I'm the Queen of the World!

So I saw Queen last night finally-

A. Because of all the hype created around it.

B. Because in all cuteness people were asking if I had seen the flick and wanted to know how I felt about it *I feel so critic-ishly kicked*

For otherwise, it would have been difficult to make me watch a Kangana Renawat movie just by the merit of her being in it.

Like I’ve said before, it is always better to watch a movie before they cram you with their opinions on it. The perspective is always truer.

Queen IS beautiful!

Also, I am beginning to realize that I can relate to anything onscreen that is based on a sense of abandon, with streaks of freedom from the stereotyped molds. It sometimes sends me into self introspection mode going in circles in my mind till real life takes over (Also the reason perhaps why I never watch anything on television). Aren’t we all trying to break free from whatever it is that defines us? Those tucked deep in riches want to live life the common man way, the common man strives to get out of his mediocrity, the house bound wife seeks adventure, the nomad travels relentlessly to find a base to root into and so on. Hence we are unified by a common thread for that desire to experience the uncommon of our lives.

Perhaps this craving is right. Why else should we get up from our beds each morning or what else would we dream of when we go to bed at night?

Queen celebrates the idea of being on your own.

Such a defining thought!

And for someone like me, it was a personal nudge. I CANNOT travel alone. Is there a name for the fear of traveling alone, some kind of phobia? Well, if there is, it would be what I suffer from. Ironically for someone who in her heart only sees herself as a nomad, experiencing life from place to place, is declaredly scared if she finds herself alone at the airport for over 5 minutes for the fear of being left behind or someone digging out drugs from her bags and getting her arrested before anyone even discovers she is missing. Not that I’d be travelling by air in those mind dreams.

Anyway, how beautifully does the movie sketch the female psyche!

I remembered my own mehndi and a thousand different thoughts zig zagging in that little head of mine like in Rani’s while the entire space around was a menagerie of sorts. That flickering doubt that came and went- Is it too soon? I haven’t even become anything in life yet? I might not become anything in life post this? But too many hopes hanging on me of everyone I’m pinned with, to tell them now to let me live my life first instead of building another one as a couple. My grandfather telling me he was glad he was seeing me getting married and could now die in peace; which he did within just three months of me leaving that house. Girls are like that or grow up conditioned like that in varying degrees - whether they live in Lajpat Nagar or not.

But then not everyone would be as lucky as Rani to be able to squeeze out a life from a latent existence in an unknown land. In a sense, the movie was real but dipped in a beautiful fairy tale flavor. The freshness emitting out of the fact that she became her own Prince Charming rescuing her from the gnawing miseries!

G looked at me intermittently through the scenes telling me now and again, “Seekho” implying on the streaks of independence as was being sketched out on screen. Little did he care to ponder over though that with an independent body comes a very independent mind! While driving back from the theatre, I asked him what did he learn from the movie. He’s a smart one now, my husband; he asks back- “What do you think I should learn from the movie?”

And very complacently I said, that it IS possible to have friends all over the world, who may or may not subscribe to the same age group, social strata or thinking genre as our lives are in. It is not always sexual. (Dear Mohnish Behl saying in Meine Pyar Kiya- “Ek ladka aur ladke kabhi dost nahi ho sakte”. Yes, fuck off!)

And he smiled mischievously for he refuses to believe one can find genuine friends over the internet and be close to them, even sometimes surpassing real life friends we’ve lived with. He shakes his head when I tell him of a 23 year old friend who confides in me, his life's trials and tribulations or of a 55 years old someone whose voyages on the sea fascinate me as though I journeyed with him. It is possible to share lives with strangers. Not all strangers come with dangerous motives. Some come with empathy that familiar faces find it strange to offer, without petty judging. And a woman thinking out of the box is not playing with her character.

But the most important thing that dawned upon me from there - Nothing good will happen to your stuck up life till daaroo happens to you! Oh yes!

I always forget I am reviewing a movie after a paragraph on it.

·        I wished I could see myself standing on a crowded threshold with that huge-ish map and make out anything from what seems like gibberish there.

