Of birthdays

I turned 23 yesterday.

Birthdays used to be such a big deal in my childhood and it is very hard to shake off that feeling even now. Since my sisters’ birthday and mine were just 4 days apart, the entire 1-2 weeks before my birthday felt like a run up to some big festival. First came the clothes. Till my 12th birthday, I would wear a ‘pattu langa’ for all my birthday parties. So a few weeks before the birthday, Mom would take out material gifted by an aunt or some relative and ask if I liked it and wanted it stitched. It was on rare occasions that Mom had to go and buy dress material since there was so much ‘pattu silk’ material gifted over the years to both of us skids on various occasions.

Anyways, since I didn’t have much of a taste in ‘pattu’ silk or its stitching, I went along with whatever Mom suggested. Then came my second dress which was going to be a lovely frock – all lace and satin and velvet. If Mom happened to go to Madras, Bombay or Calcutta or some other big city on work in the month or two before our birthdays, she made sure she got us dresses from there since the variety was so much wider. Sometimes, we had to buy it in Vizag only but that was a trying time for my Mom. I was especially fussy and made sure we toured every single shop in the city and checked out their stuff before I finally liked something enough to buy it.

When we were slightly older, Samee and I would like the same dress and squabble over who was going to buy it. It was unthinkable that we wore the same kind of dress for our birthdays! But then, she had the advantage that her birthday was earlier. I remember a lovely pink creation of lace and satin I wore for my 7th birthday – I think it was one of the most delicate and beautiful pieces of clothing I ever owned. It then cost a grand 400 and all the teachers in school commented on how pretty it was and everyone I knew raved over it and in all it was a very satisfying birthday.

Once the clothes were done, my Mom would take us to a cards store where we could choose to pick up our invitation cards set. Over the next couple of days, Samee and I would make a list of the people we wanted to invite for our birthdays and show it to Mom and she would edit it, usually to add relatives, family friends and neighbours. We were then asked to write the names of the invitees, the birthday date, time and venue and our own names in the invitation cards. It was such fun – and the best part was that we actually set aside 1-2 evening to go all over the neighbourhood and invite everyone.

Next on the list of things to do was the menu. Since I was easily bored and my childhood war cry was ‘Boru Koduthundhi’, my family devised various ways and means to keep me occupied. My aunt hit upon discussing my ‘birthday party menu’ whenever there was a danger of my getting bored. So when we came down to actually deciding on a menu, it was a fairly easy job and though I was made to feel like it was all my decision, I didn’t have much of a say in that matter. Once the menu was decided, Mom would take us to the bakery where we would go through endless photos of cakes while Mom would sigh but wait patiently, then fight because usually we ended up liking the same cake again and finally make a decision.

The next step was shopping for ready to eat stuff on the menu such as chips, sauce etc. And of course, toffees to be distributed in school. My secret ambition was to distribute the small 5 stars or the little mini Diary Milks which came in small boxes and were available only in imported goods stores but my Mom always refused. Then I assumed it was because it was very expensive and we couldn’t afford it so I didn’t mind at all – now I realise it was probably because my Mom was as usual following rules to the book for the school diary instructs parents to make sure children give only ‘token toffees’ (or some such very strange term that only our school could have used). Anyways, I always, every single time, bought a pack of Coffee Bite and a pack of Eclairs.

Then finally D day would arrive. I’d be woken up early in the morning and my aunt would always be the first person to call and wish me. Then I’d have a head bath, eat breakfast, wear my pretty new dress and insist on clipping my hair instead of the usual braids, and if I had stockings to wear, nothing like it and I’d set off to school. During some period before the break, the teacher would ask me to come forward and stand next to her table while the rest of the class stood up and sang ‘Happy Birthday to You’.

When I look back on that moment, over the many years, in different classrooms, with different teachers and with different classmates, I think every single time some 40 odd students in the class stood up to sing to me, I can see myself visibly puffing up. I felt so pretty in my new clothes and shoes and stockings, the teacher was smiling at me, everyone was singing for me with huge grins and everything felt just right and the way it should be. Then I’d hold up the box for the teachers to take the toffees and then distribute it to the whole class – 2 on each table, one of each kind.

Then I’d choose my best friend in the class to accompany me to do the rounds. Now this choosing of a friend always involved a lot of politics. All the girls always wanted to be called to accompany somebody on their birthday and the birthday person could take only one friend. So during the run up to the person’s birthday there would be many reaffirmations of friendship in the hope that one was going to be chosen to accompany the birthday girl. I don’t know why the honour of accompanying the birthday girl was considered a big deal – maybe we considered it an indication that we were the girls best friend and this was important at an age where we counted who had the most friends and maybe it was a public acknowledgement of the girls popularity – it is probably a sampler of the behaviour girls indulging in when a bride is choosing her bridesmaids from her friends!

