Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the flooziest of them all?

Comical! Two fairly successful and established actresses have been hopping on their heads for the last one month, trying to outdo each other. It’s getting shriller and fiercer inside the ring, but who’s looking?! Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the flooziest of them all?

Thus ensues, the Ridiculous Battle for Supremacy! Whose legs are longer, whose waist is smaller, who gets the bigger men, who gets the bigger money, who has more fans, who has more films, who is sexier, who’s the better actress, scratch, snatch, claw, clench… Who’s the queen of the powder room?

Does this No 1 jamboree make any sense to anyone any longer? Can’t go looking for one every Friday?

Truth is that no one cares, so who are Kareena and Katrina singing their songs for? The auditorium gets empty every three hours. Even the tiny piece of popcorn under seat K11 is vacuumed out. The audience returns to their homes and their lives…

Go get one, girls…and let your publicity managers have one too.

It’s been a long time…

We finally launched the Cine Blitz Gold coffee-table book this month, titled, Love and Longing in Hindi Cinema. The book travels through the decades and takes a closer look at the various interpretations of romance from KAAGAZ KE PHOOL to KABHI ALVIDA NA KEHNA.

Apart from valuable inputs from industry influentials like Aamir Khan, Katrina Kaif, Karan Johar, Javed Akhtar, Vikram Bhatt, Sriram Raghavan…there is a wealth of well researched information laid out along with breathtaking pictures from the past and the present.

While working on this book along with my gang of girls, I realised how much I’d actually been missing romance in our movies. I don’t think it’s just nostalgia. My younger colleagues agree with me as well, most of them being in their twenties. There is a sort of purposive-ness that’s crept in, the hunger for eminence overpowering the hunger to express…

In a way, this book is a reminder of how vital romance is, not just for our movies but also our lives. Love, longing, angst, passion, romance, music, melody, grace, gentleness, affection, monsoons, mountains…memories…being completely and wholly alive…living life from the heart…being full and overflowing…rather than empty and dry.

So let’s bring back the romance into our films and our lives, guys. And let’s not be apologetic about being emotional fools. Leave the calamities and the catastrophes, the demons, the devils and the disasters to the phobic Big Daddy. We are Indians. We are a joyous people. Give us our song and dance…and romance. Give us our joie de vivre. It’s been a long time…

The Theatre Of The Absurd?

Most of the statements made in this editorial, including the header above, don’t belong to me, even though I wish they did! ? These thoughts and words belong to some of the most prolific social commentators/ thinkers of our times who I happened to watch and hear on a forum discussion on CNN IBN. The topic was Rahul Bhatt and David Headley. Voice and words, theirs, sentiment, exactly mine. I couldn’t have put it better than them, so why waste time?

Filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt’s son Rahul Bhatt and his friend Vilas volunteered to help the investigating agencies with crucial information on the David Headley case and fell in between the slats. Maa main desh ka sachcha naagrik banoonga? Slap! Slap!

The kids deserved better. An anguished Mahesh Bhatt cried out at the CNN IBN show, “It was Rahul and his friend Vilas who walked into the office of the Head of Crime in the Mumbai Police department and said that maybe David Headley was the same person that they ran into two years ago and that changed the course of their investigation. The authorities in Delhi were clueless till then. And when the Intelligence experts came they privately thanked us and said this was the right thing to do because we guys were groping in the dark. Is this how you reward two young men who have done what the nation prescribes to everyone? I think no. They imposed a code of silence on us and then selectively leaked out the information to suit their own designs. I am outraged. I am hurt, betrayed by the authorities who are actually supposed to handle this case with great sensitivity. It is the duty of the investigative agencies to come clean and tell the truth in a shriller voice that can be heard.” Duties of the investigative agencies! Have we heard that anywhere before?

As Pooja Bhatt rightfully pointed out, David Headley officially gets a visa, gets into the country, scans the cities, moves around freely, gets a house, enrols himself in a gym while the Intelligence sits on its butt. It is left up to the FBI to ring the alarm bells after which two unsuspecting youths come forward and voluntarily offer valuable clues. And what happens to these two young conscientious citizens? They suddenly need a clean chit to lead a normal life!

