Category Archives: bollywood

Move over Superman!

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Got this through a forwarded email. I felt it was too funny to be skipped! Rajinikanth, as all Indians are aware, is the Amitabh Bachchan of South India. He is the undisputed megastar of movies down south. And while our own Big B has retired from his screen image and prefers playing more real characters (read o-l-d m-e-n) nowadays, Rajini is still going strong.

Well, the forward was about some of Rajini’s Laws-of-Science (and logic, may I add!) defying antiques from his movies. Here they are. Have a good laugh!

  • Rajinikanth has a brain tumour which, according to the doctors can’t be cured and his death is imminent. In one of the fights, our great Rajinikanth is shot in the head. To everybody’s surprise, the bullet passes through his ears taking away the tumour along with it and he is cured! Long Live Rajinikanth !
  • In another movie, Rajinikanth is confronted with 3 gangsters. Rajinikanth has a gun but unfortunately only one bullet and a knife. Guess, what he does? He throws the knife at the middle gangster and shoots the bullet towards the knife. The knife cuts the bullet into 2 pieces, which kills both the gangsters on each side of the middle gangster and the knife kills the middle one!
  • Rajinikanth is chased by a gangster. Rajinikanth has a revolver but no bullets in it. Guess what he does. Nah? Not even in your weirdest imagination. He waits for the gangster to shoot. As soon as the gangster shoots, Rajinikanth opens the bullet compartment of his revolver and catches the bullet. Then, he closes the bullet compartment and fires his gun. Bang… the gangster dies!
  • Rajinikanth gets to know that the villain is on the other side of a very high wall. So high that Rajinikanth can’t jump even if he tries one of those Superman techniques that our heroes normally use. Rajinikanth has to desperately kill the villain because it’s the climax! Rajinikanth suddenly pulls two guns from his pockets. He throws one gun in the air and when the gun has reached above the height of the wall, he uses the second gun and shoots at the trigger of the first gun in the air. The first gun fires off and the villain is dead!

But seriously, are you guys aware that Rajini is big in Japan?!

Rajini_Japan

The ‘Moral’ Police

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(Warning: If you possess religious sensibilities and they are easily offended, I advise you to refrain from reading further. And especially if you think the following quote from Voltaire is a bunch of bullshit: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to death your right to say it.”)

There are very few things I strongly hate in this world and one of them has got to be the moral police. Two stories in today’s news caught my eye and both are related to this issue – one a severe, disturbing example, the other a far more light-hearted, even ridiculous but nonetheless disturbing – one in Pakistan, the other in India.

In Pakistan, in the Swat valley, which the government virtually gave up control of in favour of Taliban militants, a 17 year old girl was publicly flogged for having an affair. (Read it here and watch it here.)
Apart from the fact that 

“they did this brutality just on suspicion. There was no trial. No evidence, no witness was produced.”

lies a very fundamental question, what is exactly an affair with reference to a 17 year old girl? Is she married? If she is, in my humble opinion that is a far greater crime than the one she has purportedly committed, assuming that a 17 year old married girl was probably married off against her informed will or decision. If she did make an informed choice and decided to commit adultery, then as an individual she has every right to. I am truly unaware of her circumstances, of her relationship with her husband and hence cannot make an unbiased judgement. 

