Let me start with ‘The Dictator’ first. I hadn’t heard of Sacha Baron Cohen till ‘Hugo’. A quick reference search and I became a fan. The gross antiques are very much a part of his style of comedy but ‘The Dictator’ has another level unlike ‘The Hangover’. I hadn’t expected much from the supreme leader of fictitious country ‘Wadiya’, but if people do recover from laughing at the gags, his punches on politics can make everyone look inwards. Is it that philosophical? Naaaah. But in my desperation to justify my enjoying such a movie, I found too many reasons that make it good. So I gleefully throw myself of the high horse and say ‘The Dictator’ is a much needed farce in the current climate. Wish someone could make something so biting and funny about Indian politics. (sadly, the generation that can do this isn’t thinking beyond memes these days).

Next came ‘MIB 3′. Frankly, I haven’t seen the first two movies. But Roger Ebert called it the best in the series , so I had to watch it. There has been enough of time traveling in my past decade full of literature, but this one still made me suspend the reality for 106 minutes. That’s good enough fantasy. Everything was predictable but it was not about the 3D angles and animation anymore, you end up caring for J and K. You might even find Griffin endearing. Griffins are symbolic to resurrection and have deep meanings in fantasy genre, who would have thought you could find depth in a franchise like this?

Next on the list is ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’, and ‘Moonrise Kingdom’, if I could swing it. My high horse has galloped away out of sight for now, but you never know when can he make a come back.

This time Liechtenstein is on the cards. Bill Bryson has made it more exciting for me. I plan to go to the same hotel he went to and didn’t drink a glass of orange juice. It is a country so small it was accidentally invaded by the Swiss in 2007 on a dark night during a mock drill. It is too small to be different from Switzerland, and yet here we go…to find out how small it exactly is.

Bayern Munich lost in the champions league final. That’s just sports.

Euro zone is in big trouble. When have they not had trouble? Remember the first half of the 20th century?

Shahrukh Khan is losing it all or has he already lost it?

Aishwarya Rai is not losing it, or so they say. Frankly I am not her fan, but now I sympathize and understand. 

The decent good movie I saw last week was called ‘The Dictator’. Hope I’m not the only one who can see the irony in it.

I’m not going to start on value of rupees, politics and petrol. We love to update statuses, do some funny retweets, but now whenever these things pop up on the screen, they hurt the eyes, make you feel like someone is shrilly singing in your ears with a megaphone.

Sarcasm seems to be the only language that people use on social media these days. Satire is good. Wonder if it is the only outlet left. Is the need for everyone to be satirical all the time making skeptics of us all? Wonder how many of them are mistaking it for real wit.

Even existing inside my own bubble of being positive, the rampant world seems scary. Hope the scare is just an illusion or is hope just an illusion?

This is making me a bit nostalgic. I swayed between too serious and too careless in my early school years, but I always had my eyes on the future. I’m living a version of that future right now. My plans have changed along with changing reality but I wonder how much of it all depended on how I performed in school. Almost everyone my age that I communicate with no longer thinks of mark sheets.

We all have stories of our school days. While reminiscing on social network, all one does is tag pals in old school pictures. But no one remembers each other’s mark sheets. And still there was a time when that mark sheet decided the course of our lives.

Education system is changing too fast in India and it takes an effort to stay up to date. The pressure and competition is increasing but is the too distracted generation keeping up with the transition? People do boast about how advanced their kids are about using gadgets, but do they have another level? If yes, what and where is it? It definitely doesn’t seem to be just in the mark sheets.

Eventually it is all mangled somewhere between understanding, curiosity, researching and cramming. I wish I could be a school student now with all the resources and development. But I also feel a bit thankful that I am out of it all before it all got so complicated.

Once again this is a second rambling post in two days. I’m neither questioning the education system nor am I lamenting it all getting complicated. All I have on my mind is: This feels like the best time to be a student and the worst time too.

Since I saw the movie two months back, whenever I read news, words kept popping out from articles in reference to the thought of ‘being someone’ and ‘doing something’.

The thing is, ‘being someone’ is highly emphasized in pop culture today. The next Rowling, the next Tendulkar, the next Instagram. Everyone and everything promising is labelled ‘the next fill in the blank’ for the world.

This whole jargon of media has perhaps now followed us as it rests in our pockets with our mobile devices. It has taken over the language in which people dream, shape up their ambitions. I somehow feel it could take the individuality out of the next generation that heavily relies on pasting quotes without giving credits. But there is no need to be that cynical just as yet.

After all ‘doing something’ and ‘being someone’ may not be the same thing but these concepts aren’t too contradictory either. The subtle difference between doing something and being someone may not be lost on everyone as both these things are simply stepping stones in achieving worldly success. The problem lies in the dreams of being someone without actually going through the toil of doing something.

Writing this and thinking aloud is giving me a sense of ‘doing something’ but virtual ramblings may not be that substantial if they aren’t backed by real work.

