Bollywood is a time machine (no kiddin’)
Chris Bohjalian’s new blog says ‘everybody’s a critic’. Now, this post of mine has nothing to do with what chirs had to say in his, and I’m not going to start with what my daughter thinks about reviews on my new novel in amazon.com and bn.com. Why? Firstly because I’m not a writer, I mean not yet. And secondly I don’t have a 14 yr old daughter.
Jokes apart, I’m a critic too, a movie critic for now (can’t seem to part joke from my writing). Hindi movies are crap. And I know it isn’t the first time you are hearing this, they really are, except for few (very few). But here I am taking this challenge to write against this cliché. No kiddin’.
Hindi movies have a special place in our (Nepalese) hearts. Cheesy as it may sound, but it’s true. Whether you like it or not, whether you admit it or not, it has become a way of life for almost all of us. I don’t mean bollyhood movies when I say ‘it’, I mean our secret admiration for the cheep, corny bollyhood movies. Now, don’t tell me you don’t, once in a while, feel like doing nothing but sit back relax and watch a hindi movie channel. The fact that those channels stretch an hour long movie into what seems to be for ever with their advertisements matters less. You just want to get hold of the remote and turn off your mind and watch. The ‘mind turning off’ part wasn’t figurative, you can literally turn it off since you already know (not guess) what’s next in the movie.
I’m a huge fan of, say, Ron Harward or Steven Spielbergh. And I’m not kiddin’ when I say I watched this movie, as recently as a few months ago, in which the so called ‘hero’ is a dancer, singer, super-man, every good thing you could possibly imagine, and of course romantic at the same time. My point? Is that I don’t ‘not watch’ them. Reason? I feel damn good. Not good as in “wow!!! WTF” good, but “good day, sunshine” good. Now, don’t get me wrong, no, the director of photography of these movies aren’t at all masters, most of them are crap. Well, I know you are dying to know (LOL) where my talk is heading. Ok, here is what I mean.
Imagine yourself as me. No don’t do that. Imagine you as yourself but you are a 10 yr old and you feel swell as hell because you just learned how to ride a bicycle by yourself though you sit on top tube instead of the seat coz you aren’t tall enough. You rush to tell your sister that you didn’t even notice you were riding by yourself and that you are “awesome!” Your sis gives a damn coz she is a Sarukh Khan fan and Zee TV’s showing ‘Kuch Kuch Hota Hei’. And you go and lay flat on the couch and start watching, though the sound of people cycling and playing cricket just outside your room in the courtyard makes it impossible for you to fully hear the movie. These are the days when movies start making sense for the first time in your mind. These are the days when you have your first of crushes on a girl in your school. Not because she is a John Petrucci or a Blink-182 fan, but because she doesn’t cry on the way to school or she has neatly cut fingernails.
The movie ends… You stretch yourself up (coz hindi movies are at least 2 hrs long and with the advertisements they are 3 to 4 hrs at the very least) and you dab your tired eyes and you open them to find yourself in the present.
span style=”color: black;”> Enough of time traveling. Basically, what I mean is that it’s obvious that hindi movies are the first movies that we relate to. We weren’t born movie critics. We can’t watch the first movie of our lives and tell that the plot of the movie was shitty and all. So, we have no choice but to feel fine watching these movies of our times missing our sisters and our brothers (he was the one backing up my bicycle LOL).
A Flawed nutcracker
Here is one good way to get an internet connection.
You go to the internet head office once a day for a week or two just to get them ready to set up a router or switch or what ever it is. They agree to install not because they think they should, but because you don’t seem to give up trying and they are sick of seeing your face on a regular basis. Then you wait for a month without any signs of connection.(That’s the length of time between two full moons.) The cause? Only god knows. In fact you don’t wait. You call the office every single day for twenty days and technicians come every other day to fake an endeavor to make it work. Each time they come, they have an excuse for failure. Someday they don’t have a clamper (an instrument used to staple the head of a RJ-45 cable, which looks like a nutcracker), other days they don’t bring a ladder or they simply can’t tell where the problem is.