Since I always had more than one equally close friend, I dreaded having to make the choice on my own birthday. To make things worse, with my birthday being almost at the end of the academic year, I would have been the ‘Chosen One’ for more than one birthday girl and they would be expecting me to return the favour. For almost every single birthday, I would request my teacher if I could take more than one and be refused, resulting in hurting some friend. But I’d quickly get over the guilt by going to the principals and then to each section of the class and the staff rooms to offer chocolates to the teachers and thank them when they inevitably commented on how pretty I looked or how lovely my dress was – we didn’t realise then that they were just being nice so we took the compliments at face value and got totally kicked about it, storing away some specially nice compliments in our memory for future recounting.

Sometimes, the birthday girl would ask the teacher in some other section to ask for her friend in that section to come up and take chocolates and the friend would come with a grin she could hide and an attitude which said ‘Look, I know the birthday girl!’. I bet none of us ever con concentrated in class when it was our birthday or even that of a friend, not that I personally concentrated in class at any other time also. So birthdays were a big, lovely, ego massaging event at school from which I came with an almost empty box of chocolates and great excitement for the party ahead.

But now I will have to rush or I’ll be late for ‘Honeymoom Travels Pvt. Ltd.’ so maybe I’ll follow up on this post some other time. Ciao, dear reader.

P.S: I just noticed that sadly, this post has a hell a lot of tense continuity errors (if there is such a term) and glaring grammatical errors. I am most upset.

Quick Update

The reviews for Salaam-e-Ishq and Parzania will have to wait – I am going to Bangalore this weekend for Unmaad and I am totally and completely thrilled about it. I’ll be meeting up with quite a few people I haven’t seen in a long time so am very much looking forward to it. Abhishek is already on campus so will get to meet after exactly a year for I met him last for Unmaad ’06.

There will be all the shows and pronites and carnival village and informals and loads of other events and all the noise and confusion and chaos. It’s just that its going to be strange to have nothing to do at Unmaad, no walkie to hold and just lounge about the place. But there will be all the bhasad and junta and it’ll be soooooooooooooooooooo much funn!! And of course L^2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This excitement matches up to how I used to feel when, as a kid, I was about to make a train journey with a big group. Oohhh!!

Well, have a good weekend everybody. I certainly will.

A post I will regret later for its nonsensical content

The good thing about living in Hyderabad is that it provides me with a very active social life. While I laze away at my aunts’ place during weekends, the city is teeming with friends from school and college so each day I have my hands full after work – movies, eating out, fairs, shopping. Moreover, I do frequent trips to Vizag and Bangalore. Despite these social activities, I’ve managed to get my hands on some very good books last year and read them, of course!

I have relatively laidback roommates who go out, other than to work, about once a week. When they are back from work, the cook dinner and settle down in front of the television and retire to bed early. Since I’m out after work and usually come back home quite late, after dinner outside, my interaction with them has been minimal – in the sense that we are friendly and get along comfortably but we are not friends by any stretch.

Now there are times when no one in my large circle is available because every one is tied up with something and I end up alone at home. Which is perfectly okay by me because I then join my roommates for dinner and read till I turn in. But there are these rare occasions like today – none of my friends were free and my roommate went out for dinner and I had just finished the John Updike novel I was reading so I was alone at home with absolutely nothing to do!!

As if to complete the dire scenario, there was a problem with the Hutch connection today and the line kept getting cut off or simply wouldn’t connect if I tried calling anyone. I read the newspaper, solved a couple of Sudoku puzzles, even watched TV but it was so awfully boring. And why is it that whenever I watch TV, I never get to see ‘Friends’, ‘Joey’, ‘Seinfield’ or any of the dozen or more comedy shows that I would watch!! Instead, every single bloody time I turn on the TV, I am subjected to ‘Desire: Table for Three’.

Speaking of which, that should qualify for the ‘Worst Ever TV Series’. I can’t believe Star World is promoting the damned show so much. The script is uninteresting, the dialogues sound forced, the situations are very contrived and the actors people starring in the show are guilty of the worst display of acting skills in television history.

But I’m digressing – so I was alone at home with no where to go, no one to talk to, nothing to read, nothing to watch, nothing to do and worst of all, nothing to eat either. It just about drove me crazy. And it made me think of how, when I was in school and college, I would talk to my friends on the phone for hours at a stretch.

