To Hair Loss

I could hear them cry out loud
But never could have cared less
How the mighty and the proud
Nurse in them such foolishness
But now I bask in better light
Whisper in some silent prayer
When fanning fires of fearful fright

The pillow wears my crop of hair.

I see them squandered on the floor
And everyone of them doth sting
At my core of heart and more
- The blackest fibers of my being.
A shining pate of errant yield
No oil, no herb can come to aid
The mysteries of the scalp that sealed
This early autumn of my head.

photo: gettyimages.com

Challenge-d to the hilt!

Why should I go buy a ticket to a Bengali film if it cannot even command 15 minutes of attentiveness from its audience?

Well, I don't have any rational answer to that after I laboured through the screening of the film which was being touted as the next-big-budget-crowd-puller from the Tollywood stables and yes, it was none other than the much publicized/marketed (courtesy-t2, The Telegraph) - Challenge.....nibi na sala.

People with even a feeble grasp of Bengali would be hard to convince regarding the "respectability quotient" of a film with such ruffian leanings in its nomenclature itself. Still, I ventured an audience in hope of "some mindless entertainment" if not a "memorable love story" told "differently" as is always promised. Needless to say the company of friends who would give any film a chance in their idle weekends made it sort of inevitable for me. One of them travelling half the city to watch the opening show of "Don Mutthuswami" is a case in point.

A detailed review would be a waste of cyber-space so let me put the slush succinctly, if ever there was such a phrase i.e. Shipping tycoon dad's (Rajatava Dutta) overprotectiveness about pretty daughter(Subhashree) meets fierce, fun-loving, goon-bashing brawn of college boy (Dev) and the "challenge" is born. The inanity of the proceedings is exemplified by the fact that the only dialogue evoking ceetis and taalis in the entire film belonged to the Mithun-starrer "Mohaguru" (explains why the last Bengali film I watched in a theater was "Tiger" by Mithun). The newcomer pair does little except pose prettily or murderously as and when required by the invisible script, if any. The saving grace of the film is some definitive moments when Biswajit Chakrabarty ( hero's father) helps us to some laughs in his encounters with the caricature that Rajatava Dutta has come to make of himself with every passing film.

In short :

People who went to see gravity/logic/physics/biology-defying action sequences came back disappointed.
People who went to see a cute/cuddly/teddy-bearish love-story with fresh faces came back empty handed.
People who went to check the "promised land" of micro-minis, hot-pants and tank-tops (as in the film posters) came back frothing at their mouths - demure salwar-kameezes being the chief culprit of them all. Traitors! Frauds! Thieves!


So, next time any director promises a "different" film make sure you send in your friends ahead of you to get the right review and not the ones doctored by newspapers to give trash any semblance of respectability. After all, hard-earned money is not best-spent in buying boredom of a darkened auditorium, that too empty.

Did I mention that my ticket was paid for by a friend.
Yes, the same one who went for "Don Mutthuswami"'s premiere.

Refinement in Confinement

BSNL gets on my nerves sometimes and so does the KMC. The latter's trigger-happy ( or should that be 'shovel-happy') grave-diggers keep digging at our roads with unbridled joy as if it was the only job in the world that needs considerable merit and rigorous practice at the same time. So they keep to it like HS appearing candidates attending to their calculus. Sometimes they dig even when the tar on the roads has not even cooled. And I don't need to tell you how mutually fulfilling both parties find this exercise to be. In fact, they should, since their symbiosis disadvantages none but the average man who aspire to walk his stretch of road and make his share of calls. Make calls ? Yes, sir! Calls! That's precisely what KMC and BSNL colluded to deprive me of. Telephone calls and Internet.

How? Well, one of their more industrious exponents kept digging someplace near my house a tad too overzealously. Might be a case of family feud or a bothersome overseer, but instead of gold all he hit and ruptured in his frenzy was a cable which contained amongst many others' the telephone line to my house. As a result I have been making do without my internet connection for the last 10 days. Yes, you read it right, 10 days! The first couple of days were suffocating. No people to chat with, no blogs to read, no mails to forward, no people to disturb! Then of course calm descended. Instead of 'deathly' the proper adjective would be 'filmy'. A filmy calm.
Watched about a dozen films in these 10 days, one of them being the much touted Slumdog Millionaire ( the review to which I posted here). Found it to be a tad too "fishing-for-applause"-type, unauthentic, almost synthetic film on slum-glum.

I digress! I digress!

So, every day I come back home and check my phone to find it in its sorry state of disrepair. No hum. Ho hum. So I end up watching endless films like 'Gone With The Wind' and go to sleep.
But yesterday the stars shone down on me and the line was restored. What a relief!
And I am back to blogging now.

Take that you Bloody Scoundrels of Nether Land!!!!!

( Will soon make something out of KMC too. Soon).