Darbar Twist!!

There are many times where you feel that a movie has begun well but stuttered in the 2^nd half. Darbar somehow belongs to that league. It has all the elements of a Rajni mass masala movie but fails to provide the complete satisfaction to its viewers, who would like to get that one memorable movie from Rajni before he moves on with his political career.

Instead of dwelling on movie’s failures, I would like to pen down my thoughts on how the movie’s story line could have be bettered. This post contains spoilers, so do not read further if you have not seen the movie.

The movie starts with a rampaging Rajni, taking on all the gangsters involved in the marijuana/drugs industry. I would like to keep that start, for it provides a good beginning to the movie. However, I would like to remove the reference that his daughter is dead and replace it with, still to be found. The first half is quite nicely paced with the pre-interval scenes referencing the ‘proxy’ jailed gangster’s son quite the highlight.

It is after this point that the movie loses steam and where I would like to write an alternate story line.

• Second half begins with Rajni confused about his daughter’s location. He tries to think through the past events.
• The events leading up to the train station fight and the car accident injuring him and his daughter are good and can be retained.
• After the accident, Rajni’s daughter in the hospital is replaced by a proxy girl set up by the main villain and his daughter is kidnapped and drugged.
• Rajni receives a call from the main villain, telling him that ‘the game has just begun’ and he would have to find his way through the ‘proxy’ situation in reference with the ‘proxy’ gangster son whom Rajni had gotten murdered. The main villian then asks Rajni to search for his missing daughter in 48 hours. If not, he should resign from police department.
• Rajni then goes through the birth records of the ‘proxy’ gangster and finds that the dreaded gangster (Hari Chopra); who had killed some cops years ago by burning them, is the man behind his missing daughter.
• Unfortunately Rajni does not have Hari Chopra’s pic and is unable to find him.
• To instigate the villain to come to a place of his choice, Rajni decides to resign from the police department and asks Sunil Shetty (Hari Chopra) to meet him at the burnt down building where he killed the cops, along with his daughter.
• Hari Chopra accepts the challenge and brings Rajni's drugged daughter to the ruined building. After a big fight, Rajni rescues his daughter and defeats the villain.
• However, instead of killing him, he lets the relatives of the slain cops burn him, like how the villain had burnt the slain cops years ago and walks out of the building carrying his wounded daughter in his hand.

This second half provides a link to the first half and completes the ‘proxy’ story arc. A strong villain (like Padayappa’s Neelambari) raises the tension in the story and provides satisfaction to the viewers when the movie eventually ends. 

Waiting to hear all your comments on the alternate story line. 

Tennis!!

When I picked my Tennis racket last year, I was quite apprehensive if I would be able to play the sport, as it is quite labor intensive. However, my self-doubts were immediately proved wrong, as I have loved this game immensely.

One of the main reasons for this, has been the opportunity to meet and play with an amazing set of friends in our community in Hicksville. When I first moved over to Hicksville 2 years ago, I had not imagined there would be a place in New York that would mimic Denver in greenery and foliage. Even more surprising was the fact that we (in our Eagle Rocks Community) were all interested in playing Tennis.

We started out playing Tennis casually on the beautiful summer days and continued it through fall of last year. We eventually hosted and played our first Tennis Tournament of 2018 (Kali, Karthick, Madhi, Senthil, Kasi, Surendar and Muthu) and it ended eventfully on Labor Day with all our families joining us for an amazing evening filled with Tennis, pizza and lots of laughter with Karthick and Madhi defeating Kali and me in our doubles finals to be crowned the champions.

With the mild winter of last year assisting us, we started playing intermittently this year from March and have marched on till now like last year. This year’s tournament (Karthick, Madhi, Senthil, Kasi, both Surendars, Muthu, Kumaran and Chandra) has seen many closely contested matches and some one-sided ones (mainly due to injury to some of our players). The finals between Karthick & Kasi and Chandra & Kumaran was one of the best matches ever played and I feel quite privileged to have umpired this awesome match (as well as having enjoyed it) with Chandra and Kumaran crowned the champions. With this glorious tennis season firmly behind us, we hope that Kali would be able to join us for our next year’s tournament.

We hope to start playing our tennis matches early next year and I wish to thank all my tennis friends for all the cherished memories. Thank you so much and hope to meet you all soon on the cricket field.

The Opening Act!!

Goosebumps!!

That is what happens when ‘The Man’ Rajnikanth enters the screen with his scorching screen presence. Flower petals shower, horns blare and the theatre lights flare, taking you right next to him. Then the magic happens, as Rajni slowly but surely pulls you on a momentous journey with him in his movie. 

