Bollywood comes of age

CV has gone and come so many times that the statement 'CV is back' has become something of a cliche. After a lull which went past which exceeded a year, CV has been stirred to write about a slew of movies that are threatening to make the typical lazy, plagiarist movie makers to stop and rethink, or at least CV hopes that will happen. After catching the much hyped shabby rip-off of Mememto inexplicably titled 'Ghajini' (the name of the villain who hardly justifies with his acting skills the logic of naming the movie after his on-screen persona), CV was not exactly feeling like writing about his sorry experience. Even his vitriol was too good to be wasted on the crap effort, CV thought.

Just when he was about to resign into thinking that expecting good movies from Bollywood was an exercise in masochism, CV caught a slew of movies, three of Bollywood descent and one with an Indian connection which gave rise to new hope. The movies were Das Vidaniya, Slumdog Millionaire and Dev D. The first few are mentioned here.


Dev D is a totally modern take on the novel called Devdas authored by Sarath Chandra Chattopadhyay. While the original novel and the spate of movies it inspired over the years all showed the protagonist wasting himself to his eventual death from alcohol abuse after being unable to come to terms with his unrequited love for his childhood friend Paro, Dev D in a refreshing change. The novel has been given a complete overhaul which it needed to stay relevant with respect to the ultramodern and cosmopolitan lives that it's intended audience lives in a modern India.

The dramatis personae:-

Dev: The spoiled brat son of a wealthy Punjabi businessman. Headstrong, egoistic and possessed of a perverse sense of humor, he is all show and pizazz before life puts him through some stern tests.

Paro: Dev's childhood friend and sweetheart. A freethinking and outspoken girl who is anything but a prude.

Rasika: An acquaintance of Paro who tries her best to seduce Dev.

Sunil: A worker in Dev's factory. He has a crush on Paro, a crush that proves costly for him.

Leni/Chanda: A mixed race girl child with her own share of insecurities possibly arising from her confused idea of culture. The infamous star of an explicit video clip who realizes that pain is mandatory but suffering is optional.

Chunni: A pimp who introduces Dev to Chanda.

Unlike the original, Dev loses the love of his life not due to compulsion from his parents but due to his own arrogance and egotism. Having lost Paro, Dev settles into a drug and alcohol aided haze of self-pity and during one of his sojourns into the darkness of the night, he comes across Chanda, a student by day and high-profile prostitute by night. The viewers, and then Dev discover that Chanda was a girl who had her own share of demons to fight after a video clip of her sexual romp with a casual friend gets spread all over the country, turning her from a school student into a 'disrespectable slut' overnight.

Over time, Dev finds himself drawn towards Chanda but is shattered when he is forced to face the reality of her identity when a prospective client of hers drops in to her room. What follows is more of self-pity, drugs, alcohol and a road accident in which he ends up killing a bunch of homeless men who were sleeping on the pavement. Further misadventures see him transform into a penniless hobo, wanted by the police.

On the verge of slipping into a blackhole of vice and addiction, Dev in a sudden epiphanious moment realizes the folly of his ways and decides to turn over a new leaf and profess his love to Chanda. After some searching, he finds her and finds out that she too is in love with him and has been waiting for him ever-since. The movie ends with a smiling and happy Dev and Chanda riding on a bike enroute to the police station where he is supposed to surrender.

The movie has extremely slick camerawork and a series of extremely peppy tunes/songs which gel with the story of the movie instead of acting as a speed-breaker, as in the case of most Bollywood offerings. One realizes that Bollywood is finally showing signs of coming of age as Dev D consigns to the rubbish heap the prudishness that has for long been the hallmark of Bollywood movies. There have been Bollywood movies in the past containing strong sexual content but they have all used the act of sex to symbolize depravity, addiction and vice, but not Dev D. In this movie, there is a liberal serving of sex by Bollywood standards, but without an iota of guilt which the other movies supply by the truckloads. Here, the sex is for gratification and pleasure. It stops at the pleasure level without feeding the audience with a morality lesson they did not ask for. A very slick and enjoyable movie.

