Month: June 2010

My ‘now’ song: Zindagi bhar nahin bhoolegi woh barsaat ki raat

Posted on by sudhagee

Do you ever have a song, an idea, a storyline, or an image stuck in your head? And it just refuses to go away? For sometime at least. I have this with music—it could be a song, an instrumental piece, a jingle, etc. This becomes my ‘now song, and the ‘nowness’ (pardon my English here) could be for any length of time.

My ‘now’ song is Zindagi bhar nahin bhoolegi woh barsaat ki raat from the 1960 Hindi film Barsaat ki Raat.

I prefer Lata Mangeshkar’s version (featured above) to Mohammad Rafi’s, arguably more popular, version. To me, Lata’s angst-filled voice just reaches out and envelops you in a kind of bittersweet longing, not just for love, but beautiful memories, relationships…

May the best colour win!

Posted on by sudhagee

I am totally fascinated by the ongoing 2010 World Cup Football in South Africa. Not the game actually, but the different colours that the various football teams wear.

It is beautiful to watch the two sets of colours darting about on the TV screen creating fluid, swirling patterns. So far I have liked…

The orange of Ivory Coast

Source: http://www.clbuzz.com/

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Colour Coordinated Wimbledon

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I visited the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, better known as Wimbledon last September. The first thing that strikes you about  the place is the colour coordination—green, purple and white. The colour combination prevails in buildings, seats, flowers–everything.

Entrance to Centre Court

But I am getting a little ahead of the story. Like all things, let me begin at the beginning.

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The doubly inspired ‘Rajneeti’

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 Rajneeti…—an intense course in ancient Hindi. If d film is a bouncer just remember Godfather and put things in perspective…

I received this text message from my friend Shalini, who watched the film the day it released.

Source: Wikipedia

The Godfather angle was a new one, as all reviews and speculations about Rajneeti was that it was based on the Mahabharata.

Now I had to see this doubly inspired film. So off I went to see Rajneeti.

And…?

 

The first half was well-paced, had some strong  characterisation, and kept me hooked. All this of course changed in the second half. It was downhill all the way, particularly the dialogues.

In fact, I would say that the dialogues are the biggest drawback of the film. I did not have a problem with ‘ancient hindi’, as Shalini had, as it fitted in well with the geographical area that the film is based in. My problem was that the dialogues did not match the character who spoke them. For example, Katrina Kaif’s character suddenly changes from speaking ‘regular Hindi’ to ‘ancient Hindi’.

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117 doors

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During yet another attempt to organise my digital photographs into some sort of a library last weekend, I noticed one thing.

I had lots of photographs of doors. Yes, you read right. Doors. Wooden doors, painted doors, open doors, closed doors, doors in walls, even door exhibits in museums! All in all, I had 117 photographs of doors.

Here are some doors from my collection (obsession?)

Door Exhibits at the British Museum. The one on the right is made of limestone

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Do you believe in rainbows?

Posted on by sudhagee
If you squint really, really hard, you can see the faint outline of another rainbow in the top left hand corner of the photo

On Sunday, as I was finishing my weekly vegetable and fruit shopping, it started raining. It was a short, sharp spell and the sun was out in about 5 minutes.

And along with the sun came the rainbows—all three of them. People stopped to look at the rainbows; some even took pictures of the rainbows with their mobile phone cameras, me included. And then went about their own ways, me included.

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