Better safe than sorry

Imagine you walk into an office. You see a big iron door that can be swung open only if you really took the effort. It has a handle that looks like the mother of all Godrej cupboard handles. Also assume you have had a normal upbringing, with exposure to all kinds of movies where robberies were shown. What would you think it was?

a. The door to the pantry

b. The door to the washroom

c. The door to the safe

I suspect most people would vote for three.

However, some discerning personnel in facilities management had clearly decided that one must not leave anything to chance (lest the deluded public make coffee in it or worse still, go for option 2). Hence there has appeared on the door, in big bold letters, a sticker announcing ‘SAFE’.

Being conscientious. That is the name of the game.

Saturday musings

Recently I met a friend who complained about how bad work was. However, she smiled and added that she had a secret weapon to keep her morale up. Every Monday morning she just tells herself ‘It is only till Friday. It cannot be bad’. No, she is not one of those corny people who read Chicken Soup books and see the positive side of things. It is just that in her earlier job she had to work 6 days a week, sometimes spilling into 7. It was not a glamorous, highly paid job. But the nature of the job demanded that she give it that kind of time.

I immediately thought of those long hard years of my life (admittedly only six) when I had to work 5.5 days a week. In my first job, Saturday was a holiday and you could come in if you had work. Unfortunately it turned out that everybody had work on Saturdays and hence came it. Infact everybody had work till 11 p.m. everyday and had work on all days of the year except Sundays. This meant they did not even taken any vacations. All this of course looks suspiciously like people were really inefficient or the work culture mandated that people ‘should be seen to be working hard’. Most times, the truth was there was some work or the other. And the rest of the times you turned up so you did not look like the only one without enough work to do. When I moved to my second job, atleast there were no pretences about Saturday being a holiday. You had to come in on Saturdays and bear the yoke.

All this changed last year when my office decided to give Saturdays off. So these days, I wake up at 11 a.m. on Saturdays, potter about the house nibbling at food, reading the newspapers and checking mail. By lunchtime, I have mustered the strength to have a full, wholesome meal. After this effort I need to rest with a quick nap. Evenings I go out for a walk or watch a movie. Then I go to bed thinking ‘I can do the same thing again tomorrow!’ Though more often than not, on Sundays I have the energy to go out and meet people, do shopping, read more serious stuff, pursue some hobby and think about what I want to do in life. Earlier on my Sundays used to be like my Saturdays and by the time I rested and recuperated, Mondays would be upon me. Life would be one constant blur with just one long sleep day in between.

Anyone who works Saturdays ought to seriously think about it – is it really worth it?

Movie review - Jhoom Barabar Jhoom

There is one scene in the movie where Bobby Deol and Abhishek Bachchan are seated in a scooter with a sidecar. As they careen through the streets of London, Sholay’s famous friendship song ‘yeh dosti hum nahin thodenge’ plays in the background. Given that we are almost 75% of the way through the movie, I secretly suspect that the director Shaad Ali cast both these stars in the movie just so he could have them re-do the scene made famous by their illustrious fathers.

Jhoom Barabar Jhoom is out an out a parody of Hindi movies, gleefully taking a dig at stereotype Bollywood. The storyline is very simple and is really an excuse for the director to fit in melodramatic courtroom scenes, snatches of the heroine prancing around with her towel after a bath and even a gentleman clad in black with light bulbs accessorizing his clothes. And I am not sure if it was meant to be, but Amitabh's random presence in the movie also seemed to be laughing at his completely irrelevant omnipresence these days.

Does the movie work? Almost. The movie plunges into the storyline straight on while the audience has not yet warmed up. The plot could have excluded anything that was non-standard Bollywood. That would have made the digs more apparent and kept up focus. The second half is basically one large song (foot tapping definitely). The movie is not brilliant but any steps to be irreverent should be applauded. However, going by the reviews and audience reactions, I would think it will probably be a very niche audience that will catch on. The question – how did the patriarch of all things fantastic in Bollywood, Mr Yash Chopra, actually produce this movie.

P.s. If the sarcasm does not appeal, you can always entertain yourself by trying to guess whether Preity Zinta has merely forgotten the collagen treatment for her eyes or if it went bad. The lip job is more obvious though.

