Barfi - the movie

Off late, there have been very few things that have pushed me to open up MS Word and type out an opinion or a thought about something I want to share with the world.

I will admit, that my work (‘office ka kaam’) has slowly tightened its grasp over my mind and has engulfed me in its dullness with surprising strength.

Anyway, I am not here to talk about all that. I am here to tell you about something that I come across very rarely nowadays—a well made Bollywood movie.

Barfi: 'one of a kind' movie

Every few years, there comes along that one movie that has the power to pull you into it, to engulf you with its simplicity, a story so well-told that you are left thinking about it long after you have exited the movie theater.

Well, I must say this, that BARFI is one of those movies. A clever love story that slowly surrounds you like a fog in winter which would make you pull your woolen sweater over you and stay there in its warmth.  A story told beautifully and with performances that will be talked about for years to come by people who really value good quality and sensible cinema.

It’s a story about a deaf and dumb boy from Darjaleeng who falls in love twice, but with two people who have  completely different personalities. No it’s not your average love story because the persona portrayed by Priyanka Chopra is that of an autistic girl, which she has portrayed very convincingly. I’ll be honest, I was never a big fan of Miss. Chopra, except in the song ‘desi girl’ with that saree J. But this performance has earned her my full respect as an actor.

The story crawls into your heart as the movie goes on , but the writer and director had something else in mind, than just a cute love story. They slowly and very cleverly turn the love story into a suspense story. So cleverly have they done this, that around the last half an hour of the movie, you are left wondering to yourself “Wait, wasn’t this a love story?”, but that question is not the kind that will leave you shaking your head in disappointment. On that contrary, you will be left with nodding your head in approval.

The music (some really unique work by Pritam)  is charming and mixes smoothly with the 70’s era in Darjaleeng, the cinematography does not cease to please your senses and of course the acting is at par with some of the best out there. Every performance in the movie, be it Ileana (debut Bollywood movie) as the girl who chose comfort over love, Inspector Dutta as the cop who has spent a better part of his life chasing Barfi, or Barfi’s best friend with his genuinely Darjaleeng’ish accent: is equally convincing.

So, please, do yourself a favor and give yourself a break from the no-brainer movies that Bollywood has been churning out with will glory, and go watch this movie. Go experience of stories of  two kinds of people (mute and autistic) in a way that perhaps no other Bollywood movie has been able to capture. A movie that doesn’t generate pity at the disabilities of the people but rather shows how sweet their lives can be. Go marvel at the acting-talent that Ranbir Kapoor possesses which puts him in a whole different league than the current crop of ‘young talent’ without a doubt in my mind. Four generations of actors in the family truly shows in his performance .

Thank you Anurag Basu for giving me that push to start blogging again.

The Letter

It has been almost two months since my last post here. I had gotten a little busy with work and preferred movies and sleep on weekends to writing up something for the blog. I am guilty and I apologize. I finally found something to write about after a long time.

Let me first give you a background of what this blog is going to be about.

First off, it is a VERY LENGTHY blog. So readers are advised to step away from the computer, do a few stretching exercise and then come back to finish reading. 

My younger sister recently graduated from college, she today has a Bachelor of Technology in I.T, of which I am extremely proud of. She also bagged a job with TCS, the Indian IT service consulting behemoth, via her campus-recruitment program. She is set to join the company in three days time and as an older brother, I had some words of advice for her before she left to start this amazing new phase of her life. This blog is an open letter from an older brother.

The blog hasn't been proofread yet. So kindly ignore the grammatical errors...

our Angel :)

My dearest baby-sister,

They say that the human mind can retain a few memories from a person’s childhood with amazing clarity. For me, the day you were born is one of those memories. I still remember every single detail of the time when Shruti and I were first brought in to say hello to mom, after she was okayed to be visited by friends and family. We did not get to see you since you were too tiny and were kept away from everyone except the nurse. But, we were very well aware that we had a baby sister now, someone actually younger than us, who had just come into the world, and were as excited as a cat with a ball of yarn would be.

Two decades have gone by and today you have turned into this smart and fantastic young woman that I am super-duper-proud of. You graduated recently from college and are now ready to step out of our family’s wings into the big-bad-world out there.

Being your older brother, I am probably as scared as mom is today to be letting go of your hand. I’ve always seen you more than a sister. You are to me, like my own kid, if I ever had one. And I will always love you like one.

As you get ready to leave the house and start your own life, please take a few moments out of your life to read this letter where a brother wants to share some advice and caution you against what is out there. This might be really boring to you all who are so used to having super-short conversations via texting or tweeting (I know you don’t use twitter…but it was general mockery at your whole age-group) , but please do finish reading the whole letter. Remember, most of the things I will say here- I KNOW that you already do and safeguard yourself against. But I will write them down anyway.

So here goes,

-sweetheart, if you think you have seen your share of ups and downs in life so far, you are wrong. Life will continue to shoot arrows at you, maybe even bigger and sharper ones as you grow. You will have to deflect them, maybe even take a few hits, but heal from the wounds and move on. Life isn’t easy, it never was.

