Before I forget again, here‘s the best music review site I have ever seen on the ‘net….took me quite a while to search my old mails and find the link.

Flashback: Me at 10 years. I see the poster of Purana Mandir when I am passing the local cheap-o cinema theater ( from my school bus), and of course, I am dying to see it. My parents forbid it. ( as any parent should! ) I cry, I throw tantrums. Finally, an ice-cream and three Superman comics later, I agree to postpone my viewing of Purana Mandir to when I “grow up”. My father assures me that good movies like Purana Mandir are inevitably shown again and again at theatres. I agree, and I bide my time.

Last week, I decided I had grown up enough, and went off to watch Veerana. Another of those classics that picked the wrong time to get released…I mean, couldn’t Mr Shyam Freaking ramsay wait until I grew up before releasing his masterpieces? And now he comes up with something like Dhund:The Fog….lame name, lamer pikchar! But Veerana, aaaaaaaah, Veerana reminded me of how much I would have enjoyed the golden years of Indian horror cinema had I been born a couple of years ago. Sigh!

I didn’t go there unaccompanied, of course. NOBODY goes to see a horror movie unaccompanied. There’s the faintest possibility you might get scared, and lose your marbles. So having a partner is highly important. So Vasu tagged along. And needless to say, there was no soul in the theatre ( at least the balcony) other than myself and him. Heh heh heh. Spoooooooky!

Actually, it was spooky. Until the movie started.

Veerana kicks off, as with all Ramsay Brothers movies, with a khun-khaar chudail killing some helpless gaonwaala. And all the gaonwaalas have a meeting to figure out what’s to be done. One eerie-looking fellow with a scar that looks like cheap plastic, and an expression to match, starts recounting tales of how a beautiful woman haunts the Veerana, and how she changed to a bat and sucked his blood. In other words, how the cheap-plastic-scar was born. Exeunt eerie-looking gaonwaala. Enter Thakur Something-Pratap Singh. (“Vijayendra Ghatge”, Vasu tells me. I bow to his superior B-movie sense ) The thakur decides something is to be done, he brandishes a nasty-looking Om-sign-made-of-thermocole, zoom-in, close-up, cut to the veerana jungle at night. With much wailing of violins and Bappi-da’s (yeah, yeah, yeah ) synthesiser experiments, the thakur is lured to a deserted haveli by this khun-khaar female, who makes plans to frolic with him in a hot-tub. (Vasu: “you know what, buddy? One of the fantasies in my life was to play the lead role in a Ramsay brothers movie.” I agree.)

Just when things are about to get interesting, thakur saahab decides to pull a necklace off our lady. And then, gents and ladies, we happen to witness the pride and joy of Maganlal Dresswalla’s make-up skills….the lady shapeshifts into (gasp, gasp) a deadly looking chudail….who starts doing what every self-respecting chudail does in Indian cinema. (Eeeesh, no, she doesn’t start singing, this is a Ramsay Brothers movie, forgoshsakes, not a Yash Chopra one..) Scream, shriek, scream some more, shriek some more. Double the volume when Thakur saahib brings out the Om-sign. Shriek some more when the gaaon waalahs decide to hang her to death. (Nevermind the fact that they could have burnt her to death and be done with the entire thing….) Hasta la vista, chudail babe.

Enter our old friend Guran from Lagaan. (“Rajesh Vivek”, Vasu declares. You’re god, man! ) He happens to be a tantrik working under Mahakaal, and carrying out weird ceremonies with weird villain-looking guys who hang around brandishing spears (and, no doubt, earning money as extras) . Evil-Tantrik-boss ( henceforth referred to as Baba) hypnotises the thakur’s elder daughter, and Nikita’s spirit possesses her. Baba also makes it a point to deliver her back to the Thakur household, and gets employed as Jasmine baby’s attendant. This turn of events tells us two things – (a) The director has obviously seen The Exorcist, Omen and the standard horror fare of the seventies. (b) we are in for a long story. Total paisa vasool. Vasu tells me: “dekhna, both of the thakur’s daughters will grow up to be awesome-looking babes.” They do.

And if you wanna know what happens next, go watch the movie. ;-)

Other highpoints: Hemant Birje plays the hero. And I start getting fond memories of Tarzan ( one movie that my parents fortunately didn’t postpone until my growing up) and Kimi Katkar. Mental note: Get Tarzan. Hemant Birje, by the way, has precisely seven lines of dialogue throughout the film. “waah, kya sundar ghar hai” happens to be one of them. VAsu and I tried four-five times to get the proper note of woodenness in our voice while saying that line….but no, it came out with too much emotion. I envy Hemant Birje.

