Upgrades from Blogger

The new look for the blog, for those 2 of you who sometimes stop by, is courtesy the new set of tools offered via blogger.com on their new tools test site. There are far more options in terms of design templates, layout and customizations of both. This helps eliminate the need to hack the CSS and HTML - which I had been doing earlier with somewhat limited success in terms of liking what I saw.


Don't get me wrong. I am happy to be able to take somewhat of a crack at stylesheets. But I will be the first to resort to WYSIWYG editors. Especially when it comes to layout and design. These new abilities are much overdue. Not sure if it's enough to catch up with Wordpress and its tools. But at least Blogger is showing some intent in doing so. Of course, Blogger does one thing better - it allows users the ability to modify HTML for free as opposed to Wordpress who only offer that ability for a fee.

Anyways, those few of you who still have a Blogger account and haven't already moved over to Wordpress, you can finally do a few cool things with your blog's look and feel.

Rocket Singh: Salesman Of The Year

 
This is yet another movie review. As you've probably noted by now - I've had some time on my hands to watch these movies. Because of a whole lot of changes in my personal life (and professional for that matter), haven't really had the chance to pen down thoughts. Until now - sort of

Rocket Singh... is about a rookie salesman Harpreet Singh played by Ranbir Kapoor who fresh after graduation joins a company that assembles and sells computers. Things seem good at first but trouble's ahead because Harpreet has been raised an idealist of sorts with a solid grounding in values by his grandfather. His value system is soon challenged the day he's sent out to visit a potential client to close a sales deal and the manager over there demands a bribe to ensure that Harpreet and his company are awarded the contract - as opposed to someone else. Harpreet, seriously offended by the bribery demand, walks out thinking he's done the right thing. He can't wait to tell his superiors about the sleazeball client manager.

However, instead of the pat on the back that he thought would be forthcoming for his honesty, his superiors are livid with him and berate him for having offended and walked out on a major client. Harpreet soon realizes that what he encountered at the client location was actually standard practice. What's more - he soon becomes the butt of ridicule in his company for being a naive loser with no idea how the world works. And this is only the beginning of his disillusionment. He also learns that another standard practice adopted by his company is to mark up the prices of their computers exorbitantly - far higher than the sum of the parts - and to never offer the promised offer sales support.

When things finally reach breaking point for him (by now his fellow sales staff toss paper rockets his way all day), he decides to turn on his company and clandestinely start his own computer sales company from inside his employers facilities. As he starts getting clients for his own secret company he also slowly starts recruiting disgruntled employees of the parent company to secretly work for him as equal partners. He also wants to do things differently by offering his clients lower prices and fantastic after sales service - all things that his original employers don't practice. Also, he will offer no bribes to get contracts. In short, he wants to maintain the highest standards and ethics for his nascent company. His company's name - Rocket Sales.

Little by little, Rocket Sales starts to steal away clients from Harpreet's original employers. It turns out that there is a market for an honest, upfront company that delivers what it promises at a reasonable price. Of course, this situation where Harpreet operates a company secretly within the premises of another cannot last. That of course forms the remainder of the movie. A lot of what happens next is predictable. But its done well.

Rocket Singh is about an idealist and his attempt at trying to do things his way. But it's also a simple story about ideals and ethics and whether those have any relevance in the real world. The movie has a very low-key, indie movie-like feel to it and that works really well for the subject matter at hand. Though it's a feel good story of sorts, melodrama is at a minimum. The story moves forward pretty evenly and all the actors do a pretty good job. Ranbir, especially, does a very convincing job as Harpreet Singh.

I really liked this movie as well. It's a good story thats well told, well acted and well directed (dir: Shimit Amin).

Definitely a must see.

Ishqiya: No Sh*t - Love actually kills!

Produced by Vishal Bharadwaj, and directed by Abhishek Chaubey this movie is about 2 incorrigible thieves - played by legend Naseeruddin Shah and the more-often-than-not fantastic Arshad Warsi - on the run from a local don. In the course of their flight they end up taking shelter temporarily in the house of a pretty but not-so-fragile widow played by Vidya Balan - who was married to an outlaw herself until a cooking gas cylinder blast under mysterious circumstances killed her husband and barely left her alive. And while she may be beautiful, little else about her is as it appears on the surface. All this makes for an interesting triangle of relationships. The triangle develops slowly and keeps us guessing about how it's all going to look eventually. It helps that the three leads do a great job with their characters. Like the relationships between the leads, the story arc also takes its time to move forward. But I thought the journey was worth savoring. For the most part that is.

Unfortunately, just as the inter-relationships brew starts to get real interesting two-thirds of the way through the movie, the story sort of falls apart a little. It's almost like the director suddenly realized that he's got to end the movie pretty soon, and hurriedly arranges events to bring the earlier juicy proceedings to an abrupt and somewhat improbable finish.

I liked the movie a lot though. The story was for the most part very well written. Some of the dialogues were difficult to understand because of the regional dialects used - but that also adds to the charm of the movie about life in the hinterlands. The actors were all extremely good, and the best thing I can say about the movie is that I disliked the ending because it brought an end to what was turning out to be a delightful, depraved love triangle.

More power to depravity.
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Mumbai Meri Jaan - When love and Hate collide

A "Crash"-like amalgamation of separate story threads involving different people living in the city of Mumbai, Mumbai Meri Jaan shows how different people from various walks of life are affected by bomb blasts on Mumbai commuter trains and their aftermath. Its main purpose is to highlight the fact that the veneer of cosmopolitan life that Mumbai prides itself on is really only held together by fragile threads that strain and break often when such terrorist attacks happen.

