Be a real good neighbor for a day!

One of the great mysteries of this retro goes metro world is the surge in enveloping vintage expressions and opening our eyes to the Newfoundland of universal neighborhood. Just mention childhood and we will find ourselves harken those warm sighs of the slightly ripped, yet perfectly original pictures in black and white albums of kith and kin, of long love dried out yet tasty and sumptuous even today. And now mention adulthood, what you see is a total metamorphosis of all past expressions, of hours of free laughter to enveloping expressions, put on faces. Sometimes I feel we are all engaged in a street life masquerade, good outside, yet rotten and dead inside. As the world is on the verge of a population explosion and we check the status of the globe by just one click, don’t you thing in all that we have lost touch with the real us? Everyday as we update the minuscule details of our small life on the internet aren’t we just getting a little polluted in our head in the process. Since the time we have gained global citizenship and have started caring more about our virtual friends in Geneva or Iceland, we seem to have no clue about our next door neighbors. As Twitter have taken over phone calls and Facebook and Orkut are our letter writing pads don’t you just crave at times for a little peek a boo game with the days gone by. A little nostalgia is good for the heart, but in the fast paced life and moral rat race that we see everyday can we really afford the time to be nostalgic, can we really let ourselves shed our put on SMS lingo and write a letter in normal language? Or can we just stop our internet cooldom and be just us on one fine day? Life isn’t actually a fairytale, so I think is it time to shutdown those laptops for a while and taste the real flavor of the versatile city we love so much and drown into the forbidden world of pure joy. Write a letter to a dear friend, talk to your neighbors, take your dog out for a walk and show a gesture of genuine goodwill. Be a Good Samaritan in the real world, and bid adieu to the virtual world for a day, for just one fine day. Be a good fellow citizen in your real world and you would see how your virtual life improves. Take the risk, and say "Hello Kolkata" one day.

Snow in Nashville

Finally it snowed, and it was nice. Nashville usually never experiences heavy snow even though we see the Fahrenheit scale reaching 0F at times, which might snow one into believing that the white flurries are coming soon, yet that seldom happens. But last Thursday it happened, and I cant tell you how excited I was to see the cavalcade of soft white snowflakes coming down from the sky and forming a light white layer on the ground. The snow was hardly an inch or two but it was all I wanted. Here are some of the shots taken by me during the snowy day.

A Drama of the Idiots

by

Barnali Saha

In the mortal world of Bollywood, mainstream plagiarism seems to be a pied-a-terre for actors and directors. The latest Bollywood drama 3 Idiots had hit the screen just a few days back and now as the popularity of the movie is soaring sky high, controversy about the originality of the script is raging. The producers and Aamir Khan have vehemently denied the fact that the plot of 3 Idiots is the brain child of Indian writer Chetan Bhagat's novel Five Point Someone and have even gone to the dire extent of calling the script "original"



 Anybody who is aware of Chetan Bhagat's innovative novel would raise his eyebrows to this outrageous claim of Bollywood of calling an openly borrowed theme as its own. Bollywood definitely lacks creativity and have often shown its great dexterity of stealing movie themes, plots, dialogues and even music from Hollywood. There are countless examples of stolen and used plots before us. From Aamir Khan's much talked about Ghajni (original plot Memento) to Amitabh Bacahan's Pa (Original plot Robin William's Jack) Bollywood have deftly been a copy cat. I have forever wondered why is it that Bollywood never mentions the names of the original movies where it had copied its plots from in its own cinematic versions. Why is it that they have forever been inclined to copy and forget? I guess it is the basic element of movie making in Bollywood that one should not have any scruples when entering the business. Now that they have Indianized their copy and forget policy, their targets have been shifted to a national base. From big budget Hollywood movies, Bollywood is currently concentrating on blindfolding humble writers like Chetan Bhagat by blatantly using his creativity and declining fervently that they have adopted the idea from him. It is sad that Chetan Bhagat who despite concocting the brilliant story of Five Point Someone had been given no credit, no respect whatsoever in the movie 3 Idiots. It is indeed ironic that he has never been mentioned in the movie 3 Idiots, he didn’t make any public appearances with the cast and the crew of the movie, yet it is he who has made the making of the movie possible. Bhagat was actually pretty excited about the movie since we all knew from the cover of Five Point Someone that the novel was soon to be a motion picture (the director did not turn out to be Ritesh Sinha though). I guess the writer had not expected the events to take such an awkward turn.