Bappida‘s music. Anyone who says Bappi Lahiri is a copycat composer is obviously shortsighted, that guy gave some great tunes in his time….and even Veerana has two-three eminently hummable songs…..can’t say much about his background music though.

Gulshan Grover. Satish Shah. These guys brighten up a movie with their hamming. Am not kidding.

The cool-looking females who played the Thakur’s daughters. The very epitome of eighties chic ( pink skirts and all), hubba hubba!!!! And Jasmine beti sure could increase her eye-ball size by 40% at the drop of a ha…er…knife.

Last but not the least, Vasu!! With his indepth knowledge of B-Movies, and his devastating sense of cinematic techniques, Vasu managed to make Veerana a very educational and entertaining experience for me. Every twist in the plot was foreseen and explained beforehand. Every trick the characters tried, from Rama Vij’s hysterical screams to doctor sahaab’s goggle-eyed fright to Gulshan Grover’s impending death in the wood-mill, Vasu predicted these with deadly accuracy. One wonders if the script has been coeditted by the man. (Hmmm, come to think of it, I don’t know too much about your past life, Vasu) Thanks anyway, da!

The next day, I saw HP2: The Chamber of Secrets. At the risk of sounding mentally deficient, I say this – The movie is just an enhanced version of Veerana, maybe with much, much better Special Effects, and slightly better acting. Slightly. Grow up, Hollywood. Stop those masala movies.

A perfect weekend.

I hate shopping for clothes. But I guess I needed some new ones. Usually it’s my parents who buy stuff for me. Or gifts that I get from friends. Or the occasional T-shirt from quizzes and cul-fests….

Hmm, so yesterday I was deciding what to wear to office, and I came across this long-forgotten envelope filled with gift vouchers – 2000 Rs worth of Wrangler gift vouchers, in denominations of 500, won at IIM-Bangalore, and these were valid even at Hyderabad, at some authorised store at Basheer Bagh. So off I went in the evening.

Those bloomin’ morons! They make me wait for 15 minutes while they discuss the pros and cons of whether or not the gift vouchers should be accepted or not. Seems that’s a Wrangler “showroom” and not an “outlet”. I very decently point out that the name of the showroom, or outlet, or whatever, is printed at the back of each voucher. Ahem, ahem. “No sir, actually this was issued in January, and this store was a showroom then.” OK, I point out the words that say “Offer valid six months from date of purchase”. Some wiseguy decides to phone the Boss who’s hiding out somewhere in Malagasay, because he has to shout over the phone and go “Haan, sir?” “Haan, sir?” five times after every line.

Finally, the jury comes to a decision. “Sir, actually”, the “phone”y wiseguy starts.(you can almost hear him going “eh heh heh heh” in his mind)”ACtually, each voucher is valid only one product. So if you buy something above 500, you need to pay for it in cash.”

Right then, I decide I am not paying anything. Gave the shitheads a hard time while searching for T-Shirts, and T-Shirts that cost precisely Rs. 495 each. Fine, so I lost 20 Rs. overall, but that’s ok.

Next week, am getting Anil and Dhaaji to go to the same shop with their vouchers.

Morons! Why give out vouchers at all if you don’t want to honour them? And why need to add asinine “conditions” ?

Office Annual day on Monday. Moi was entertainment ( read “cultural programme”) incharge. Thanks to laziness ( or the loadbalancer-related work, if anyone would believe me , the actual practice for the songs got postponed to Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Friday, I didn’t come to the office. Saturday, the key player in the skit ( yeah, there was a musical skit ) was AWOL. My role in the selfsame skit was…umm, remember the black guy in Chicago who played the piano and introduced every song? That was what I was supposed to do, minus the-introducing-every-song part.

Hey, but the skit was fun, it lampooned everything in the office, right from the “vision” part of it, to people getting hooked-up through Yahoo Messenger. ( try singing E-Mail Se Maine propose kar diya, chat par unka jawaab aa gaya to the tune of Aankhon Hi aankhon mein ishaara Ho Gaya ) And miracle!!! With 45 minutes of practice to sync up with the music, people managed to stay in scale!!! What else could a lazy pianist hope for?

The music part was four songs, or rather five songs, if you count a 2-song medley as a single one. All but one featured me on vocals; Baahon Mein Chali Aa was me on piano and Laitha on vocals. Champagne Supernova and Time of Your Life were blasts from the pasts, both Deepak and I don’t have to think when we’re doing them…..ditched Creep, because I got worried people would start running on the “run, run, ruuuuuuuun” part.

