Fanaa
Kajol , honey, you are just absolutely fabulous. No offence Aamir bhaai, you are wonderful too just that Kajol is better. The brilliant actress that she is, she deserves a better comeback in terms of the script than fanaa has to offer. Just about decent script, a little good music and a reputable hero are definitely not a wonder mix when it comes to making an explosive box office hit. But, a brilliant actress like Kajol can make up for all other inadequacies. The script does justice to her character in the sense that it's - if not centered, slightly more focused on it. The first half passes you by like a breeze, especially, with the delightful shaayri which Aamir khan has to share while being the perennial flirt that he is in the movie (at least in the rosy first half of it). Kehte hain mohobbat mein neend ud jaati hai. Koyi hum se bhi toh mohobbat kare. Yaar! yeh kambaqt neend bahut aati hai - was the nugget I liked best. :)

The graph falls along the Y-axis in the second half. To put it simply, shit happens, so did the second half of the movie's script. "There's a poker up my behind" faced Tabu is not a pretty sight to watch as a police officer and nor is the "extra wise for the size of my behind" kid that Kajol had conceived because of Aamir in the first half. In all, Load of bollocks, except for the munchkin - Kajol. O baby! baby! I am still swaying in ecstasy thinking of you honey. Ajay Devgan - Grrr! keep away from her, no more kids, you understand me?!

Cheers!

/PhaKuDi

To the victor, go, the snores
Yesterday I attended what can probably be called a disastrous dinner party. Vijay, neighbour, colleague and a friend of mine invited a bunch of us from work to dinner at his place. Instead of bothering Vijay's wife for the food (which we eventually ended up doing anyways) we decided to do some collaborative cooking and assemble at least an edible meal like a lot of those days before her arrival. In Gibraltar all of us (technical people from the India) are supposed to be on 24/7 support and yesterday turned out to be one of those "support call just before dinner" kind of nights which entangled more than half the dinner party crew in an online emergency all night long. An evening which was supposed to be fun and frolic turned out to be a war footing incident and both Vijay's house and mine were soon transformed into battle stations for fire fighting. Armed with our VPN connections and SSH terminals we were no less in comparision to a fire crew equipped with axes and water hoses.

Anyways people had to struggle till late in the night, sharing laptops for doing their part in resolving the issue at hand and my single bedroom apartment had to support lodging for 3. Ofcourse, I had a futon to spare but, that still left two of us on the same bed. Let me tell you something about two straight men sharing a bed - it's an awful experience which one should avoid as far as possible.

--> You get awake as if you just had a nightmare even if it's your own left foot that your right foot is touching.
--> In case an inadvertent tug of war is initiated, you will give up any number of blankets but, you won't be ready to share one.
--> You definitely can't sleep without a top like you might be used to regularly.
--> There is an invisible LOC running thru the middle of the bed which you will treat with utmost sanctitiy when compared to the one that runs between India and Pakistan.
--> You are painfully aware of your sexuality.

Phew! I gave up all hopes of rest after struggling to put myself to sleep and started reading a book. Meanwhile, my opponent managed to catchup with the sleep fairy. I call him an opponent because sleeping with a ... errr ... by the side of a man (sounds better) is a competition and the first one to get there is the victor and to the victor go the snores (it being slightly colder in Gibraltar than in India). After futile attempts to sleep on blanket + towel covered floor, the reclined chair and the home gym work bench, I finally gave up and got back to the bed to sleep with my eyes wide open.

Yawning away to glory even as I write this.

/PhaKuDi

Mission Impossible - III
If you are going in with the expectation that it's going to be like the other 2 MI movies then I would say - please don't go. The only similarity that this movie bears with it's counterparts in the sequel is the fact that Ethan Hunt is still capable of jumping off tall buildings and shooting a million rounds of ammo, just that, he doesn't want to do it unless there is a compelling emotional/centimental reson a.k.a. rescuing his wife from the bad guy by delivering the ransom. Unlike his image in the previous movie as a super spy capable of getting his girl, he is gagging for his wife's life and begging the bad guy not to kill her. Not too cool for a super spy eh!? One more noticeable point is Ethan Hunt's change of taste in women. He used to like all those super sexy, hard to get and action loving babes driving around in super cars but, all of a sudden he gets married to this doctor in a chapel within the hospital and no prizes for guessing where the first night (after marriage) takes place - the hospital supply room. Gosh! this fellow doesn't even share half the chemistry he had with the girl from MI-II and he is married to her. Maybe the film was just trying to highlight the flip side of marriages - no chemistry, timely sex and using your spy education to lip read you wife's girls only chat in the kitchen. Jeez! I could have handled Ethan Hunt as a balding and dying old man but, the lip reading thing was just too much. Unlike the rest of the movies the IMF message delivery doesn't happen to him in any impressive manner. Yes! they have managed to domesticate even that. Ethan Hunt gets a call and runs to the super market out of a party on the pretext to get some ice and meets up with his ex-boss (no bosses in other movies) who delivers him a shitty looking kodak camera which has the message after exchanging all the plesantries of the world. The crap doesn't stop there. Unlike in the previous 2 movies this movie isn't about the article that this chap is trying to retrieve. No one even knows what the hell it is. May be they were just trying to create some mysticism by not telling you what the hell it is. A description like a virus which would end all life on earth or a nuclear device which would evaporate earth would have sounded cool but, nope it is just called the Rabbit's foot. Rabbit's foot, my foot. But, the actual part of the movie which made me feel stupid for paying to watch the movie was the bollywood ending wherein the fellow is being tormented by an explosive brain implant while his wife is forced to save him by electrocuting him and then bringing him back with a CPR while trying to shoot the bad guys. Hmm! multi tasking and women. Oh by the ways the time lag between his electrocution and the CPR is the time taken by the novice wife who is used to nothing but bandaids and kitchen utensils to shoot down 2 bad guys with mighty guns. Finally, after she is done with all the tasks in the world she manages to recover him. Hmm! this is why they got him married to a doctor I guess. The action is not even half as explosive as MI-II. John Woo is wild and unmatchable ain't he? Anyways everyone is entitled to an opinion and I personally think the movie is a load of bollocks.

