Month: October 2007

Laaga Chunari me Daag…..

Laaga chunari me daag, chhupaun kaise, laaga chunari me daag…

Chunari me daag, chhupaun kaise, ghar jaaun kaise, laaga chunari me daag…

And so goes one of my favorite songs since childhood!! Not only did I like the lovely lovely music of the song, I also kinda sensed the pain, the irony, the anguish, and yes, the helplessness hidden and yet so obviously present in the lyrics of the song. And in the movie titled so too!! But alas, where the song leaves you thinking; the movie forces you to stop thinking, by ending itself in a goody-goody manner, and it’s all the more irritating, because till the interval it gives you so much to think about!!!!

Phew!! I guess I’ve confused you… :-P. Ok Ok, so keeping things straight, Laaga Chunari Me Daag is a movie made by Pradeep Sarkar(Of Parineeta fame!!), and deals with the ‘profession’ that girls are made to pursue outta their ‘majboori’!!

Rani and Konkona are the daughters of Anupam Kher and Jaya Bachchan, a “traditionally-rich-but-now-on the-verge-of-bankruptcy” couple in Benaras.(I dunno how this happens in bollywood movies…. haven’t they heard of savings and investments and insurance policies???? But anyways, lets continue..). Yeah, so to pull out the family of its financial crisis, the ‘un-matric’ elder sister Rani marches off to Mumbai to hunt for a job. I know it’s a cliche, but in big-bad-world of Mumbai(!!!) , the hunter becomes the hunted, and falls for a job offer into the bed of her boss-to-be. Actually not straightaway, she first calls up her mom and tells her that she’s gonna deny the offer; but her mom is so tensed about her husband being ill, that without listening to the qualms of her daughter she tells her not to return until she makes a living. What a mom!!! Anyways, as expected, no doors opened lead to the job! (now anybody with a little bit of grey matter in their brains would know that a call center boss will not employ a highschool dropout!!). Hurt, angry, resentful, pained, and bitter, she decides to make a job out of her first attempt to get a job. Groomed and styled by a high-society whatever(we really dont know what Suchitra Pillai does for a living, or did I miss it??), she transforms from a gauche village belle to a sophisticated-n-sexy call-girl, or ‘escort’! She starts getting clients right from the word go, and her house in Benaras, her sister’s education and her parents all start basking in the glory of her money! Money only, not her, ’cause we Indians are hypocrites…although we can accept the dough, we cannot accept the ‘tainted’ girl who kneeds it and dishes it out!!

So by virtue of her money, her house gets a new life, so does her dad, her sister gets an MBA, a great job and a loving boy-friend; and after a little bit of rona-dhona, black-mails, realizations and self-realizations and counter-realizations; the sisters-duo of Rani and Konkona get married to the brothers-duo Abhishek Bachchan and Kunal Kapoor. And they live happily ever after! <Phew!>

Ok, after reading this you all might think that I did not like  the movie at all…..well, it’s not exactly so. The movie is watchable, but not a must-watch! The first half of the movie is thought-provoking, intense. It makes you think abput how difficult life is for certain people, as opposed to us, who have had such a comfortable upbringing. But in the second half, the director tries to pull off a happy-ending in a biiig hurry. Yes life is not so difficult to everybody, but for those for whom it is, the conclusions and endings are not so simple either!

On the positive front, we must give full marks to Rani and Konkona, around whom the movie entirely revolves. If anything holds your interest over the entire movie, it’s the power-packed and yet spontaneous performances of the two! Abhishek and Kunal surely serve as eye-candy 🙂 , and Mr. Kher and Mrs. Bachchan are efficient as usual. The cinematography is grand and at the same time soothing to the eye; and the music pleasant. And yeah, a special mention to the costumes of Rani and Konkona: they are authentic and rich in Benaras, and trendy and really smart in Mumbai and above(!).

Now if only more attention was paid to the story and screenplay…If Only!!!!

Rating: Yellow

Knock Knock!!!! Who’s there?? It’s me, myself!! :-)

Hey all!!

First of all, please accept my most sincere apologies for not being on the blogging scene regularly. If I’d asked myself why, there wouldn’t be any particular reason I could give. I was busy, I was pre-occupied with things, I was not in the mood or the right frame of mind to write….. No excuse is really valid!! So, I said what the hell, let’s (re)start all over!! 🙂 And what better category to start with, than my take on movies n remakes??   😛

Haven’t caught many movies in the mean-time(and dont’ ask me why!!<sigh>)..<oh what a rhyme..lollzz>:-D, and haven’t written about any, too…The last one I wrote about is Die Hard 4.0!!!  So here I go!! Do read my next post 🙂

Just look around!!! There’s so much to learn!!

Was returning home from office yesterday, when I stopped by at the key maker’s. There were a couple of other elederly men there, and were discussing current affairs, as usual. Because of the lack of options, I reluctantly started overhearing their conversation. Little did I know, that this would turn out to be the most sensible talk that I would heard in the entire day, or may be in the entire week too.

The key maker was kinda working late, so an elderly man there were asking him to hurry up. As an analogy, he said that “it is the law of nature, see, even birds go home when the sun sets. Only a few work late, like eagles, kites and vultures, but they too, only till a stipulated time.” This sentence kinda caught my attention. Then the conversation drifted to whether one can see such birds these days, and the same guy said that yes, you can easily find them at Parsi crematoriums, where the funeral rituals include laying up corpses of the deceased in empty wells, where they are preyed upon by kites and vultures, and eagles. “Strange are the ways of some”, he said. The other two people there laughed acknowledgingly. But then the man said, “There’s nothing wrong in that too….In some communities they burn, in some they bury; Parsis feed them to birds: So even after they are dead, they are used in feeding hungry birds. So what if it sounds odd, Parsis make difference to the world even as they leave it!”

Isn’t that insightful? I mean, being so much educated, and supposedly fitting into the ‘intellectual’ category of people; I had not even thought about why Parsis could be cremating their dead bodies that way; let alone thinking about them so profoundly. But an elderly,lonely, probably not very educated country man woke me up from my delusions. Philosophy, my friends, isn’t the copyright of Paulo Coelho or Ayn Rand; or even the myriad Yogis and sages. Philosophy is delivered by any one who wants to think, and say his thoughts aloud!!!

Well, I am generally delighted when I get to know anything that is informative and at the same time intelligent and insightful; and given that, the man surely made my day!!!