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Its Kads return to big screen and how can this blog keep quiet [after all her search accounts for 60% of hits to my site!!]…….
Late but nevertheless…here are the links to savour:
First Look,Promo, Teaser, Songs

Promo Video (ram format)
Posters Pics and costumes are very colourful….
Another songs site (No, havent heard them….news is that it is disappointing…does it matter?? ….I even did not even notice Aamir Khan in the promo…so there…).

So all you search engines…note this ….KAJOL FANAA kajol Kajol Fanaa kajol….should I repeat….??
[All those fans from the corner of the world, who leave comments here in various languages..please note, this site is not a fans' group.....for that visit Kajol-Boards.Net]

May 26th is the date….

After a short hiatus, its time to update. There has been no dearth of topic to write all this while, but just could not manage to update. Infact it has almost become a habit to keep piling the toblog list for a while and then either summarise or to just leave it.

My Autograph:

After a shaky start, the narration just gets poetic. With its slow but relevant proceedings it keeps getting better.

It rocks. For 2 hard hitting reasons. One a story could not have got more real. Second the authentic performances (it may not be an overstatement to say I could feel the characters breathe).

Having heard about the Tamil version, I had confidence to take the family with me to watch this in Kannada directed by the actor himself, Sudeep. This is his second direction and sadly both are remakes. And he joins the group of other director-heroes in Kannada Cinema, which has no shortage for them - Ravichandran, Ramesh, Upendra(though he is a director turned actor unlike others). Anyways considering there are enough chances to spoil a remake too[Telugu remake didn't do well at boxoffice], he has done a good job.

But the strong point about the film is the solid script which when just narrated is enough to captivate you. The movie has come out as a visual poem with almost no rough edges[except perhaps the shaky start]. And a strong intuition tells me that this story is real, if not director’s someone else’s

It starts with an intention of the guy to invite all his old friends for his marriage. The nostalgic memories of high school is the first phase ended when he invites his school friend-hearthrob, now a poor jaded lady.

Second phase is set in the scenic Kerala, where he had to relocate. A crush in college and it turns intimate, but before it could turn into a relation, he has to move away.
And this has deteriorating effects on his mind, body and his relations with his family.
Third phase is a mature friendship with a lady who supports him, encourages him to find his identity and much more (like shows right direction to him when he is confused).

And all of them , along with other pals, teacher attend his marriage - which is, with sufficient hints let me conclude that it is, an arranged one !

And if that is not real, what is ?

This is just a skeleton and main story. But cinema adds flesh, blood and soul. And colour, pain and joy. The acting, picturisation and songs blend well.
One sentiment keeps making its presence at regular intervals and thats what makes it special - and NO, its not Love. It is empathy. You empathise with hero, his parents, his heroines and almost everyone. And if you are me, you will empathise with Madhava’s character too!(both initially and later).

The choice of actors for the characters is very apt. I liked those juniour artistes - the boy had just perfect amount of mischief and curiousity in his eyes. Performances were also touchy with Sudeep handling the double mantle(director-actor) easily. His acting has matured a lot now and he does not go overboard in the performance which had so many such oppurtunities, instead he made it look very natural. Three cheers to three girls ;-)[Meena,Sridevika,Deepu]. The supporting cast [Srinivas Murthy, Rashmi Kulkarni, Yathiraj, Hirish, Laxminarayan, Vishwanath] too looked fine.

Some cribs: 1. There should be a better (Kannada) title possible.
2. Audience were taken granted to follow Malayalam. Though it sounded like Kannada, it was logical and though important part was later translated, either a subtitle or a background narration should not have been difficult or caused problem.

Half a dozen or more stories running parallely, though looks puzzling in the beginning, converge during the later stages. It is all about the absense of compassion, fear, oppression, exploition, corruption, the vulnerabilities, color descrimination and prejudices. It took some time before I could clearly understand or before it sink in me. In approx 90 minutes, the audience is taken over a ride of emotions varying from - pity, anger, shock, fun. At the end one leaves the hall feeling for everyone but not taking the side of anyone - that is exactly what script writer/director too has done - in a neutral view a slice of life is shown of people who are under fire one moment and holding the trigger, another moment.

My three favorite scenes are - a mother scolding her good and correct son while taking the side of an evil son. This emphasizes there is a different world in everyone’s eyes. Another scene, that of a angry-bored lady who says “I am not feeling well today and it is NOT because of car being stolen, I wake up like this everyday” (not very accurate…reproducing from memory). This shows how important is it to compose ourself and that our own mindset is very critical in what we percieve about others. Third one is where a father inculcates strength in his daughter by tieing an invisible thread.

This movie is again a writer’s favorite for there can be written pages about the behaviour, about why, what, how of it , and more - like the politics, the situation forced action vs reaction against action, the history, the facts so on and so forth.