·        I wished I knew what heeng was called in English, for friends around then looked up to the “English ma’am” honouring her presence to the group, to enlighten them.

·        I wished I knew how to contrive golgappas, even on Indian soil for that matter, to be able to eventually have that first kiss with that Italian hottie.

·        I wished I was streamlined Lisa Haydon-ish enough to be able to wear some Alexander’s shirt and scream out of the bathroom for the fear of some lizard, which I anyway do.

·        I wished I knew how to wear a bra like that under the covers just as stealthily as I can take out one.

·        I wished my parents would have at least let me go on that all-girls school trip in class 9 from my convent school. At least some kind of taste of that life on my lips for my life to look back on and not write such dreary reviews.

Let everyone live their lives before someone decides they should walk the aisle. Let that someone be the one who has to do it.

P.S. I still loved Highway more. While everyone gushed over Alia’s performance, I still can’t get over Randeep’s characterization and how well he sank and vanished into it, losing every iota of who he is otherwise. To an extent Kangana did too. That’s why these movies work for me. Also I’ve told my husband I am going to America alone now just to face my fears. He says, first try and book tickets uptil Unnao from here, some 100 odd kms from Kanpur. And to think I thought he’d be a new man post the movie. Tch!

Lunchboxing with my Mind.

And I’ve just returned from watching The Lunchbox.

Strange it is how sometimes things happening around you are not motivation enough to write but a contrived screenplay of a couple of hours on the big screen forces you to send your brain cells for a little jog or may be a leisurely saunter in the by-lanes of your mind, so far blocked or ignored in life’s humdrum.

I knew the story would not appeal to my husband, so I tagged along a couple of my girlfriends. We had seen Lootera and although he enjoyed it, he went weary with the pace. The Lunchbox seemed even tardier, like a soft uncertain wind trying to raise its head in a placid backdrop but bogged down before it can rise, managing only to rustle a few already withered or on-the-verge-of-crumpling leaves. Most people can’t relate to sentiments, especially when we are used to of motion or suppression.

I loved the movie.

Perhaps because I am, at a certain level one such leaf watching autumn slowly color my evergreen pride?

Perhaps because the idea of two people who are absolute strangers getting to bond through a thread of simple conversations, is not new skin for me?

Perhaps because as a woman I could relate to the restlessness in Ila’s form that wants to be heard, wants to be important and seeks a purpose of this all?

Perhaps because as a human I could empathize with Mr. Fernandez, a man who knows how to take care of himself but yearns to be taken care of?

Irrfan’s character is heart-warming, a face in the crowd yet subconsciously refusing to accept being one. He looked into that bathroom mirror and said that the space smelt of his grandfather and stiflingly comprehended that he was that grandfather ~ it was nothing short of a revelation for anyone who beholds such a marvelous conceptualization. He says he realized then he had turned old. Here was a man welcoming an early retirement, a man who lost his wife to old age and the same man who did not fathom when old age dawned on him. How amazingly well captured an emotion it was that only someone on this side of the fence would relate to!

Do we really realize how gradually age catches up on us? One day we are twenty and things move on, like a whirlwind sometimes and like the standstill of waters at the other. While weighed down in the twenties to establish our identity and lives, all too soon, thirty knocks at our door. We open the gates and let him in, as though it was in guise of opportunity, with a bit of apprehensions and some exhilaration too, for such a thing is anticipation. Little by little every day the same old drudgery as nothing changes and then one fine day we are forty and out of the blue everything’s changed forever.

But does the person who live inside the aging body really change? His aspirations, his fancies, his dreams, his desires, they remain ageless. He molds himself to the accepted beliefs of the society to behave in a certain mature way because that’s what adults do, to think in a grown up manner, to give up on particular things because it is the way the wheels of the society turn. He surrenders considering perhaps his aging bones too weak to stand before the frail fingers that could be raised. But the heart ~ It still remains at some threshold where it found its identity and continues to stay there. It just loses its legs or will to move on.

