Retrieved via the Wayback Machine. Originally posted by FatCat

How men can’t take their hands of their “golees”. How Bombay has changed so much, even Mulund is now a happening place. Why a credit card is like a note from your mother.

Some of the funniest gags from Kunal Roy Kapoor’s stand-up act at the David Sasoon gardens last night. Tragic then that I had heard all of them before.

Six months or so ago I sat through a Kunal Roy Kapoor gig at “Starters and More” and laughed my guts out. Last night I was happy to see him to take the stage again. Only to hear all of those jokes verbatim. Except for a couple of laughs, which I admit I could have forgotten, everything else was a rerun. And of the clearly new stuff some were direct lifts off Jerry Seinfeld’s eponymous TV show.

Kunal Roy Kapoor has a lot of talent and, pertinently for a comic, an engaging delivery style. But last night’s gig made me feel a little ripped off. Sure people were laughing. After all Seinfeld normally broadcasts at some 3 in the morning or so when all the three people in India watching TV are introspecting to FTV. That too the show is on Zee Cafe with a viewer base of several people, by which I mean 5.

Stand up comedy is a wonderful art form that is under-served in Bombay. But last night’s show, Boman Irani in the audience notwithstanding, was a severe let down and does not augur well for the art. I guess I will have to go back to my Comedy Channel Tivo rips for some good original laughs.

Sob.

Comments

Comment by Anurag on February 8, 2006 @ 10:37 am

Seinfeld is on Mon-Fri at 7:30 PM on Star World these days. I am surprised he could directly lift off stuff!

Comment by akshay on February 8, 2006 @ 10:56 am

You have - Comedy Channel Tivo rips ? I want,

I saw Art , a poorbox production which is an English Comedy - actually it was adapted from a West End play. May be I’ll review it today.

Comment by Bewra Kekra on February 8, 2006 @ 11:32 am

Actually, if you want to catch Seinfeld, it’s on at 7:30 pm on Star World.

Sarcasm’s nice, but when you get your facts messed up, people aren’t laughing the way you intended them to.

Comment by FatCat on February 9, 2006 @ 1:54 am

@akshay: Will give. Its all on a hard drive. Some 4 GB worth. Sometime after 15th Feb perhaps we can meet up.

@Bewra / Anurag: I stand corrected! But you get the drift of what I said I hope..

Retrieved via the Wayback Machine. Originally posted by FatCat

I had a problem each with the movies I watched yesterday. One was directed by Mahesh Bhatt who has less consistency than he has hair on his head. The other starred Jennifer Aniston who will forever be the spoilt one from Friends. For me atleast. So going into watching both movies back to back at the MMB I had to spent the whole train ride from home isolating both sentiments.

Now I am not a professional movie watcher or critic (though I may review them like one!). I can’t tell my Kurosawa from my Ajinomoto. So I went in expecting a good story telling experience. Not looking out for the editing, the sound technology and all that jazz.

Both Arth and The Good Girl are stories about relationship. Wihle the former concentrates on the aftermath of infidelity, the latter nicely depicts the motivation to go bed-hopping.

Arth is one of those rare Hindi movies I have seen that has secured both critical and commercial success. Not to mention the phenomenal popularity of the songs in it. The story speaks of a jilted wife whose husband has run into the arms of a movie star. The wife goes through a gamut of emotions from depression to anger to loneliness and finally to independence. In the meantime the movie star herself abandons him branding him eternally untrustworthy.

Arth is not a slick movie. And it is not meant to be. The directly clearly wants to portray the characters and how they cope with the situations they are put into. No time for camera angles and life-like sets and panoramic shots. There are clearly good guys and the bad guys in Arth and really noone who struggles with both sides of an issue. An over-simplification perhaps.

Shabana Azmi as the jilted wife is excellent but maybe pulled it off a tad too effortlessly. Arth belongs to her. Smita Patil fits the role to a T. Khulbhushan Kharbandha shines in his role of the infidel husband but, I dare say, not by much. The screenplay does drag a bit in places but the Jagjit Singh ghazals help to tide over some of these patches. The songs come late in the movie but are well worth the wait and are undoubtedly classics.

The Good Girl takes the same overall theme of infidelity but this time makes the woman the adulterer and spends more time talking about what led to her having an affair with a co-worker. The great thing for me about this movie was how you could love and hate ALL the characters in it. At some point all of them beg sympathy and then a little later evoke loathing.

Jennifer Aniston slogs through a deadbeat life working in a retail store. The only thing more deadbeat is her marriage to a pothead painter, played by John C Reilly. She has been trying with no success to have a baby and thinks her husband has a problem with his swimmers.

When a new co-worker played by Jake Gyllenhaal joins her store she sees the opportunity to meet somebody new and exciting. All this is depicted with excellent subtlety. Soon she is having an affair, sleeping with her husband’s best friend to keep him from talking about it, and finally gets pregnant.

