Slumdog Millionarie at Oscars

A.R Rehman, one of the most deserving musical composer wins Academy Awards in the 81st award ceremony. He grabs oscar statuette in his both hands, one for his best original score and the other for best original song (Jai Ho) sharing with Guzar for the film Slumdog Millionarie. Resul Pookutty wins Oscar for best sound mixing for the same film. It is a great recognition for these achievers and a historic moment for India at Oscars.

Slumdog Millionarie also bagged another 5 awards in the category of Best Film, Best Direction, Best Film Editing, Best Cinematography and Best Adapted Screenplay making a total count of 8 wins out of 10 nominations.

I am truly not impressed with this film, but sincerely appreciate The Music Maestro and Resul Pookutty for winning their awards. According to me, "Jai Ho" is not one of A.R's masterpiece. Some of the greatest works of him include, starting from his first film Roja and others like Taal, Dil Se, Thiruda Thiruda, Vande Mataram to name a few. A.R stands out from many other Indian music directors with his original music composition, unlike many others who have many times borrowed (stolen?) music of other countries. I think it finally worked out right for A.R, by being at the right place (Hollywood) at right time with the right director Danny Boyle. To me, this award to A.R is a recognition for his musical work since 1992.

About the movie, Danny Boyle says that it is an optimistic movie and he brings out the hope of a slum boy who suffers through out his life. I wonder how many got inspired with this movie! I at least, didn't take away any of these when I finished watching the movie. Though the depiction of slums and the people living there were realistic, the story was not. The story is piled up with imagination, which makes it good, but can't be claimed realistic. When the story is not realistic, it becomes hard to relate to it and it is difficult to take away what Boyle is trying to say, the hope. In the movie, to me, the truly interesting part was how the director has interleaved incidents happening across three time frames.

Among all these celebration of Slumdog Millionarie, Indian film industry is celebrating it as its own victory. What bothers me is that, they truly fail to understand that in more than 50 years of movie making, with about 1000 movies releasing a year, we fail to make one such movie and take it to Oscars. Surely, Slumdog involved very many Indian artists & technicians and also story based in Mumbai slums, but shouldn't there be a limit to Indian film fraternity taking credit in Slumdog's jai ho?!

The five people you meet in heaven

This book by Mitch Albom starts of with the story of a man who is dying. It begins with words like "All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time..." The start is distinct and interesting. The story is about a man named Eddie, meeting five people in heaven. These are people who altered his life forever or whose lives were changed by him. These people reason out some of the happenings in Eddie's life and helps in finding the peace he is searching for.

I am strong believer of "everything that happens in life is for good and we just can't comprehend it when it happens..." When looked back at my life, I can now explain the reason for some of the events and some still remains unanswered. The author comforted me with the thought that they would be answered someday...

The writing of Albom is simple, but the content was definitely interesting and solaced me. His way of story telling is sentimental, but has some deep meaning in his thinking. This book is a short read and it cheered me.

One night @ the call centre, a mindless masala

I picked up one of the best selling novel by Chetan Bhagat for two reasons - One, the title sounded interesting and two, it is from an Indian author. The bollywood movie "HELLO..." definitely wasn't my inspiration.

With the intent of not revealing the plot of the story, I would try not to be superfluous, but be concise in giving my take on it.

As the title suggests, the story is based on one night's events in a call center. It revolves around 6 people working in the same group at a call center, who assist customers on home appliances. As any common person can predict, many events happen that night. With this kind of a storyline, it becomes difficult to narrate many convincing events happening over a night. So the author smartly tries to break the chronological order of events on that night and narrates the love story of a couple in the group as a flashback. But, very many pages of his writing goes in this story telling.

Though in prologue, the author's words emphasize on inspiring the youth, the book merely fails in doing it. It would have been better off, if it was not portrayed as a motivational message for the reader. May be the author is attempting to pass on the moral in a "contemporary" manner by stretching the fun (love) part & maintaining a very short narration (given by GOD) in enlightening the youth!!

The author gives a simple & powerful message of, we need to follow what we truly believe in life - Be in the life making or career decisions. But, he truly does not focus on that. The loosely stitched storyline and the less imaginative stereotype way of telling story makes the writing mediocre. At some points, the reasoning in the book becomes nonsensical - Like calling common Americans as dumb. May be I will accept it to some extent, but not to the extent that the author has depicted and uses them in trying to solve the big crisis of layoffs in the call center. At that point, the story really lacks sense and becomes unbearable to accept. No set of people in the world can be so dumb, according to me.

I think the author wants each reader to relate to one of the characters. But, the story becomes so unreal, he fails in that attempt too. Towards the end, in an effort to get some real sense, the author tries to play a trick of giving a quick alternate option - Like instead of GOD speaking, assume some real person spoke those words (may be for readers like me). But, it doesn't truly convince and at that point in the book, it really doesn't matter. However, this trick reminds me of what Yann Martel does in his book "Life of Pi", a must read book I would say. I guess Chetan got inspired by this!

Inspite of so many discontents I expressed, it remained gripping and I wanted to finish it in one go. I guess, to me the anxiety of how GOD is going to appear and how well the author can stitch that to the story kept me going. However, that part of the book really disappointed me.

One night @ the call centre, truly a masala book.