I mean we’d just call up each other and chat forever, about everything under the sun and then some. But I’ve noticed that these days, we call up each other only to fix up meeting plans or exchange important information. If we do call up each other simply because we haven’t spoken to each other for a while, the conversation rarely lasts longer than 15 minutes. I thought my parents would be happy with this much-awaited change in me but that’s not so because now even they want to talk to me on the phone but I keep hanging up on them quite early on in the conversation.

I wonder if its because the nature of my friendships have changed and become more superficial over the years. Maybe we are just good for meeting up and having a good time together and that’s it. Or maybe I’m reading too much into what could be a general inability to indulge in pointless talk as you grow older. So maybe it’s not just me – maybe this is how most people and most friendships change over the years. Sigh!!

Well, being alone has made me type out a post I find quite boring when I’m reading it myself! But the good thing is that having something to do is actually making me quite sleepy…huh!!

Guru: Not such a Winner!

One overwhelming feeling I had after coming out of the theatre was how tough it was to make a movie spanning an entire life. Usually, the movie revolves around a particular incident or event or a time period but when your movie is about the entire life of an individual, especially one who has done a great deal, it becomes so much tougher to put in all the big moments of his life, put in his relationships, his ideas, his principles – all that make up the fabric of his life into less than 3 hours – that too, making way for songs.

I’d say Guru was a good movie, but not a great movie. Mani Ratnam has a very strong support system in the form of Rajeev Menon and Rahman. Rajeev Menon works pure magic on the screen. The visuals in the ‘Barso Re’ song are simply stunning as are some of the scenes shot in Turkey especially the mosque (or whatever the structure is) that comes in to view against a blue blue sky as Guru enters and exits the country. The colour of the film during Guru’s Turkey stint is exotic and seems quite right for the period and the location.

I could go on about the visuals - the packed, shaky feeling the train scenes give the audience, the filtering light effect at the place where Sherawat’s item number takes place, the Bombay of the 50’s, the way the look and feel of the film changes through colours and tones to reflect the passing years. Speaking of which, post-independence Bombay had trams!! That’s how it is shown in the film and it was such a surprise to me.

Another thing about Mani Ratnam’s movies is the way he blends the music into the movie. It doesn’t mean that he has only situational songs – he does have songs as inserts like ‘Barso Re’ or ‘Ek lo ek muft’- it’s the way the music is so seamlessly blended into the movie that it never comes at the wrong time. Sometimes, there is a song playing in the background and you don’t even notice it because it becomes a part of the scene. While I personally think that’s quite a wonderful way of utilising the music, Rahman’s brilliant scores are best appreciated outside the movie.

I think Mani Ratnam has always managed to get excellent performances from his actors. Abhishek is very good – good enough to let you forget for large stretches of the film that he is actually Abhishek Bacchhan and not Guru. Vidya Balan shines in the limited time she has on screen, Madhavan is quite sufficient for his role but more importantly, he looks very very good…mmm. And Mithun is simply perfect!! This is probably the only movie in which I don’t dislike Aishwarya – she isn’t all dolled up in this one and does not simper or make ‘big big eyes’ expression; in fact, she doesn’t look like Ash doll and she doesn’t revert to her standard stock of expressions which is such a mercy because she is quite decent in this movie.

And each scene is shot with such thought and such care. I especially like the little touches – when Vidya Balan guesses that Aishwarya is pregnant – it was a completely unnecessary scene but its just a little touch which makes you feel more strongly about the characters. (On a side note, it is immediately after Guru and Sujata come back from a trip to the US that we are told Sujata is pregnant – is it a hint about the reason behind the US trip? Or am I reading too much into it?).

But despite all these pluses, Guru (the movie, not the man) does not come out such a winner. I think my biggest source of dissatisfaction with the movie is that while each individual scene is beautifully crafted, the big picture is ignored. For example, I’d have really liked to know what made Guru such a success. There is nothing he has done in Turkey, with the exception of a very quick promotion, which forms a base for us to think that he is an extraordinary young man. Yes, he is quite clearly depicted as a very confident and ambitious young man but there is no substantiation as to what he has done to realise his ambitions

To continue on that point, I’d have preferred the movie to show more of the kind of struggles he went through to come up in life, obstacles he faced and how he overcame them, even if by dishonest and illegal means. It just makes it look too easy as the factory grows from strength to strength through photos. Even the scene where Guru has to meet a Minister and the manager warns him that the minister is an ‘imandaar admi’. And yet, he offers a bribe very subtly and that is it, so easy.

