ReviewMaster Haha – Aisha!

Cut to a small school in the rural village of Delhi, in a run-of-the-mill-opulent classroom.

Masterji: Children - match the following. Come on!

Column A – Males

1. Loaded, social misfit with all the charms of a donkey in heat
2. Fashionably balding, oh-so-sensitive, bordering on feminine, guy (Also loaded!)
3. Hunk straight out of a magazine centre spread (Looks loaded!)
4. The odd BPO guy (This guy is not loaded!)

Column B – Females

1. Fashionable, social butterfly, bordering on arrogant, girl (Loaded – you get the picture!)
2. Size zero hottie straight out of … a movie, perhaps!
3. Misguided, naïve, small town girl with small town aspirations
4. Loaded, Social Miss-fit and appendage to Female # 1

Masterji: Now children, match the above and tell me the answer.

Students: Masterji, Masterji, the answer is: a-4, b-1, c-2 and d-3.

Masterji: Excellent, But if you have gotten it wrong like the director of Aisha, Rajshree Ojha, then you better go back and revise your Mills and Boons!

This is exactly what RO (Rajshree Ojha and not Reverse Osmosis) did or did not do. Painful, especially when the audience has to sit though all possible incorrect combinations of the “Match the following”.

I mean combinations like a-1. Why? That was never going to work. We know that. Or b-3 and a-3. Those were particularly jarring ones. Gosh!

However, there are a few positives from the movie. The music is fantabulous, which begs the question – why couldn’t RO release just the music album? Ok, just one positive, I can’t think of any more!

ReviewMaster Haha!

(If you feel this ending was abrupt – try seeing Aisha!)

Quips on the Go!

MPs have announced a pay hike for themselves. They have also asked that 1000 Crores of scandal-related-income be tax exempted. Where is the logic in taxing tax-payers’ money they ask.

Votes for Rajya Sabha candidates are going cheap. JMM is quoting Rs. 1 Crore per vote while BJP is slightly cheaper at Rs. 50 Lakhs + a car! You may want to pick up a couple of votes before inflation strikes. (As you can see I don’t have the fancy Re. symbol yet!)

Kalmadi is facing the music for taking the ‘Commonwealth’ Games literally. He must have felt it was common practice to siphon off the wealth, from the games. Silly mistake, can we worry about things like vegetables now?

Speaking of food, a collection of very, very rich, well fed, MPs are debating the issue of price-rise in Parliament. Increase in levels of debate, decreases inflation through release of hot air.

Also, 400 students were recently held up and arrested for Partying. This is a serious crime, if you do not take a gazillion permissions, no-objection-certificates and permits from an equal number of Government agencies. So start planning for your 50^th anniversary now!

In other related news, the Indian Government has announced that it will set up a National Commission for Boring Societies, which will present recommendations on how to reduce parties and party related crimes (Political parties exempted!).

The mother of Scarlett Keeling fears that she could be murdered by the Goa Minister’s nexus of crime. Which came as something of an extreme shock to the people of this country; people who have a hard time imagining that crime and politics could go hand-in-hand. 

The largest photo on Earth!

70 Billion Pixels Budapest - The largest photo on Earth - created by 360world.eu

Amazing photo of the city of Budapest. Zoom in to see the minutest of details!

I Luv Hate Storys!

The recent Imran Khan hit, Bollywood blockbuster, has been tanked by critics. But despite that the movie has been a runaway success, so much so that top actors like Katrina and Priyanka are now vying for roles alongside our hip and happening, Imran Khan. Who it seems, was on the verge of being plucked out after Luck proved unlucky!

On IMDB, IHLS has 5.3 stars.

This critic has given the movie 3 out of 5 stars without saying a good word about the movie. Every other newspaper critic literally said the same thing.

But, (there is always a ‘but’ coming) most critics and viewers have missed the layer of duality that was woven in (might I say perfectly) with the plot. In fact, it was done all too well. I realized it, and henceforth, I will make it my mission to spread the message embedded in the movie!

Jay Dhingra (Or some totally not-so-gay name of that sorts!) is this irresistible brat, who unknowingly works his charms on Simran, a die-hard romantic and a colleague. And they live happily ever after. In short that is the story.

But on deeper introspection you realize, that there is a layer of complexity hidden beneath this misleading simplicity. All through the movie, the director ridicules the Yash Raj brand of romance. The usual, dupatta-in-the-wind, pink dresses, sarson da khet, guitars and caps, misty-eyed looks, candy floss and other sugary stuff. And, suddenly, lo and behold, the director does a volte-face and does exactly the same general stuff. The same usual, sad songs, teary heroines, tough decisions ('Luv' related mind you!), proposals on bended knee, flowers, pink sarees, chocolates and other miscellaneous sugary stuff.

Was he (The director – Punit Malhotra) really mocking the sugar-coated romance? Or not? He critiques and vociferously supports the same brand of Yash Raj romance. Nice.

A lot of critics and viewers naturally missed this layer of complexity and termed the movie as rubbish! But it wasn’t. It explores the philosophy and mysticism of duality, in the way the human mind perceives complex emotions; with equal measures of like and dislike, good and bad, yin and yang, night and day… (Not to be confused with ‘Knight and Day’ – which is another gem BTW!)

PS: Inception may have borrowed heavily from this movie!

Man v/s Food

What attracted my attention this week was a new reality-TV show on “Discovery Travel and Living” by the name “Man v/s Food”. We all wish we could hog on all the artery-clogging, heart-busting, greasy fried food and yet have a clean lipid profile. But that is not the way God designed it all. Shucks!

Help is at hand though. This TV show caters to your innermost food fetishes! The host holds the record for the biggest human stomach, well he must, since he puts away, literally truckloads of food with ease. The amount he consumes will put any 3^rd world country to shame!

