Johnny Depp, rainy day, no one else but fries and coke for company...Alice In Wonderland was just amazing! He's one person who reinvents himself every single time and with such perfection! If only people learnt a thing or two from him...

On a different note, Saif Ali Khan as Castle? Still digestible. Kajol as Beckette? WHAT?!

Ekti Taraar Khonje

Lately I’ve been going through the phase of cutting people out of my life for a while. It’s my aversion-to-communication phase. I’m also loving being alone after a long time.
Being the sucker for new experiences that I am, I decided to go for a movie at a multiplex alone today. Doesn’t sound like such a task, does it? Well try it on your own sometime. It’s quite a task. Usually, people attach going for movies with merriment in a group. I personally think, though, that watching movies alone can be fun. So I did what I was planning for a while.
I went to watch “Ekti Taraar Khonje” at Fame today. I never thought I’d be one of those sad people ending up at a movie hall all alone but hey, I wasn’t sad. I could concentrate a lot more on the movie and I loved the fact that I was the independent woman who doesn’t care who’s sitting around her. It just means to me that I’m a lot more secure about myself than most people who insist on having somebody by their side no matter what they’re doing. Whether it’s taking a walk alone or going shopping (although I do believe that sometimes shopping is better when with a friend so that she,preferably,can see what you can’t see).
Coming to the movie now…Ekti Taraar Khonje was just another Bengali movie that made me sad. There’s immense talent in Bengal which is untapped, but there are a dozen standing like a wall against that bunch of talented people and making movies which they think are brilliant, but are crappy to people like me. It’s nice to admire Bergman and it’s different when you’re trying to bring in something abstract in a storyline that just converts it to plain bullshit,rendering it of the flow that it so badly deserves because you’re making a commercial movie, Goddamnit! If you want to make an art movie, make a separate one.
“Ekti Taraar Khonje” as a title itself, to begin with, was far too irrelevant. The once in a while ringing phone of Sayan Munshi only emphasised the title very shadily, with “Twinkle twinkle little star”. Cliched and unacceptable.The opening lines by Sayan Munshi in a narrative style were impressive. It raised my expectations. The storyline turned out to be very typical and tried out. I could feel traces of the flop Hindi movie “Mithya” (starring Ranvir Shorey) making its way into a Bengali overrated storyline. It’s disconnected at many places and makes you walk out of the hall. Not with irritation like that produced by Yuvvraaj or Housefull, but by the mere thought that the movie was a wasted attempt at copying something that goes on to add some unnecessary cream over a spoilt cake. The culmination of the movie was yet another offshoot of an inspiration from Kaminey: the bad guys die and the hero survives to romance his girlfriend.
Tollywood is not without gems. Sayan Munshi delivered a more or less consistent performance with a few moments that made him rise above the movie. He’s a talented actor who doesn’t know how to select his script. Arpita Chatterjee was awful. Why she ever left her “happily married” life to act again is beyond me. She’s only a pretty picture and would’ve added an extra bit to the movie had she been dumb. Dhritimaan Chatterjee is not bad. Sayan Munshi’s city friend is commendable though.
What made me want to pull my hair and scream out loud in the hall though was the advertisements. The silly bits added into the script merely for the promotion of Senco Gold and Kaya Skin Clinic. Silly and totally uninspiring. The music is passable. Shaan sings a couple of melodies which sound fresh but some of the songs are very badly timed, adding to the mess that the movie already is.
All in all, a successful attempt at sitting alone in a hall and feeling exhilarated, but a bad movie as a first. I was disappointed in my lookout for a star.

The great plummet

This victory was more or less expected and the wheels of change are rolling faster than ever. The woman who is prone to embarrass herself in public and feature in "image of the day" laughs has been chosen in the great war between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Is this the victory of a democracy? Or are most of the citizens only getting too carried away?


As people with green coloured powder all over their faces crowd in front of didi's house, in the other half of the country (and very romantically, diametrically opposite), the nano plant opens its doors and scripts yet another victory, and the nature of this victory, whether political or personal, is fairly debatable.


As more and more tragedies find their way into prime time and breaking news features, as people and chinkaras die, as the earth shakes beneath my ground (I'm also confirming the earthquake here which shook my building at 1:27 am on 1st June), one can only relate to this period as the period of disasters.

So is this painting-the-town-green yet another disaster that is only in its initial stages?

So this is what it feels like to finally get the to the other side of the weighing scale. I've been getting numerous calls following a recent photograph uploaded on Facebook telling me I've grown chubby. Whatever that's supposed to mean. I was wearing white too. People ought to be a little considerate and realise that white makes one look fat.

I've started eating only boiled food from today. No oil. No junk. Exercise. And even if I forget for one moment about my diet, I'll immediately be reminded about the "sorry state of affairs" by my brother aka broken record going "61...61...61". Loser.

Ugh. This means I have to reduce watching FRIENDS (because I feel like eating whenever they eat and they eat pizza all the time) and Travel and Living.

Bye bye binges. Hello pressure cooker :'(

Laboni used to tell me that after someone dies, the soul will hang around to see what is being done with their bodies. If, for instance, a Christian, that too someone as staunch as Armi was burnt instead of buried in a coffin, her soul would haunt her offenders for the rest of their lives. Now there's little to be done after the ashes land up in a tiny kolshi, so what if she was married to a Hindu man.

Don't chickens and goats have souls too? When we eat them (Armi wouldn't want to be eaten for sure. Her reaction is incomprehendable then), don't their souls feel angry too? I'm making sure the chilli powder reaches the depths of their epidermis!

