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Yet another hijinks-laden Anees Bazmee movie splashes onto cinema screens. But this seems to be the big one. Singh is King, oh sorry, Singh is Kinng … or is it Sinngh is King? Singh is Kinng is the next big Akshay Kumar movie. There, that should be enough of a review. I predict that the readership has immeditely split into those that hate Akhay Kumar’s guts, will never see any of his movies and say it is horrible anyway, and those who will go and see it no matter what and won’t care that it’s horrible. It’s Akshay Kumar. He needs to be watched on the big screen and that’s all there is to it. But if that’s not enough for you, the film also stars the talents of Katrina Kaif, Om Puri, Kiron Kher, Ranvir Shorey, Javed Jaffrey, Neha Dhupia, Yashpal Sharma, Manoj Pahwa, Kamal Chopra, Sudhanshu Pandey, and Sonu Sood. If there is still anyone sitting on the fence about this, and you’re impatient, let me just say that Singh is Kinng is stupid, badly made, and a LOT of fun.

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Abbas Tyrewala makes his directorial debut with an Aamir Khan production. Not a bad way to start. Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na is a typical college-romance-drama-comedy with Imran Khan giving his debut performance. The movie also stars Genelia D’Souza, Prateik Babbar, Manjari Fadnis, Sugandha Garg, Karan Makhija, Alishka Varde, Nirav Mehta et. al. The most important question always is, “Is it a good movie to watch?” To end the suspense, yes, it is. Abbar Tyrewala’s first baby makes for a very entertaining couple of hours, but the best way to describe Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na would be well executed.

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Blog ads are in some ways the ultimate solution to monetizing your blog. All the big guns use it, and the fact that someone is willing to shell out moolah to specifically display an advertisement on your site lends a certain amount of credibility to your online presence. While making money has never been the main focus of this site, I do like to try out various methods of menetization to offset hosting costs, satisfy my mercenary tendencies, and just for the fun of it.

Trying out direct advertising has always been on the cards, but I’ve never gotten around to it. One of main stumbling blocks with blog ads is the fact that, unlike contextual advertising like AdSense, you need to do all the hard work of finding the advertisers and getting them to pay your asking price for a lucrative spot on your (hopefully) much viewed sidebar — or where ever else you wish to stick those ads. That’s where ad networks often come in, and for those of us wanting to try our hand at banner advertising on our blogs and web sites, PerfomancingAds might have just come to our rescue.

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Conformity vs individuality is a matter very close to the discussion about the originality of creative ideas, which I have gotten into before and I am sure I will again. The question of individuality was brought up again recently when I received a comment on my article about creativity and religious thought from Curtis who said:

If your life revolves around what others think of you, as these words seem to suggest, then Ayn Rand is not the author for you.

A grand pronuncement indeed on what was a personal story about my second-hand exposure to the works of Ayn Rand and how I hadn’t gotten around to reading them. I’m generally in the habit of questioning grand pronouncements, or at least digging deeper into them, so I thought it only right that I explore further this whole phenomenon of caring about what other people think of you, and also caring about whether other people think you care about what other people think of you!

My response to accusations about caring what other people think: So what?
Yes, you heard me right. So What? What devine herald declared caring what other people think to be incompatible with free thinking and individuality? Confusing? Let me attempt to make sense of it all.

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If my Mother was around today, I’m sure she would recommend I read a book by Ayn Rand, just as my Father does on a regular basis. I’m quite sure she had read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in her youth and would have thought highly of them. Her sister, my aunt, was and still is absolutely crazy about those two books. Needless to say she has recommended them to me wholeheartedly on numerous occasions. I remember seeing her copy of The Fountainhead many years ago, it was tattered and disintegrating at the spine from having been devoured on so many occasions over the decades. She guards that old copy with her life for fear of losing it to that scourge of bibliophiles everywhere, unscrupulous book borrowers.

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All good things must come to an end, as does this edition of Comic Konga with this comic. I haven’t been the most punctual participant, but I’m glad I completed the set of five, and that too keeping to my parameters of using the same character. It’s been a great exercise and I will certainly tackle comics with less trepidation in the future. Anyone interested can subscribe to Vishal’s feed to know when the next one is happening.

Day 5: Love is in the Air, and our everyman robot is reacting in his own little predictably unpredictable way. The point of this one was to continue with the more complex scene setups, and to end with a straightforward caption piece. I’m quite happy with the finished visual because I had a specific look in mind and it took plenty of redraws to get it right.

The final, much erased and worked over, pencil sketch on A4 photocopy paper was traced with a black finetip pen. The inks were scanned and vectorised in Inkscape. Blue tones and text were also applied in Inkscape.

I hear love is a wonderful thing. And yet, everytime you see love visualised in images you see the same symbols and the same stale imagery. It gets to be very boring — to me at least. My try with this was to make an image about love that was not churned out by the Valentine’s Day marketing department, or by the Jilted Lovers Anarchist Cell. Is it romantic? No, probably not by most people’s standards. I do hope it is at least a little funny though and makes you smile.

Samir

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With this, the fourth entry into Comic Konga, I’m practically on a roll. A major part of Vishal’s inspiration to start an event like this was to get people who are not regular practitioners into the flow of making comics. If you stick to it, I think Comic Konga succeeds in that very well.

Day 4: In Green Consumer Behaviour, our serial protagonist returns. I also return to multiple characters and dialogue with this one. I’m a fan of both the dialogue-based and the caption-centric single panel comic. I think they each have their charm, and one often works better than the other depending on the specific situation. I’m also exploring the medium a bit more and spreading my drawing wings by tackling more complex scenes. Staging is a lot of fun.

A pencil sketch on an A4 photocopy sheet was traced with a black finetip pen. The inks were scanned and vectorised in Inkscape. Blue tones and text were also applied in Inkscape.

I have tackled the issues of consumerism, consumer behaviour and the ever growing fad of green consumers in my writing before, but the topic is ever relevant and sometimes a single comic panel can communicate the situation as well, if not better, than long articles. Let’s face it, we’ve made a mess on this planet, and now a vast population of people think all of it can be undone purely my buying more stuff. Astounding!

Samir

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