The Cover of the Book 

 3 Idiots is totally based on the novel; it has almost all the same incidents in it the only dissimilarity being that the incidents were jumbled for heightened effect. However, in spite of all fine tuning, the plot of Five Point Someone is a far better than its cinematic version. By over dramatizing the perfect plot Bollywood has just shown us the loopholes in its creativity. In a long, long time we have not seen Bollywood begetting any revolutionary movie ideas and to think of Bollywood of fabricating the revolutionary plot of 3 Idiots would be nothing but an idiotic idea itself. Since all its movies either deal with love or the platitudes of love, Bollywood could never have come up with the idea of scathing the sagacious education system in India; it seldom has concentrated on the subject of education let alone changing the system of education via cinema. It is Chetan Bhagat who is probably the first Indian to speak up vociferously about the backlogs of the Indian education system where creativity plays a second fiddle and mugging up un-understood lessons rules. Bhagat had introduced Ryan Oberoi to act as the rebel in his book and through him he had brought to light the threadbare condition of the education system in India. In the movie 3 Idiots Aamir Khan becomes Rancho (the Ryan of the book) and voices the same dialogues that Ryan had voiced in a different tone. Isn't it a little too much of a coincidence that Aamir has the same kind of name as Chetan Bhagat's character and even talks and acts like him through out the movie? Isn't it totally stupid for Aamir to convince us that the writer has personally declined any similarity between the movie and the book? It is sad that an actor like Aamir Khan who is probably on of the best, if not the best, actors of Bollywood being mendacious in public. This act of Aamir Khan will surely mar his reputation as a perfect performer and will bring to light the fact that everything is fair in Bollwyood and war. As for Chetan Bhagat, I guess it is time for him to understand when Bollywood is concerned one should never expect fame and respect as a writer, because stories are manufactured in Bollywood and are not created by imagination. I hope that all loyal readers of Bhagat's novel support him and protest against the atrocious attempt of Bollywood of declining him his due respect.

Movie Review: 3 Idiots

Chetan Bhagat's Five Point Someone may not be called a literary masterpiece, but it sure is entertaining with its guffaws and its Indianized English. I read the book a while back, and I was highly impressed by the author's straightforward and vitriolic views about the sagacious education system. Bhagat had introduced Ryan Oberoi to play the role of the rebel, an anarchist who wanted to do away with the grumpy system of education system prevailing in India. Ryan was never his protagonist; he simply played the second fiddle in the book. It was Hari, the mundane narrator of the book who was the hero. But things turned topsy-turvy when Bollywood walked into the scene to dramatize the already dramatic story Five Point Someone. And then when in the book everything went happily ever after with the three idiots, namely Ryan, Hari, and Alok, Bollywood begot its own idiots Farhaan (R. Madhavan), Raju (Sharmaan Joshi) and Rancho (Aamir Khan)the great for its new cinematic endeavor 3 Idiots .

3 Idiots can be summed up in one word as extremely majestic. It surely will make you laugh your guts out with its slapstick jokes, its funny sequences, its bathetically emotional scenes and make you to shed a tear or two in the emotional sequences. In short, 3 Idiots is a perfect desi dinner for your bulbous eyes which has all the spices in almost perfect proportion. The genetically modified melodrama has all it takes to hit the Indian audiences hard, and I see it topping the charts in no time. The movie definitely followed a major part of the book, only the incidents were either jumbled or heightened for greater effect.

3 Idiot' is a laughter riot right from the first scene where Farhaan fakes a hear attack while onboard an Air India flight to the last scene where Chatur finds out that his role model Mr. Phunsuk Wangdu is none but his college rival Rancho. I especially loved the portrayal of Raju's glum family in black and white. Despite scenes of hilarity, 3 Idiots does suffer from backlogs of vague emotions which seem at some portions of the movie vaguely put on, unorganized and unneeded. Another thing that stuck me was the heroic character of Rancho. I know it doesn’t look good for the perfect image of a movie if its hero fails to live up to the standard and flunks in exams or scores 5 point something, so Bollywood made Ryan Oberoi (of the book) alias Rancho become the class topper thus bringing forth the idea that we cannot still accept a flawed hero in our movies. In the long run, the act actually exemplified the character of Rancho and brought out the real essence of the movie. But the child delivery scene in the movie was definitely overtly exaggerated. I don’t think Chetan Bhagat has ever imagined his Ryan to do a child delivery with the aid of his friends. Since everything is fair in Bollywood and war, such sacrileges add to the vivacity of the movie's plot.

3 Idiots is a star studded affair which presents us with the grand acting skills of stars like Boman Irani as Professor.Viru Sahastrabuddhe or Omi Vaidya as Chatur Ramalingam. But Kareena Kapoor seemed a little unwanted as Pia, she didn’t add to the character of the fashion designing student Neha of the book, instead she is here a smart would be doctor who falls for the charm of Rancho out of the blue. One thing that stuck me about the movie is the way the real ages of the stars have been camouflaged fruitlessly. Even though Aamir Khan is a perfectionist as an actor, he seemed a little too old to be an engineering student in his early twenties. Nevertheless, the movie is a first hand example of great filmatography and fabulous humor. Like all Rajkumar Hirani' movie, this one has treats for all its viewers. The peppy song "Aal izz well" reminds us of his Munna Bhai movies.