Before and After Taare Zameen Par!

Cv watched Taare Zameen Par, aka TZP. The first question that people asked was this: Did Cv cry? Cv scratched his head, thought, and said 'No'. And added that he came close to it, a couple of times, hoping to change the expression on the face of the questioner to something more friendly, but no! 'Cv has to be nuts or an out-and-out cynic or worse, a hypocrite!', the wordless stares seemed to convey. Why? Why is it that people cannot appreciate something nice without putting on a show about it? Like breaking out into gut-wrenching sobs meant that you really understood the movie or something while not doing so meant you were a cynic or a hypocrite! Cv is stumped!

Though Cv was/is not dyslexic, he is not an alien to the problems faced by young Ishaan Avasti. Cv did not have English taught to him at all during his early years of schooling and as only fate can conspire, found himself in a school where English was the sole medium of communication and to use any other language would be attracting words much like the ones Ishaan attracted. But then, like Paulo Coelho writes in 'The Alchemist', fate conspired to help young Cv. Cv took to English novels and story-books like a fish takes to water. Books became his friends, and nice friends they proved to be. They offered a lot of wisdom, but never forced anything on to one, like many a friend tends to do.

Coming back to the movie, probably Cv did not feel the overwhelming need to shed copious amounts of tears as there were so many things that seemed to be mirrored from his own life. It was deja vu, and so it was amusing. Besides, Cv identified with the victim and not the perpetuator and so, was not moved to tears by the guilt. To add to that, this was a movie, and a Bollywood movie at that. Cv can see many Aamir Khan fans bristling at this 'insult', but then again, Cv freely admits that TZP is very far removed from the crap that Bollywood dishes out with such frightening regularity. But that still did nothing to stop Cv from anticipating every single twist in the plot. How ? Was Cv a mind-reader ? Nope. The reason was actually a lot simpler. TZP has no plot. By plot, Cv means hidden twists and turns, supsense and the like. TZP follows a very simple but utterly effective formula, a formula that is not exactly brand new, but still not very explored. It believes in sending everybody on a royal guilt-trip, be it the bully that troubled the shy and sensitive boy at school or the parent who shouted/scolded/harassed/beat-up his child/children to make them 'true performers' or the teacher who was not patient enough with his/her students. Thank God, Aamir made the mother and the brother pro-Ishaan, otherwise it would have been reduced to one of those saas-bahu serials that air on Hindi television channels which have the noble daughter-in-law sadly misanderstood and mistreated by all and sundry (with the only exceptions being a friendly cook or servant who invariably gets sacked at some point to render the hapless damsel even more so!)

And then, in the second half, Aamir waves the magic wand that causes all of young Ishaan Avasti's troubles to go away, in the process making the people who were squirming in their seats out of guilt and shame to feel better! Yahoo! The boy found happiness after all.

Cv may be a cynic, but here is a question for all those of you who cried and felt better watching TZP. How many actually took back something from the movie? (No. I'm not talking about the audio CDs or pirated video CDs) When the movie ended, how many actually sat through the credits which showed documentary footage of 'Special Schools' and the 'Special Children'? 'But then, who wants to see a documentary ?' is by far the most common answer. What about the pressure on the kids? Will it come down? 'Don't be silly. My son/daughter is perfectly 'normal'. He/she just needs a little push here and there to go places! What about teachers? Are they going to go easy on the dreaded 'Ruler' or 'Map-pointer' now that they have seen TZP? 'Be practical! That was just a movie. Do you think we have the time and strength to fool around to ensure that the kids have fun while at the same time meeting the deadlines to complete the syllabus? In your dreams!' the teachers will say.

Each person, no longer feeling guilty thanks to the fact that the Ishaan story ended up all rosy and cosy, will go on with his/her life, totally unaffected, doing exactly the same thing, whatever they were doing earlier. Oh, their pockets would be lighter thanks to the steep prices of the theatre tickets (assuming they didn't watch it from a pirated DVD) but the tear-soaked hand-kerchiefs make up for even that small difference!
TZP came and TZP will go, but the obsessions and ideosyncrasies of parents and the callous approach of teachers and school managements will go on forever.

