Jhoom Barabar Jhoom

Being a friday evening and all, I did what I usually do:
(i) zipped home from work with Alanis Morisette blasting loud enough to drown out the curses of people in my way (subsequently behind me and yes, still alive! Why do you ask?)
(ii) stopped by the neighbourhood video store, to take my pick from a wall full of DVDs.

Now, if you've ever shot balloons at Eliot's beach you probably know what I'm talking about. You aim at the blue n yellow specimen at the very center of the board and end up getting the dog sitting 5 feet away. Suffice to say, I had no idea how this movie (JBJ) ended up in my DVD drive. For heavens sake, all I wanted was 'Nuvvostanate Nenodantana' with good English subtitles (See, I don't understand Telugu. Sometimes I don't even understand these English subtitles but thats for another day).

So yeah, real low expectations with this one. Hey, its supposed to be a big flop after all. Truth be told, I've had a thing for Abhishek for a while now (you too? what a surprise!) but ever since he got hooked err hitched I've been avoiding him like a yeast infection. Thankfully, he isn't terribly hot in this movie (please, I'm still recovering) but his act is fantastic and his comic timing, perfection. Camera work, script and direction get an A+. Music is OK. Ricky's ring tone is genius...it goes.."Ei Handsome" :). Unfortunately people have gotten so used to the Govinda/Akshay kumar genre of one dimensional slapstick routines that humour needs to be literally force fed to get a laugh out of the juntas these days.

Anyway, If you like fantasy, you should have no problem with this movie. Its one dream sequence after another and even the bits that are supposedly real leave you confused as to the nature of reality. If JBJ were a perfume, The Matrix would be its top note and David Dhawan its base note. The only discordant note is Preity Zinta whoes dialogue delivery is every bit as botoxed as her wrinkles. Lara Dutta as a french pakistani is incredible and so is Hafee bhai as Ricky Thukral's best bud. Ricky darling as an obnoxious punjabi hip-hopping weirdo is a fabulous character and my ex-love excels at it. There are many many wonderful moments in the movie which will leave you ROTFALMAO.

Quirky, crazy, hysterical, hilarious, ridiculous, spoofy, surreal, weird, hammy and cliched. Over the top and out of the roof!! Loved it :)

10 questions I am currently pondering (in no particular order of importance or for that matter, sense)

1. Why do great books end just when you've made best friends with their characters?
2. Why must every vehicle on my lane either block the road or attempt to overtake me?
3. Does the Door (RFID) at work record details of my coffee breaks in an excel sheet?
4. Does my Boss ever stop working? (More importantly, does he monitor those excel sheets?)
5. Where have all the Thiruvanmiyur-Beach crabs disappeared to?
6. Will humanity travel to the stars?
7. Doesn't my dad's snoring ever wake him up?
8. Why do I sleep the soundest just before an alarm goes off?
9. What if someone turned off the gravity? (Any chance my Boss would notice and/or take the rest of the afternoon off?)
10. Was I intelligent before education ruined me?

Summer Night

I laugh with joy
as a sharp wind herds
wisps of dark clouds
across an indigo sky

the moonscape dims
and I suddenly see-
the woods are a'flicker
in floating fireflies.

Evolution

Ive been thinking about my future for a while now....specifically with respect to imagining what my descendants would look like if sufficient generations ended up in front of computer displays at random IT companies!! Jokes apart, here is my take on evolution...

Early life evolved, adapted and selected itself based on the environment organisms found themselves in. When the primordial atmosphere was reducing, there arose a proliferation of anaerobes, when temperatures were higher than boiling water, there evolved thermophiles that bred in under ocean volcanoes and when continental plates collided to form dry land, fish climbed out of the oceans. Life preyed on life, crawled, soared, mated, adapted and oftentimes perished. This was the beginning.

Subsequently, two factors began to moderate a species' instinctive struggle to pass on genetic material- firstly and as always, a harsh environment waiting to claim the weakest link and increasingly at this point, a competition for scarce resources and healthy mates. So the system continued, churning out species after species, each better than the last, up until the first Homo sapien came along.

And then, a third factor emerged...... Intelligence.

A species that did not clash with the elements anymore but actually bent them to its will. Intelligence that put a man on the moon as easily as a person thousands of feet below the ocean. It tore down mountains and slapped a harness on the rivers. It domesticated the wilderness, employed machines to do its will, invented the Sciences and declared itself master of its environment.

Has man in his infinite intelligence managed to bypass evolution?

How can we talk of survival of the fittest when passing on ones genes is a matter of fusing sperm and ova in a test tube? How can we talk of evolution when Scientists routinely genetically engineer organisms to endow them with the specific traits that they wish for? If natural selection were still at play, would it not have ensured that a man like Stephan Hawking (suffering from a life threatening form of muscular dystrophy) would'nt have survived long enough to even learn of a black hole?

Evolution as we know it, no longer makes any sense.


If you want to know more about self designed evolution, read Prof Stephan Hawking's public lecture on evolution.