The dialogues used in the movie will definitely come as eye openers to brainless muggers. 3 Idiots deftly bring out the very quintessence of Five Point Someone bringing to light the fatal flaws of the Indian education system. And though at some pint Aamir Khan does look like a know-it-all holy spirit inculcating others with his words, he does reciprocate Chetan Bhagat's ideas that the Indian education system lacks creativity and spontaneous love for knowledge. I hope Aamir's words reach the generation next and come as a harbinger of a utopian vision of a new educational system in India. Movies with messages such as this one should be taken as ground breaking attempts to change society.

The movie is an absolute delight when it comes to music. It features a galaxy of beautiful songs shot in great locations. I personally loved "Behti hawa" and "Zoobie doobie".

Overall, 3 Idiots is a wonderfully heartwarming movie that teaches us to stop being mentally troglodytes and introduce creativity in our minds. I give the movie a 3.5 rating out of five.

The Humorist

by

Barnali Saha

The man was sitting in front of the fireplace in his study throwing little balls of paper into it and was watching them burn. An almost tattered sheet of paper was sitting on his lap and he was tearing small bits from it and balling them. A leather bounded notebook lay open on the table next to the fireplace. The paper lacked even a single scratch from the pen, which the man was holding in is fist like some lethal weapon. It seemed that he had nothing to say or just that he didn’t know how to say it. The white sheet seemed to echo all the unspoken thoughts ringing in Miller Travis's mind, and he seemed not interested in marring its virgin beauty.

He was sitting upright in his chair, his head lost in thoughts and his mind consoling him that may be he would come up with something before the deadline. A few scraps of paper were lying on the ground; he had just torn away the three pages of pedestrian humor he had written. It lacked in compression and objectivity and was a no good article. Unsatisfied and beleaguered, he was trying his best to find out a streak of humor. There were deep wrinkles in his forehead; it was obvious that he had aged a lot more that he should have. At thirty-two he looked close to fifty with almost bald head and gray hair in the temples, the patina of wrinkles covering his face and his sunken eyes all accentuating his older age. Once upon a time Travis was a humorist who used to regularly write a humor column of great repute in the New York Times. 

Miller Travis was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to a not so well to do family of big tradition and small riches. His father, Robert Miller was a poet, his grandfather was a failed actor, and his great grand father, who was long dead by the time our protagonist was born, was a first class doctor who had amassed much wealth and tradition in his time. And that noble man had failed to expend his wealth in one lifetime left a part of it, rather a small part of it, to his future generations. One must agree that great grandfather Travis was one great man, for he had left such an enormous amount of money that the future generations almost had to demote their occupational levels to relatively nominal posts at the fringes of the fortune they had in hand.

Early in his life Miller's father introduced him to the al fresco. On several hot Sunday afternoons, father and son would head down to the bank of the little stream and sit there for hours until evening dawned and the biting gnats disturbed their sojourn.  On such lazy trips he would recite the sonnets of Shakespeare or the odes of Keats and his eyes would be swelled with deep seated imagination as his voice would touch on his favorite lines. Young Miller loved their trips and even though his father seldom published the poems he wrote after their excursions, he was forever enthusiastic to catch the charm of nature. On one such trip as his father recited, with bathetic emotionalism Keats's Ode to Autumn, Miller felt a stroke of humor inside him. And when his father had ended his monologue and stared at Miller with a questionable glance, Miller discovered that he wanted to be a humorist. And with that thought the bright prospect of another diminutive profession dawned on the Miller family.

Now, there are several humorists readily available in town, but Miller never wanted to be a stand-up comedian in a play or a joker in circus. He wanted to make skillful use of humor in the form of writing, and thereby create literature of exquisite value with his magic words. However, the transition from dream to reality is a big leap, and Miller realized the significance of this Brobdingnagian task of making dreams come true when several of his humorous articles and prose pieces were returned by the local newspapers with comments like "not up to the mark" that they "have decided to pass on." And that even though "there were some moments of extraordinary and lovely humor" they had found the voice of the writer a bit distracting. Criticisms as it is are hard to digest, they are the stale, rotten eggs you never wish to smell in your life, but inevitably, at some point of your mortal existence, those rotten eggs of cynicism are thrown at you.  And when Miller Travis faced the stinky weapon of mass destruction, he revolted back with great spirit.  For several months he burnt the midnight oil and read the great pieces of humorous literature. From P.G Wodehouse to Nikolai Gogol, re read it all with laborious cogitation. And after years of reading and pages of writing and a MFA degree from Columbia University, Miller finally managed to grab a job as a weekly columnist in The Daily Star, a local newspaper. His journalistic abilities flourished with time. After working at the Daily Star for almost five years, Miller applied for a job at the New York Times. He presented some of his best humorous articles about politics and social norms at the interview and managed to get a weekly column at the newspaper which paid him $1 for a word. But Miller was happy; it was exactly what he had wanted from his life, a job at the prestigious NY Times. He toasted to his success and joined his new vocation with enthusiasm.

