Realty, Reality and More

(This was to come out on Sunday - but how does a few days of delay affect in the land of Indian Stretchable Time )

Just read something on the newspaper - George Bush blames increasing demand in India and China for food price rise. The man does have a sense of humour, well....even if it is black humour.
But link or no link to food price...consumption is certainly on a rise in India. I went to Select CityWalk mall in Delhi today. It certainly does not look like it is a part of "Poor India - Hungry India" at all. I mean, I remember this status message of a friend of mine which went something like this - The trouble with modern-day shopping is it is so repititive. You see one....you see a mall!!". But then Select CityWalk is nowhere close to your average standard upcoming mall with the 2 sets of elevators and 2 sets of escalators.

What sets this place apart is its range of international stores (read - ultra expensive) lining the mall corridors. Everything from the benches to the parking lot to even the loos look quite high-end. This place is certainly the "mallification" of our nice and sweet snobby snobby la-dee-daa Khan Market.

I still remember my trip to UK as a 13 year old. I was amazed to see the kind of "shops" they had even in a small town like Bradford. Shops that had their own escalators! I mean I could understand the "shopping complex" having an escalator, but a "shop" having its own escalator - wow!!!...and today you have people going up and down such escalators within so many "shops" in India. But then, with India being "Frugal India", many such escalators have two guards on either side ensuring that the escalator only people approach it!!!

Seriously India is seeing some serious freedom of choice.

Well speaking of freedom, I also saw a good movie yesterday - Shaurya. So what if the concept is borrowed from "A few good men"....the plot, the characterization etc are all entirely original (even this line doesn't seem to be original anymore). I will refuse to accept Shaurya's script as an original. But as a worthy adaptation of the original movie, I will get up, stand up and then give this movie a thumbs up. There is this bright young NDA-IMA passout - Capt. Javed Khan who is accused of murdering his senior officer. The Capt. refuses to utter anything. Therefore this is an "open and shut case"....this phrase is emphatically repeated enough no. of times to make it sound irritating. Enter our Mr. Army Lawyer - Maj. Siddhant Chaudhary - (Rahul Bose). Wait...did I say "enter" - no...actually the movie begins with Maj. Siddhant Chaudhary's good friend Akash Bose's (Javed Jaffrey) marriage being fixed. The first half is also about Maj. Chaudhary imitating Hrithik Roshan's act in Lakshya - a man full of his idle-ness really not caring much about anything else. However unlike Lakshya, Rahul Bose's transformation is much more rapid and much less realistic. But once he is transformed into a conscientious lawyer - does he act or what. This chap has certainly improved in leaps and bounds when it comes to his Hindi dialogue delivery. Anyone who had watched Thakshak when it was released a few years back, and has watched Shaurya now, will attest to this.

Despite a lot of splendid performances, a certain Mr. Kaykay Menon takes the cake for his role as an almost lunatically dogmatic Brig. Rudra Pratap Singh (wow!! they actually borrowed a cricketer's entire name for this!!). Brig Singh acts as the proverbial "soldier's soldier" with belief and rhetoric which state that it is people like him who let people like us have our breath of fresh free air in the morning. His rant against the alleged perpetrators of killing of his near and dear ones when confronted with his sad past, hopefully should go down as one of the great moments of the rahul bose variety of cinema (there is hardly a distinct "parallel" / "art" cinema movement anymore, is there??!!)

All in all Shaurya is a great movie, and not just for its little touch of "moral of the story" at the end - "Right is the only thing that is ultimately right...nothing else is".