I really liked how the different characters that we follow in the course of the movie are forced to question their beliefs and assumptions about the city of Mumbai, and society in general in the aftermath of the bomb blasts. One disturbing aspect the film focuses on is how easy it is to raise the level of distrust between Hindus and Muslims - the two main religious groups in India. Via the character played by Kay Kay Menon, Mumbai Meri Jaan offers a very realistic, no-holds barred window into the sometimes paranoid mind of an average Hindu and his almost complete lack of trust in the patriotic intentions of his average Muslim brethren and the belief that Muslims are behind all terrorist attacks in India.

Other threads focus on themes which include the callousness and the lack of sensitivity of the mainstream media in its constant pursuit of the sensational, the internal struggles of an idealistic rookie beat cop trying to find his place within a corrupt law and order establishment, a poor family man trying to avenge his daily losses in the class war society inflicts on him daily and a techie slowly losing his faith in the ability of Indian society to keep him and his family safe and sound and considering greening pastures abroad. In the end though, all the characters mostly find consolation and redemption of sorts even though their personal journeys are somewhat painful and littered with more questions than answers.

Mumbai Meri Jaan is well directed. Weaving the parallel story threads into a coherent narrative is an extremely difficult job. Nishikant Kamat, not only does that wonderfully, he also does the details really well. There is a certain authenticity in depicting Mumbai and its people in ways that most other Hindi movies, to say nothing of movies by outsiders like Danny Boyle, have not been able to do right. And the acting is close to top notch by most everybody - with both veterans Paresh Rawal, who plays an experienced, worldly-wise cop partnering the conflicted rookie, and of course Kay Kay Menon essaying their roles brilliantly.

This is the kind of social commentary that is both relateable and entertaining. It is also thought provoking because it doesn't beat the audiences on their heads with simplistic, preachy messages like the Munnabhai series or 3 Idiots but instead places the onus on the characters to find their way out of tricky moral dilemmas. And because these characters are everyday people, perhaps it's a message for us folks to also find our own ways out of tough conundrums?

A definite must watch, especially for people of and from Mumbai.

(image from Yahoo India)

3 Idiots is 3 too many

The most recent movie directed by Raju Hirani, whose portfolio consists of the phenomenally successful Munnabhai series. 3 Idiots is essentially about 3 college students and their experiences vis-a-vis the Indian education system (more specifically an engineering college) telling us - the unsuspecting public - that the odds favor the rote learning robots produced by the aforementioned system as opposed to free thinkers attempting to and sometimes tragically failing to find their true calling in life. The movie stars Aamir Khan, Madhavan, Sharman Joshi - all 3 alumni of the popular Viva-La-Revolution themed "Rang De Basanti" - here playing both young college students in their late teens/ early 20's shown in flashback, and slightly older men set in current times which is a few years after their college years. Boman Irani - a staple of Hirani movies playing the rigid, negative person who eventually turns over a new leaf at the end of the movie - is around once again doing more of the same in a slightly different getup. Here, he plays the inflexible and insensitive principal of the engineering college in which our 3 Idiots aspire to get educated or earn a degree or both.

The movie begins with the characters played by Madhavan's Farhan and Sharman Joshi's Raju trying to find Aamir Khan's Rancho as they seem to have lost touch with him ever since they graduated from their engineering college together many years ago. It is during this search that the movie flashes back to their college life and their struggles with the rigid establishment. And as they seem to get closer and closer to locating Rancho, the flash backs continue to tell us, nay, beat us on the head about how so very depressing the whole education system is and how it kills eager students from the inside.

I shouldn't be so harsh though - 3 Idiots isn't all that bad. The problem is that while the message is somewhat decent - that the Indian education system favors rote learning and that Indian parents force their children into Engineering or Medicine related disciplines - both of which are true - it is so far from new that any Indian who needs to watch this movie to learn about the state of affairs is the real idiot. Also, 3 Idiots has an overly simplistic take on the whole issue as well. This simplistic take is delivered via various unsubtle scenes (which unfortunately are far from few) whose sole purpose are to serve as setups for Rancho, the anti-establishment whizkid, to first demonstrate how very clever he is in comparison to his inept lecturers and fellow bookish students, and then next to carp on about how the whole system is so rotten that it produces f*ks like them and not studs like him.

The characters too were all completely one-dimensional to really be able to relate to in any realistic fashion with the all-knowing Rancho easily being the most difficult to relate to. Only Sharman Joshi, who plays the self-doubting Raju who eventually finds the confidence to tackle the naysayers, and Omi Vaidya (Chatur Ramalingam in the movie) who plays the punching bag rote-learning bookworm really tried to break out of the narrow confines written for their roles. And the direction, while very competent, was sadly very much like the education system it beats down with glee - formulaic and by the book.

Occasionally though, there was some surprisingly dark humor - the hospital scenes for instance were good tragi-comic. Moments such as those briefly elevated the movie while bringing back memories of the classic "Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron" - but thats all they were - moments and very brief at that.

Overall, for a movie with pretensions of being social commentary of sorts, the message was far from convincing. If the director really wanted to take on the education system - he should have focused on primary or secondary education when the rote learning behavior actually takes shape. But then if he did, he wouldn't be able to get a bunch of popular actors in their mid 40's to impossibly play one-dimensional college kids and thereby lose out on the ability to hype the movie and rake in the big bucks all the while harboring pretensions of bringing in radical societal change.

(image from naachgaana.com)