My first tryst with the ‘Mass Opening Scene’, as it is called, started with the movie ‘Arunachalam’ and continued with ‘Padayappa’. The first 10 minutes of the movie, starts with the heroine (the late Soundarya) being amazed by everyone in a village who speak only about one phenomenal person, Arunachalam. He is depicted as a demi-God who has descended upon this world to erase all our difficulties. The build-up reaches a climax when she (along with us) finds ‘Arunachalam'. And Lo Behold! Therein enters ‘thalaivar’ in all his glorious form and there in, starts the opening song, where he spreads the pearls of wisdom needed for life. 

The opening act along with the opening song had even a non-movie buff (at that time) cheering on for him. That set me and the others on this campaign for justice against all the evil thrown at him (being thrown out from his home, denied his father’s rightful property and finally his lady love questioning his integrity). The movie ‘Padayappa’ does one better as Rajni kisses a snake in the opening scene, which to this day has been a remarkable feat. If we add in the opening scene and songs of Annamalai, Basha, Muthu (to name a few), no other actor has or will generate the whistle and shouts as much as ‘thalaivar’

These strong images of ‘thalaivar’ are imprinted into every little kid from the 90s and form the backbone of ‘Rajni’ folklore. However, after the drubbing of movie ‘Baba’, Rajni has understood to underplay these opening scenes so as to give more credibility to the characters in his story. His movies’ Sivaji – the Boss’ and ‘Enthiran 2.0’ have raked in the moolah, but failed to generate the hysteria of the past. 

However, the last few movies have neither failed to generate the money nor furthered Rajni’s fame. My disappointment reached a crescendo with the movie ‘Kaala’, wherein Rajni is shown playing cricket in the first scene in a non-emphatic fashion. It is understood that his character would need to be realistic, but this level of ‘non-impactful’ opening scene is now available in the regular Facebook videos

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With Rajni’s imminent political entry, the last of his films is expected to be with Karthick Subburaj (his ardent fan). I hope it will, for one last time, will generate the goosebumps that is so much sought after, by thalaivar fans and ordinary people, who try to haul themselves from their normal boring life with a Rajni movie and scream ‘Thalaivaaaaaaa….’.

P.S: I am not a Rajni fan, but love all his masala movies immensely.

Niagara!!

“When the water from the sky touches the earth, it creates heaven”.

The name itself evokes a mystical association for most of us. Right from the time I heard about an unclassified wonder of this world in my geography books, I had always wanted to visit this magnificent place. It is one of two most visited places by Indians in USA, other being Statue of Liberty. No American trip is complete without it.

For the uninitiated, Niagara Falls is the collective name for three waterfalls that straddle the international border between the Canadian province Ontario and the American state of New York. They form the southern end of the Niagara Gorge.

My wife and I had great opportunity to visit this magical wonderland in 2013 right after we had gotten married. Our first tryst with this waterfall still lives with us and we longed to come back again.

Last year, we had the opportunity to visit this gorgeous place again, courtesy my father-in-law and our best friend and his family (Ravi, Akshaya and Aahna kutty). With the music of AR Rahman humming in our ears, Ravi geared us through the 8 hour journey in our 15-seater minivan. Though we were all exhausted by the time we landed (close to mid-night), we could not let go of the opportunity to see this waterfall in beauty of the night lights.

We head to the ‘Maid of the Mist’ (boat tour right up to the base of the horse-shoe falls) in the morning the next day and were greeted by a million gallons of pristine water falling down, which spraying us with its cool mist. We skipped the ‘Cave of Winds’ (which gets you right up close to Bridal Veil Falls) this time around. Collecting all our magnet souvenirs we head back, not without promising this amazingly water-falls another visit very soon, when our princess would have grown up to collect all the memories of this place.

Jekyll & Hyde

Of all the fictional novels that I had read in my childhood, this story had fascinated me the most. As you all know, the story relates to a doctor named Jekyll and his evil alter ego Hyde. The doctor invents a magic potion that lets him transform into an evil man Hyde, who goes about trampling and killing people. The story of Jekyll and Hyde is relevant now more than ever, as the horrific stories of rape of young defenseless girls emerge from different parts of India.

We humans have become the evil Hyde from Dr.Jekyll. No incident displays this fact more clearly that the horrible rape of 8 year old girl, Asifa in Jammu and Kashmir two months ago. The horror story had even my father choking. There is no running away from the fact that our generation is corrupted. The problem also trickles down from the fact that man to women ratio is the worst in recent times, which causes these societal imbalances.

The compass of morality has swung many times in different directions in the past. But our beautiful country and its people stand at the fulcrum of history. Is this how we would want to be known to our future generations? The world’s leading country for human rights and regulations, United States of America, rightly puts so many under the lethal injection to infuse the sense of law for its many citizens and immigrants.

