Do you happen to hate Kurbaan too?

I am not insensitive to the big issue that is terrorism. I do feel sorry for hot hunks like Saif who are forced into masterminding terror plots by the big bad global superpowers. Tch tch, the heart goes out to him. What I cannot comprehend is how anyone who's watched New York can afford to watch Kurbaan. Aren't we still suffering from the effects of recession?

Ah well, the movie does teach you a lot. Here's what I've learnt:

1. Don't marry a good looking Muslim guy. He could be a terrorist.

2. Afghans are terrorists. They are also spooky people who stare at you wierdly like a bunch of undercover aliens and kill you if you threaten their secret.

3. If you suspect your neighbours of wierd undercover activities, just snoop around, tiptoe into their basement and you'll uncover a deadly terror plan as well as find a dead body or two.

4. Terrorists are dumb louts who don't watch much TV, and so can't tell a journo from an Islam fundamentalist. So the next time you want to blow their plans, just give an anti-America speech and next thing you know, you'll be in their clan - don't even bother to conceal your identity, they won't notice.

5. There are two types of Muslims - the ones who think Americans deserve to be kicked, and the ones who don't.

6. A bunch of Afghans and a Pakistani use a Delhi girl as a pawn in their war against America. This is India's problem, so we have to make a movie about it.

7. To make a dark, sultry thriller, take a good film, strip it of all colour, get a bunch of expensive actors, tell them not to act and just look tense in every scene, paste some sex scenes (refer Mahesh Bhatt productions for guidance), add a dash of gore, some extra tears. For a dash of authenticity, get Kiron Kher do an Afghani accent. There you have it. Now sit back and enjoy the critical acclaim. And dare anyone to call you candy floss again.

8. Kareena Kapoor can act: she has three very distinct expressions in this one - in the first part she's deeply in love, and can't get her hands off her new husband. Less than an hour later she's scared, and in the end she's sad. Great performance.

9. If you want to make a sexy anti-terrorism movie and still sound secular, just sprinkle some pro-Islam arguments. Nobody will blame you for killing all the Muslims, since after all you've been sympathetic to their sorrows and their motivations. Let them speak, and them kill them in the larger interest of humanity. Its a win-win situation, everyone's happy.

10. 500 hard earned rupees are nothing if compared to the sorry saga of innocent people forced on the path to terror, and noone could understand their pathos better than Karan Johar. So give him all your money.

P.S. Can't wait to write that Jaani Dushman blog. Coming up soon.

Tata has gone nuts! And this is not about some vanishing species of turtles...

Heard of OkTataByebye.com? I hadn't heard of it either - apparently it is a community portal for travellers, initiated by makemytrip.com. Bizarrely enough, Tata Sons have sued the company with the claim that the domain name infringes on the Tata brand name! Well I hate the expression, but WTF?

More about it on: http://www.oktatabyebye.com/support-us/Appeal.aspx

This isn't corporate bashing, but I do feel the company has taken it too far. If this is some ingeneous ploy to take over a popular domain name, kudos to the legal eagles in there. But if they actually contend that by being born into the Tata clan, they win copyright over a colloquial expression, then duh-uh... wait, is that copyrighted by someone too?

Do pass on the message. Not that its gonna help anyone, but we ought to know the levels of absurdity prevelant in our country.

Fly You Fools - Indian Comics about Life.

...and, we're back!

Don't you just love Google?

After years of technologically retarded existence, humble ol’ self is finally learning the ropes. And indeed, staying ahead of the geeks who first scoffed at me for not having an email account (1999), then for not knowing what to do with it and always forgetting my password (2001), then for not having a gmail account (still on rediff? Tsch. – 2004) or not understanding what all the fuss around Orkut was (2005). Ahead of them, because I figured Twitter and got hooked on to it on my own! (Loud applause) Thank you, I love you all. Muah.

