If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my Full RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The Wachowski Brothers have an immense reputation to live up to following the seminal Matrix trilogy. After that epic SF philosophical musing, they have now chosen to tackle the more straight-forward world of retro anime in the new Speed Racer movie. What came across in their previous work was the consummate nature of their vision and their execution, and I am pleased to say Speed Racer doesn’t disappoint in either department.

(Read more…)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

The director duo of Abbas-Mustan strike again. Starring Saif Ali Khan, Bipasha Basu, Akshaye Khanna, Katrina Kaif, Anil Kapoor, and Sameera Reddy, this latest outing of the sibling kings of mainstream Bollywood thrillers makes you appreciate a few things about this pair of seasoned directors: firstly, they stick to what they know and enjoy doing, and secondly, they make a constant effort to improve their craft in spite of being in this game for almost two decades. Race is a cheap and cheerful, unabashedly sleazy thrill-fest that is proud of its populist leanings and its fantastic unrealism. It comes as no surprise to me that this little beast is doing well at the Hindi box office, because it is all the better for its confidence, and I loved every twisted moment of it.

(Read more…)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Jab We Met (When We Met - Jab is pronounced like ‘cub’ rather than ‘cab’), starring Kareena Kapoor and Shahid Kapoor, is the second film directed by Imtiaz Ali. I was looking forward to this one because I fell in love with the director’s first film, Socha Na Tha, and I was expecting more of the same.

I’ve only ever written about one other Hindi movie in the entire history of this blog, and that write-up wasn’t the most flattering. If you went by that you could be excused for thinking that I wasn’t a fan of Hindi cinema. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am, in fact an ardent fan of Hindi films, but it just so happens that this year has not been a great year. There haven’t been many Hindi movies which I would wholeheartedly recommend since this blog opened shop, and I just wasn’t interested in whining about the rest of them. Now at last we have Jab We Met, and at last there is something I can gush about. That should have been enough to give up the plot of where this is going. I absolutely loved Jab We Met. After a long time, I was happy to see a simple, straight-forward romantic Hindi film done with class, which manages to be both engaging and endearing.

(Read more…)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

10,000 BRAVE NEW WORLDS
One million years have passed since ancient man first launched his frail metal crafts into the great darkness named “outer space”. Now distant galactic clusters are home to the myriad descendants of the inhabitants of Earth. Now, each world, light years separate from the others, forms part of an island universe called ‘Starswarm.’ …

Thus begins the blurb on the back cover of Starswarm by Brian Aldiss. It is an old edition of the book which was first printed in January, 1964. Like many others in my collection, I picked it up on the streets of Bombay, off Flora Fountain, in the shadows of the large tropical trees that line the pavement beside the stone walls of Mumbai University. I decided to buy it the moment I laid eyes on the cover and the name of the author, but the cover blurb simply cemented my resolve and set my pulse quickening with that yearning to devour that only a hardened bibliophile will relate to. And so on that sunny afternoon, which is when I end up doing most of my book buying in Bombay, the money was paid, the old book was placed into a cloth shoulder bag along with our other finds for the day, and we caught a bus that would take us homeward.

The other little fact that every other hardened bibliophile reading this will relate to, is that I didn’t quite get around to reading this newly found gem immediately. It was only a few months later, far from Bombay in the chaotic comfort of my room that I finally picked up Starswarm again. Once more I admired the beautiful typography on the cover, I let the cover blurb wash over me, and I was hooked anew.

(Read more…)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Once upon a time, at the height of the Soviet era, Russia and India were good friends. And not just the kind of casual acquaintances who exchange pleasantries across high-level conference tables; We were friendly enough that the two peoples were interested in how the other lived and thought and dreamed. During this era of cultural exchange, it was quite common to come across Russian literature and Russian published technical books on the bookshelves of academia and the street corners of Bombay. Mir Publishers was a well recognised name in Indian geek circles and I still have some of their books on quantum physics and other miscellanea in my collection.

But that is now. At the time I was one of the millions of kids growing up in metropolitan India whose staple for entertainment was Star Trek (The Original Series) on the single terrestrial television channel on Sunday mornings, and comics that included a healthy dose of The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician and the entire cast of swash buckling Indian Gods and Goddesses from the talented people at Amar Chitra Katha. But if you were really lucky, like me, and you had parents and family members who were book nuts, you were also treated to the weird and magical world of illustrated Russian story books.

(Read more…)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Fairy Tales have had a profound effect on all human cultures. Not just old fashioned mythology, but rather the archetype of the fairy tale as we have come to know it in the last century or so. Before then tales and myths were often dark and foreboding, showing life in all its shades and complexities. Good was not always good, bad was not always bad and the hero didn’t always get the girl in the end with no harm done. Then somewhere along the way, our stories were sanitised. They became sweet and one dimensional. Good always triumphed, and people always lived happily ever after. This aspect of ultimate romantic triumph has particularly had a straight-jacketing effect on what a writer or story teller can consider acceptable narrative closure.

Recently I watched two pieces of film making on TV. A rare occurrence because I rarely watch TV any more. But these happened to catch me during a lull in my otherwise busy mental schedule, and they held my attention enough for me to sit through them, ugly commercial breaks and all. One was a Sci-Fi disaster extravaganza and the other was yet another 3D Computer Graphic funny flick, but I liked them both to varying degrees. What made me think of them as a cohesive pair to write about together is that both movies didn’t fare very well at the box office, and neither of them ended with a passionate kiss.

(Read more…)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

My memories of reading as a child and of children’s books are a little strange.

The reason I mention those as two separate issues is precisely what I mean by “strange”. As a child, at the beginnings of the age at which “reading” started to make some sense, I discovered a large dusty tome stored away in a forgotten shelf when I was helping my Mother with some spring cleaning one afternoon.

(Read more…)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!