Raja's read only memories

Mayakkam Enna , a captivating love story Bolstered by sterling performances by actors Dhanush and Richa Gangopadhyay, Mayakkam Enna (What’s the dizziness) – a romantic drama directed by Dhanush’s brother Selvaragavan – is a movie that comes out with flying colours on all counts. Mayakkam...’s biggest pluses are its ability to sustain the viewer’s interest well into the second half (although it does get a bit predictable by then) a pellucid first-half and a background score by G V Prakash Kumar that gels with the movie. The story is woven so expertly that you would forgiven for being lulled into thinking that this is not your usual, hard-hitting movie that Selvaragavan so specialises in, when, bang... a string of surprises bombard the viewer.                 Wielding the lens is becoming the wannabe profession of Kollywood’s heroes, amply demonstrated by Jeeva in Ko. So does Karthik (Dhanush), an orph...

Shall I aim for a Grammy next? Actor Dhanush strikes a pose while recording for the song Why This Kolaveri , Di ? If SMSs and online status updates carry quirky messages such as ‘cow-u, cow-u, holy cow-u, I want you here now-u’, you can blame it on the actor-music director duo of Dhanush and Anirudh Ravichander, the people behind the hit song Why This Kolaveri, Di. Bangalore: Outlandish as it may seem, you would hardly expect the singer of a chartbuster that is doing the rounds in social networking sites to completely play down the phenomenon. But, actor Dhanush - better known as the son-in-law of Superstar Rajinikanth - who is also the singer of the latest internet sensation that is Why This Kolaveri, Di (which approximates to, why this murderous rage, girl), chooses to do exactly that. "We cannot plan such things. It was an honest effort," he insists.   The actor says he does not know why he had to zero upon the word kolaveri as the catchphrase for the song....

Should ever a book titled ‘The Art of Deception by Flattery’ be authored, A R Murugadoss’ 7 am arivu (the seventh sense) would probably rank atop in its index; it could even be a case study on how to crash land viewers’ expectations after building it up to a crescendo. The movie begins with a flashback, when we are told that a Pallava princeling (Surya) migrated to China and became the Shaolin master we know today as Bodhidharma.  Six-pack that packs a punch Cut to the present. Subha Srinivasan (Shruti Hasan – actor Kamal Hasan’s daughter making her Tamil debut) is a student of genetic engineering whose research causes the jitters to the People’s Republic of China, forcing them to send a spy, Dong Lee (Hollywood actor Johnny Nguyen, who was also a stunt double in Spiderman and Spiderman-2 ) to bump her off and spread an epidemic in India. (Are we taking a cue from Hollywood, which during the Cold War era vilified then USSR?) Thrown in the conundrum is Aravind (Surya again) ...

What you are about to read is not an original article, for it is an agglomeration of media extracts of the health prognosis and treatment of two of our political leaders - former Karnataka chief minister B S Yeddyurappa and AICC president Sonia Gandhi. H igh blood pressure and sugar levels, severe body pain and stress are just some of the ailments jailed former Karnataka chief minister B S Yeddyurappa was suffering from. If ever there was an incident to exemplify that this was the age of information, it was the ignominious turn of events leading to the arrest of this person. The charade that followed when he went missing and was forced to show up only when a court decided to issue a non-bailable warrant against him could have inspired a score of satire writers.   He was remanded in judicial custody, when he mysteriously developed chest pain, and was expeditiously shifted to the Sri Jayadeva Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences. Doctors vied with one another to give sound bytes t...

Chugging along, rather belatedly T his morning I was jolted by an advertisement in our all our dailies, and no, I am not decrying the falling standards in journalism – paid news, content that could have gone under the watchful eyes of an editor or poor quality of printing. Reading it made me wonder whether the Indian bureaucracy, wallowing largely in insipidity, was handed a crash course in sarcasm. Had it been the first of April, I would have taken it for a joke without batting an eyelid.   The advertisement in question was titled “Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) congratulates Bangalore Metropolitan Rail Corporation Limited (BMRCL) on the LAUNCH of NAMMA METRO” (produced verbatim). This statement could qualify as the biggest misnomer of the century, with one unwieldy, utterly mismanaged, politics-ridden organisation lauding another of its ilk for launching a service, which among other glaring acts of omission, commenced work on a project after a full-year’s delay wh...

Sadananda Gowda & Manmohan Singh - Different at the outset, a lot in common Karnataka Chief Minister D V Sadanda Gowda, at a BJP meeting in Belgaum on October 10, said that he met the “accidental prime minister” Manmohan Singh recently in Delhi and empathised with him as he too was an “accidental chief minister” - a statement that was, predictably, met with instant laughter and choreographed applause. If anything, Gowda was at his subtle best in conveying the truth. None expected either the Oxford educated Singh or the incumbent chief minister of Karnataka to be pitch forked into political prominence as they find themselves in today, and were done so only after other options in the respective party armouries were either exhausted or impractical. Despite them being their party’s mascots - their soft demeanours vital to the survival of the two parties - the decisions and statements of the two continue to be viewed as that of their ‘supposed’ masters, Sonia Gandhi for Sing...