The real rationale of punishing an adulterous woman, it seems to me is the ingrained jealousy of a man when a better man comes along and steals his woman. The problem with this approach is the implication that a woman, once married is the property of her husband. But we are not talking about non-living assets here, or even a living asset such as a cow or a dog, we are talking about a thinking human being, who is capable of judgement, no matter how flawed.
This is one of my problems with religion. Most religions relegate a married woman to the status of an asset. Just yesterday I saw this web comic, which talks about the status of women according to the Bible, and this is the New Testament, not even the controversial Old Testament. The comic is reproduced below.
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To come back to the 17 year old girl in question, if she is unmarried then an affair would probably just mean a harmless teenage romance. And to view that as a crime worthy of a public flogging is beyond my normally vast comprehension. When we were growing up, the most conservative of parents would at the most admonish their daughters in the privacy of their homes for such a crime, impressing upon them to concentrate on their studies. But I forgot, in Swat valley, after the Taliban took over, girls are not allowed to go to schools!
I find it frankly ridiculous that the Pakistan government so steadfastly hangs on to its claims of control over extra territories (read K-a-s-h-m-i-r) when it can’t even control the territories it already possesses! Don’t get me wrong – I am all for a Kashmiri plebiscite. But that is the subject of a separate post.
To diffuse the tension of the last few paragraphs, let me move on to the next story. Akshay Kumar, the Bollywood star, who I am not a big fan of, asked his wife, Twinkle Khanna to unbutton the top button of his jeans, which belongs to the Levi’s ‘Unbuttoned’ range of which he is a brand ambassador, in a fashion show in India. This offended a certain social worker, Mr. Anil P Nayar, who promptly filed a case against him with the police in Mumbai/Bombay. 
As if there is not enough social work to be done in India, not enough backlog of court cases, not enough unsolved crimes, terrorism and what-have-you, Mr. Nayar has all the time in the world to waste his own time and the courts’ time and the police’s time for this. I strongly believe that such people need to be flogged in public and not a 17 year old girl accused of having an affair!

Sounds Like Power

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“An American admirer and reviewer of Hindi films; dilettante; geek of all trades” has a blog dedicated to Shabana Azmi, Sounds Like Power.
The name of the blog apparently comes from a quote attributed to Shabana Azmi, as mentioned in the footer, though I confess I had never heard it before and googling for it didn’t give me much leads either. But it sounds, well, powerful!

“Say ‘Shabana’ and it is nectar. Say ‘Shabana Azmi’ and it sounds like power.”

I have always been a huge admirer. In fact, when I was still in school and someone asked me who was my favourite actress in Bollywood, I had answered quite unabashedly, “Shabana Azmi”, to which the reply was, “But she is old!”!
In fact I have been a fan ever since she went on a hunger strike to stop the evacuation of slum dwellers in Bombay and also protested the killing of Safdar Hashmi, the playwright, not to mention her movies, Ankur, Arth, Ek Doctor Ki Maut, Fire, Khamosh, Mandi, Masoom, Paar, Shatranj Ke Khiladi etc. etc. etc.

Omigosh!!!

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Me thinks, some people have too much time!
“The accusation suggests that the film Slumdog Millionaire calls Indians dogs and slum dwellers, slum-dogs and has demanded the makers change the film’s title to Slum-dash Millionaire.”
“The protesters said their sensibilities had been offended by the title, which they said was abusive of people who live in slums.”
…
The Jhuggi Jhonpdi Sanyukta Sangharsh Samiti (a group promoting the rights of slum dwellers) threatened to burn director Danny Boyle’s effigies. “We will burn Danny Boyle’s effigies in 56 slums here,” Tapeshwar Vishwakarma, General Secretary of the group said.
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Vishwakarma filed a petition in the court of the chief judicial magistrate last Tuesday, charging the movie’s music director A R Rahman, actor Anil Kapoor and other Indians associated with the film with abusing slum dwellers in the name of entertainment just to earn money and fame.
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Image courtesy IMDb.

Dr Kotnis ki Amar Kahani

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drkotnis.jpg

Dr Kotnis ki Amar Kahani is a Hindi film released in 1946 directed by V. Shantaram (he also played the title role). The film is based on the true story of Dwarkanath Kotnis, one of five Indian physicians dispatched to China to provide medical assistance during the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1938.

I saw an article on a Chinese website about him, which says-

“No single Indian has been more revered by ordinary Chinese than a doctor from a middle class family in northern India. On the day when the Chinese pay respect to their ancestors, the grave of this doctor on the plains of North China is covered with flowers donated by the local Chinese.”

This would be such a shining example of Sino-Indian friendship and collaboration.