My romance with the Internet really started when it first helped me find a home and roommates in a new city. Three years, two cities and umpteen relocations later, Internet is again the reason I have the apartment I always wanted, and a sweet li’l roommate, everything worked out within a week and right under all the estate agent noses left sniffing the rainy air! And yes, my present job too. Just the one I wanted, and noone else thought such jobs exist. No need for applause.

The Internet has also been remedial to my Queuephobia – no more physical banking, ticket booking for me, sir. The scoffers of yore would be delighted to see my (company sponsored) lappy with four browsers – one to browse in German, another for English, one exclusively for using Outlook and one with a fancy logo.

AND the point of telling you all of this is… uh… I did have a very good point… never mind. Just wanted to blog.

Is there life after death?

Well, I had to talk about it. This is the story of a magazine gone wrong. It was called India Insight.

Many people would have many different sides of the story to tell - this is my side of it. More than a year ago when I had the crazy urge to stop working as a translator and try my luck as a copywriter, I packed my bags and came to a city I thought I knew - Pune. The King in Paulo Coehlo's Alchemist says that when you set out on the way to your dreams, nature rewards you with a little success on your first step - its called beginner's luck.

So with no experience, no training in media, I ended up with the job I'd have killed for - not as Junior Copywriter in some obscure advertising company, but as subeditor for a newly launched weekly magazine with some ambitious plans to redefine journalism in India. For the first few weeks, the work was maddening - intimidating, exhausting, but oh, the feeling of holding a fresh copy of the magazine in my hands... 64 pages of honest, if a little amateurish journalism, that I helped organise, arrange into one issue packed with stories on every subject of interest from politics to films to history to sports... this was May and June 2008. India Insight was launched on May 4, I joined the tiny team on May 13. By the first week of July we got a real office - by mid-July I got help as two more sub-editors joined us. By end of July, from a team of two - me and the creative head slogging on issue after issue of the magazine - we had grown to a full-fledged editorial team of 3 sub-editors, a chief editor, a copy editor working from Delhi, and 3 assistants to the chief designer. By August, publication stopped.

I won't get into blame games here, so never mind what went wrong. Only a lot of dreams were shattered - big deal. But one issue of that magazine, dated August 8-14 2008, which was the first product of our complete team, never made it to the stands. Somewhat hurts. It also hurts, still hurts that two people among the new faces were there because of me. I told them we needed more people in this amazing new publishing house, that we had two magazines running and more in the offing, that yes it was a risk for them to quit their present jobs but that the risk was worth taking. I'm not conceited enough to think that I influenced their decision or the course of their lives, but I was the Nimittya - there's no better word for it. Had I not told them about this job, they wouldn't have quit their jobs in Bangalore.

I'm still chasing my dream. And I remain indebted to India Insight for marking my first step towards it. Journalism is what I wanted for my life and if I started late, it was only because I hadn't had the nerve before. This was my beginner's luck. This weekend, I'll be in Bangalore, watching a play by my favourite theatre group. We'd done a little story on them, in the August 8 issue - very few copies of that issue were printed, and I've managed to save one with me. I'll hopefully be able to hand it over to the group's director.

India Insight, meanwhile, lives on. After August last year, it was re-launched from Bangalore in October. And again from Pune last month, this time as a fortnightly. The publishers remain optimistic and I too wish the magazine all the success. Only hoping that this time, the still-ambitious project does not displace a lot of young people, play with their dreams and render them jobless in a month.

Truly multi-media

Television has changed. Thank God.

 Gone are the Tulsis and Parvatis and the entire generation of low IQ TV shows they had inspired - I don't care to be politically correct. If you don't agree with my views, read some other blog. While the sari-clad, heavily bejewelled bahus no longer rule the roost, the intellectual damage they have done to Indian television will take some more years to repair. The Ballika Vadhu generation of popular soaps address serious social issues - but in form, story development, characterisation and dialogue, they still largely survive on Balaji-created clichés. Good girls still prefer ethnic wear, and a pair of well-toned skirt clad legs usually carries a femme fatale with evil intent. Sigh.