How empty are lives that get trapped in the wheels of earning a livelihood everyday so they have no time to stop and stare even at each other perhaps? And then some other voids that just make you stop and stare at them, having no motivation to stop doing it? Lives that have within their grasp everything a normal person should be glad to have and yet feel like sand hastening through the gaping edges of the begging palm.

I remember in the early years of my marriage I would leave little notes in my husband’s lunchbox, his office pouch, his wallet, his cupboard drawer, etc.-something that would remind him of me out of the blue and make him smile. Yes, a hopeless romantic like that. I would put up a picture of someone with open arms asking for an embrace or a sticker that said “I want you every day” in the inner cupboard door to catch his eye as soon as he’d open it. I would send him random messages of “miss you” at particular times to build the stimulation of meeting me upon reaching home eventually. I don’t know when I stopped. I don’t know when it began to seem that he had more important things to do than get bothered by inconsequential notes popping every now and then, every here and somewhere.

We give up and give in without realization.

When the protagonist says he should have looked at his wife laughing at those now forlorn serials a bit longer, my heart went out to him. Why do we realize we should have loved a little more, laughed a little longer, lived a little livelier only when it is no longer possible to do so?

I came across arguments on Twitter that stated had it been an aging woman and a young man in the same scenario, the society would have not been so generous in accepting it. Sad, that we want acceptance of the society for every bloody thing. They fail to realize that it’s not so much a matter of an old man and a young woman, or a married woman and a single man and other such classifications. Marital status or age is immaterial here. It’s the matter of two mortals trying to haul out their individuality through a reflection of similar needs in each other; the acceptance that such an unearthing of oneself is possible at any milestone in life and through our co-passengers in this journey, whether they boarded on the same route with us or not.

I was quite glad that the director here did not make a moral issue out of the entire predicament where the characters find themselves. When the man writes back to her asking if she would go to Bhutan with him, I quite anticipated a horrified Indian woman sentimentality surfacing that would go aghast at the idea of having crossed the line or even of its thought crossing her mind.

I silently rejoiced when she didn’t.

It is distressing to see people judge others without knowing what places in life they come from. What’s wrong with an old man finding a girlfriend? How is it morally a crime if a married woman finds solace in someone’s words outside the bounds of her matrimony that the dwindling threads of it fail to ensure? What right do we have to stop someone from getting happiness from whatever that redeems him unless we have better ways to ensuring it for him that pleases his hungry soul?

It’s a love deprived epoch that we live in,

Where money is easy to get and people difficult to find!

Where faces abound but familiarity fails!

Where we laugh too often but smile too less!

We live in a world where living it up is not thought as much as finishing it all up. Yes, the streaks of such ideas cross by even the sanest of minds. Like she said, we all find ourselves at some point or the other, ready to take the plunge but the depths to which we would have to fall, freezes our feet and numbs the mind. We continue where we are, allowing it to lead to a slow, excruciating death than a sudden, end-all one.

Little battles of little people. Millions of lunchboxes opening every day and so do millions of hearts. And day after day, without a second glance, with eyes riveted to some other priority each time, they come to a close. And the sun sets and the sun rises and the fan on the ceiling continues to sway.

And now Dirty is IN!

Okay, finally The Dirty Picture is done and although I am not a review person but this seems to be the third of its kind on popular demand if I may add. It is not about what I liked or disliked in the movie technically per se, as other and better reviewers already put it out there-much like a man, it is what the movie leaves you with, should be of paramount consequence to wish to reproduce it.

~While returning from the theatre, I was suddenly down a very horrible memory lane, hitherto buried in my heart. But like it is with volcanoes, things don’t come to the surface till their time is ripe. I was very young, barely into my teens I think when I was walking towards home by myself and a man on a cycle stopped me and asked for an address on a paper. Before I could read or explain, he unzipped himself and asked me in a half mocking way “Madam, pen chahiye kya?” and he guffawed and cycled off. I was shaken beyond belief, threw the paper and ran into my home, shivering and mute for the entire evening, going numb with fear. Years have passed and I still regret not having pulled his shirt and slapped him across his face or raised an alarm and someone would have come along to teach the bastard a lesson, never mind that he was twice my size. Such dirt-bags have ego balloons that need to be pierced lest they burst on someone.