Appeared in  City Express , the daily supplement of  The Ne w Indian Express , on October 3, 2011 “You, a Tamilian, eh? What makes you people a daring race?” a goon questions the hero. In reply, the hero, Vishal, slam-dunks a glass bottle through his adversary’s mouth that pierces through the back of his head, leaving his henchmen too stunned to react. Vedi (U/A), a remake of the Telugu film Shouryam , comprises similar scenes and a plot that has been done to death by Kollywood’s honchos. Vedi (the cracker) has Vishal essaying the role of Prabhakaran, an IPS officer in search of his long-lost sibling, who also has to overcome his nemesis (Sayaji Shinde) along the way. He joins as a physical education trainer at a college in Kolkata, where he comes in contact with Balu (Vivek), a gym instructor, whose desperation to obtain a muscular figure forces him to nestle balloons inside his shirt.  Paro (Sameera Reddy), a student in the same college, gets smitten by Prabhakaran. ...

These are testing times indeed for the office of the ombudsman, the Lokayukta, in Karnataka. Only recently, Justice Shivaraj V Patil was forced to step down as Lokayukta after a fine piece of journalism , by the Bangalore Mirror, revealed that he had obtained a plot of land in his wife’s name, which he had ought not to as a judicial officer. Another piece of investigative journalism, this time by the New Indian Express, reveals that former Lokayukta Justice N Venkatachala had converted a residential site allotted to him in Judicial Layout in Bangalore , into a tennis court, in full violation of land norms – a minor violation of course, compared to some scandals doing the rounds in the nation’s judiciary. It must be remembered that Venkatachala was N Santosh Hegde’s predecessor – the man behind the investigative report on illegal mining that felled a chief minister and jailed a powerful minister. In fact, many wondered whether Hegde would be able to emulate him, such was the aura...

PS: Incidents, characters, references and descriptions in this blogpost are real and not imaginary “ Vanakkam sir , enge poganum (where do you want to go)?” asked an autorickshaw driver the moment he stopped in front of me after I hailed him. Being multi-lingual is something I pride myself about, hence, that this person could guess my ethnicity easily took me by surprise. You would have been better off as a diplomat, my friend, I thought as I said, “Indian Express Circle,” and boarded the rick. If rocket science is the most complex task to assimilate and implement, then striking a conversation with an auto driver, in my opinion, comes under a diametrically opposite end. Issues such as the Indo-Pak relations on and off the cricket pitch, the latest celebrity to land in controversy, price-rise – an issue that would strike a chord with anybody – serve as cue cards for such situations. Hence, I casually enquired, “Is this a four-stroke vehicle?” despite knowing very well it to be ...

This review can also be read at: http://expressbuzz.com/entertainment/news/kollywood%E2%80%99s-usual-suspects/309554.html Multi-starrer Tamil movies are a rarity. Even rarer are movies comprising ‘solo’ heroes pitted against each other. Combine this factor with the backdrop of IPL, the Mumbai mafia, glamour and action, and you have Mankatha (U/A), an entertainer that can be fairly approximated between Hollywood’s Usual Suspects and the director’s earlier venture, Saroja. Vinayak Mahadev (Ajith, was the name intended to be an obeisance to the lord on the eve of Ganesh Chaturthi?) is a suspended police officer residing in Mumbai. He dates Sanjana (Trisha), the daughter of Arumugam Chettiar (Jayaprakash), a smuggler. Vinayak has secret flings with women, unknown to Sanjana, and makes no bones about having crossed 40 years of age. Chettiar makes arrangements to launder `500 crore into the nation, which a gang led by his henchman (Vaibhav), and including a police inspector (Ganesh Kakumanu)...

Bangaloreans may not have noticed it, but net cafes, or internet browsing centres, are to India’s IT capital as the tiger is to a cell phone service provider – a twist in the catchphrase that featured in its recent advertisements makes for an apt description; few such centres are in vogue, save them. From the days of obsession, similar to what the Dutch had for tulips, to the near disillusionment of browsing centres, the IT capital has had its own Roman Empire; the market scenario prior to the entry of broadband internet can be approximated to the reign of Julius Caesar. Obsession? That too with the internet? Anybody growing up in the late 90s would extoll at length on the city’s then new-found obsession. For, inviting wide stares and fascinated looks on anything remotely associated to the internet – then in its infancy in the nation – be it on a TV channel, tabloid, newspaper, magazine, or heck, even a porno mag, was not unusual. Understandably, Sabeer Bhatia, the creator of Hotmail...

T here are movies that astonish us with their finesse as there are those that do so with their HQ or humbug quotient. Bodinayakkanur Ganesan falls in the latter category. A protracted and a hopelessly predictable plot, over-the-top melodramatic sequences, dialogues that lack brevity and gaping holes in the screenplay’s logic are some of Bodi... ’s minuses. A voiceover at the beginning of the movie, probably that of the director’s, asks the viewer not to confuse the film they are about to see with a Bharathirajaa movie. He need not, the viewer would have found that out minutes inside the movie. Bodi... simply fails to make any effort to engage its audience. After all, how would it if it comprises scenes where the hero, Ganesan (Harikumar), suffers a series of epileptic attacks, but recovers the very next instant (even Maggi noodles takes 2 minutes to prepare!); the villain, Thiruvachi (Ravishankar), a local don chases and hunts hogs in sewers for food, but kills a municipality off...