After twenty fucking days of futile effort, they decide that they are a little more than dubious about the 83 meters of RJ-45 cable which connects the switch on the electricity pole to my computer. Which means, an extra charge of Rs.83X20 if you had paid for this faulty cable, fortunately you hadn’t. You had decided not to pay a dime until you assure of the connectivity, which was an apt thing to do.
Now this is where things get really freaky. You call the office to say how peeved you feel at what is going on. And instead of being sorry, the man on the other side literally yells at you for not paying the dues. He wants you to pay rite away if you want the cable replaced. But he wouldn’t say more than “it seems to be the only problem, can’t you see?” when you ask if he was certain that the new cable will work. You hang up confused and enraged.
After ten days or so when you call the office to check if anything was going on, they send the same old fellas over. This time it takes them no more than a few minutes to fix up the connection. Flabbergasted by what you’ve witnessed, you ask the man to explain. And all he says is “It was the damn clamper. We were using a shitty clamper last month.” Then you forgive them for wasting your month, for not treating you good enough, for being careless, for wasting your telephone calls, for still not being sorry. Finally, you hope that your little tale ends up happy. But you are still disgruntled, for the speed of internet connection you get can only be called glacial. You have already paid and you are helpless now.
Well, I’m confident that by now you have learnt that this is not a good way to get an internet connection. Now, the part that you might not know is that this is an anecdote of mine, which I thought deserves to be written. So, all the ‘you’s in the story are in fact ‘me’s. And the moral of the story? It is that the thing that looks like a nutcracker is actually a clamper, and it can sometimes be a pain in the ass. And that ’sometimes’ is more sporadic than we imagine.
My name is Ashesh (with a capital ‘A’)
There aren’t quite a lot of people who pronounce my name rite. Its not that my name is impossibly difficult to pronounce, it’s just that (well I think) people take it for granted. For them it’s nothing more than a tag which says “Ashesh” scribbled under a picture of a lanky young fella in their brains, with which they have nothing to do except to utter with utter negligence. Well, if you think it’s tough, then try “Mimansha” or “Vilakshan”
There are times when I hear my name and I’m drenched in this utmost desire to point a gun to the utterer’s temple and make him say my name a zillion times correctly, and of course with (Itl)love(Itl). People keep surprising me (well, they used to but now I’m used to it) with newer versions of my name. “Ashesh” with an ‘aah’ that sounds nothing like the beginning, a ‘shee’ that sounds nowhere near the middle and a ‘ssss’ that’s not bad an ending, of my name. Some, specially westerns, come up with such extreme variation to it, they induce me to imagine a folk of donkey like little creatures with feathers, circumambulating my skull. Some simply remind me of yucky, flabby rarer ends of our body which we sit on. I just don’t get why they seem to relate it with the word ‘ass’ and not ‘us’, which indeed is a better word and phonetically related to ‘Ashesh’. Well, what’s even worse, is when I meet new people and the few weeks that follows, they seem to try all the possible permutations of the word, until they finally settle with one. I have to respond to such words, which I just can’t remember where I heard before and suddenly I realize, that it sounds somewhat like my name. And an interesting thing about it, they make me feel like one of those people with nome de plume in detective movies.
Well, life isn’t all that bad when you have friends who know just how you like your name tongued. There are fortunately some people who keep me from being a full time imaginary murderer. Even some of my new acquaintances make effort to verbalize those three syllabuses, and perfectly manifest my name. And at times I have a notion that they have been thinking of those three syllabuses for at least 5 minutes before letting out. I suppose most of us take moment like these for granted. Well, I don’t. I cherish each of them. To you guys, my saviors, my buddies, my whatevers…… Thank you. And to my new pals thank you for those 5 minutes you spend on my name.