/PhaKuDi

'Pool'ing around
I remember myself only working/drinking or lazing at home from my last trip to Gibraltar. Weekdays were full of work till late nights and weekends were reserved for sleep, beyond anything. This time around, I came in with a firm mindset to change all that, I have been more or less (not more of a less) successful at being active. Now a days, weekdays and weekends are also about activities other than work. I work out. He he! I know it doesn't make a great deal of difference to my figure but, it's a better way to be, rather than just killing time idling around. I read, I blog, I go on long walks, I go out for a drink and I play pool. My friend Seshadri, Sesh for short, got me introduced to the game. Sesh is good company for me when it comes to playing pool. He is more than a beginner and has a few tricks to teach me, a beginner.

Today we went to a bar called 'The Anchor' which is a small place built on a quaint, sailor's bar kind of theme that starts from the old Anchor at the door step and runs through out the place, from the crossed paddles on the door to the fishing nets and the mini life saver doughnuts on the doorways. Mike, an elderly gentleman with a good sense of humour, owns the place. He is quite popular with the local crowd. Pool tournaments are held in Gibraltar every Thursday and Mike is a helmsman for one of the teams. By the time me and Sesh finished 2 frames we were joined by 2 other guys, Chris and Robert, who wanted to play against us. After the introductions and the pleasantries we set the frame for a game paid for by Chris and company. The next game was to be on us. Football fever is on and with England playing today, no wonder they both were dressed in the English league Ts. Robert decided to settle down for a drink while Chris teamed up with Mike against us novices. We played, as expected, we lost both the frames. Meanwhile, two other regulars, Charlie (wonderfully bald, by choice) and Mr. X (dunno his name) teamed up against Chris and Mike. People are allowed to fill their own drinks at Mike's bar. It was intersting to watch them play, trying to block the pockets for the opponent team and all. Almost towards the fag end, Mike missed the black ball and Mr. X jumped in, to pot it. While celebrating his victory, little did he realize that the cue ball was slowly finding it's way to the adjacent pocket. I pointed it out and Mike and Chris went 'Hip Hip Hurray!' while Charlie and Mr. X were not too happy about it :D. Let me describe this Chris fellow for you. This bloke is lean, quite atheletic and looks like border line Keanu Reeves. Chris and Robert hang out a lot and an enumeration of the adventures of a drunken and elated Chris was the bar's attraction of the evening. Mr. Chris man having celebrated the German victory in the opening match of the world cup went up to a Blue eyed Blonde and told her that she was the woman of Matrix (the movie) and that he was Keanu Reeves :). "You should have seen the look on her face", he says. They also told us of the time when Chris tried to imitate James Bond by jumping into a glass pane at a friend's bar and how Robert had to temporarily repair it for the night by nailing a plank of plywood on the window sill while everybody else was enjoying football. The event was followed by a standup comedy by the man himself. He shared a lot of local and global jokes with us, some of them adult and racist in nature, yet, very funny. As we were about to leave after a gut busting string of laughs, Chris proudly proclaimed that his mind was like a computer which held more jokes than intelligency. He He! yup, you read it right, he said 'intelligency'. You should have seen his friends pull his leg about his 'intelligency'. :)

Ok! moral of this whole Chris starrer is that Gibraltarians are nice, friendly and responsive people and the fact that I got to know some of them better, over a friendly game of pool was exciting for me. I intend to try more stuff like poker and squash and socialize a bit more this time around in Gibraltar.

Cheers!

/PhaKuDi

Maa Tujhe Salaam
Living all by yourself is very liberating. You can listen to music loudly without disturbing others in the house, you can cook and burn stuff to your heart's content, you can jump into the water without a voice yelling at you to be careful, you can do your laundry once in 2 months, you can snore as much as you want if you have sinus trouble, you can get drunk everyday if you want, you can go to the movies without worrying about anyone at home waiting for you at the dinner table.

