Indian Writing

Boman Irani. One of the best actors in India today.

And Lage Raho Munnabhai is good fun. Boman Irani is superb, especially at a moment when he jiggles his hips and goes, Just Chill, Chill, Just Chill.

And Arshad Warsi is great, Sanjay Dutt is… himself (no comment), and there’s a fleeting special appearance by a very goodlooking actor.

Two complaints: I didn’t care for the Radio-Will-Be-The-Moral-Force-In-Your-Lives moments (even if it was an ironic reversal of the radio-station hijacking in Rang De Basanti). Except that it gave Jimmy Shergill a small role and something to do, and that’s a good thing because otherwise he wouldn’t have anything to do, and that would be sad.

And I didn’t care for the music. No, it’s not the kind that grows on you - more like toadstools. One of the songs was based on Cliff Richard’s (gah) Theme for a Dream -

You are my theme for a dream
Yes you are, a rare and lovely theme (You’re a theme for a dream)
The dreams I dream day and night
That your arms are holding me so tight (You’re a theme for a dream)

I did like the way the songs/dances were choreographed and filmed though, especially the song in which Munna and Circuit are drunk. I especially liked the big furry costumed lions.

Here’s a picture of Boman Irani from Let’s Talk.

Jerry Pinto on the media circus for KANK and onwards:

The media began to behave as if the film had actually investigated marriage as a serious text instead of a way of showing pretty people doing petty things against a backdrop of extreme privilege.

For that is what Karan Johar’s cinema is about but you’d think he was actually making something important and meaningful. So meaningful that NDTV literally couldn’t stop talking about it…

Watch Barkha Dutt talking about remakes on We the People, when the remade Don (Shahrukh-Priyanka-Kareena) comes out. For you see, NDTV has managed to tie up with Farhan Akhtar for that one and he might just give them a little spot in which some extra holds up a mike saying NDTV. Industry sources say that CNN-IBN has tied up with Jaan-e-mann (Salman-Akshay-Preity), so we will have Rajdeep Sardesai on love triangles, perhaps? No one knows which way J.P. Dutta will jump when his version of Umrao Jaan (at Kargil, perhaps?) is released but someone will snap up this one since it has Aishwarya, Abhishek and Sunil Shetty and then we’ll have indepth interviews with the designer of the costume and the zari workers who slogged for hours….

Six policemen get life terms for the rape of an Irula woman.

Sadanand Menon on Hrishikesh Mukherjee and the house on Bandra’s Carter Road:

Not only has Hrishida (as he is universally called) lived on Carter Road, Bandra, for almost fifty years now, but he must be the one person whose house (former house, now) ‘Anupama’ (opposite Otter’s Club) has featured the most in Indian cinema. He had moved into the house in 1960, soon after Anuradha, the successful remake of Madam Bovary, with Leela Naidu and Balraj Sahni. The shoestring budgets on which he made his films on the one hand, and the debilitating Gout condition which used to frequently immobilize him since the late 1970s resulted in his making a series of ‘home-bound’ films like Golmaal and Khubsoorat in which the main set was his own house. There was a period when, for some five years at a stretch, every time you visited the house you could lose your way as major portions of it would have been remodeled for a set.

Hrishida said it was cheaper than hiring studios. I remember rushing in through a door where I was sure a toilet existed and stopping petrified at the sight of Utpal Dutt sitting in an easy chair rehearsing his lines for a shot. He looked up, understood the situation in a jiffy, and returned to his reading with a bemused shrug. The toilet had been ‘redesigned’ to look like an office room. It was an oblong, barrack-like, one-storied house whose best feature was the front portico with its swing and coconut palm and its room-size balcony upstairs, from where you could sit and gaze at the sea and the tides and sunsets over Danda beach for hours on end.