We tried contacting the baby elephant of Andhra politics, Chiranjeevi-gaaru who while not ducking loosely tethered electric cables, makes rare appearances in the legislative assembly. On being asked if he would aim for a united Andhra as a challenge he said, ‘The TRS issue is a very serious one and we ought to make a movie out of it to educate the masses. My son, my brother and myself will act in it and my brother-in-law shall produce it. That way the funds from the state exchequer will stay within
the familyfunds from the state exchequer will stay within the family only‘. He failed to approve of pink as a color for the state assembly building and preferred red as we already, know else somebody gonna get a goli maar!. He pressed that there were other issues that needed immediate attention, ‘So many farmer-suicides as a result of drinking pesticides, we need to help them by providing free tractors, seeds and building canals‘. Who better than Chiru to explain the apathy of farmers who have to dodge other tractors that trespass upon their fields. .Our brief meeting was cut short as he had to leave for a rally and mouth a few dialogs from his popular movies, apparently that’s the closest he can get to questioning the government. Our sources tell us that he can’t speak without a script and hence has to resort to dialogs from his politically themed movies. As kids we were told that failure to finish the rat race of competitive exams would result in us being barred from every profession in the world except cinema. With movie stars running for office, it doesn’t quite paint a rosy picture of the future, but then we are again drifting out of syllabus.

We next spoke to someone who studied politics in college, who graciously took time of his busy schedule that included playing mafia wars in a dual monitor setupplaying mafia wars in a dual monitor setup. The former CEO of Andhra Naidu-gaaru had to say this on the issue, ‘What two states three states you people are talking, we need to have an Andhra 2.0 that will take us through the new decade. Let me show you the powerpoint presentation I showed Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, that even my cook has seen a hundred times‘. We asked him what he felt about Chiru-gaarus tractor and canal logic to which he replied, ‘In the last election they accused me of distancing myself from the farmers, and hence I have raked up enough points on farmville to counterattack accusations on my lack of agricultural knowledge. Please wait as I harvest my strawberries, and plant rice that will be ready in 12hrs‘. Not wanting to sit through a seminar of anti-incumbency, polarized mandate and other political mumbo-jumbo, we chose to leave gather more info for this report. The erstwhile governor of the state is now an icon and modern day marvel of the human libido. At a time when men half his age have problems keeping their side up, Tiwari-gaaru was screwing not one but three of them! ‘I have participated in the freedom struggle and am therefore absolved. Plus these are doctored tapes, they do not show the fourth girl in it! It is a conspiracy because I refused to wear pink chaddis and paint the raj bhavan pink. I was after all only checking if the women wore pink chaddis or not‘. The above revelation sure gives us an indicator of how many English women were boned during the struggle but we were shocked to learn this, ‘These days I am getting calls form some forex-somebody and niagra-somebody who claim to be foreign brands and want me to be their brand ambassador for a newly introduced target audience‘.

Our two favorite guests were quick to jump on the bandwagon and cash in  on the free publicity the issue was getting. ‘This is not the Indian Pink League to bow to their whims and fancies, we shall however market the cheerleaders as pink girls and I shall occasionally wear a pink turban. If Mr.KCR is willing to play ball, we shall brand it a telangana double every time the batsmen run twobrand it a telangana double every time the batsmen run two.‘, thundered a visibly upset Lalit Modi. He thereafter went on a roll to market the IPL with a customized version to suit KCR, ‘The 15min break shall be called the Telangana time-out and KCR can give speeches and use it to promote his cause during home games. I can also ensure that Arun Lal and L.Siva utter the words Telangana randomly in every alternate sentence on-air, since none of what they say makes sense anyways.‘ If promised to ensure the games went incident free, he promised to coax Ravi Shastri to alter his famous cliches like ‘hit like a tracer bullet’ to ‘swept like the telangana elections’. Chetan Bhagat wasn’t very amused at  the whole tamasha and was upset that we didn’t approach him first, ‘The whole idea is blatantly lifted form my new book, I am the sole creator of two states and KCR ought to give me credit for the agitation. Heck he isn’t even on twitter so that I can block him, abbey yaar these madarasis na are not cool like us to be on orkut and twitter.I should stop writing in 5th standard english else these people will easily comprehend and market my content as their own‘. He even had a few words for Mr.Tiwari, ‘Saala buddha satiya gaya hain, his whole three women massage scandal is also inspired form my book. They are clearly the three mistakes of his life and who do you think came up with that? I hereby stake claim to anything that has to do with the numbers one, two , three, and five and will block anyone who makes fun of me‘. That’s all we could get, for he was angered to know that we hadn’t read a single 5th-std English  textbook of his.