Hmm! such wonderful sense of freedom, isn't it?! I say irrespective if all this crap, home is the best place to be. It's the most comfortable too and a huge amout of credit goes to our mothers. Even silly little tasks like folding dried clothes and doing the dishes which probably don't even take more than 31/2 and 51/2 minutes respectively get dry and repetitively boring over a period of time. Just imagine! almost all our mums have been doing it for years now and not only for themselves but, for the whole family. Apart from performing all the chores of the house hold and orchestrating the pain staking baais and milk men of the world, these wonder fairies still have the patience to listen to all the stories you have to tell about your respective schools / colleges / work places / friends / enimies / blah / blah. Hmm! if we go into granlarities of the coarsely classified tasks like cooking, cleaning and care taking, we'll definitely hit issues which are best tackled only by moms. Three cheers to all the moms of the world, and mine in particular - love you, missing you.

/PhaKuDi

The Da Vinci Code
Yesterday I watched the movie 'The Da Vinci Code'. I had read the book already and wanted to see if the movie conveys the same image as the book and yes it does. Nothing superb about the movie though. It's just a good depiction of the novel. The script sticks slavishly to the book, which is good but, the only pathetic part was that the cinema hall in which it was playing, the only one in Gibraltar called the Queen's cinema, had loads of technical difficulties due to which we had to watch the movies in pieces and some of the bits were chronologically jumbled up. Having paid for a 5 pound dress circle (top class) ticket audience were pissed off but, not to the mighty extent that I expected them to be. I guess, they are used to such frequent technical failures or they were just taking the 'Hey! Shit happens!' attitude. But, everyone was impressed by the good gesture made by the management of offering the audience a free ticket to the show next day in compensation to the bad one that day.

I recently read the news that the movie has been banned by the Andhra Pradesh government and that the rest of the country gets to see it only with an 'A' certificate pasted on it's face, even otherwise, there has been lots of opposition for the movie and hence, the book all over the world. Funny you know, how immature people can be sometimes. Christianity is too profound a religion to be shaken by a single movie or a book. So, why do they really have to bother about it? Opposing it is one thing, trying to demean it and ban it is another. Inspite of all the opposition in the countries with a christian majority, the movie has been rated 'PG 12' in most of them while the Indian censor board gives it an 'A' certificate. I am sure the average Indian audience is not so immature that the movie has to be restricted only for Adults. It only shows the fright of the religious leaders who recommended the censor status and the immaturity of the local governments in going a step further and banning the movie altogether.

/PhaKuDi

Right Index Finger
Just two days ago, I never imagined that the question "What is the most important organ of your body?" would make me think twice. But, the arrival of the new IBM T43 laptop changed it all. This cool thingie comes with a bio metric security system and has a finger print scanner embedded into it which accepts you right index finger print for a password. "It's not without flaws but, you'll get used to it." said the IT guy when my swipe didn't succeed till the fourth attempt. I told him that all these failed swipes could annoy me over a period of time and I wanted him to disable the reader. He said it's against the "acceptable usage" policy of the company to turn it off. Heck, I'll have to live with it now :(. Trust me! this finger print thingie is nothing like they show in the movies. Logging on to a computer has never been such a pain in my life. I swipe and I pray and it comes back with a finger print and a red box on it saying please swipe again. Sometimes as if in an attempt to lift your dampened spirits it asks you to swipe a bit to the right or left. Just when you are on the verge of running out of patience with all the instructions it humors you with a new kind of instruction - Wow! slow down brother you are too fast for me, it politely asks you to "Swipe slowly". But, when you swipe slowly it will present you with a big, bold red cross on the finger print as if it's mocking at your foolish ass for having believed it and actually siwping slowly. Finally, after fiddling with your mind and patience for a while it opens up the doors for you with a bold green tick mark on the finger print. Hmm! those of you who think you haven't been so lucky in your life (and who don't own an IBM laptop with a finger print reader), consider yourself very very lucky 'coz you don't have an annoying finger print reader to deal with every 5 minutes you leave your computer idling aroud. Our company's net worth is in billions of dollars and the company makes millions a day but, frankly I think they would have made much more suing IBM for all the mental trauma and the loss of precious productive hours that the employees have to go through using these damn things everyday. Also, before arriving at some numbers I would urge the jury to take into account the amount of time and love spent in taking care of the right index finger just so that it is clean, it doesn't have any cuts, bruises or burns. I know that the skin ridges grow back irrespective of all the afore mentioned affects but, I wouldn't want an accidental cut while chopping the vegetables to lock me out of my computer for days now would I!? :)

07-Jun-2006 - Eureka! The trick with the right index finger is to swipe it till the tip otherwise, register your thumb and almost all border line careless swipes will be accepted too. May be because the thumb has a better surface area than the index finger and contour matching of partial scans is easy and effective. Once you unlock this baby it's all Vroom! Vroom! 2 GHz processor, 1GB RAM, etc., etc.

/PhaKuDi