I wish I had the spunk that Silk had!

It’s a dirty world and sometimes the only way to deal with it is to raise up your sleeves, dip into the muck and splash it across the face of him who wants to tarnish you instead.

~Having made that point, picture abhi baaki hain. My first encounter with ‘The Dirty Picture’ came about while I was generally shutting down my yahoo mail one late night and the yahoo news feed spoke about the just out first look of Vidya Balan’s bold shots. I checked out six of those pictures and some comments on them and suddenly felt the very urgent need to wake up my sleeping husband so that he could tease me for the rest of my life about my dubious tendencies. Phew!

~We are digressing...oh wtf-Balan is hot! I always found her so-elegance personified in a sari and what an amazing cross-over this is. She’s a gutsy girl to pull off something as bold as this and do it with such panache. She also proved that you could be fat and yet sexy alright you need boobs too but at least the tummy and thunder thighs were ignored I have hope! I have hope! She has such an amazing vulnerable confidence that catches you even in a guarded moment. Okay, to cut a long story short-I am just blabbering and justifying in case she becomes the target of my phantasy in dreams tonight, giving competition to the dudes already there vying for their turns. “Mujhe to chadhe aise zeher ki tarah ki paani bhi peeya to aag lag gaye!”

~So the movie brought me face to face rather jism to jism more aptly with my own dirty side-not that it was hitherto latent or anything, just draped a little modestly with the veil of sweetness and sophistication “It’s a curse really!” My god, I regretted not having coins to throw towards the screen and wish I knew how to put my fingers in my mouth...for that seete of course. I so wanted to laugh out loud at all the innuendos which is so me and clap like a rickshaw-waala at the scene where she takes out orgasmic sounds when the neighbour and his wife were hitting the sack. Of course I didn’t-stupid, silly couple sitting next to me and a horny group of guys in the rows in front deterred my chutzpah and also a husband who laughs the loudest on stupid Akshay Kumar humour but found me laughing here a little too voluble. Nobody loves me!

Man, she was rocking-also made me realize that there should be categories of orgasmic sounds too just as there are of positions and stuff. Sex is so underrated when it comes to being explored-so ironically that. And the scene where she practically makes love to herself in that red lingerie-I so wished I could sneak around carrying a torch and focus on what the guys were “up” to. Why should all the fun be on-screen?

Vidya is unapologetically brazen, Naseer-the man I so adore for his refinement that I wrote a post reeking of masked lust for  him a couple of years back after I had watched him enthral a vast audience in a theatre play; he does such a fine job in being disgusting here. And 500, really??????? I am still wondering if I should raise an eyebrow at it for underestimation or overestimation. Makes you speculate if you should keep a count too, you know for reference sake, even if it is with the same man for crying out loud and God help that man. “Har admi ki liye ek aurat bane hain, agar usse bach gaye to samjho zindagi bach gaye” Thank god they were less biased against women in such numbers by remaining mum about it.

Even Imraan Hashmi, whom I otherwise loathe, managed to look appealing or perhaps I was really on an overdrive of hormones.

So I liked Delhi Belly more than Zindagi Na milege Doobara and The Dirty Picture more than Rockstar-doesn’t sound too good as an announcement being made but then wtf! I am Desi sometimes and I like my “entertainment” that’s more in the face now than of the dreamy clouds.

It also brings to light what I always believe of life-Don’t judge and of women-Don’t make them go hush-hush about their sensuality and physical desires. Why can’t we be horny and yet not slutty like most of the guys anyways are? Women who use their charms to get things done are dubbed as “loose” but then those who have the brains, use them instead of their balls to carve their niche. What you have, you use it-is a good salesman’s rule!

I have always liked Mallika Sherawat too, despite her weird dumb-assness sometimes. She does not mince words. She does not pretend to be holier than thou-this is me, take it or leave it and don’t you dare try to take by force. She’s also a slap on women who change their colours like the weather- “film ke tarah jo interval ke baad badal jaayen!”

