Variety is the spice of life

Consider these two story lines – Story 1 – Very contemporary with probably the most original storyline in recent times (unless if inspired from some foreign language film). Deals with murders that are being televised online and also has a tragic real time incident as backdrop and has an interesting twist which is untraceable. Story 2 – pretty stale. Done to death backdrop of cop vs gangster. Involves lot of flashbacks and is almost predictable or the twists are hardly original. Which of these stories would you bet on to be a winner at BO? I would want to bet on the former, for the only reason that the latter, being a cop story is dime a dozen. The movie with story 2 is “Vikram vedha”, the recent blockbuster which is running packed houses, increasing in trend every day. The former being a damp squib of a dud movie called “Inaiyathalam” (Website). When I was watching Iniayathalam, I felt at many places, what reviewers mean by amateurishly picturized. There is a chase scene in a mall...

For past few years, I’ve been so much bogged down by negativity around me, especially colleagues whose professionalism, or the lack of it, drove me nuts. I was having trouble to fathom how people can be so irresponsibly idiotic and so callous at the same time. One common thread across all those characters I could find was that they were all connected to someone seriously higher up on the echelons and had their backing and blessing for no reason obvious to me. I decided to quit fighting the shadows and reset my priorities and opted for something that I didn’t want to do in first place. I had to shelve a lot of my ambitions and goals and literally kick myself into being someone I hated and like a soldier simply following orders without bothering on the logic, I forced myself into a different routine. Needless to say the pinpricks and ego bashing were severe and took a toll on me with stress levels shooting up to stratosphere. I seldom manage to compartmentalize issues and till the time m...

Few weeks back I received a parcel, which had a slogan printed t-shirt and a thriller genre book by an Indian author. I knew that I’ve been nominated for the review and the parcel was expected but I had little clue on the concept of book curation and about the subscription box “Fiction crate”. Due to postal delay, the parcel reached me after a month’s delay and the hand written note along with the parcel, acknowledging the same, was a pleasant experience. It’s been a really long while since I received parcels with notes, that too handwritten. It was very personalized and was quite literally charmingly old world. There were some cute book marks as well and one trivia tag. The tee shirt that accompanied had a slogan on book reading and felt it was tailor made for me, literally and figuratively!! I’ve started reading the novel a while back and will post a separate review on it later in this space. Thanks to Brags for clarifying that the concept was to post a review about this conc...

Sometime back, went for a lunch meet with friends after a really long while. I don’t exactly remember the last time I had such a leisure meet with friends, not because I had been busy but off late had been shutting off myself without even me realizing it. The frustrations in office had crept to such an extent that it had totally changed my psyche and made me so much negative and angry that, I was lashing out at every single opportunity, at anyone, be it family or office. There was nothing extraordinarily different or path breaking in that meeting that set to light this thought process, but the very normalcy of the event made me realize, how far from it, I was. Whenever I read through my older blog posts, more often than not, I would be stumped by the thought process behind certain posts, on what was the trigger and many a times, I couldn’t even believe it was written by me as I would never be able to attain such a mindset to write such kind ever again. The person of that moment used t...

Few weeks back I read an article on MGR, our ex-cm and ..well if you need me to explain who he was you would be the exact person as target audience for this post. The article was one of the several thousand written since his heydays and went on eulogizing the kind of person MGR was and how his legacy continues to live even after about 3 decades since his demise. Whenever I read something about this man, I am always stumped by the unabashed adulation he manages to generate even by those who were never born in his lifetime, never been directly linked to him or never even witnessed his deeds in person. Yet, when they mention about MGR, they all go gushy mushy and all heartwarming, making him sound like a saint. Even current day superstars or crowd craze heroes never get such a warm reception or mention. Even for Jaya, who succeeded him and matched his legacy point by point, there is always a counter in the form of misdeeds done by her and on her scandals. Probably MGR had the advantage ...