I really wished I could write further but, since I browsed through the internet, I fear my thoughts now are not very original. I conclude by saying , this slow-poison-movie deserved the Oscar honours.

Being Cyrus:

An art film that has tried to be commercial with the help of starcast and promotion, this one does not disappoint. A different one, as everyone would opine, has its highlight in good performances and yeah, a different plot.

Paramasiva:
Whenever I see a bad one, I keep consoling myself to remind me that, bad ones make us realise the goodness in average ones. Along with that this also gave me a good insight on why Tamil filmdom produces so successful films - because audience will be happy for anything. This movie, if made in Kannada would not run 2 shows in B grade halls in Karnataka, in Tamil runs almost full house after 25 days and receives whistles and claps !

Zathura:
A kiddish adventure-turned-comedy movie. Oh! the comedy was due to an inquisitive and curious backseat kid’s never ending continuous questions. But alas, the post interval was not so fun because the kid changed his seat and moved away.

Tch. I never thought I would use my blog as FOW.
Never; for theree resasons:

1)There is never an end.
2)Its about people (so far!) and as per the saying, only small minds discuss people and I better be discussing ideas !
3)This site is *my* real estate and I should not give space to others. As the tagline says, it is about “my life and thoughts”.

However today, I will slightly digress to note about a peculiar person, who has least respect for himself, which is partly fair, but he constantly tries to see his nature in everyone else. On finding that others are different, he focuses his energy to find defects !

The other day I was asked by him if my English is good. According to my knowledge and belief, it is. I might not form outstanding sentences but I believe they are free from common errors and most importantly I have been able to communicate well the scenarios or situations. And I pointed to this.
The answer which he did not expect and like. He was looking for a companion in lowering self esteem or looking for a sympathizer, “No dude..I am also as bad as you are”.

Unable to digest an unexpected reply, he questioned me again to confirm. If I were half smart as I am now, for now I am experienced of the aftermaths, I should have predicted what was in store and should not have affirmed my earlier stand.

From that day started the torture. Fresh from dictionary words were hurled at me and the meaning was expected from me. The grammar questions replaced the customary greetings. On my ignorance about the answer, I was duly reminded of my earlier claim.

This continued so much that given a normal man, has three options:
1)Go and upgrade English so much that you know all possible words in dictionary. This is called improvisation or defending mechanism.
2)Go and fall to his feet demanding his mercy over the egotistic statement you made in ignorance, and beg him to stop the vocabulary war. This is surrendering mechanism.
3)Shoo him off ! This is called offending mechanism.

If you know my nature, you might have rightly predicted my choice - No.3.
But did I succeed ? No. The reasons are for another story.

Did I fall prey to him again with my “foot in the mouth” statements ? Yes. These details are detained from the general public, because it requires lot of explanations and I have least energy to write.

Anyways continuing from the experiences, let me record the lessons learnt. But before that, you know what ?! I do not deny that I have been part of similar plot but with a role reversal ! (But of course , not this harassing but in my own gentle way). But the important point that should not go un noticed is the fact that, in all such cases, where I had to bring home the point, the start was never from me. It was the other person who blew his trumphet right into my ears and he flaunted his ego on sleeve. Added with “in-the-face” behaviours.

And even then, in most cases, unless *I* was condemned or belittled, I did not return the assault. Unless that, I never bothered about other person’s high-headedness or his foolishness. As you can see, it is all about *myself* This approach has given me clarity in many actions and decisions. Selfishness and its benefits, is a topic of another post.

I know what inferiority complex has done to me and I know what confidence has done to me. Inspite of difficulties associated with the latter, (such as this post explained) it is forgone conclusion that it is advantageous to accept latter than the former.

PS : 1. Let me know of English errors above, if any before someone else catches it
2. The above person is much more than this post. But as I said earlier, this space is not to describe him.

This post has been in my mind’s draft since many days.

Like many others, I too started my blogging at blogspot. At that time it was the best one available and very easy to start off. As long as I type and publish it looked all fine. But as I looked around and saw the features and wanted them on my site, when I started changing templates etc the real problem started. My annoyance and frustration increased logarthmically and after a point I just stopped blogging until I could find a comfortable place. After that, it was wordpress and the love just grew !

Whenever I was asked of suggestion to create a new blog, I still continued suggesting blogger, for the starters, because hosting wp is still a problem, where as with blogger it is click and start.

Those who did start their blogs after a couple of days, when they started comfortable, started changing the look. Hey, its easy –go here, click there and you are set. No problems so far. Then the query was to put links in sidebar. Hey thats easy too — create a tag yourself, put this here and paste it there, publish and you are set to go. And any minor hiccups, hardcode it again. You change the template, hard code it again.