It is important to let the woman breathe, feel free and not handcuffed by the older mindset. Let her laugh the way she wants to and run around in pace with the wind-give her the head instead to stand tall in the face of it. Don’t make her cross the limits by insisting to mark them for her. Watch not how her bosom heaves outside, watch how her heart beats within. Men are meant to be analyzed, women just adored. We are meant to be loved and not understood. Just give us that minus the criss-cross of trickery to avoid the fuckry.

“Jab zindagi ek baar milte hain to doosre baar kyon soche!”

Something that should stay with us for a long time.... 

And also this was the closest I could get to watch a 'Junglee Jawani' type flick in the theatre...so yiy, yiy, yiy!

Love and the Semblance of it!

I love cinema that make me not just look but also think. A very belated watched Rockstar did the same. Nopes, this is not a review-this is the aftermath of some churning and wriggling while watching it not in the way you think though.

I don’t take the motion pictures too seriously but I like to ponder over the food for thought that some of them sneakingly sow in my mind. These are then the movies that stay with me for a longer time. And Rockstar fanned the hitherto latent pang with the astounding love equation between Heer and Jordon-the characterisation that left me bowled over.

The love that is unconditional, that is so strong that it becomes an ache to bear and like an alchemist to all ailments-that directs all your bodily functions into pumping not blood but emotions! A love that defies reason, relations and practicality- like poetry residing in bodies-that makes or breaks, leaving you impervious to any other sensation and oblivious to any other human being!

Does such a love actually exist or it is again a gimmick of the movie makers to keep schmucks like us in the dreamy zone of hope and expectations?

My lucid mind tells me it is all crap. How can you feel so strongly for someone after meeting for a few days or post years of separation? The fast paced, realistic world and the variety it offers, reasserts my conviction that ‘No one and nothing is indispensible or irreplaceable’. But then the bent-on-general-awareness waala mind points to me of the Cupid struck suicide cases that occur where love lost souls prefer death over disjointing. Stupid people, I say-whimsical brood!

Self-love is the only and truest form of love-how can you love someone, if you don’t love yourself enough to stay alive and make true your dreams. How can love be one-sided and yet forever? How can one love another and just one person so much? Although I also feel too much education and the classy flavour debars one from entering this mindless portal as reinstated by the Rockstar. Love is the idol of the idle-to feel it raw, perhaps you need to be raw and open.

Upon deeper introspection, I felt the “what-if” trudge in with its nimble feet on the well attended, sprawling lawns of sanity and leaving its indelible footprints. What if these people have managed to experience what we block ourselves to? What if they are not immature but just more receptive of feeling sans logic, that we so lack? They are not senseless but more sensory. What if they have traversed the thin line and moved over to something greater that we with our nitty gritties of issues cannot even fathom?

Issues like-Am I being used? Does he really like me? Is there a future? What if she wants my money? We are really different people! Why hasn’t he called? and mindless more. What if what we think is love is not really it, but a little semblance that we have found and cling to it fanatically feeling that's the best we can get and thereby shut all doors to the horizon waiting to expand? 

Maybe the souls who experience that kind of pure, unadulterated love are those who never think-just love, who never get-just give and who don’t even want anything in the first place or want anything else. And then maybe again, this entire concept is the conditioning of the mind and is as plausible as the Santa Claus. So we might just as well and please refrain from hanging the hope stockings, yes even the imaginary ones, in the dim vestibules of our lonely-in-crowd minds?

And so thus my tryst with internal struggles continues-I ache to feel that love which becomes a pain to bear and not just a pain in the arse. A love that pounds within me with such throbbing that mutes every other noise of the world! And then I dismiss myself as a hopeless romantic-in love more with the feeling of being in love than persons. Love always makes me an oxymoron-I know the coherent view but I incline towards the fantastical one...I am consistently wary of the fake yet persistently experimental for the real...I pride in all my judiciousness and still secretly pine to be erroneous.