They've never come to haunt me!

Am I questioning your existence, you great big forces of life death and beyond?

I'll still sleep hard tonight.

My passion for food is inexplicable. This passion sometimes borders on fanaticism too, but that's only fair when you love something. From here springs up my spite for vegetarians. True, any sort of food, when prepared with a hint of creativity and a dash of magic can taste just as wonderful. I've almost been weaned on meat. I'm a non vegetarian,heart and soul and can only imagine my plate to be complete when there's everything on it.
What I persistently hate about vegetarian food is Paneer. It's possible because of the kind of place I live in where there's so much importance given to fish and mangsho. At special ocassions, in most cases, if one of our vegetarian friends ask for the vegetarian section, all they end up with is a preparation of paneer. It's impossible to sometimes surviv only on daal and rice when the others at the party maybe devouring their meats voraciously.
Bengali vegetarian preparations are tasty , though lesser known. Authentically Bengali cuisine boasts of some of the best vegetarian dishes and luchi-aloor dom is just the beginning to the long list of vegetarian delicacies.
People are often surprised when they meet me and discuss my food habits. Being a south Indian Brahmin, it's almost a sin talking about meat as passionately as I do. Then again, people know little about madrasis except the usual idlis, dosas and sambaar. Delving a little deeper into the cuisine of the south will reveal more than just appams and aviyals.
When I'm out having lunch at some fancy place, I'd ideally opt for non vegetarian food sonce I'll be paying anyway. The worst kind of experience I was faced with was a few months ago when I dragged my family for dinner to Little Italy on Camac Street. It was a vegetarian restaurant and rather expensive and at the end of the day, the pocket pinch was harder to get over for my father because, in his opinion, he had effectively spent only on cereals and a few green leaves.
Last week I was out to lunch with my friend who's now turned vegetarian keeping in view the ecosystem and the many animals that are having to sacrifice their lives just for the sake of pleasing our tastebuds. I've tried many times to tempt her into eating chicken but wow her determination. For someone who was a big fan of the English breakfast at Flury's I found it hard to believe she had turned a complete vegetarian only for the sake of saving a few poultry lives, which were probably raised only to be eaten for a meal and forgotten.
This friend of mine confessed, though, that she misses the taste of meat. This probably led her to discover a substitute for meats. It's something called "mock meat" she explained. No, this isn't what we Indians eat as the soya nuggets or granules that are apparently as similar in taste to chicken as possible. Two days back when my mom was in her rare creative moods, she made us Spaghetti Bolognaise with soya granules instead of minced chicken. It's best forgotten. This "mock meat" concept though reminds me only of the "mocklate" and "fishtachios" from FRIENDS. My friend claimed, though, that mock meat tastes just like real meat and it's like salvation for vegetarians.
I took my animal lover friend to this place called Govinda's. It's a restaurant run by the Iskcon community, who are devout followers of Krsna. On entering the place I remembered how as a child I used to create a ruckus to go to Mayapur because they served food which did not have onions or garlic. The lobby to the place had a smell (my mom says it's the smell of their incense sticks) which nauseated me. It was like the smell of purity.
The menu card took me by surprise. They claimed they made vegetarian chinese without using onions or garlic. I was my usual condescending self but because I was feeling adventurous that day, I dared to order a crispy chilli potato. What landed up on my plate baffled me. The potato tasted good despite the use of the staple chinese ingredients. I was stumped but really enjoyed it. This little meal brought down the walls yet again. That there IS a life for a vegetarian and there are substitutes for virtually everything. It's not like I didn't know this, but the reminder was timed well.
That evening, though, I dug into two pieces of fried fish heartily and forgot the world around me existed temporarily.

It's been two painful, disillusioning and personally unfruitful long months since my last post. There's a very nice phrase I always think of whenever I'm faced with such phases of disconnection and discontituity : twenty years later, you'll look back at all of this and laugh. For now, I'm already laughing at how I've gotten nowhere. There will be a couple more prints on a piece of paper that'll declare that officially I've gotten somewhere in my so called career and that I should be given the accolades (really?) and opportunities I deserve. 18 years I've subjected myself to restrictions, confining myself to solitude (well it's not as morbid and as true-to-the-core as that sounds, but for a chanchal and onnomonoshko girl like me, it's like shredding me into bits). The last two months especially have been extremely stressful. I'm hardly the sort of person who sacrifices sleep. This time, though, I saw where I was headed. I had sleepless nights and OH the heat. God is punishing us for all our wrongdoings.

Sometimes I wish I could escape to Italy, learn the tricks of the trade and open a restaurant here and make whopping profits (people eat any food they're given. My good!). I don't want to study anymore. I want to be like Natasha Agarwal.

If the facebook "dragon year" predictions are anything to go by, I was also told I will bury relationships I'm no longer benefitting from and move ahead instead of thinking about what it used to be like and keep mooning and whining. Thank goodness for the reassurance. I realised one fine day the word "acceptance" had gone missing from my dictionary for a while.

Whatever the past few months may have been like, I'm here again. "This too shall pass..." I keep telling myself.

P.S. I tried the Black Forest ice cream yesterday at The Cream And Fudge Factory. For all you chocoholics, PLEASE go and try it. It's divine! The Fro Yo! comes a close second from the outlet Mamma Mia!, which is healthy ( : ) and tastes as authentic as any frozen yoghurt you might've tried abroad. Try the mixed fruit version with a helping of strawberry. Yummm!