The movie ends, depressingly perhaps, with her in her old job, back with her husband, a baby and all her skeletons burried for good. It is not a story of personal triumph like Arth. A woman tries to break out of her opressed surroundings but fails and goes back to the drudgery.

All the characters are excellent. Jennifer Aniston was a revelation for me in a dark and unglamorous role. The Good Girl is a good movie which does not try too hard.

I recommend both movies.

Comments

Comment by charukesi on February 7, 2006 @ 12:36 pm

fatcat, it is believed that Mahesh Bhatt bsed Arth on his own life - Smita Patil being Parveen Babi in real life.

Comment by Akshaya on February 7, 2006 @ 9:40 pm

Boss your understanding of cinema is so bad that either you shouldn’t watch films at all, or should watch about thousand more before you start even thinking about them critically. Writing is an altogether different matter.

- Akshaya

Retrieved via the Wayback Machine. Originally posted by FatCat

I must admit I was pleasantly taken aback when I saw the pleasant stage setup inside the Horniman Circle. I had no idea that there was a such a sumptuous setting hidden away inside that traffic island. So it was with a reasonable spring in my step that I walked in to watch the Pravah Theatre Laboratory perform their unique version of Hamlet.

Now Shakespeare, as we all know, was an englishman who wore wired up collars and had a luxurious moustache. He was the author of many plays, some of which have gained worldwide fame as a ridiculously difficult school textbooks with weird punctuation. Alas thine musteth have cometh acroth some of them in thcool.

Of his plays Hamlet is undoubtedly one of the most famous. It is about a danish prince Hamlet, son of King Hamlet (or is it the othe way around) who avenges the death of his father. Hamlet, the father, was killed in treachery while Hamlet, his son went off to fight Fortinbras , son of norwegian King Fortinbras (unrelated).

Now what Pravah has done is convert this play into a fusion trilingual format with English, Kannada and Hindi melding in bits of Bharatanatyam and Yakshagana. I must admit if one does not have a background to Hamlet the play can be a little confusing. Also not being a native (or any other) speaker of Hindi a lot of the Hindi spoken portions completely left me stranded. But thankfully I was sitting next to my friend R from Egmore in Chennai and we mutually comforted each other during those moment of duress.

The concept itself was executed very well. The set was simple and utilitarian. The actors were well rehearsed and some of the exchanges had a slick choregraphed quality to them. And this was no mean feat with all the characters played in multiple languages and with periodic Yakshagana segments.

The use of a female character to play Prince Hamlet in parts was a little unsettling in the beginning but grew on me as the play progressed. Knowing the story beforehand really helped and otherwise the play may have been a bit too complex for the layman.

For me the highlights were the excellent use of the set with a window in the background screen for effect, the energetic intense Yakshagana segments and the excellent and vocal support.

The murder of Claudius was depicted through Yakshagana with an intensity that only complemented the bard’s genius.

On the flipside some of the scenes seemed unecessarily abstracted but that is a question of personal taste and I am sure theatre connoisseurs will have relished it. Also the dialogue delivery by the english Claudius was completely lacking punctuation, not unlike a Saravana Bhavan waiter rattling off the menu.

So overall it was a good show. Well executed with no apparent glitches anywhere. Some of the actors were extremely talented and I wish them success with their plans to carry this project around the country.

Now if I only knew what some of those Hindi words meant. R from Chennai next to me still can’t figure out what the word “Khatputhli” means. Frankly neither can I.

P.S. It may be good to indicate what language requirements some of these plays might have.

Retrieved via the Wayback Machine. Originally posted by FatCat

Every morning thousands upon thousands of people wake up to their cofees, masala teas, uthapaams, croissants and broadsheet. There are few pleasures greater than falling off the bed, running into the fridge and assorted furniture before reaching the front door, and sweeping the day’s paper off the door mat. Personally my waking moment is defined by the instance when the mist in my eyes clear out to reveal airport strikes, cricket scores and the like.

So it was a mite symbolic that my personal Kala Ghoda experience began at perhaps the most important print media location in India. The TOI-VT heritage walk was scheduled to set off from outside the Times of India building, across the road from VT, at half past four on a Saturday evening. By the time I reached there was a fair sized crowd outside the main entrance into the building. But something seemed amiss.

Milling around the entrance into the building were a battalion or so of policemen. Now in my experience heritage walkers are probably the most docile of people. They walk around, looking at things, asking questions in little voices like “Oh and what stone this?”. So unless there was a sudden surge of historical zeal among the guardians of the law something was out of place. For a brief ironic moment I was standing outside the office of a newspaper complete lost to what was happening around me.