I want to solve this mystery once and for all so that hapless people don’t spend endless hours in sighing or viewing prospective romances with soul-mateish spectacles. If only we could separate the romance from love, perhaps we would define them both.

Of 'Zindagi Na Mile Dobara' and more!

It is 1 o’clock at night. I have just returned from my first night show of a movie in a year because the world was hollering about Zindagi na Milege Dobaara since a week and I thought if I won’t catch it now, I would soon probably be gasping for air or something or be labelled an outcast and deported to Alaska.

But as I was returning I was also pondering over my exact feelings about the movie. Of course there was a feel good but then there is also a tad bit of disappointment somewhere. That was also introspected and I came up with my very own bullet list again:

1. We actually had centre seats 6, 7, 8 (my nephew had also gone with my beloved and me) but the stupid seat guy made us sit at 3, 4, 5 and then came a fat aunty ji, some ten minutes late in the movie with two gawky guys dangling by her sides, made us all stand and create a ruckus and probably got us cussed under the breath by those seated behind us and despite me asserting that she’s seated her big butt on our space, they eventually gobbled up our seats and we had to settle back on her corner ones. Not that I was cribbing about those seats before, beloved was-but then the aftermath conclusion is I hate being bullied into giving what is rightly mine for no rhyme or reason. So bad start and also a nudge to beloved to remind him the umpteenth time that it is great that he is so super accommodating and all but there are times in life when he has to give up the ‘chalta hain’ attitude that surfaces EVERY where. I tell him people are using him for his niceness and he only says ‘Chalo, kisse ke kaam to aa raha hoon!’ Grrrr-believe me, it is not so “awwww...” every time.

2. Facebook was screaming and reeking with praises of the flick and how it was changing lives-some scores of very flattering updates were about the movie. I remember a cute blogger friend also updating this as her status. “Those who liked Delhi Belly and not ZNMD are sick.”

I did not dislike it really but just to be sure, I took the thermometer into my mouth to check if I was-98.4 it says and along with that in asterisk, are the invisible words that only I can perceive- ‘You are over healthy, could you please do something about it?’

I guess over expectations nipped the outcome a bit. Lesson learnt also that one must watch movies that we look forward to before the reviews flow in because you might not read the movie buzz section in the newspaper or avoid the pompous critics on television giving their ratings but you can run, you deny but you can’t escape the reviewers on Fb-count me as one of them too.

Zindagi Na Milege Dobaara:

Firstly, why such an excruciatingly painful title Madam Zoya Akhtar? I mean agreed there have been worst-Kabhi Alvida Na Kehne, Kuch Kuch Hota Hain, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam it’s now 1. 19 a.m. please forgive me for my tired memory and hence not coming up with more of such obnoxious names, I shall devote a post on this some other time to make up. But fortunately for those flicks the names kinda gelled well with the mouth. Zindagi-makes me just stop short at that...“Zindagi” for ZNMD is too weird an abbreviation and a very inconvenient for the lips.

Please don’t get me wrong here my friends- I have nothing against wholesome family entertainers-they’ve built our cinema on that. Look at The Johars and The Chopras achieving cult statuses by selling larger than life dreams. You come out hoping for a Raj to bump into or imagining flowers blooming at every encounter to turn it into love at first sight and then dance on well choreographed chartbuster numbers in Swiss locales, wearing heavily designed outfits at your sangeet. I never thought I’d be saying this but I now think-Isn’t it time we grew up?

I mean agreed ZNMD sounds such a fabulous proposition if it could really come true. If all men could go to Spain or even a poor old Singapore for bachelors party and then bump into beautiful scuba divers and have one night stands with good girls and with no strings attached! If we could meet up school friends after years and get together for such longish time as though nothing’s changed! If we could just dive into water or jump off a plane or run before a mad bull which I feel many do anyways in this part of Uttar Pradesh with rampant street animals making a go at your rear side at their whims and fancies and feel that we are living again. If only we could just as easily turn down marriage proposals without caring a damn about the feelings of those involved especially family and become Runaway Brides and grooms! Yes, we’d be kings of wishful thinking!