America is dotted with food joints that have a challenge item on the menu. Adam, the host, devours these ginormous helpings as a part of the challenge! By most standards even the normal helpings are a challenge to most people, if not Asians. Challenge items can feed a small family, for a week! This is the scale we are talking about.

The challenge starts will Adam sitting behind a mountain of meat (This is no place for a vegetarian to be!), barely visible, smacking his lips and limbering up his esophagus! Adam begins by thrusting a bucket-load of food down his neck. By the end of the hour Adam would have devoured a goat or the better part of a large cow with a side order of a vegetable garden!

If you are still watching you can’t help but imagine the kind of strain this puts on the city’s sewage system the next morning. Heck, I dare not imagine the strain Adam puts on his lower orifices when he unloads it all. A mud volcano comes to mind! Holy Shit! (I need some time to purge that image from my frontal lobe!)

Bleeding-edge Politics!

We here at the Morning Haha know that our attempts at humor bring tears to even the most hardened of war-criminals. Nevertheless, we do believe that it is the ‘attempt’ that matters. Success still eludes us, but we keep trying. Maybe, a change in strategy is what we need.

A change in strategy is exactly what helped Mamata Banerjee achieve her objectives. Tears are the nuclear weapon of human emotions. As Mr. Pranab Mukherjee (and men from around the world, including the Arctic) will most definitely attest to, the moment the mushroom cloud of tears erupts, logic, rationality, good-and-bad, right-and-wrong are the first victims to be decimated. Resources, history, precedence and planning die of radiation fallout. Eventually a nuclear winter sets in.

These bleeding-edge techniques have usually been confined to the domestic scene. This is probably the first time in recent history that this weapon has been deployed in the political landscape.

Our political pundits agree that this may soon become a weapon of choice for the politically inclined. We predict that we will soon see tears being employed in courts, parliaments, TV studios (Wait! We already have that!), processions and legislative assemblies. This is just the beginning. Sobb Sobb.

Not an Intelligence failure … they said!

“The Pune blast was not the result of any intelligence failure but an 'insidious' planting of a bomb in a 'soft' target establishment, Union Home Minister P Chidambaram said.”

Whoa, not so fast Eddie!

If this is not a failure, I shudder to think what would an actual intelligence failure be.

Maybe we are being too hard on the old guy. Maybe this was a success after all. Maybe they alerted the local authorities a couple of days in advance. Nope that did not happen. Maybe they asked prime targets in Pune to be on the alert. That did not happen either.

Maybe they did warn the old, respected home minister in time for him to take cover under his desk, in New Delhi. Probable.

For the benefit of those who are linguistically challenged, like yours truly, ‘insidious’ means ‘beguiling’, ‘treacherous’ and ‘producing serious harm’. This proves that the home ministry is hard at work to come up with (not plans to counter terror attacks) better worded statements post the mayhem.

We need to give credit where it is due. And it is definitively due here. We were not dished out the stale “I salute the indomitable spirit of the people of City X”. This is a bigger relief than you think, by the way!

Yet another IIT graduate lay dead, while our intelligence agencies celebrated their ‘success’ with the home ministry. Yet another terror attack, while ‘Aman ki Asha’ continues to spread ‘Asha’ through its song, dance and fart sessions!

WTF?

Is this fair? Is this justifiable? Are we not forgetting something?

TOI on the left hand side features a couple of articles on terrorism in India. The first article talks about over 700 terrorists in J&K waiting to kill and maim innocent civilians in the name of religious war. The second article talks of a young, successful IIT graduate whose life, love and family was riddled with bullet holes, by the 26/11 perpetrators.

On the same page is ‘Aman ki asha’, the grand TOI initiative to bring the people of the India and Pakistan together. Their argument is that the establishment is different from the people of Pakistan. People are essentially similar, culturally and emotionally. Hence we can be friends. No harm done!

I can almost picture a crazed L-e-T terrorist having fits of laughter. They will take this not only as another sign of weakness but also as an opportunity to further their designs. This initiative will have a real positive impact on terrorist confidence. Way to go!

Coming back to the point of ‘being friends’. Ultimately, it is the people of the nation who are responsible for a nation’s misdeeds. They are not different from their nation’s establishment. The uber-romantic notion of Jai-Veeru-dosti between India and Pakistan is counter-productive and directionless.

Will this stop another smart IIT graduate from being gunned down? Will this make the crazed L-e-T terrorist any less crazed? Will this bring any real peace, even for a month, week or day? I sincerely doubt.

Friendship is between equals. We … are no longer equals!

God–Phone Descends!

All hail the new God of all phones, including, yes, including the now dated iPhone. Google was already the God of search engines, it now has transcended into mobile operating systems. Google-God has now taken the competition to various fruity vendors of over-priced, malfunctioning, computing hardware.

Let us also take this moment to announce the demise of Microsoft’s mobile computing platform – The Windows Mobile. Even the much-awaited Windows Mobile 7 is going to look like road-kill compared to Android 2.1. Windows Mobile is now relegated to the history books. A moment of silence please, guys!

The God-Phone touts a 3.7 inch AMOLED touch screen display, a 5MP camera, Android 2.1, 1GHz Snapdragon processor, active noise cancellation, voice-enabled search, 512MB RAM and a 4GB memory card apart from the usual bells and whistles. To top it all, the sweet hardware is from HTC. It is bank-robbery at $529.

The sad part is that this God-phone (Google calls it super phone) will not descend into India, at least not now. I, for one will be eagerly waiting for my rendezvous with God.

Check out these links to get acquainted with God!

Link 1 – CNET news page

Link 2 – Google Nexus One home page