Here you go:

Time is impatient.
It has to figure me out,
Before I take shape.

pratiksha thanki
May 4, 2012

Last night while coming back from the Spring festival (April version of the Oktoberfest), we took a train back home at about 11 PM. As Stuttgart is not Munich, it sleeps early on most nights. But looked like everyone was out last night to let their hair down and their spirits up. I got to sit next to a cheerful old woman with fresh lilacs with green leaves in her hands. She smiled at us, offered to move just in case our group wanted to sit together and merrily watched us jabber away in 65% English, 15 % Hindi and 20 % German. When she got off the train at Weinsteige, she wished us good night and even after going out waved at us from outside. After nearly 10 hours of memorable time spent at the fest, all I can think of is that old lady with lilacs in her hands. Was she going home? Was she visiting someone? She definitely seemed Deutsch. I have stopped thinking about how am I perceived as an odd woman out in this strange country, but I still wonder what she thought of us. Who were the lilacs for? Probably a beautiful, ancestral vase. Or for a family member, a friend may be a date.

For some reason, I’m still thinking about her. But what was she thinking about? She has definitely seen many festivals in her lifetime and been in our shoes a few decades ago. Did we make her nostalgic? We all have back stories in our lives. The old lady with lilacs definitely has one. Probably I am never going to find her back story, but somehow she has almost become a part of my back story.

I had no expectations from the movie, but it had some really good sparks. There is a very strict, conventional story arc in any spy movie. Eventually all Jack Bauers of the world save a specific city, country or sometimes mankind from something really fatal. Sriram Raghavan has Ek Hasina Thi and Johnny Gaddar in his past that does him credit. But when Saif Ali Khan is producing the movie, Raghavan may not have had all the creative liberty, no matter what they talk about in publicity interviews.

Everyone and their uncles have gone overboard by comparing Agent Vinod with Bond and Bourne movies. But this RAW spy doesn’t claim to be original at all. His character works well and with a li’l more thrilling story it would be good fun to watch him in a sequel.

Along with Raghavan’s retro homages to crime novels, old Hindi thrillers and of course those spy movies, there are flashes of Guy Ritchie influence here and some Tarantino there. It is a collage that works for someone who appreciates the genre and doesn’t have the expectations set too high.

I expected some mushy romantic scenes when I heard the Rabata song for the first time given the relationship of the producer and the heroine of Agent Vinod, but that one single long shot song sequence is very refreshing.

We watched the movie sitting with the crowd that included a big bunch of Indians along with people from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Turkey, other Middle Eastern countries and some German fans of Bollywood. Wonder what was going on in their minds.

Often in the afternoons when I’m done with my work, I glance out of my window and there it is, lite up in sunlight these days, decorated with daisies for the Spring. It is a bakery. For some reason I thought of referring the bakery as ‘she’. Indeed she has been more of a friend since a year and a half now. I go down to her and ask for a ‘kuchen’. Generally it is ‘Johannisbeerekuchen’ I ask for, but I never realized it is seasonal thing.  I also ask for Kirschkuchen, Apftelkuchen or a simple jam doughnut – a Berliner they call it here.

It is a quintessential German family run place and the youngest woman behind the counter seems to be in her 20s. Once she was surprised that I ordered a piece of pie with liquor in it. I obviously have South Asian skin colour. She almost warned me about the sherry, associating a stereo-type with me. It had been six months since I had been going there. These women behind the counter are a judgmental crowd. They raise eyebrows when I buy a Brioche. I could avoid the place. But as long as the pie tasted good, it didn’t matter.

There are bouts when I eat ‘healthy’ food. I hadn’t been there in a while. Today, I was mourning some bad news. The news wasn’t so bad, but bad enough to eat a piece to feel good. Who knew I was about to get some smile on the side of my pie today! When I walked in there, the girl cheered up. She told me they had Johannisbeerekuchen. I deserved my piece of pie, a pick-me-up. But she remembered I loved Johannisbeere. She knew that part of me. I was no longer a stranger to her. So what if she didn’t know my name. She didn’t know what was bugging me. But she had still made me forget all my worries. I am no longer a stranger here.

And yet, there were a few reasons to watch the movies. Those reasons were: Martin Scorsese. Martin Scorsese. Martin Scorsese.

The man has created such a 3D visual treat that is unprecedented, even James Cameron has to bow down to this. The camera moves from unexpected angles really making the setting and characters real instead of the shoddy embossed feeling that some recent 3D movies came up with. When almost every remotely fantasy related movie started to show up in not so good 3D, audience doesn’t get much excited about a 3D movie anymore.

Something about the way ‘Hugo’ is shot, makes it visually so powerful that even its slow pace doesn’t bother those who are sucked into its colourful canvas. The first half of the movie takes its time to help us soak in the visualization of Paris and the railway station, the boy who fixes things and his book-loving friend who wants to find a purpose, a sulky old toy shop owner, a goofy but scary station inspector and these characters are established as they should be in a children’s story.

Scorsese has moved to another level with Hugo. And on top of that, he even pays a homage to the beginning of the world of cinema through a character. Through a story that shows much respect to books, machines and cinema history, Scorsese celebrates human creativity with an extra dimension in ‘Hugo’.

Hugo isn’t the kind of movie that one should watch at home on a TV or a computer screen. If you do get a chance, watch it on the big screen with the 3D glasses on.