-Do not ever forget your family and friends. Respect everyone who have helped you out during your earlier problems. Stay in touch with them. Your family would be calling you every other day for the next month or so, to see how you are doing. The frequency of the calls might come down to one call per week. But we WILL keep calling. It might become a little irritating, but trust me when I say this, we will NEVER have heard enough from you. Also. Take time out of your life to actually make a phone-call to  good friends on their birthday to wish them. Sure, you can wish them on facebook, but a personal wish face-to-face or over the phone goes a long way in cementing a relationship.

-You will start earning now, for the first time in your life. It is a truly fantastic and euphoric feeling. This may sound clichéd but you will soon learn that ‘ With great power, comes great responsibilities’ which means, with the power of earning money, you will also have the added responsibility of managing your money and how to spend it. You will not be taught this in school or the college, but life will be the teacher for this. Spend carefully and save wisely my dear sis.

-You are moving to a new city where you will undoubtedly meet new people and make new friends. You will want to go out to party on some weekends when and if work pressure permits you. That is completely fine. Life after all needs some fun in it. If you happen to go to a pub, do NOT accept a drink from a stranger (Especially men). Actually, let me rephrase that: do not accept drinks from ANY MAN. Have your drink made on your own, or accept it only if it is ordered and made in front of you. You have no idea about the evil-creeps that lie out there waiting with their fangs open. Being an older brother, I will ALWAYS feel insecure about your safety. And I hope you don’t mind that.

-Trusting people will be an issue. Be very picky when it comes to choosing your friends and even more careful when it comes to choosing who to include in your ‘circle of trust’. It may even mean you will have a few lesser friends than the most popular girl in the group, but trust me: you will be much safer this way.

I think I will wrap up my letter with that point and another small paragraph about how much I love you.

I have and will always continue to cherish the times we spent growing up together. I will continue to regret all those times when I hit you because you were getting on my nerves as a pesky 7 year old. I will always love you more than any or all of your friends ever can or will ever do(all put together). I will continue to call you ‘beta’ every single time we speak on the phone. I will continue to invent quirky ways to greet you when we speak on video-chat. I will continue to look-forward to every single time I call you and you greet me with your chirpy ‘hi BHAI!’. I will continue to include your happiness  and safety as the first thing I ask of God everytime I pray.

You my dear lovely young sister, will NEVER EVER be a grown-up for me. You will always be my baby-sister. The day you bagged the job was one of the proudest days of my life. I will be proud of you no matter what you do, I am proud of you for just being my sister. Remember this Shillu, if a day  ever comes (May it never come), that the whole world has turned against you, you can be assured that there will be one person who will ALWAYS be on your side…and that will be this older brother of yours.

With all the love I have,

Bhai.

fraaandship!

So here I am, on yet another Sunday that seems to come and go like the trucks on the national highway in India. They just ride along and people along the highway hardly even notice them. Sundays are something like that too, hardly noticed nowadays.And as my good friend Nisha rightly predicted,  I end up getting up early morning and thinking what to do. I finally end up with a novel in the loo to help me pass time. Oh before you go all “eeeewww!!”, don’t think I don’t I know you’ve done that too. After all, having a long relaxing loo-trip is indeed a luxury for all working people. ‘Sheesh!’ you say? Well, I say “just wait till you start working pal…and then you’ll know what I am talking about!!”.

Another weekend, another AMC12 trip, another movie. Watched ‘The Grey’ yesterday. Liam Neeson packs in a power-packed performance as always. Intense movie but I would’ve wanted a better ending than the current one. The movie still manages to hold  your attention till the last moment and which is precisely why the ending could’ve been better.  Ok..so enough movie talk for this blog. I am sorry, it’s just that I’ve been watching so many new movies (one every weekend…compared to the 3 movies I watched in Rolla during my entire three-semester stay there! ) that I just had to share something about at least one of them.

I wanted to write a deeply-thought out blog this time but I guess I won’t be doing that. Don’t have the patience for that today. Maybe next time. So I’ll be pretty much just ranting about foolish, and small things that I’ve come across in the recent past. Kindly adjust. I would, at this point warn you that this particular blog is just going to waste your time..but then, which previous blog of mine hasn’t?! hehehehehe. *No I won’t use LOL for that, I am against using LOL. I prefer the much more realistic laughter*

kind of sums it up :)

The other day I was having a conversation with my best friend Mr.Lee (his real name is something else but I like calling him Mr.Lee on my blogs…and in case you are wondering, No, he’s not a chinki. He’s as Indian as you can ever get). So, it was our typical conversation with us tripping over each other at every available chance, taking dirty jabs at each other over and over again, to the point that neither of us have any more derogatory things to say for each other.

That’s when I realized that the foundation of our friendship was on these very highly idiotic conversations. These very brainless and insult-filled conversations that we shared is what makes us best friends. I really can’t have such conversations with any other human in the world, chiefly because I cannot insult people like the way I can with mr.Lee.

Friendship isn’t created. It just happens. A chance encounter with a fellow newbie in class can turn into one of the strongest and humbling relations you can have with  another human. For me, friendship is about bitching about my best friend to my best friend and then the next instant talking about how cool the latest movie was. It’s about being as spontaneous as that damn chicken that suddenly becomes possessed and tries to cross a road when you are driving down at top speed.

This one’s to all those people who know that no matter what they do, they’ll always have one person in the world who will take their side – their best friend!

Peace!