Perhaps, we should follow their lead and plead to our court/judges to do the same. Alas, there are as many holes in the law as there are in the lawyer’s gown. However, I do hope that with increased social media awareness, laws around rape would be tightened and the guilty would be punished with nothing but death sentence and that too, after castrating them. This I believe, would send the right message to our current and future generations and help protect our women, for without them there is no life.

Moana

As I watched this movie for the 100^th time at my daughter’s insistence, it still amazingly held my attention. As in the case of good movies, the screenplay of this movie captivates us and takes us along on this beautiful journey. Disney’s Moana is perhaps one of the very few engaging animation movies, that has layers of human emotions quietly concealed in this story of courage, luck, persistence and finally, achievement.

Moana, in short, is a straightforward story of a village chief’s daughter who has to find a demi-god and get him to restore the heart of a ‘Mother Island Goddess’, he had once stolen. Maui’s action of stealing the heart had aroused the ocean monsters and travelling around ocean had become dangerous, pigeon-holding the natives to this island.

The movie starts with a visual splendor of Motunui, an island somewhere in Hawaii, blessed with sunshine and flowers (which transports me to a different world, where I am not ploughing snow off my car in the middle of a freezing never-ending winter). Moana is pretty much guided by her grand-mother, who leads her to the hidden cache of boats and ships that the natives of the island once voyaged and reveals that she is the one, chosen by the ocean, for undertaking this perilous journey to find Maui and restore the heart. In spite of Moana’s father’s numerous warnings, Moana boards her grandmother’s chosen boat and sails to find Maui, much like our life’s journey (which pretty much also is taking us to an unknown destination).

Her encounter with the presumptuous, boasting Demi-god is hilarious and her journey with him and a nearly brainless chicken keeps us entertained through a major part of the movie. Through a series of encounters, both of them understand each other, their inner fears and finally Moana convinces Maui to sail with her to Te Fiti. This I believe teaches us to be patient and understand the people we like in our life.

Their first attempt ends in abject failure where Maui and Moana fight with each other and even after Moana convinces Maui that his strengths lay far beneath himself (more than his magical fish-hook). Maui leaves Moana, but she restarts her journey alone and soon is joined by Maui to restore the heart in spite of stiff opposition from a ‘Lava Demon’ (TeKa). This part is my favorite in the movie as it perhaps asks us to dig deep within our reserves, when luck does not flow in our way in life.

Moana is unable to find TeFiti, but understands than TeFiti has transformed into TeKa due to her lack of heart (indirectly telling us that mother earth will destruct us if we don’t stop polluting and choking her) and as Moana restores the heart back to TeKa/TeFiti, all is well. This journey truly encapsulates our entire life’s journey and I hope by the time the sequel comes out, our daughter would have all grown up into a Moana in her own right.

 

Pay-Day Loans

The general perception of Indians about America is very different than reality. The ‘land of opportunities’ unfortunately, has its share of poor/struggling people. This is accentuated by the fact that most people are forced to live paycheck to paycheck. The recent recommendation of ‘Dirty Money’ show on Netflix (by a colleague of mine) brutally exposed to me the condition of nearly significant part of the American population.

Families that run out of money towards the end of the month can borrow $500 or more from these pay-day loan websites/shops. However, like the ugly concept of ‘kandhu vaddi’ (loans based on exorbitant daily rates) in Indian states, this has a horror part attached to it.

In the show, one of the borrowers borrowed $500 and expected to pay back $650. He then proceeds to pay his 4 installments of $150 expecting only a remaining balance of $50. However, he is in for a shock, as the $600 he had paid only keeps the loan amount active and has never decreased the principal amount. He ends up paying nearly $3000 for the $500 he had got in the first place. The show specifies that the ‘pay day loan’ companies often are registered to Indian tribes (Red Indians) which complicates matters as the State government does not any jurisdiction over Indian tribal land (something that bewildered me even more). The owner of one of pay-day loan company enjoys an extravagant life style and is prosecuted by the federal government for various financial crimes, pending a judgment from the supreme court.

The similarities of the brutal lending scheme in our country runs a parallel with the ‘Pay-Day’ loan scheme in no less measure. What astonished me is the fact, that educated lower-middle class people in America are caught in this debt-trap, which I would say has engulfed nearly all our farmers, forcing them to commit suicide.

All said and done, greed for money and power unfortunately plays a major role in our life throwing aside humanity and goodwill. I hope that our future generations can at least enjoy the happiness and peace that we have enjoyed through our stay on this beautiful planet.