Variety is the spice of life

 In my few decades of existence i've witnessed very few global situations that have spooked the world as much as the current situation might have. There are certain spots that are never quite devoid of conflicts, like the middle east, several places in Africa and the not so economically prosperous regions of Europe like the Balkans. As a kid, gulf war was the first major war that i saw on TV with all those scuds and patriot missiles, glowing green on screen and bursting like diwali crackers. I was more curious to see how those cruise missiles were launched from ships, hardly having the maturity to realize what was happening on the other side. Bosnia-Serbia war was the next big one, that was mostly followed on newspaper. I am not sure chronologically which one came first but remember that one was filled with much more gore and lead rise to several movies. Slobodan Milosevic, Bosnia Herzegovina would've made as much difficult words to ace on a typing exam as much as verbal. But t...

There is a long standing belief in tamil movies that sequels of movies that were superhits usually tend to bring bad name to its illustrious predecessor and flop big time. There is always additional pressure on movies that are brought up as sequels right from day one because, they have to live up to the success of the previous version, which is the catalyst to its creation. The additional challenges being, how to make the already set storyline, revealed to the audience, more interesting and entertaining. It is like a magician trying to go one up on his trick after revealing his hand and it is never easy. The obvious weaknesses listed here are the potential pluses because of which the sequels garner more attention. The ease of relatability for the audience, time save in introducing the backstory for the characters, the familiarity of what happened previously which feeds on to the frenzy of what is coming next in the sequel are all the pluses which will become its own negatives if not ha...

When i saw the ad for this series, Trisha was the primary reason that hooked us onto this. She looked very old despite the best effort from her make up team and i started watching the series with literally no hope after getting to know that she was playing a police inspector. The first episode ended in an intriguing note and the series literally took off from the next episode onwards. For starters more than the individuals, it is the work that has gone behind the story board in making the investigation process interesting, has lent more teeth to the storyline. The way each of the murders are linked and how it keeps on getting extrapolating makes interesting viewing for sure. What starts as a serial killer case, becomes a major case of mass murderer and the reasoning behind all those killings is quite novel to be honest. The director does a tight rope walk on a knife's edge in many cases where religion is involved and makes sure that he is not branded as favoring any one in particul...

 Junior trips with questions that really sets me scrambling for a response many a times. Whenever he comes across some new word or a character or a concept he will ask about it with his own perspective added as basis behind that question. Recently he came across the word dictator and his immediate thought was it describes school teacher, for they do the dictation in classes. When i told him it is quite different in concept even though the words kind of meant the same, he asked follow up queries. Possibly the way i explained about dictatorship led to the confusion, but his queries made me wonder how to give a response that is convincing for me first up. I told him that, dictators are kind of bad people, who try to rule everyone with their power. He asked why they are bad and i was stumped for a response. For he had equated dictator to king and since kings rule over their subjects and its their will that is carried out by the people, he wanted to know why dictators are bad but kings ...

Recently i saw promotions for movie "Aranmanai 4" where the director was mentioned about the franchise. The fact that audience already knew what to expect from the movie - be it the horror element, that happens in an aranmanai, with revenge being the usual reason why the ghost is haunting the place, culminating in good forces take divine help and destroy evil, only makes every other installment in the franchise all the more difficult to deliver. He used a good catch phrase that the audience knew what to expect, he has to retain the scope for their expectation at the same time, ensure its novel enough across each installment. In other words - old wine in new bottle. Same goes for Peter swanson's books, especially those involving Lily as the prime character. All of his novels have a POV perspective to the story where each chapter is delivered from the perspective of the narrator, where almost all the main characters in the novel, take turns to take the story forward. It is ...