Raja's read only memories

Bollywood fare, served with Tamil niceties When the recipes of Gobi Manchurian and Chicken Tikka can transcend national barriers and become a rage elsewhere, can’t we have different versions of an intra-national rage: a remake of a successful Bollywood movie in another language, for instance? Director Shankar answers the question with Nanban (friend), a faithful reproduction, nay a spitting image, of its original, the Aamir Khan-starrer 3 idiots , comprising its highs and lows with equal measure. The hero and the anti-heroes The flaws in our higher education system, especially engineering, and campus life unite to form a heady theme, with Vijay, reprising Aamir Khan’s cool dude-cum-Buddha-like role in the original, offering ingenuous solutions to many a conundrum. Did he levitate on screen? I don’t know; however, I am not willing to bet against it. Jeeva and Srikanth (after a hiatus), portraying Sharman Joshi and Madhavan’s roles in the original respectively, are hi...

A scene in the recent Bollywood blockbuster, three idiots , goes as follows: The principal of the college explains to an eager bunch of freshers how the Americans spent years of complex research and millions of dollars in developing a pen that can be used in a spacecraft, even in zero and sub gravity conditions and in extremes of temperatures. At that instant, Rancho (the character portrayed by Aamir Khan), almost innocently asks, “Sir, can’t we use a pencil instead?” when all the students burst into laughter. If anything, it only establishes the fact that he did not know about the perils of using a pencil in a spacecraft and the Space Pen. PS: This scene could have been probably inspired by the age-old joke, which probably originated in the Cold war era and continues to circulate via e-mails and SMS’ worldwide, in which the US and Russia (or USSR), in the height of the space race, were developing a pen for use inside spacecraft and during one such meeting between scientists of b...