PS: If you believe in any of the above, you are in fact my new best friend. God promise, grandfather promise, sister-in-law promise.

PPS: This post is also part of BlogAdda’s Spicy Saturday Picks

If you enjoyed this post, then you may also like:

• Words from the father
• Rage against the Republic
• A double always comes with troubles
• Page 3 on terror
• Thala Ajith fans can now become real citizens
• This seat is reserved
• Pirates of the Aden

(At Lifestyle)

Girl: I love Puma, It’s so very European you know…
Boy: (blank expression)

(At Van Heusen)

Another Girl: Only my man can wear pink (Hands her boy-toy a pink shirt)
Another poor guy: (blank expression)

I generally don’t eavesdrop and snoop around coochie-coo couples but this was more like in the face. I fail to understand this so-called-maal-kaalchur and therefore we goto our resident genius philosopher the one-and-only ‘Baba Bangali’ who is second only to the ‘Great Gounder‘. In my quest for knowledge to ensure that I am not ill-prepared and caught in a maal kaalchur crisis, I humbly ask the great baba.

Baba, What does the Europeanness of a brand have to do with its likeability?

Bhakta, For this you will need to understand the mind of a woman. Anything from foreign shores rakes up value. After all that four-feet something Fuhrer was also European and people still go ga-ga over the Beetle just because that midget drove it! So you see my dear Bhakta, Puma is German and so were the Nazis. I hope you remember that the founders were part of the Nazi party before they split. The woman in question is actually an undercover Nazi agent and the phrase you heard is a coded sequence to reach out to fellow Nazis. So its not about her choice of garment nor is it about the brand nor its origins, it’s all about locating fellow Nazis so that they come out of hiding.

Baba, Then what about real men wearing pink? I also observed that stores are stocking only light colors like yellow or pale green and light blue!

Bhakta, you must learn to look beyond objects and the hidden inner truth. Close your eyes and stop being materialistic, you shall see things in their true color. You my friend have unearthed a major conspiracy by the light-colored-league to banish our favorite solid colors from the shelves. By inundating the stores with lighter colors, the unsuspecting youth have no choice and are forced to wear them. They also have their agents  prowling around malls as regular shoppers or stores employees who will voice their opinion as how lighter colors light up ones personality. You slowly resign to fate and accept what is thrust upon you, unassumingly thinking that you have made a wise choice. It was never a question of choice as you never had one to begin with. This might seem harmless today but tomorrow it
will
snowball into
a catastrophe of
gigantic proportionstomorrow it will snowball into a catastrophe of gigantic proportions. Today they take away your choice to buy a solid color shirt, tomorrow it will be your choice of beverage, favorite snack, gadgets and even cars. Imagine a time when they will control you and your life would be restricted to a pod and thousands of you will be grown in farms!

I had to drive to the AP border to smuggle my favorite ‘Thums Up’ into Chennai. Is there something I am missing here as well?

Wonderful observation Bhakta, You may note that ‘Thums Up‘ is currently endorsed only by Khiladi Kumar and Megastar Chiru. It enjoys a handsome portion of the market share in AP but the lack of an ambassador seems to have driven it out of the market in TN. But Bhakta, this is something even a nincompoop like you can figure out. So let me give you a low down on the rivalries in Kollywood. When Coke signed Vikram for the Tamil version of its Aamir Khan ads, it also got Vijay on board to woo the masses. Pepsi on the other hand had Madhavan and Surya doing the SRK-Saif ads. This left only the also-rans who were begging to be signed up so that they could hop on to the endorsements bandwagon. So now unless our favorite ‘Roachstar‘ steps in and quenches the thirst of ‘Thums Up’ lovers in TN you will have to adjust with either Coke or Pepsi for your Rum.

(Images courtesy: Flickr, USU and JimPryor)

If you enjoyed this post, then you may also like:

• Ghanti Bajao, Ghanti Bajao
• Fasting and very furious
• mallika tune kya pehna?
• why do you blog
• Shakuntala, Get a science textbook!
• Baba Bangali….
• Review: Mission Istanbul – Kissin Miss and Bull

I write this in pain and angst after watching your magnum opus ‘Dasavataram‘ on an eventful Friday the 13th. I had to fight with the distributor for a ticket to watch you erupt on screen and this is something I had done before only for Chiru and Thalaivar. Before I bore you with the insignificant observations that I made, I would like to tell you an incident from school. I was in the IInd std and we were doing a play for the annual day called ‘The Nutcracker‘. A friend walked up to me and this is the exact conversation for I can never forget.