Then the whole quarrel between Abhishek and the Mithun-Madhavan duo is stretched out for too long. In fact, at one point I remember getting quite restless and even looking at my watch and wondering if the movie is going to move along. The fight is too long drawn out, with a pointless emotional scene in a hospital also, a part which could definitely have done with better editing. By this point, the grip of the movie has quite slackened and what’s happening on the screen sadly doesn’t seem so compelling any more.

Despite all this, I think Guru would have come out as an excellent movie if not for the climax, which was what did the movie in. All through the movie, through your hero you are glorifying ambition, the hunger to become big and rich, to do anything to achieve your ambitions. And then, in the last 5 minutes, precisely, you make it sound like your doing some public service to help the country become a bigger power. I’d just like to think that Guru used an emotional angle to win over the jury, an excuse and a covering which he himself didn’t put faith in. But sadly enough, the movie gives no indication that it is so – and therefore, you have an extremely melodramatic and annoying climax involving a long speech.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the speech itself is quite painful, it doesn’t really make you sit up and take notice. The dialogues in this scene lacked punch and this reflected in Abhishek’s dialogue delivery as well. And the camera revolving around Abhishek is so distracting that at some point I simply stopped listening to the not-so-interesting-anyway speech because I was like ‘what the!! Someone stop the damn camera, or my head will start spinning’.

I guess I’d sum up the movie as being good but disappointing. I am off to Salaam-e-Ishq in 2 hours. While I wouldn’t mind not watching, a friend of mine is desperate to see the movie on the first day and so I am letting myself in for what I suspect will be a soppy, mushy romance though I’ll be more than glad to be proved wrong but when a movie has been hyped and looked forward to the way this has been, its more than likely to not turn out good. It looks like a Indian ‘Love Actually’ but since I didn’t care at all for LA, that doesn’t make a difference.

Happy New Year!!

Oh, I know the New Year wishes come late but a new year is a new year and its okay to wish people a happy new year as long as it’s still January. This was one of my worst New Year’s Eve ever – rivaling the time I was sulking because my parents refused to take us to some concert and slept through the night of the 31st.

This year there was this grand old plan of going to Goa, THE place to be for New Years. First, a couple of friends dropped out because they had issues with a couple who were a part of the group. Then, I almost couldn’t go because of an approaching deadline for a very important personal project. After much dilly-dallying and on again off again, we finally set off, though I felt I was going more as an obligation than because I wanted to go.

The killer was the journey itself. An 18 hour journey by road with a driver who isn’t very good just killed the holiday spirit in all of us. We just couldn’t wait to get out of the car and fall into our beds at the guest house when we reached on 30th night. The only silver lining was that I got to meet GV, Shivani, Mihir, BJ, Savvy, Spunky and Ravi and we had a very nice dinner at Baga beach to celebrate Swetha’s birthday, which was almost ruined coz it was spent in a car.

We spent all of 31st lazing around at Sinquerim beach, couple of water sports and lots of prawns…:p. Anyways, we were all (all = Hyderabad gang + IIMB gang) go clubbing for New Years Eve and we decided to go to Club West End, a new club which sounded good (especially since they were charging 600 bucks per head for unlimited booze).

When we got there, it turned out to be filled with aunties and uncles. And there started the trouble – some of us said it’s a cool looking place with great music and free booze – lets just go ahead and enjoy ourselves, never mind the aunties, uncles and their kids. Some were neutral. And the others, led by a person Who Shall Not Be Named, wanted to go to Club Cabana. I argued that we would get stuck in traffic, Cabana would be way too expensive etc but alas and alack, led by He Who Shall Not Be Named, nobody paid any heed to me.

The IIMB gang sensibly decided to get off midway and spend New Years Eve at Baga beach while we reached Cabana at 11pm past to find out it was way too expensive. We then set out for the beach but thanks to the traffic, we welcomed the New Year in a traffic jam in a car. I was soooo very pissed and hyper disappointed that I yelled at everyone – something to the effect of ‘I told you all so you idiots but none of you listened to me. I’m the only one here capable of some planning and you’ll don’t even have the sense to listen to me and then you all jointly ruin my New Years’. And I left in a huff and went to the guest house, got hung up on the phone by my Mom for being rude to her and slept.

I know – that was atrocious behaviour and I’m a BAD BAD BAD person. But my New Years Eve was ruined, I was upset and disappointed and I’m only human so I do get a kick out of saying ‘I told you so’. But to make my (non-existent) readers forget about what a painful person I actually am, I will follow this up with another post so that this one is forgotten.

Oh, and the 18 hour return journey just added to everyone’s misery. L

I do hope that darned trip is no indication of how the rest of the year is going to be. *Fingers crossed*.