 But well, a Sarabhai v/s Sarabhai isn't everybody's cup of tea. Intelligent television humour is what I'm talking about. Sarabhai created its own definitions, with characters replacing old clichés with fresh pet peeves. Who can forget the middle class Monisha; lazy and lovable, missing no chance to save every rupee of her wealthy hubby, to the point of selling stale wine packed in a plastic bag to a cop! That was Star One of yore, with fresh, funny, youthful content which provided good relief from the run-of-the-mill productions of that time. Sadly, Star One soon sold out. Dill Mil Gaye and Mile Jab Hum Tum might not fall into the Saans-Bahu category as rightfully boasted by their respective makers, but the bird brained doctors and collegians looking like 30-year-olds definitely don't qualify as quality television…

 So well, the change I’m talking about isn’t really a change in content. A few shows might have relaxed the dress code for their leading ladies, but television IQ has a long way to recover. What I am talking about then, is the PR approach. TV shows realise that to get noticed in times of shorter attention span, they need to have a presence on various media. Who would have thought 10 years ago of a TV show sponsoring another show on another channel as part of its promotional campaign? Or for that matter TV stars pretending to be their screen selves for the benefit of media? Enter Sony Entertainment Television. Some years ago, the ingenious publicity campaign of totally overwriting Mona Singh’s true identity with the bespectacled Jassi succeeded in creating sustainable hype around the otherwise mundane show. The same channel now has gone a step further for the new show Bhaskar Bharti – a lame TV execution of an outrageous concept. A guy turns to a girl overnight, and is doomed to a woman’s life.

 While the show itself is lame, the way it is being promoted is interesting – besides the usual hoardings and advertisements, Bharti maintains a blog and regularly updates her Facebook and Twitter profiles. Now, TV shows having a Facebook profile may not be new, only that here, the tweets are actually an extension of the fictional show. Wish that kind of creativity had also gone into the making of the show.

 What intrigues one is, what if that idea was applied to some classic old shows – imagine what Joey (from Friends) would daily tweet about – who’d be on Harriet Brindle’s friend network? Maybe we’ll soon have an entire network of fictional characters tweeting on the net, forever blurring the line between Tellyworld and cyberspace…

Learning to walk

I was about to start off with a story of my life, but face it, nobody wants to read that. So here I am, my first blog, with no clue about what I want to write about. My own life is too insignificant, and while the people in my life are my personal superstars, I don't know about you guys. In fact, I don't know you guys at all!

So let me just say that I meant to write, since a long  time. And only got the courage now. Special mention here to two blogs that have kind of given the li'l ol' push: One is Woman in Black (http://womaninblack71.wordpress.com/), a blogger I started following a couple of months ago that has me hooked for her sheer wit and honesty. Hers is also the vein I'd love to see myself writing in - WIB, please watch out for plagiarism :) 

Second was an online review of the embarrassingly amateurish movie Dashavatharam (yes, Gayathri, I'll still call it that) to which I posted my opinion, and ended up in an online war of counter-comments with a little racist down south. No, I'm not saying South Indians are racists - I still speak fondly of my time in Bangalore and the people who made it special for me. But boy, did I enjoy snapping at my racist friend! And I thought, well, its about time I had my own little column too.

I'll share more about myself in weeks and months to come. For now, I am Deepti*, I work for a magazine, love movies to the point of obsession - I promise you a Jaani Dushman blog soon, which will summarise years of hard work researching crappy movies, appreciate food enough to enjoy Sushi, dream of writing a novel and becoming the ultimate polyglot. 

And finally a confession - I'm bad at concluding! So I'll just say ciao, and thank you for stopping by. Hopefully the next post will actually have a subject :) 

*Thought of using a pseudonym, but forget it. Maybe I'll create an online alter-ego later to say all the nasty things I can't say here. Or I could post nasty comments to my own blog!