I haven’t written a Hindi movie review since Band Baaja Baaraat, not because there have been no films worth writing about, but because none have seemed to need the extra attention, or have required that I share my point of view on them beyond a recommendation. Like the previous film by the same team, however, Ladies Vs Ricky Bahl is a deceptively simple but intricate creature, which pleases me on all the levels at which I enjoy watching movies. Once again, I’ve been given a film I do have a few things to say about.
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Of all the much touted maxims of modern society and intellectual thought, things like separation of church and state, equality and equal opportunity for all and the like, the one I think is the most artificial construct is detached, unbiased and impersonal reporting. There is a prevailing falsehood about the effect of personal bias on the story that a reporter tells and how it affects the perception of ‘the truth’ by the reader. The falsehood is not in believing this bias exists and changes things, but in that it may actually be a perfectly avoidable evil.
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Like much of my fiction reading, The Gates of Eden (1983) by Brian Stableford was picked up in a bargain bin, where all the strangest treasures are to be discovered, this one in a second-hand book store. The cover art by Doughlas Chaffee showed an auburn-haired beauty standing handsomely holding a spacesuit in an alien landscape. I love the traditional science fiction paintings of the time, so I had to see what this was about.

Before the hyper-space vessels could go from planet to planet, stations had to be set up. And that meant manned spaceships cut off from Earth for decades.

The explorer vessel Ariadne had gone toward galactic centre and was considered lost–until its call was heard appealing for a xenobiologist.
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And the blurb continued on the back cover, but I was already hooked and wanted to know more. So I picked up the book.
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My ever-restless and creative friend Reena was recently talking to me about a series of photographs she’d taken over her last trip to a national park in her neck of the woods. They were just not turning out as dramatic and eerie as she wanted them to. This, of course, set my photographer-sense tingling and I wanted to know what the original pictures were like and why they weren’t working out.

She had already attempted a black & white version of one of the images of a rock pool, and while it was fairly dramatic, the flatness of the tones and a very bright highlight told me that the image was very likely overexposed. Since my curiosity had been piqued, I asked her to send me the original image to play around with. Since I was playing anyway, I thought I’d record my thought process as I tried to fix this overexposed photograph.

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We all made paper boats when we were kids. If you lived through even a single monsoon in India, it would seem unnatural not to, and they were a lot of fun to make too. My Grandmother’s place in Bombay used to be an old muddy compound back then, and when it rained a small pond would form at the base of the stairs leading down from the building. The water would collect there and as the monsoon progressed it would get deeper, because eventually the soil was saturated and couldn’t absorb any more. It was probably only ankle-deep water, but you know how proper civilised people are about “dirt”, so after much “suffering” someone decided it might be a good idea to throw a few bricks there as stepping stones to save them from the muddy water.
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For writers, bookshops are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you were probably first inspired to have writing ambitions somewhere in a bookshop, surrounded by the wonder of words; On the other hand, bookshops and the books in them can be the greatest obstacle to writing that was ever conceived.
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Like most people, I didn’t even know they were making a new X-Men movie until I heard some buzz online and saw the first character shots. It all looked harmless enough. Then I saw the first trailer in the cinemas, and that got my attention. But what sold me on seeing this film was that Mathew Vaughn was directing it. I’m glad I did, because out of nowhere, the man has given us one of the best comic-book movies ever.
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