Notes

That is the question I’ll try to answer in this post. I am no accomplished film critic and my thoughts might look to you, and probably to me too a year later, naive.. You don’t need an extraordinary, innovative or intelligent story to make your movie stand out. Now don’t get me wrong- if you have a good story, your job is already half-done; what I am saying is that it is not absolutely mandatory to have one. Take Kill Bill, for instance: it was made on just one word ‘revenge’ and carried a pretty lame story. A badass woman, who is almost murdered by the gangsters she works with, comes back to to kill everyone to take her revenge. The Ajay Devgn starrer Singham had a story better than that! And still, Kill Bill is rightly considered a Tarantino masterpiece. Even King’s Speech had an ordinary story, that of a King learning to deliver public speeches. ...

I have never met an unconventional Indian. By unconventionality, I don’t mean reckless; I am not talking about a person who does not take decisions by his mind but by his heart. What I mean is that Indians generally are really reluctant when it comes to thinking out of the box. Let me share with you two anecdotes before getting into the issue. I was returning from a trip to Jaisalmer a day after New Year ’11. We (which included my parents and my little sister) were in a taxi which was taking us to Jodhpur and the road was passing through the desert. That was when I saw an auto rickshaw (a usual one, like the ones you see on the roads in Delhi except that it was painted white) which had three foreigners inside. One of them was driving and the other two were in the back- their luggage was tied on the top of the auto. The sight aroused some curiosity in me and I enquired my taxi driver. He told me that these fellows (like a few others) had hired the auto in Jaisalmer and were driving it all the way to Kanyakumari (a quick search on Google maps puts the distance between the two endpoints to about 2700kms)! I was amazed. ...

I left Adobe a few months back and there is one aspect of their business model that I always wanted to write about. I’d rather get my thoughts out and ‘move on in life’, so to speak! Trust me, this is not an account of a frustrated ex-employee! And my thoughts are not about the product I worked on there- I’ll keep that for a later post. First of all, this is how I would rank the software companies in contemporary times: ...

I wrote this long ago for a friend’s blog, as a guest writer. Here’s the original post. Given an opportunity to write something for Sumit’s blog, there are many anecdotes that I can share. But there is this one incident that infuriated me more than any other prank or crime in stupidity that Periwal has committed till date. I will write about it and chances are high that this post might never see the light of day (on his blog) but if it does, well, I’ll feel as if a burden has been lifted from upon me! ...

I have already resigned from Adobe, the current being my last week in office. Because of this, I don’t have a lot on my plate and was heavily bored before I, in almost desperation for change, left for Kasauli last Thursday at about 4:30pm. Kasauli was there in a small ‘drive destinations around Delhi’ list that I maintain- I ‘picked’ Kasauli from that list, mainly, because driving there would be a 2-day trip which was all I was looking for in the crude summers. ...

A few days ago, for some reasons, I was reminded of a night-out that I had gone to when I was in fourth year in DCE. The night-out was so awesome that it really deserves a blog post! This is how the scene began. One fine night, just some time before the last day of our last semester, Arpit began talking to me about how many different places were there in Delhi that I, being a non-Delhiite, should’ve had visited before leaving college. Among the places he mentioned, I liked one called Chanakyapuri- there is a road there called Shanti Path which is home to many embassies in India. The road is flanked on both sides by trees and is (obviously) a posh and high-security area. Even though I had once passed through there, the idea of going there on a night-out excited me. I wasn’t really sure that Arpit was serious until the next day when he and Prashant called me up to discuss the plan for the night! We arranged two bikes- we didn’t have any of our own- and included another friend of ours called Ashutosh. ...

I spent an almost half hour day before yesterday, trying to come up with a good blog post topic; in the end, this is the best I could manage! I’ve been to Bangalore couple of times. I first went there for about fifteen days around the New Year which fell during my first year in college. I was just seventeen and I enjoyed that trip as any teenager would’ve. I visited various popular places (in and around Bangalore) such as Mysore, Lal Bagh, the three parallel roads (MG, Brigade and Commercial street) etc.: places that I would probably avoid going to at this age! I fell in love with the city and later in fourth year, when the placement season began, I was hoping to land a job in a firm based out of Bangalore. That didn’t happen and I was wondering when I would go back there. ...

This happened a long time ago: the weekend of September 10 last year. I didn’t feel the need to write about it, simply because there was nothing special about it. I’ll devote a post to it nonetheless so that I have one less point on the ‘blogging topics’ draft I’ve saved on Gmail! We were four people (Samrat, Anuj and Rahul, apart from me) on two bikes (my Classic 350 and Anuj’s Apache RTR) and we left Ghaziabad on Saturday morning at about 6am. We reached Mussoorie around 5pm and apart from a stretch on a toll road (about 75kms long) which begins just after Meerut, the road conditions were pathetic, to say the least, throughout. ...

I have heard many people (including my father) bragging about how bad the traffic condition is in their city and how difficult it is to drive there. Their favourite line is ‘If you’ve driven in my city X, you can drive anywhere in India’! To all such people, I extend my kind invitation to test their driving skills in Noida or, for that matter, in Uttar Pradesh once! The people are highly impatient when they are out driving on the road. The shared-auto drivers and rickshaw-walas, on the other hand, behave as if the roads belong to their father! They change lanes or stop their vehicles (to pick up or drop passengers) in the middle of the road on their own free will and ignore you even if you are travelling at 70kmph, even if you have to use disc brakes to avoid a collision and even if you are raping the horn of your vehicle like a maniac! Moreover, the red light signals stand merely as an indication that you might want to halt when the light is red- you don’t really have to if you don’t want to (this stands true for drivers of motorcycles, cars, buses and trucks alike: rickshaw-walas never stop at red lights!). Most motorcycle riders never wait at a red light unless there is traffic policeman visible somewhere or they are locked in a place from where it is difficult to manoeuvre their vehicle forward. ...

This post may contain a few, but not big, spoilers! I began writing this post yesterday, just after I got up after completing my ‘preparation’ for the Academy Awards ’12. But by now, the awards have already been announced! Still, here’s a gist of my preparation and a wee bit more. I had decided some time ago that I would watch all the movies that had been nominated for the Oscars this year- that is when I began my so-called preparation! As with college semester examinations, I could not complete the entire syllabus; rather I am contented with what I could finish. Below is the list of the movies I managed to watch: ...