But soon a few co-bloggers informed that there had been a demonstration of some sort outside the building but now the police had cleared out everyone. Leaving the path clear for a largish group of heritage walkers all under the expert guidance of Abha and Shradha.

After the initial huddle around the walk-leads I must admit a little dissapointment. The walk would only cover the archives office of the Times of India and then proceed to the Victoria Terminus building before closing. Hardly the multi-building, street-stomping experience I had expected it to be.

But the walk-leads seemed kicked about it and it was a nice lively bunch of walkers. The cheer was infectious and I stepped into the building feeling enthusiastic if a little tentative.

After a quick walk down through the brown-marbelled main corridor and an elevator ride we were in the innards of the building. Times staff swiftly guided us to the Times Archive in a corner of the floor. On entering we were handed over to the energetic and passionate deputy manager of the archives.

Mr. Koshy was an institution of sorts with some 36 years of experience in the archives. Now a motley bunch of intruders into your office would drive anyone wild. Koshy, however, seemed to take considerable joy in quickly sketching out the history of the archives and showing us how the data preservation, microfilming and extraction processes worked. Soon, in his thick jovial malayali accent, he showed us what most of us had come for. Microfilm images of some of the more memorable newsaper pages. I was able to see blow-ups of the Independence Day issue from 1947 and the 1862 issue when the “Times of India” masthead was adopted.

Little has changed in Bombay going by those old broadsheets. There were advertisements for houses on rent, wines, beers and spirits, and even a ship for the exclusive transport of opium. Even back then the city knew its priorities. There was also a curious little ad for a second hand harmonium. Ah the great vices of Mumbai: wine, song and err.. housing.

We then walked around the office to the reading room, one wall of which was lined with framed representations of first-issue covers. One of the women walkers seemed to know her way around the office and even seemed to know some of the people on the covers, some popular even today. But everyone was flummoxed by the pretty woman on the first Femina. In my infinite wisdom I suggested it could be Rita Faria, our first Miss World. I was immediately, and with uncommon severity for heritage walker, rebuked by the well informed woman-walker. Note to self: Do not publicly volunteer information to elder women especially if Rita Faria went to school with them for ten years. (What are the odds.)

Note: The archive is available for public use. Contact the office directly.

Next stop: Victoria Terminus: The building they call the Taj of the Raj.

After profusely thanking Mr. Koshy we marched out, down and up through the subway and in through the large main gates of a most breath-taking building. The grandeur, gothic architecture and brilliant story-telling by the walk-leads transported us to an age gone by and evoked the “Victoria” term in us. (Hehe. sorry.)

While any idiot can stand in front of the Terminus building and be overawed by the sheer size and overall opulence of the building, it needs a keen eye and a good guide to really help you appreciate the building for all its worth. Both Abha and Shradha knew all there was to know about the World Heritage Monument and we soon broke into two groups for enunciatory ease.

Shradha talked us through the earliest history of the terminus when it was merely a locomotive shed down to the modern day when it has become a sad untended relic in the hands of the evil Central Railways.

The railways have played a great role in the development of Bombay into a commercial nerve centre over the last two centuries or so. From the day the the first train pioneered the 21 miles from Boribunder to Thane the railways have been a central part of the Mumbai soul. And the Victoria Terminus building embodies this story of progress and advancement. The architect, Frederick William Stevens, has tried to capture every possible nuance of the history, geography, people, flora and fauna in the intricate details of the building.

While it is easy to be carried away by the domes, the windows and the imposing sculpted busts on the frontage of the building, there is much delight hidden away in the small ornamental carvings topping the arches and columns. Squirrels, owls and other small birds and creatures are sculpted with fascinating detail. The exterior of the building alone evoked many oohs and aahs from the walkers.

Once we stepped inside the small square central atrium the feeling of awe was complete. We were standing right underneath the imposing central octagonal dome and on all four sides a cantilevered stone staircase snaked all the way to the top. The way Stevens had reduced the 8 sides of the octagonal dome to a square base was sheer architectural genius. Anyone who had walked in then would have seen a bunch of forty or so people all standing motionless with gaping mouths at the view that soared above.

So it was a complete dampener of spirits that a building of such splendour has been closed to the public. Not to mention that photography was dissalowed. Given a choice the 40 or so of us would have happily shifted the Central Railways office ourselves then and there. If only to catch a little more of the wonders the building held in secret inside.

As we walked out of the VT gates I must admit that VT did make up for the somewhat short mandate of the Heritage Walk. Shradha and Abha deserve heaps of credit for their patience and diligence in making us appreciate the finer details of the architecture, the history of the building in particular and the story of the city at large. Mail them on heritagewalks@hotmail.com to participate in some of the frequent walks they organize all over Bombay.

In the meantime I was off to Horniman Circle to catch Hamlet.