Oh, Cv almost forgot: The verdict on TZP ?
The casting is good, acting convincing and the music very original, fresh and innovative. And good. Just filter out all the nonsense about emotional effect the movie movie is going to cause and what you will have is a lovely movie which you can safely and enjoyable watch, with your entire family.

Five Point (yawn) someone

Complexvanilla was having suffering from another bout of insomnia when he happened to chance across 'Five Point Someone', a book which he had religiously avoided reading, as all things overrated put him off, and this was a book that he felt, was certainly all hype and publicity, like the crap Arindham Choudhary dishes out.

A couple of hours zipped by with no signs of approaching sleep and the book continued to hold interest and CV continued to plough through it. Five hours after he started with the cover page, the last page had been turned. The book was over. CV gave a yawn and reflected on the story. This post is not a spoiler of the book, nor is it intened to be a review, but it intends to dissect the book to find out what led to it's success and popularity, and whether it truly deserved it.

Three dudes with contrasting natures come together as hostel mates in the hostel of IIT Delhi. The book is about their adventures and misadventures. With one of the characters (Ryan) portrayed as an Indian version of Ayn Rand's Howard Roark (some seqeunces seem to be lifted straight out of Rand's Fountainhead - for instance, Roark speaks out against the need to copy the Parthenon while Ryan speaks out against the need to copy the design of a car-jack. So very original! ) and the dialogs straight out of hostels and college campuses, it cultivated the fan following of the college crowd. The second wave was created by people who just had to read or be able to claim to read what the 'in-crowd' was reading so they took to reading it. The book has an intriguing love story woven in it - or so the people said. CV was rubbing his eyes in total disbelief. Since when did women start asking to be taken out by slightly overweight strangers whom they happened to knock down on the road? Offering a lift is one thing, but an offer to go out for ice-cream? Either that was one desperate girl or the author was indulging in some bizarre fantasy. Or maybe the author wants to say that women hit on IITians even if they look like shit? Maybe. In any case, disbelief, suspended or otherwise did not stop CV from reading the whole damn book.


So, anything interesting at all??

Yeah, CV thougt that the timelines adopted in this book were different. There are three timelines in this book. One is set in the past, when the adventures and misadventures occured. The last two pages bring out the remaining two timelines: Hari, when talking about Neha (The Girl), says that he can now say what happened between the two of them (current timeline) and says that it is irrelevant and goes on to another timeline (intermediate timeline) in which Neha is yet to arrive in Mumbai where Hari-boy is chilling out. So, the mystery is whether Neha and Hari stuck together? Hardly. If that were to be the case, the author could have just done with two timelines, finishing off with a Hollywood style credits line, with a quick description about everybody, something like 'Ryan is currently a full time researcher in lubricant technology while Alok is happily married with a fat kid to boot, Neha and Hari went on to sire a foot-ball team' and so on and so forth, but the peculiar nature of the third timeline indicates that things did not go all that rosily with the couple.

Verdict? Overrated, as initially suspected, but is worth a read, if you have a couple of hours to kill and no TV, PC or laptop anywhere near.

complexvanilla redefined

So complexvanilla is back here, roused from his slumber once again. Actually, he's not really been off the blogsphere or something as he keeps contributing to another blog, at least in part. Though the other blog might be more thriving, this blog still remains what it was created to be, a stomping ground for the nested minds, which are collectively called complexvanilla, which means a difficult combination combination of something very simple, or a complex mixture of ingredients that by themselves are plain vanilla. Which brings us to the question 'If complexvanilla is a bunch of minds and not really the person to whom they supposedly belong to, does complexvanilla have a gender? How is complexvanilla to be reffered to? As a collective noun? He? They? To simplify things and abstract philosophy from bare-bones reality, complexvanilla will be he. The personal pronoun 'I' which indicates a single identity is no longer considered accurate in describing the amalgam that is complexvanilla, and is henceforth given up in favor of either the proper noun complexvanilla or the third person. From now on, complexvanilla takes center-stage, as it was always meant to be. There is no 'I' that owns complexvanilla. complexvanilla is free. He can and will do as he pleases.