He:Even though you are the Nutcracker, I am on screen much longer than you
Me: How is that?
He: I play a mouse, a hare, a doll, a Russian Cossack and a tree.
Me: I’m the hero!
He: My mom says that I have a far more important part as It involves so many roles and dress changes.
Me: Still, the whole play is about me
He: Total up the time people will see you and me, I am there longer than you.
Me: It’s not
about
time it’s
about focus!It’s not about time it’s about focus!

I didn’t even know what focus meant(heard the teacher use it while shouting at the lighting guy), it was like those words the great sages speak that make sense years later. The teachers had told every kid something similar so that they don’t get jealous of me hogging the limelight, and I pricked his bubble. Either of us didn’t know what it meant but he assumed that focus was something important and ran away sobbing.

I consider you to be a very intelligent person and assume that you can catch my point. All through the movie, this incident kept hitting me each time you plastered your face. I don’t get this fixation you have with latex and donning multiple roles. Did someone ever tell you that a great actor is one who can do many roles? The way I see you is like my friend who was in every scene of the movie in some role or the other but the focus was never on him. The importance of focus is something I learnt in a theater workshop fifteen years later, but used it to justify my role as a kid. You are a great actor and this urge to reinvent yourself puts you in a league of your own. You by yourself are in institution in acting and many actors have learnt the trade by just watching you the ‘Ekalavya‘ way. We have loved your performances in Nayagan, Hey Ram, Pushpak, Thevar Magan, Mahanadi and more recently Virumandi, Anbe Sivam etc where you played to the galleries meant for the so-called intelligent junta. We’ve also cheered your performances in Panchatantram, MMKR, Avvai Shanmugi, Singaravelan and Apoorva Sahodarangal where you enthralled the front-benchers with comic timing like never before.

The problem with Dasavatarm is not with your acting prowess and I shall be committing a cardinal sin if I even spoke of it. The basic premise of the story and the plot is something that I liked a lot, however I felt that you molested the screenplay just to accommodate the ten characters. I have always believed that a story creates characters but the characters don’t
drive a storya story creates characters but the characters don’t drive a story. This was the principal flaw in the film for me and the chaos created by the entry and exit sequences of these characters took the focus away from the movie. Lets not get confused with chaos theory for that is reserved for the coming paragraphs. Sticking on to the screenplay, I felt that most of the characters were forced into the story to accommodate meaty portions of screenplay and an opportunity to exhibit your latex fetish(I know it sounds corny!). Many portions of the film were there just so that your CG dept gets a chance to show many Kamals in the same frame. I shall curb my urge to dissect every frame and point the fallacies but will surely do in case I receive rediff style comments.  Right from the audio release everything about the movie has surrounded the ten roles. Being able to enact ten roles is a phenomenon and praise worthy, I have no qualms against that and will even go under the knife to state that no current actor in world cinema can even dream of attempting it, forget surpassing.  But amidst the din created in the media by the ten roles, the real loser has been the screenplay. Below are excerpts from an interview you gave to the Times of India.

My ten different roles are the USP of Dashaavataram…. I used to spend five hours only in makeup. What was interesting is that I have started respecting women more after that…….The loudest seller in a bazaar attracts attention. I have always felt that the loudest crying child gets the milk [link]

I can go on and cite many interviews where all the talk has been about the roles, make-up, CG effects but the screenplay has been the neglected child. Just so that I clear the air once again let me reiterate my earlier statement, my problem is not with the ten roles but with
the screenplaymy problem is not with the ten roles but with the screenplay. All the more because you took it upon yourself and declared it to be your most satisfying role. I quote from an interview you gave to CNN-IBN

The screenplay is what I enjoyed doing the most and that’s the 11th role I have played – the most pivotal and difficult role. It’s like the loneliness of a long distance runner.[link]

It sure must have been difficult to weave all the characters into the story, but that is the very reason for its complexity. Your story never demanded ten roles, you stuffed them into it and wove the screenplay around them so that they embed seamlessly with the plot. Its a case of inviting issues you never needed in the first place and then proudly claiming to have weathered the storm.

(Continued in the next post)

If you enjoyed this post, then you may also like:

• A case of ten avatarams (Part 2)
• Review: Vaaranam Aayiram – My daddy, my hero
• Review: Singh is Kinng – Better seen on trucks
• Review: Kidnap – skin skin baby!
• Review: Wake up Sid – A Boy, not a Man
• Anniyan/Aparichitudu……….
• The 2009 Dandanakka Awards – Part 2