When the peel is in the dustbin, instead on the street- it’s in the right place, doing the right thing. Not on the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

In between the Lakes and Palaces

If you’re A poet A misfit A dreamer A schemer A rebel A loner A doer A thinker Please For the love Of the universe Don’t change A piece of blue paper with these words on it was handed to me on a bowl with many others, with different quotes to it. The universe chose this for me, amongst all the other chits of paper, stuck between my fingers as I lifted it from a ‘bowl of quotes’ placed at our table along with the bill at a café, in the narrow lanes of Udaipur. With partially digested pasta with pesto and a shot of caffeine in the form of Irish coffee, I was hit with strong words making me ponder about- What am I doing? - in middle of the largest state in the country. Of all the café’s in all of Udaipur, I walk into this and this little blue paper falls in between my fingers. I was lost in a sea of thoughts, each word playing on repeat in my head as I walked down the narrow lanes towards Bagore ki Haveli, again. I couldn’t hear the words of my friends, just s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Arrival at La La Land to find Fantastic Beasts

When you’re walking around the mall and see a piano playing itself to a set tune with a barricade around it saying- “just enjoy the music from a distance”, but deep down, you wish you were wearing a suit or tuxedo, jump right in, start playing it and the whole mall breaks into singing and dancing- You’re still not over La La Land. At least I wasn’t. From the way it flows and you find it difficult to put the experience of it into words. Just like something that cannot be explained, but experienced only in a dark room, on a large screen through four seasons- a perfect symphony of the love for dreams and dream of love. Something that could make you remember the most inanimate thing, that you’ve forgotten and stays in the cupboard or the last time you played it. A guitar that you used to play for the fun of it, means a lot more and you wish it was here, with you. When Bollywood that thrives in music in creating moments falls short in front of a magical musical, and you know it’s someth...
Post a Comment
Read more