The FUN began when Chandru decided to check out Rishi’s guitar after lunch, he started strumming something in G, and moi decided to fit in Blowing In the Wind…and voila, 15 minutes of practice and we had a decent medley of BITW along with Neil Diamond’s I Am A Believer.

A decent time was had by all.

Veerana, Ramsay Brothers’ immortal epic is in town, and come what may, I am not missing it. Besides, I think it will get me in the mood for Bhoot.

Currently Reading:

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon. This one is a lulu. One night and I am already into the 370-th page. 1940. Joe Cavalieri (or Kavalier) and Sam Clayman. Two Jewish kids. Cousins. One a refugee from Prague, an art-school graduate, HOudini-admirer and non-practising magician. The other a Bronx-native, good with words, and an avid comics-fan. 1940, remember? The Golden Age of American comics, with sales of Superman touching nearly a million per month. (Afterthought: The sales right now, for an average comic is about 20 thousand in the US) These guys create their own comic-character, the Escapist, and strike gold. Sam Clay writes comic-book history to flee from his own mundane existence, and because he’s good at writing and coming up with ideas (“The important thing”, He points out early on, “is not what the Escapist can do, it’s why he does whatever he does.”). Joe Kavalier paints to finance an escape for his 13-year old brother from Nazi-occupied Prague. Beautiful writing by Micahel Chabon throughout…..especially the parts where he points out how the partners were influenced by a screening of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, just before which Welles himself had professed to be a fan of the Escapist. I hope the euphoric high the book has taken me to persists until the last page. And I also thank the unfortunate moron who sold off his copy to Blossom’s at Bangalore. And also my Boss for sending me to B’lore at the right time.

Kishore Kumar – a Biography – I forget who’s written it, but it was good enough for me to read a second time. The nicest thing about this book is the anecdotes, I am a sucker for movie-related anecdotes, and this guy claims these aren’t half baked “legends”, but stuff straight from the horse’s (in this case, Ashok Kumar’s) mouth.

I am enjoying myself.

I had nothing much to do today morning, decided to come to the office and check out some bookmarked sites, and one of them happened to be The Comics Journal. A quick checkout of the column archives took me to this article, and I was struck by these lines there….especially the words I have highlighted in bold.

The first truly great comics book of the new millennium was published in early 2001, a collection of a weekly newspaper strip that was launched over a decade ago. Odds are, you’ve never heard of it: Peter Blegvad’s The Book of Leviathan. I’m convinced that there are now two types of people in the world: people who agree with me on the above, and people who haven’t read it yet. In a Hit List review in TCJ #234, the esteemed Ng Suat Tong wrote, “A rare instance in which the label ‘essential’ is not misplaced, Leviathan is one of the great strips of the last decade.”

Blegvad uses an astounding range of styles to illustrate his and his characters’ thoughts on things like philosophy, science and poetry, usually working in a few ridiculous textual and/or graphic puns for the ride. Leviathan is, technically, a full-color strip, though the artist seems to use color as needed, most strips being B&W save Levi’s sea-green sleepers and the pink Bunny. Other strips are eye-singeing explosions of color. A strip that looks like it was engraved centuries ago could sit next to one that appears to have been done by computer last year and would they still work as a continuity. Blegvad even shifts into a non-representational style to draw impressions of sounds for a strip where Levi is awakening to the sounds of his neighborhood. Appropriately, the artist’s visual style is as elastic as his protagonist’s sense of reality.

Both being fanciful child-and-cat strips, there is an obvious comparison to make of Leviathan to Calvin & Hobbes. But as great a cartoonist as Bill Watterson is, he’s no Peter Blegvad, and Calvin and Hobbes are skilled vaudevillians doing cutesy shtick when compared to Leviathan’s Byzantine wonders. Even Blegvad’s throwaway jokes show a level of thought and insight rarely seen in any medium, much less comics. Leviathan is closer to Hobbes the philosopher than Hobbes the stuffed tiger.

I guess therein lies the difference between a syndicated strip and undiscovered genius. I went and did a recursive “wget” on the Leviathan archives at http://www.leviathan.co.uk. There weren’t too many of them, and I read the first one, entitled “Orpheus”. It’s really, truly good!! How brilliant it is, well, I don’t think I can really go into details, because this is just one story that I read. Yes, the inherent humour is a little more sinister. I don’t think people would appreciate getting Levi strips every morning in their mailbox. :-)