Prologue: Bowing to the moral police gaining ground our country, I have decided to give a guidance rating to the movies. Love in a Metro gets a 15 (in a green circle) for a long and longing display of Shilpa Shetty’s belly, liberal images of promiscuous activity in urban middle and upper middle classes and especially call centres (much to the chagrin and wistfulness of my friends in BPOs) and above all gratuitous scenes of women drinking and smoking purely for pleasure and without remorse. Now that I have given you three reasons for seeing the movie, let’s go to the rest. The Story Well actually there are 4-5 stories. Aakash (Shiney Ahuja) is a theatre actor playing to empty halls and struggling to make ends meet while Shikha (Shilpa Shetty) is a lady struggling with her husband’s silences, absences and distances. They have a brief encounter at a bus-stop and the inevitable happens and then does not happen. Shikha’s husband Ranjeet (Kay Kay Menon) is a top exe...

It has been over three months since the movie was released and I just got to see it on a flight from Frankfurt to India . Agreed that it was not the best location to see a movie but what the heck. One inescapable conclusion - Mani has added business naivete to his already well recognized political naivete (Dil Se, Yuva, Bombay ..). What was he thinking? The story in brief – Gurukanth Desai is a failure in academics, goes to Turkey and earns a decent work reputation there but comes back to India to start his own business here. He marries Sujata (Aishwarya), who has a failed elopement plan on her resume, for dowry to start his business. He comes to Mumbai, makes it big in the textile trade and over time becomes one of the largest industrialists in the country. But this is not at the cost of creating enemies – personally and professionally and is finally hauled up before the court for violating some license era regulations. A lot about the direction The movie could as w...

Short review of Corrections Corrections is this highly acclaimed book which came out 3-4 years back. I have been wanting to pick it up and finally got a used hardbound book in great condition for around Rs100. Now after reading I am thinking of selling it back, probably in weight!! Corrections is about a dysfunctional family in Suburban U.S. That one line describes the book quite neatly. You practically know who the characters are going to be – elderly parents in St.James (Kansas) with the old man suffering from Parkinson’s, and the old lady living out delusions of her own; elderly son who is financially well off and living in New York and is bordering on depression encouraged by a wife who doesn’t like his hobbies or his parents; second son who teaches literature at college and has lost tenure after seducing a young student and then escapes to Lithuania to help in defrauding Western investors; daughter, an upmarket chef marries an older guy followed by a break up, has a lesb...

Review of Fever Pitch - Nick Hornby, 1992, 242 p. Fever Pitch was voted the best sports book of all time by Guardian-Observer in a survey a couple of years back (beating out books like Beyond a Boundary). It surprised me that I had not heard about the book till I came upon this list. I picked up the book with some trepidation as I am not a great football fan, though I do catch the occasional EPL or Champions League matches. However one thing which enthused me was that the book was about an Arsenal fan and whatever little I have followed of the EPL, I have always been an Arsenal follower. Fever Pitch is an autobiography – a growing up story of the author set against the backdrop of the the author’s love and later obsessive interest in the Arsenal football club and how the key moments of his life, professional and personally, intertwine with the (mis)fortunes of the club. The book is structured innovatively with memories broken down into specific match days which is in fact re...

Review of Babel I have seen two of Alexando Gonzalez Inarritu’s earlier movies – Amores Perros and 21 Grams (both with the writer Guillermo Arriaga). I liked both of them immensely, especially 21 Grams for its structural complexity, for its top rate acting, for its moral clarity. Inarritu has reached a kind of auteur status after his two movies – for his structural innovativeness, his micro-cosmic moral world view and the great work he extracts from his photographer and editor who have as much a role to play in his success. Babel covers similar issues though not the same terrain as some of his earlier movies. It has 4 interconnected stories – some connections stronger than the other. · One story has a Moroccan villager who buys a rifle to guard his flock of sheep and gives it to his kids who playfully shoot at a tourist bus while practising with the rifle. · The second story involves an American couple (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) who ar...