What disturbed senior lawyer Harish Salve was that “the impression which has been indelibly created is that these boys are up to something.” Salve expressed his dismay vociferously. “We look more and more like a lynch mob and less and less like a democracy. All you need is the police to cast aspersions on somebody and we are ready to beat up people. We are becoming a country of gestures, we are not delivering results. How many convictions have we opted? It is the theatre of the absurd.”

“Why should we harass two citizens who have behaved correctly?” Social scientist Shiv Vishwanathan demanded to know. “In fact, I am surprised why no one asks whether the Home Secretary should get a clean chit or why no one asks whether the CBI or the other investigating agencies should get away so easily. This is a serial of stupidity, stupidity of investigation, and the intelligence of citizenship succumbing to the stupidity of an investigation.”

Sadly for these brave youngsters, Vilas has already lost his job at the Moksh Gym and Rahul is losing his mind wondering what wrong he did.

And far away somewhere Mr Amitabh Bachchan is upset about Shah Rukh Khan not responding to his birthday wishes.

What planet is it where we live these days?

What’s shocking is rocking or what’s rocking is shocking!

WANTED strikes gold and two weeks later, MAIN AURR MRS KHANNA bites the dust. Gauri Khan’s ramp walk created more flutter in the media than Salman and Sohail Khan’s film. Is there any method to this madness? I don’t think so.

I loved WANTED. It was a typical, loud, predictable pot-boiler of the senseless Eighties which we’ve seen to death but yet I enjoyed it thoroughly. No logic. But I didn’t even feel like watching MAIN AURR MRS KHANNA. No logic. I am a film buff, I love Kareena Kapoor, I enjoy watching her on screen, I had enjoyed watching Salman in WANTED and I wasn’t doing much at home during the Diwali holidays but I couldn’t get myself to go and watch that film. I just didn’t feel like it.

There’s a dialogue in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s ANAND – (My interpretation) Hum sab rangmanch ki kathputliyan hain (film stars, in this case) jinki dor uparwale (the audience) ke haath mein hai. Kab kaun kaise uthega yeh koi nahin bata sakta…The dialogue is followed by a loud guffaw. Hahahahahahahaha! Exactly my sentiment when I think of fame in the modern day context. Famous for being famous is the new phenomenon of the 21st century; the triumph of the trivial, thanks to the 24x7 streaming on the news channels; and we are all hooked to it. Looking for logic in what’s rocking and what’s not is a lost cause. Kabhi bhi kuch bhi rocking ho sakta aur wohi shocking bhi ho sakta hai.

For all that endless debate and analysis of what the viewer really wants and doesn’t want, I don’t think we can ever predict why we respond to certain things in a certain manner and why we, all of a sudden, stop responding to those same things in that certain manner.

Taking joy in nonsense is one thing, but I hope we haven’t started taking nonsense as joy!

Am I making any sense? Does it still matter?

It isn’t the whistle that pulls the train, you know. It is the steam.

Talking of optical illusions, someone told me that Sridevi has lost so much weight, especially on her waist, that it looks like she’s done a boob job. But why would she do that, now, at this age and time in her life?! “They look ominously big and out of proportion suddenly! A bit like Dolly Parton.” Well!!! It’s possibly just optical trickery, the thinner waist making the bosom look bigger…or may be, like she used to in her good ole HIMMATWALA days, Sri still stuffs them up.

Silicone implants happened to our film industry long after Thunder Thighs descended on us. Sushmita Sen was the first actress to go to town with her breast implants and since then it’s sort of blown out of proportions! Liposuctions, nose jobs, cheek jobs, tummy tucks, face lifts, skin peels, laser scrubs, contouring, sculpting, etc, etc. There are as many horror stories as well. Pretty-looking faces turning grotesque overnight! Botox is paralysing even the tiny traces of expression we occasionally got to see on some of these actresses’ faces. Some of them actually look like their own wax replicas. I don’t think there is any actor, male or female, who hasn’t done ‘corrections’. Lips and Jaws seem to be the latest obsession in town. A month-long holiday to some unknown foreign destination and suddenly you find them stepping down the Mumbai airport with swollen lips and painfully stretched, razor-edged jaw lines. I hope they can chew their food, poor things.

In 1947, when Kedar Sharma introduced fourteen-year-old Madhubala along with the nineteen-year-old Raj Kapoor in NEEL KAMAL, he apparently asked the under-developed teenager to tuck some coconut shells into her blouse. Ouch! That must hurt!