In the beginning, everything was working just fabulous for him. People appreciated his creativity and he received rave reviews for his marvelous write-ups which combined the wide-eyed imagination of a rustic with a mordant city dweller's social criticisms. He made friends with great intellectuals and drank with some of the brightest men in New York. Travis attended book parties, discussions and interviews, in short he did all those things a literary luminary should do. But then everything turned upside down when he decided to volunteer for the Iraq war. His urge to see the action first-hand took him to the crux of the battlefield. Travis served as a supply truck driver and while delivering the supplies he imbibed with the exciting first-hand action the macabre side of a war. He saw dead and injured shoulders, civilians with their limbs broken and twisted like twigs; he saw bodies of children lying around, dead and burnt. His friends back home who had thought that a humorist like Travis who successfully derived humor from all aspects of life might be able to have a column or two of his Iraq experience. But their ideas proved utterly long when two months later Travis retuned home with PTSD. The war sight came as a shock to his senses and he began suffering from irritability, hyper-vigilance and hyper tension.  The condition worsened over time and Travis began having horrific nightmares. With PTSD haunting his life, Miller's ability to concoct humorous articles steadily worsened. His new articles were drab and unexciting; the humor was seemed put-on and stupid in some cases. The disheartened readers emailed The New York Times about the wild and irrational articles of Miller Travis. The directors of the paper contacted Travis with an ultimatum that if he failed to write a truly humorous article up to the taste of The New York Times for the weekender, he would lose his job. And since the time he had received the email, Miller had locked himself in his study trying to write something.

After almost twenty hours of forces incarceration, Miller Travis had no luck working. He just failed to get anything going and rejected all the drafts. He sat on his chair, his hands cupping his drooping head, the nerves pulsating rapidly in his temples. HE felt like a failure. For twenty hours he had been trying fruitlessly to discover a dollop of humor in his drab, whitewashed study. There were no true sentence, no real wit in him. All his creative abilities seemed to have died a sudden and horrific death. Travis looked at the clock in the mantelpiece. It was four thirty, but he didn’t know whether it was the beginning or the end of a day. Travis stood up and tied his gown, put on his sleepers and walked out of the room.

Travis lived in the top floor of a six storied apartment building with a small enclosed terrace which looked across the Manhattan luxury. He went to the terrace and soaked in the sights and sounds of the city. It was almost daybreak; the sky was a vast canvas of some unknown artist who had put several shades of red, orange and pink with care. The diffused lights from the sky brought out the soft beauty of the sepia tinted city that lay before Travis's eye.  His eyes suddenly fell down at the small green field surrounding the apartment building. The field was covered with thousands of dried fall leaves that the tree next to the apartment building had shed. The leaves looked so sad, so withered. They seemed to be staring at the vast sky with their listless eyes. They were like a sea of silent corpses lying in a battlefield after the war was over. Travis stared at them wondering how much life the leaves had only a few months back when spring was in full swing. The tree next to the building which was verdant with leaves stood specter thin, its bare branches screaming disgust. As Travis looked at the sight underneath his apartment, he realized the futility of existence. That everything in this world ends up in a big lump of nothingness to a sea of fruitlessness and hopeless exhilaration. It is strange that every year, everyday, with the march of seasons, with the end of days, with the movement of time, nature fills our staring eyes with false hopes of perfection. Travis understood that every year at that particular time the battered field would look the same only to be turned green and juicy in spring and then reduced again to a sea of fallen, dead leaves with the advent of winter. There was so much humorousness in nature; it is always fooling you with its sleight of hands. It was a manipulative necromancer ever challenging us with its deceptive devices, but we always fail to understand its illusive strategies, its unspoken challenges or winks. Travis could feel the invisible and illusive hand of nature tickling his body. He suddenly began to laugh. After a futile day, he had managed to find the humor he was looking for, it was indeed the truest sense of humor--the humor of nature, the humor of life. Travis's laughs echoed in the corners of the sky and then died down to a wave of nothingness.