Stephen King's 'The Shining'

I have watched Stephen King's 'Pet Semetary' and read 'Rose Madder' and liked both. A friend of mine has recommended King's 'Thinner' very highly, but whether I will be reading it in the near future is another matter! Why? I happened to read King's 'The Shining' and had a nasty experience!

Stephen King adopts a dark style of narrative which appears to go down pretty well with his fans, but then, if darkness is shown to contrast with light or to even accentuate it, it's different, but when all there is to the story is darkness and more darkness, one feels suffocated. Here's my take on the story:



SPOILER WARNING: Given below is a gist of 'The Shining'. Plot details (if there are any!) will be discussed.

Let me introduce the dramatis personae and give the lowdown about them till the starting point of the novel.

Jack Torrance: Talented book-author and budding playwright whose career and ambitions seemed to be going downhill after he became a full-blown alcoholic. He was forced to quit drinking when his wife Wendy threatened him with divorce after he broke his infant son's arm in a moment of alcohol induced madness. After quitting drinking, his frustration levels kept increasing. He got fired from his job as faculty member of a college when he almost beat a student to death upon catching the boy trying to slash his car tires. With the help of an influential friend, he found a job as the winter caretaker for the Overlook Hotel, Colorado. Jack Torrance needs this job very badly.

Winnifred Torrance aka Wendy: Jack's long-suffering wife. She always put up a brave front and lived with the crazy antics of her alcoholic husband who is now reformed. Like most wives, she too is given to nagging her husband and often suspects him of drinking, even though he has stayed off the liquor for months, causing him a lot of heart-burn.

Daniel Anthony Torrance aka Danny: The Torrence's kid. A boy gifted with telepathic and precognitive skills. Often sees snippets of the future as well is able to read people's minds. These days, he is plagued by nightmares, some of them related to Jack's new job.

Tony: Danny's 'invisible friend'. A mysterious boy who appears in Danny's mind and shows him glimpses of the future and things which otherwise would not be known to Danny.

Al Shockley: Jack Torrance's long time drinking companion as well as a rich and influential person. Majority stakeholder in the Overlook Hotel. The man who got Jack his caretaker job at the hotel, after Jack lost his teaching job.

George Hatfield: The boy on the debate team whose influential father was despised by Jack Torrance. Jack threw George out of the debate team on the pretext that he stuttered while speaking. George showed his displeasure by slashing the tires of Jack's VW Beetle. Jack retaliated by nearly beating George to death and lost his job as a result.

Dick Hallorann: The chef who works during the summer at the Overlook. Like Danny, he too can read people's mind and sometimes foresee the future.

Stuart Ullman: The notoriously uptight and tight-fisted manager of the Overlook. Jack's boss.

The Overlook Hotel: A luxury hotel with a notorious past including murders of mafiosi, suicides and accounts of prostitution. Rumors of it being haunted do the rounds often.

The story in a nutshell:-

Ullman, upon Al Shockley's insistence gives Jack the job of the winter caretaker of the Overlook. Dick Hallorann, a chef, briefs the family about the kitchen and the stores and in the process discovers Danny's special gifts of telepathy. He takes a liking for the boy and tells him that he too can read minds and further goes on to warn the boy about the queer things that occur in the hotel. He also tells the boy to telepathically signal to him for help, if he may require it. The Torrances are left to fend for themselves after all the staff of the hotel, including Ullman, leave for the winter. Initially Jack is happy, but the loneliness and the gloom (and the ghosts?) of the building overcome Jack who starts going on the wane. Danny is attacked and nearly killed by a ghost. An illogical and stressed out Jack puts paid to the family's only chance of leaving the hotel and reaching the main town when he sabotages the only snowmobile on the hotel premises, the only mode of transportation in the extremely snowy conditions which were prevailing. Jack goes completly insane and starts halucinating about drinking and even gets drunk on drinks which inexplicably appear in an empty wine-cupboard (Work of ghosts?) Maddened by his drinking and the voices of the ghosts that seem to appear and talk to him, he tries to murder his wife and son. His son sends out a telepathic SOS to Dick Halloran who comes down to help them out, only to discover a stark raving mad Jack. An injured Hallorann (injured griviously by Jack) along with Wendy and Danny make their way out of the hotel even as the old boiler (whose pressure had to be periodically reduced to prevent an explosion) exploded after the insane Jack had forgotten to dump the pressure for an extended period of time.