Enhancement is a big part of show business, no doubt. But it isn’t the whistle that pulls the train, you know. It is the steam. I mean, wear stilettos by all means but don’t get so tall on me that I start wondering if you have a face at all! Finally, you know, there’s a big difference between a beautiful actress and one who acts beautifully. A balance between the two would not be such a bad idea either.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to be sensible about something that’s happened to someone else.

A lot of opinions flew across the length and breadth of the country after Shah Rukh Khan’s detention drama at the Newark airport. Sympathetic, indifferent, emotional, angry, nonchalant… Our Poojaniya Shri Amar Singhji also had something to say from his sick bed. “Even Amitabh Bachchan was subjected to security-related checks in France but he never spoke about it.” So?! Perhaps Bachchanji only makes issues about not being given the front row seats at award functions!

It’s the easiest thing in the world to be sensible about something that’s happened to someone else. Look at the ruckus the Amar Singhs and the Bachchans create every time there is something even remotely unflattering said about them. “The security procedures at the airports are not totally unjustified,” said Singh. He’s right. Procedures have to be stringent when it comes to the security of a country. And may be our country needs to take a lesson or two from this incident. But we all know that this is not just about procedures. It is the lurking mistrust beneath these procedures, towards a particular religion, that’s disturbing. Aamir Bashir lost out on a role in MY NAME IS KHAN, an opportunity that could have changed his career, because he was denied a visa to the US. Irrfan Khan, Naseeruddin Shah, Aamir Khan, they have all faced scrutiny and just because they didn’t make a hue and cry about it doesn’t mean they enjoy it.

According to Amar Singh, it would have been better if Shah Rukh had let people make an issue of his detention rather than protest himself. Spoken like a true politician. But why doesn’t Mr Chanakya impart some of his chanakya-gyan to his very own Chandragupt Maurya, the Pasha of Protest, who dashes off a ranting blog for every tinnie-winnie-winkie-willy comment made by every Tom, Dick, Harry or Ram, Shyam, Ghanshyam?! Kyon bhai? Tumhara khoon khoon hai, aur humara khoon paani hai?!

But! Aji aisa mauka phir kahan milega…Shri Amar Singhji was unrelenting in his chase. “There are two types of people in society,” he continued. “One who make an issue out of an incident, and the other who cooperate with procedures.” Kitne oonche vichar hain! But isn’t it strange Amar Singhji, that wisdom to some people comes only after the opportunity to use it is lost!

Akshay should be making a little silent prayer to God that he’s gotten away with it once again!

Sigh. Apparently some mysterious elements are trying to sabotage Akshay Kumar’s films. “Because they are jealous,” Kumar declared with great seriousness on National Television, but refused to divulge the names of the culprits. “I’ll divulge the names when the time comes.” That time doesn’t exist, that we all know.

All these big superstars, all seasoned and beefed-up and seen the good and the bad and all that jazz, should be men enough to take a couple of blows on their chin, one would have thought. But who says big boys don’t cry!

It’s one thing being a superstar on paper. It’s easy to say, “I’m humbled” when the honours are pouring in but you really need to have a lion’s heart to accept rejection with the same humility. “I goofed, guys, I’ll try harder the next time.” In inconvenient times we’ve seen the biggest of them drop poise and get all prickly and defensive and un-humble suddenly. Shah Rukh Khan blamed the press for the debacle of PHIR BHI DIL HAI HINDUSTANI. Amitabh Bachchan put up huge ads in the papers comparing Abhishek Bachchan to Al Pacino and Marlon Brando immediately after the release of GURU. It’s becoming a regular affair. Flash press conferences, last minute success parties, blatant declarations of box office collections…and whatever it takes.

And so Akshay Kumar pulls out this conspiracy theory after his latest film KAMBBAKHT ISHQ gets bad reviews. He should be thanking his stars if his film (like they claim) has raked in the two crore viewers and the Rs.100 crore box office collection. He should be making a little silent prayer to God that he’s gotten away with it once again!

By the way, whoever they are who are supposed to be conspiring against Akshay Kumar’s movies, must surely be ace idiots! They are not expecting Akshay Kumar to come up with a MUGHAL-E-AZAM someday, are they!