Movie review - Groundhog Day

Released in 1993, the movie did pretty well both with the critics and the hoi polloi. Last night I managed to watch it on Sony Pix (God bless them for being a free-to-air channel). The movie is very nicely done. Phil Conners (Bill Murray) a cynical TV station weatherman goes to cover Groundhog Day. He is accompanied by his producer Rita (Andy McDowell) and cameraman Larry. Phil unfortunately gets stuck in Groundhog Day and is unable to move to the next day. Every morning it is February 2nd and he wakes to his radio alarm clock at 6 a.m., meets the same strangers and lands up at the Groundhog Day celebration. He is alarmed at first. Then he decides to exploit the situation. After this he becomes despondent and tries to kill himself. Eventually he learns to appreciate life in general and, as they say, stops to smell the roses. He learns new skills, meets all the townspeople and gets to know them and saves people about to die in accidents on February 2nd

At this point, I fell asleep in front of the TV and had horrible dreams about being stuck in the same day. Luckily this morning, I woke up in a new day and also figured out from the Internet that Phil does manage to escape the time loop when unconquerable, irresistible and kindhearted Rita falls in love with him.

Bill Murray is brilliant and Andy McDowell is charming. The movie is clearly meant to make one think about how your life is being lead and if there are some corrections to it long overdue. The kind of thoughts that occur to you if you are not trying to fight off sleep while watching the movie. However, as I said I am glad I woke up into a new day...Or did I? Lets see

1. The alarm clock went off at 7 a.m. - check

2. Left for office at 9 a.m. through the beach road - check

3. Radio city played Scorpions - check

4. Computer took 5 minutes to boot up - check

Ye God!

Poster boys and girls

One area that seldom gets attention in Dravidian politics is the fine art of making posters. For some reasons, the minions of the party have long felt that the one way of displaying loyalty is to ensure that your constituency is choc-o-bloc with posters of all relevant leaders. Presumably when the party chief’s car whizzes by at 100 kmph on roads cleared by the traffic police, some special vision capability will make them note that T Nagar had only 149 posters as opposed to Adyar which had 152 posters. The Adyar MLA gets a pat on the back and looks forward to becoming a central minister some day.

The casual observer however immediately notices a flaw in this strategy that emphasizes volumes. The T Nagar guy takes a mere day to up his count to 160 and the Adyar guy obliterates all business signs, trees, people on the road with his increases. Sooner or later, both chaps run out of walls, the general public is complaining about the lack of space to spit without disfiguring your favourite leader and there is chaos all around. It was at this fine moment of despondence that some worthy invented the ‘Cutout’.

A Cutout is a huge, larger than life cardboard picture of your beloved leader that one can erect on wooden poles. If mere walls were a constraint earlier, then the Cutout solved the problem in one stroke. You did not need walls anymore. Footpaths did nicely. So what if the voter had to swerve his way around every Cutout and jump onto the road and back on to the footpath constantly. That is the kind of aerobic exercise that makes the average citizen fit and brings down health expenditure in the government budget.

Sadly the Cutouts began to disappear one day. My guess is a passing flight bumped into one of them and as they say 'what tangled webs we weave'.

So innovation became the name of the game. MBA style cunning was used to subtly differentiate poster A from poster B. What was hitherto a piece of cheap paper listing down details of the leader being praised, the ambitious sponsor of the poster and some general terms of sucking up (‘Our great leader’, ‘the greatest son of the soil’, ‘may we be humbly permitted to give a bath to your dog’ etc) became a work of art.

People decided to take their inspiration from the movies. Remember the good old days when the hero and heroine methodically changed clothes every twenty seconds in movie songs? Watching a series of posters on the Beach road gives you the feeling of watching such a song. First there is the poster with the leader’s head morphed onto western clothes, then onto Indian clothes and finally some colourful casuals. That the morphing has transformed the perpetually dhoti-clad man into a somewhat thinner, shapelier and nifty dresser is considered artistic license.

Not to mention, it is not just sartorial elegance that wins votes. Apparently during the last elections one of the reasons the incumbent was rumoured to have lost was because of the serious, unsmiling face in the posters. This election the posters were modified to show a benign smile that the electorate could apparently identify with. Sadly in the more remote villages where wall paintings are still cheaper than posters, the benign smile turned slightly constipated in the artist’s reinterpretation of the original work. It seemed to understand the common man’s urgent need to perform ablutions by the wall

My latest fancy has been to gawk at a poster that depicts a smiling yesteryear leader now deceased. Emerging from the open heart of the deceased leader, like some grotesque mid way picture of a heart transplant is the smiling mug of a current leader. Still it is a whole lot better than the Congress posters. Devoid of any imagination and burdened by history, the congressmen feel obliged to make family snaps with pictures of various generations of the Gandhi-Nehru family appropriately sized to depict current levels of importance. Thus Nehru would be fluttering like a fly by Sonia Gandhi’s head. Entertaining but not in the same league as the open-heart surgery one.

Some day, I am sure Chennai citizens will be too advanced to vote going by the posters. But I do hope as an art form it finds its place in history.