Devdas - of the Kamal Haasan variety
While looking for the Dev D music at a music store this weekend, I stumbled upon an older version of Devdas - rather Chandramukhi Devdas - starring Kamal Haasan and Sri Devi. My curiosity was sufficiently piqued, but this picture on the sleeve made sure I had to buy it:
Devdas - the attack of the clones edition
Now you are probably thinking that this looks suspiciously close to the album cover of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Shahrukh Khan starrer:
Devdas - the ‘original’ edition
A closer inspection of the two covers will reveal, that indeed, the Kamal Haasan variant is just a shoddy photoshop job on top of the Bhansali version. Someone not only planted Kamal Haasan’s head on to Shahrukh’s torso - they added insult to injury by repeating the process for Sridevi and Sripriya (with Aishwarya Rai and Madhuri Dixit being the respective victms).
The movie turned out to be a badly dubbed version of an old Tamizh movie. The soundtrack seemed to have been (badly) redone for the Hindi version - so ridiculous dialogues weren’t the only coat of fresh paint that had been applied over the original. That said, we managed to extract a few laughs from a movie that has been been roughly modeled on one of the greatest romantic tragedy of all times. Here is a synopsis in 8 easy chunks:
 Pink? Pink? What's wrong with Pink?
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Raja (Kamal) is a brat with prediliction for ridiculous pink t-shirts and chain smoking. |
| Enter Devi (Sri Devi) his love interest - who is an Air Hostess for Indian Airlines - no less! She is seen here clearing her ear, while her friend pretends the she and the movie camera do not exist. |
 Let's pretend that there is no camera
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 In love at last!
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Through a series of contrived and rather forgettable events they fall in love and decide to get married. The families are happy with the match and the two go on a wedding card distribution spree. |
| But alas, the wedding is not to be - Raja, thanks to years of smoking like a chimney has - yes - cancer - very visible cancer. |
 Look ma, I've got cancer
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 The concerned brother
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Devi’s brother comes to know of it and wants to save his sister from her fate. |
| He contacts the friendly family priest/astrologer and urges him to postpone their wedding by 6 months - knowing well that his chain-smoking-cancer-inflicted brother-in-law to be wouldn’t last that long. Note the clever assumption that his sister will show sound judgement and will not marry a dead man. The priest obliges. |
 No comments
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 The elaborate song and dance routine.
| Raja in the meanwhile realizes the gravity of his condition and starts supplementing his copious intake of nicotine with healthy quantities of liquor. The jeopardy of his betrothal also opens door to a brothel. Enter Radha - played by a certain Sripriya. She is seen here indulging in an elaborate song and dance routine with the soon-to-be-dead man. |
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Devi - with a little nudging by big bro and a little prodding by Raja himself - ends up marrying an old friend of hers. He is visibly pleased. After the wedding they all come together at Radha’s place for a grand, tearjerking finale. |
 The guy who finally gets the girl
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Doomsday keeps coming closer
Doomsday keeps coming closer
Just a few years ago, doomsday was something that happened a few hundred years down the road. But of late, Hollywood has been pushing the date a little too close to the present. I just saw the trailer for the movie 2012 and found it sufficiently spooky. Watch and judge it for yourself!
From today, I won’t be mopey about mops
When I moved to Bangalore, I wasn’t sure if I wanted a maid working in my house. It was partly out of concern for my privacy, partly driven by desire to not have any dependence whatsoever on another person and partly because I didn’t know whom to ask for a maid! A few weeks into doing my own dishes, dusting and mopping, I realized that household chores can be an excellent workout, besides being a form of meditation. Six years later, I am still mopping the floors of our flat myself.
The biggest problem to have plagued my enterprise has been the non-availability of quality mops. Many things can go wrong with a mop. Its head can wear out and start leaving long cotton strands all over the floor or worse, the head can come off the handle because either the head or the handle rusts, causing the connection between them to sever. Over the years I’ve tried practically every brand, model and make available at the shops here, and all of them have met more or less the same fate. Another problem is accessories - almost all the mops sold are supposed to have replacement heads available - but best of luck actually finding one.
This Saturday while looking for a new mop, I came across a whole section dedicated to them at Spar. Apparently 3M have figured that this space needs a shakeup and have decided to take a plunge. There they were - Scotch Brite Mops - all nicely packed and neatly stacked. I procured one for a princely sum of Rs. 225 and took it for a spin today. So far, I am impressed. The cotton strands are looped for longevity, the head is neatly screwed onto a sturdy handle and there are strips of some synthetic material with dots of a plasticy polymer on them amidst the thick cotton loops, that are supposed to allow me to scrub stubborn dirt with ease. Today, it all worked as advertised. We’ll see how it holds in the coming days. Considering this is 3M we are dealing with, at least a replacement head should be easy to procure.
Scoth Brite Mop
Will 3M be successful? I have my doubts. Firstly, I know (at least anecdotally) that I am part of tiny minorty that buys mops for their own use. Mopping in most household is delegated to maids - and while we might demand the fastest, newest laptops from our employers at work in the name of productivity and efficiency, a maid at our house isn’t going to get the latest, greatest tool that the money can buy; especially if the tool (as is the case here), happens to be on the expensive side. The product might work if commerical establishments start procuring branded mops en masse, but as long as their are cheaper alternatives available, I don’t see that happening either. But who knows - 3M might just be able to muscle shelf space and bulk contracts and put others out of business. As far as mops go, I don’t think that will be such a bad thing.
In summers, the grass smokes
In summers, the grass smokes
Taken at one of the numerous parks in London on a particularly hot summer day. For me, travel and photography are inseparable. I haven’t been doing a lot of the former, and so the latter has suffered. This is the nature of things that have been keeping me busy for the past few weeks.
Monkeys
Monkeys 1 
Monkeys 2
The real thing and a dustbin shaped like one.
Similar simian pursuits:
Ghajini or how I shouldn’t have begun my new year
Ghajini is the sort of movie that makes you thank Aamir for doing only one movie a year. There are so many obvious lacunae in the plot (even for a straight forward revenge formula) that I wouldn’t even bother pointing them out - except for this one; because had they addressed it, the movie would have ended at least an hour in advance: Ghajini (the villian - played by Pradeep Rawat), after having killed a handful of his rivals with impunity, holds back from killing his archnemesis Sanjay Singhania (the hero - played by Aamir Khan) because he suspects that he’d get into some complications with police! The songs were an annoyance too and affected the flow of the story. And to top it all, the parts of the movie that were not flashbacks, had Aamir and Jia at their irritating best.
Miscellaneous points of interest (or may be not): There was a lot of (possibly unsolicited) Apple product placement - an old iMac (possibly G5) sat on Aamir’s desk. Then there were a couple of white MacBooks and a black MacBook for him when he was on the move. Even Pradeep Rawat had a first generation iPhone! I suspect that this particular product placement could be some deliberate poking-fun at Apple because Aamir is Samsung’s brand ambassador.
Then there was this shot where Aamir is summoned by Asin at one in the night so that she could hand him some money for treatment of his imaginary mother in the village. Aamir is wearing a dark (maroon?) shirt and standing with his back to the camera. If you look carefully, you can see a house-fly sitting on the shirt. And indeed in a second or two, it flies away.
Ah well, the film has been marketed extremely well and I’ll probably now be accused of not enjoying the movie because I was focussing on the minutae. Go ahead, ruin your 3 hours - but consider yourself forewarned! Meanwhile I’ll pretend that today never happened.