END OF SPOILER

Stephen King has bloated this gist in the most obscene manner by adding reams and reams of absolutely useless 'filler' data, information that is present just for the sake of increasing the size of the book, the number of pages. One is also not clear as to what King wishes to convey through the story. Through the collapse of Jack, one feels that King intends to say that 'Once a drunk, always a drunk' or something to that effect. It is a very disturbing and depressing read, especially for a person who may be contemplating or trying to quit drinking. Darkness, it is said, is not an attribute by itself, but the mere absence of light. There is so little light in this novel that Darkness, one feels, has become an attribute in itself. Darkness is all-pervading and one feels the need, nay, the very yearning for light, which is not there and the reader is left high and dry, marooned, so to speak. Completely avoidable reading.

What is Love?

Is Love a destination or a station in transit? Are people who claim to be on the lookout for love really looking for love or is it something else that they are seeking? Love means many different things to different people but can anything really exist in so many different forms or is it just one thing that people have bent around for the sake of their own convenience? George Orwell paints the darker side of a society that cares only for convenience and not for values in his timeless offering, 'Animal Farm'. Rules are part of every society, religion, race and culture but how often is it that these rules are bent, often twisted completely out of context to obtain licences for doing things that would be too dastardly otherwise? These people who bend the rules feel guilty no doubt, about what they do, but that guilt is shortlived. More so when the society that these law breakers fear condone their actions instead of condemning them. That is how people get damned, twice over. Once for breaking the rules and the second time, for fooling themselves into believing that what they did was not bad, after all.

Love too is no different. Gibran says that Love puts one through the most taxing and stringent of tests before bestowing its gifts on the people who aspire for it. He says that Love threshes you to seperate your husk from you and then grinds you into wheat and then kneads you into dough to make you plaint and in the end, bakes you in the oven to make you fit to feed the Gods. Love puts one through so much of pain, anguish and suffering but in the end, gives the seeker so much more, but does anybody stay long enough to find out? Does anybody really experience the true nature of love? Often, I have come across people wistfully hoping for their Prince Charming/ Princess Snowhite to appear out of the blue and spirit them away from the humdrum everyday realitiies but do these people even realize that the same reality that they despise today might look like a bed of roses in comparison with what may befall them the next day?

People think they are looking at love but it's actually something else that they are looking at. Even the people who might know the truth deep down would not be willing to accept it. Why rock the boat when it is in steady waters? Why get up suddenly and lose the wonderful dream that is there? Why fix something when it is not broken completely and so on and so forth.

Love never makes an attempt to hide a part of itself, but if peoplle refuse to accept it for what it is and instead fool themselves into believing something that is not there, who is to blame? Love never fails, but people in love or those who think themselves to be lovers. often do. All too often.

An ode to Anger and the Mind that created it

The Dark recesses of the mind reek,
Of the overpowering vitriolic odour of Anger;
An anger deeper than the Oceans,
Anger at having been relegated to,
The status of a non-entity.

Anger so potent that it can burn the Mind down,
And with it, what houses it.
Anger knows no distinction between the good and bad,
For it, it makes no difference,
They are all the same, the same common enemy.

The Mind that bore Anger in its poisonous womb,
Regrets not, bearing its dreadful child.
It takes pride instead, in the fact that it too is not spared,
By the horrendous destruction brought about, for it knows:
What its child wreaks is but what it wreaks, upon itself and upon everything else.

-complexvanilla aka Prashanth Dwarakanath Chengi