All this before the world was blessed with wp.com. And once that happened, I predicted a premature death of blogger. It was not to be. But now I had 2 suggestions.

Those who got ahead with wp, the above queries were solved in a flash. But now queries got different - “I want like this that is on your site”. Importantly, calendar, categories, extra stuff in sidebar. It was impossible in blogger or it was a pain to do this in blogger. Then I started suggesting only wp - links, categories etc managed in a flash, but one thing remained a pain in wp too -sidebar management.

Even in my standalone WP installation, theme independent sidebar management was my dream requirement. Few weeks ago, sidebar widgets have arrived and it is just perfect and it is what I refferred to as last nail in the coffin of blogspot! (Infact why it was not taken up from the beginning is a mystery considering that few of my seimologic plugins worked on all themes without my effort)(And one thing is still pending is the javascript ability in widgets, right now it is only text or php).

And looking at these widgets (del.icio.us, text,rss,shoutbox), I remember using all these without the power of plugin/widget and feel that I should have started late..now it is so painless!

The new widgets‘ list is growing very fast and the oppurtunities are unlimited ! I have decided that I will use only widgetized themes anymore.

PS: There is now a web2.0 service called labelr which manages categories for blogger, for those still with blogger. But to them also, I suggest one click import in wp.com.[This again is so hasslefree, I had to manually do all that :(]Talking of labelr, as Scoble said earlier, name ending with r seems to be a trend..and I have a perfect web2.0 compatible name - ravikiranr

As to any other Kannadiga, it was a sad moment yesterday when I heard the demise of Dr Raj. Even though our generation was late to really witness his charisma onscreen and become die hard fans of him(on his films’release on Thursday the queues ran for kilometers, its said), we did get to see few of his films in the hall. And rest we caught up on the small screen.

There is no second question about his acting skills, one of the best in the entire country, but it was really sad that his popularity never really crossed borders. While his contemporaries tread different paths, he remained loyal to his love - Kannada and Films. It was not until the tragic incident of his kidnapping by Veerappan did he become world famous - so much so that, one prominent international news channel reported that Rajkumar “of Hindi Cinema” was kidnapped (whereas it was long since he was dead).

He is only one actor I have seen, who so comfortably suited to any role he did - Be it a God’s role or be it in a devotee’s role . In a serious role, tragic role, in comic, in King’s, in peasant’s he simply fit the role like a T. And of course, his brilliance in all of the ನವರಸ (navarasa), made his worth incomparable. This constituted to half the success.

He never had to work on his acting I guess, it was born talent but he took up to singing much later in his life and along with winning many hearts with his singing alone, he went on to win “National Award” for it inspite of presence of many full time professional singers. This gives a glimpse of his ability.

Not only did various awards reach him, as the saying goes, value of awards itself increased by honouring him.

But more than all this, his selection of films, his down-to-earth humility, his ability to transform people (there was a small revolution in terms of closing of local liquor shops after his film Jeevana Chaitra and many gave up drinking voluntarily),his work for the language (during ಗೋಕಾಕ್ ಚಳುವಳಿ or otherwise by just enriching the Kannada Cinema), his peace loving nature made him different from other onscreen heroes.

May his soul rest in peace.

When you’re young you want to change the world. When you’re older you just want to understand it. - Unknown

Is it ? I tried understanding all while and have energy to continue that. Understanding the world -its people, thier behaviour, relations, its very existence, the science behind it, the logic behind it ..Most of the time the understanding fails and it poses more complex questions. There I can accept either of two solutions - one to believe that there is an answer to everything and “one” source knows it and to surrender to that source. Other being comfortable to realise that there need not be an answer, or that there can be an answer but at this certain point of time I do not have any way of knowing it. Understanding it. I can either continue trying to understand next oppurtunity I get or close it once for all by choosing the first path. I think I can be comfortable in the second choice.

But what I guess is important either way is to realise that “we do not yet know it completely”.

But while all this pondering has been happening and fights going on, I never thought of changing the world ..if any, that feeling(only mildly) is surfacing now. I realised early on that it is too vast and always tried to find a place for myself inside it. Yes there are irregularities, things that are not right, things that can go wrong. Yes, but I somehow remain blind to them (is it fear or is it a failure I do not know) and concentrate at what is right, at what is good, at what makes this such a lovely space inspite of those dark spots.

But I realise that if everyone resorted to safe corners, today it would not have been as good a place. Fighters (freedom or any other fighter for a social/general cause), believed they could bring about a change and worked towards it. Some succeeded and hence today it is much cleaner.

Yet, is not as clean as it is ought to be and that requires those who behave opposite to what the quote says.

First try to understand and then try to change.

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