The Times of India recently informed of a study that revealed that romance novels lead to unstable mental health for women making them either over-the-top expectant or wanton to materialize such as they read, in their own mundane lives. So I guess it is time we told the movie makers to stop messing with our heads and please don’t give us larger than life ideas that seldom see the daylight. I mean till we craved for houses and families like Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Ghum it was alright-please don’t make us yearn for a life like what you show here! On a personal note perhaps I am also a bit bitter because I have always wanted to live like that-be on the move, new experiences around every corner-may be this mad post is just a response to the ‘sour grapes’ syndrome of the fox who is tempted by the grapes on the vine and then raises a snooty nose in disdain when it realises that they are beyond its reach.

Then I am also pondering that maybe it is the small city deficiency syndrome-may be life is such in metros of Delhi, Mumbai and the likes. But then we also have friends in these places that are equally stuck up in the grinds of the everyday earning of bread and butter that I suppose they strive to be served in gold plates adorned with precious diamonds, for their work schedules are so maddening that enjoying what they are reaping is postponed till some other time. Enough is never enough!

The movie-ZNMD was less of a movie and more of an experience, a journey you made with them. Of course I laughed and smiled and ogled at the three gorgeous and sexiest men in the Indian film industry and wanted to be Laila at many points yes, the smooch point topping the list. But then I also felt it all was too beyond our reach. I mean what could possibly have been the outcome of life for the trio after such a road trip-back to the grind or can they afford to party like that forever? How can you keep living Zindagi when zindagi makes 101 demands out of you to slog to survive? We all love holidays, we all love to be free without responsibilities, do things that make ME happy at the end of the day and period. But is it really possible? To just be with no strings attached?

It’s not that people like those don’t exist who live up their lives-they do, but their number is too miniscule to want everyone to be and behave like them. Possibly like a rare ‘Salman’-who gives up his obligations to an unborn child and his unwed mother for he never really grew up to want to grow up? And then also-do Hrithik, Farhan and Abhay really look as though they were out of college just four years back? Despite all their hotness, please! There were many shades of Dil Chahta Hai and The Hangover there and also some other movies which I could not put my finger on. I loved Farhan’s recital of poetry, loved the Senorita song and ached to be buried in the tomatoes too. And as far as the lip lock was concerned-we’ve seen Hrithik do better- remembering here the Dhoom kiss with Aishwarya that was oh-so-awesome!

On the other hand was Delhi Belly, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Again male bonding formed the crux with three guys as the protagonists. I read many reviews condemning the toilet humour and offensive language yet there was a novelty attached to it. The unique blend of English and Hindi that did not look artificial or put on in anyway-no songs, no intervals, no pretence, no dreams-just shit happening as it really does happen in actuality sometimes. There were genuinely moments when I laughed my head off my seat.

Despite all my aversions to crassness in real life, if you ask me which is closer home to me-I’d say there are more chances of me finding myself in trouble with the mafia and hear the worst of F and all the rest of the alphabet words than finding myself with a sexy finance man, who’d be ready to give up his job to go away with me to Morocco and the likes and sing Senorita there for the rest of our lives. I know what you are thinking-is ke liye tereko Katrina types hona padega-but then even hypothetically it is a weird possibility. I also know that you are going to tell me ‘It is just a movie-itna sochte nahi hain’-but you know, one of those days when a movie makes you-THINK!

After having blah-blahed about it all for three pages and still having you hear, let me also say this-our opinions of movies are formed not just by the content and merit of the movie itself but what frame of mind we are in when we venture to dekho them. I remember a couple friend and us went once to see this suspense thriller by the actor who played Meheer No. 2 in the television serial ‘Kyonki Saas bhi kabhi Bahu thi’ and laughed our guts out at the ham scenes and blatant and obnoxious over acting and omg-dialogues that were dissected and imitated-it remains one of my most enjoyable movie experiences ever! I don’t know what made me write a movie review for I generally don’t. Just that ZNMD makes you wanna be free and when you can’t, you wanna tell the world it is an impractical and bad idea! ;-)