Variety is the spice of life

Junior never ceases to amaze me with his sense of timing. At times for the sheer innocence of it or for the absolute honesty and conviction with which he says and does things, it makes me happy and a proud parent, inherently feeling super embarrassed thinking how I was at his age!! Couple of days back, while playing on the school slide, he was bitten by a red ant. The ant had plunged its stingers on his right index finger and not knowing how to remove it from his hand, by the time it did fall off, the infection had already spread over his entire arm, which was turning beet red in color, the finger already swollen to twice its size. Before running to his mom crying, junior ran back to the slide, said something to his friends and came back running and crying. After he got consoled a bit, she asked him why he went back to slide, thinking he might have gone to beat the ant. He said, he went back to warn his friends who were playing on the slide and had asked them to be careful!!!! She was ...

I try to read one book per month minimum. Most of 2022 was spent on Alex cross series by James Patterson as I wanted to finish the series. Having completed about a dozen or so of that 2 dozen and odd series, had hardly posted a review for the reason, none of them were that impressive. James Patterson thrives on psycho villains and serial killers who are very meticulous and almost always have Alex cross as the one who crosses their path. In fact, till the last reveal, it would be very difficult to guess the “whodunnit”. But rather than that being the plus the reveal often make you realize, just for the sake of a grand twist, such characterizations serve no purpose. The fellow person who would’ve travelled throughout the story as a close associate of Cross would often be the serial psycho killer. It became a standard template across all those stories and had given up reading that series altogether. This one was long pending on the list of unread and had started reading just to close the ...

I would’ve skipped this movie if not for a WA status screenshot message, mentioning something funny about the movie. The lead character resembling a doctor friend of mine was another reason. Few minutes into the movie, it was clear that the hero was the villain in the story, and it is going to make a mockery of the possible positive/good characters. But the extent at which it is dealt in the movie is possibly a trendsetter for upcoming ones!! The hero is unabashedly selfish and is motivated enough to kill anyone from achieving his goal of becoming a successful lawyer. He is openly jealous of his fellow lawyers and schemes of ways to pull them down or outwit them whenever they get close to success or potential successful cases. He even tries to undercut the lawyer under whom he assists as junior, who kicks him out when he gets to know about his deceit. He soon lands up in a scheme, where he witnesses another lawyer who has made “ambulance chasing cases” into a well-oiled machine for min...

Tamil cinema has been blessed with several music directors, who have given soulful compositions that have survived across several decades. Going by my playlist my favorite music directors from Tamil are KV Mahadevan, MSV-Ramamoorthy, IR, Deva, ARR, Yuvan, Karthikraja, Haris, GV Prakash, Anirduh and couple of songs of Santosh Narayanan. While people generally talk about rise of a music director in association with fall of the incumbent legend, ex: IRR taking over MSV eventually to lose out to ARR, in my view, it is the fall and not as much as the rise that has contributed to the change in leadership. Music is a very niche skill and barring flash in the pan kind of hits, for some one to survive long in the industry, one should be literally and figuratively well versed. The person should be individually better composed for producing better compositions. Pretty soon, we may’ve algorithm’s that would create or code tunes based on a huge database of good sounds. Till the time, technology com...

With every advent or upgrade in the communication platforms, there is always an upheaval which results in major overhaul/relook of the existing setup. Something that every sector goes through in case of major disruptions. The television industry, which was once known as the primary source of news and restricted source of entertainment, witnessed a boom in the 90’s with the advent of satellite channels that fed on movies and movie related programs, fueling their exponential growth. With the introduction of 24/7 news channels, anything and everything became some news. When political parties decided to wade into the tv channel business, they started off with dummy channels that played out of license or free to air movies, depending on the clout of the party and soon they realized the clout of news channels and every party with a symbol or not, started their own news channel. Nowadays, it has led to a new forum whose primary job is to filter out fake news from original!! Amidst all these n...

Towards the close of last year, that is couple of weeks ago, I watched a hindi movie called “Doctor G”. Had been wanting to post about ever since. The lead guy, Ayushmaan Khurana, whom I believe resemble Edward Norton in some angles, has made a name for himself in picking off beat themes. Almost all his movies have a never tried storyline and his character would be something that majority of the mainstream heroes wouldn’t touch with a stick. I’ve seen most of his movies and I like the humorized approach towards such sensitive topics. He is possibly the bravest actor in India who bets the box office potential of a script sheerly by its content. Doctor G is a testament to this statement where 90% of the cast are ladies, including the director, with the theme being primarily about ladies and how bling guys are towards them. And who better than Ayushman to pass on that message!! Only a lead guy who is super confident on himself and on the role, he is portraying could’ve even committed to t...