Heart Beating Around The Bush

I haven't been inclined to watch a (Bollywood) movie in a very long time now.
Saturday being its laziest, I laboured myself into opening the Amazon Prime Video app, browsed nonchalantly and somehow settled on watching Dil Dhadakne Do

A family that does some much needed soul searching on a cruise. For one, the characters are beautifully layered, each one sketched impressively. I kept searching for a story for the first hour though. The whataboutery keeps meandering here and there...you know something's gotta give and you're waiting for the tipping point but there still isn't a plot that manifests. There's enough innuendo that there's been a past to many of the characters. Yet, it doesn't evoke the curiousness to see the skeletons tumbling out.

A fabulous display of theatrics, especially Anil Kapoor and Shefali Shah...again temptingly layered...beautifully played...which the story pitifully only showcases but never puts to strong use.
I loved the solid acts, but managed to connect with the characters of only Ranvir and Priyanka.
There's also a tiny cameo by an actor playing Amresh Uncle that's very endearing.

A great showcase of acting that jumps aboard the cruise and flounders in search of a tale to tell. 

Book Review: The Everything Store - Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

I bought this book after I came across another book called Hatching Twitter. Thanks to Amazon's own advanced prescriptive analysis!
NYT has said that this is one of the most well written biographies. I tend to agree strongly. 
Non fiction can be a hard read but author Brad Stone makes sure he straps us into our seats from the word go and ensures we stay with him from cover to cover. 
The book opens with the story of a child prodigy in a school in Houston - ...HOUSTON guys...we've a connection! - and delves straight into the initial career of a young and ever enthusiastic Bezos. 
The conception of Amazon is very interesting and Stone gives us tremendous insight into its formative years. 
Bezos is no ordinary entrepreneur. Withe grit of Hercules, he has braved Amazon through tumultuous waters, where a lesser mortal would've long conceded. 
A captivating narrative of Amazon's growth from strength to strength, Bezos' intuitive investment in futuristic technology and some interesting snippets into his life with a photo spread thrown in for good measure!

It's a story you'll certainly relate to if you are an Amazon user and intrigued by if you aren't still. 

One of my best reads in recent times. 

Dancing under influence

A Sunday as lazy as it was, I was squandering away time browsing social media when I suddenly remembered that my sister used to like a song that featured in the musical countdowns of the 90's.
It wasn't a very popular song and she liked it because she thought Rohit Roy looked very cute in it. Now, neither the film nor the song evidently showed up on Rohit's Wiki and I had to dig very deep into the archives of my brain for a significantly long time, with a few trials and errors, faintly recollecting words from the lyrics before I finally hit upon the right result.


I'll come to it in a moment but in the meantime, my trial and error resulted in unearthing a couple of other incredulous songs:
- Doston ke liye aaj ki shaam hai from a movie called Trishakti starring Milind Gunaji, Sharad Kapoor, Arshad Warsi...and someone else I cannot recollect, amongst a murder of supporting cast known for playing bad guys quite often
- Ab tak hai puri azaadi from Kudrat with a relatively decent cast of Akshaye Khanna and Urmila Matondkar.


Phew, coming to our actual result - it's a song called Humko hone de sharaabi from a movie called Koi Kisi Se Kum Nahin!
Now the song quite falls into the 'so bad it's good' category. The theme is of a friend's wedding party where his three bum chums plead with the bartender and subsequently with the friend's newly wed wife to open up the bar counters. The song also packs in a dream sequence for one of its verses.


I watched the song with much amusement, observing the expressions of the actors, the haphazard choreography and partly also the lyrics. The song has Ashish Vidyarthi, Milind Gunaji (little wonder then that I looked up the other song as well), Mamik Singh (from Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikander), Ashok Saraf (the barman), Kashmira Shah (the reason for dream sequence) and Rohit Roy who does look cute!


It definitely is a so bad it's good song. Cos I ended up watching it twice or thrice over.


And then I thought the film might be so bad it's good too and looked it up.


It starts with Ashish Vidyarthi waking up and realizing it's his wedding and his three buddies who also seem to live with him engage him in the usual pre wedding banter in a very large bathtub. Turns out that they are all cops and Kashmira and Ashok are also cops who show up at that instant to report that some goon's whereabouts have been traced. (This was apparently Kashmira Shah's first movie).


The cops place duty above all else and set out to the goon's den while the wedding guests wipe brows and twiddle thumbs. Then all turns well, mission successful, the heroes show up just in time for the wedding. And then cut to the song where all this exploration began.


This sums up about the first ten minutes.


The movie is rather shabbily made. Raj Sippy does have some successful ventures to his name, but this one goes downhill straight off. If a capable actor like Ashish Vidyarthi cannot emote convincingly, there's little hope for the rest of the cast.
I guess they all signed up because that was the age of action-masala movies and anyone and everyone wanted to be in this genre. The A league of stars had conquered this territory long since.  With a weak script, there's little chance that the tier 3 actors could have taken this film anywhere at all.


I couldn't bear to watch more than twenty minutes in all. Shuddered to think how the crew pushed themselves to make this film. Glad that masala has made more room for meaningful cinema since.

Have a goal

In an internal corporate gathering in 2009, an ambitious young man who had already scaled the ladder half way up, expressed aloud a hypothetical question, 'How do I become the section manager?'.
There was a hushed gasp among the audience. It was as if he had committed blasphemy. One of his peers who recovered from the shock wave quicker than the others gave a generic rebuttal which kind of hinted that ambitions have to be realistic.

Now I don't know how serious the man was when he put up that question, but maybe he transformed it into a goal from that moment on, if not earlier.
Seven years later, he did take over the coveted role of section manager! The hypothesis became a self fulfilling prophecy! The dream came true!

Have a goal. Walk seriously towards it. You'll find a path. The amorphous gradually becomes crystalline. Dreams gradually do become a reality.