When Rajini became a heroine !

I don’t remember the last time coming out silent after watching a Rajini movie. Typically Rajini movies leave us filled with positive energy. Surprisingly after Endhiran, we were awetruck, in silence for quite some time. As Rajini spoke in the movie’s audio launch, it was an experience. Shankar is one director, who understands his actors very well, he knows what the fans want from their favourite stars. Even though Endhiran is not Shankar's best in terms of his scripts, the movie had easily one of his weakest scripts, the first time songs looked irrelevant and unfitting. In Endhiran, Shankar showed us exactly what we have been missing all these years from the super star. Nobody had screen space or a role to play when the super star plays a character with a destructive intention, including the humanly Rajini. For the first time we saw a movie where Rajini had to underplay just to ensure he himself can steal the show with another role, the scene where he mimics the sheep when the Robot catches the human, a perfect example. He almost became another heroine of the movie, having had to come just for songs. I do have my doubts over the (electro-) magnetic abilities of a Robot as depicted in the movie. But without doubt the magnetism of the super star does exist and that is on the non-magnetic objects like us.

It was when Chandramukhi released, a lot of people said Rajini should retire since he had come up with a good movie at that age after a forgettable Baba and its good to retire while being at the top. After a few years, he gave Sivaji that was better than Chandramukhi. Even now I see people saying Rajini should retire because he has done the best work of his life. I also agree that Endhiran is one of his best works, and probably the best in the recent past. But when it comes to his retirement, I don’t want it to happen in the near future. The best part about champions is that they set their next goal immediately after their current goal is achieved. Lets see what he does in his next movie.

What's sure is the one who is going to direct Rajini’s next movie will have to deliver much better than his best if he has to satisfy us. Shankar has raised the bars of Rajini movies to a much higher level in his last 2 movies. In fact I don’t see anyone else who can make movies with Rajini.

I want to see a Rajini movie made by Shankar, an out and out mass movie, probably Rajini playing the hero and the villain, even better would be Kamal as hero and Rajini as villain. When we have a producer like Sun pictures, paying both wouldn’t be a problem as it had been. Such is one movie they must do before the two retire, that is I think the best that can ever happen to Tamil cinema. I think it must be the Raa Raa song from Chandramukhi that gave Shankar the hint on how much we, Rajini fans are missing (his best) negative antics from his movies. Seriously I would bet if there is any role Kamal can’t do better than Rajini, it is the villain role. Shankar gave a trailer of Rajini style with the mottai boss in Sivaji, and almost a mainstream villain in Endhiran. Lets see what Shankar comes up with next.

And lets hope that Rajini doesn’t take a break for long and gear up for his next asap.

Memory

This weekend was another good weekend out of home, went to visit the LongLeat. In the Longleat house, a palace like building, I came across this poem.

What do Cats remember of days?
They remember the ways in from the cold,
The warmest spot, the place for food.
They remember the places of pain, their enemies,
The irritation of birds, the warm fumes of the soil.
They remember the creak of a bed, the sound
Of their owners footsteps,
The taste of fish, the loveliness of cream.
Cats remember what is essential of days.
Letting all other memories go as if of no worth
They sleep sounder than we,
Whose hearts break remembering
So many inessential things.


I remembered the scene from Aalavandhan, the introduction scene of Nandhu.


Nandhu:  Gnabagam, that’s a key word. Adhu onakilla, enakkirukku
Vijay: Adhan un viyadhiye, gnabagam. sila vishayangala marakaradhu nalladhu Nandhu.

And we have this famous proverb “forgive your enemies, but never forget them”. Wish you all have a good memory of all the essential things and a great life.

Kallikaattu Idhigaasam

The weekend that just got over was an amazing weekend. Instead of the usual schedule of watching 6 to 8 movies, this weekend I watched only one movie, even that was started at Sunday evening. I spent a lot of time working as well. But that is not what made the weekend amazing. It is the second Tamil novel I’ve ever read, a promptly named “Kallikaattu Idhigaasam”.


Vairamuthu wrote in preface that Idhigasam means “It did happen”. But the translated English word “epic” means “impressive”. I don’t really know whether it happened or not. But definitely it was impressive, I felt very moved. This book made me take pauses literally to avoid crying. The climax of the story is predictable, but there is no other way it would have ended. The author has put on a very good effort to depict the details on the course of the story, the way he explains a process is amazing, be it the making of country liquor, stealing of goats/chicken, making of chicken kozhambu, cow delivering a calf etc.


The first ever line I loved was this, “மனிதனுக்கு மனிதர்கள் மட்டுமே தேவை என்பது இரண்டு பருவத்தில்: ஒன்று வாழத் தெரியாத இளம்பருவம்; இன்னொன்று வாழ்ந்து முடித்த முதுபருவம். இரண்டிலும் தனிமைப்படுத்தப்படுவதுதான் வாழ்வின் சாபம்” (There are only 2 stages in life where only human warmth is required for a human being, one is the childhood and the other is the old age. Left alone in those stages is the curse of the life), about a kid whose mother just got married and the stepfather was not ready to take him into the family, obviously with no other choice left for the mother.


Then the classic yet funny irony “சில பேர்தான் பிள்ளைகளைப் பெறுகிறார்கள். பலபேர் பத்து மாதம் சுமந்து பிரச்சினைகளைப் பெறுகிறார்கள்” (Only a few people have children. A lot of people give birth to their problems.). Somehow a thought immediately came in, about my parents, whether they fall in the first or the second category. I think they are in both the categories, the first category for their first 2 kids and the second category for their last kid ;).


The story had its share of romantic touches as well, for e.g. a short poem in which Vairamuthu explains the beauty of a girl,


பாசம் புடிக்கும் தண்ணி
பலபேரும் குடிக்கும் தண்ணி
சிறுக்கி மக குளிக்கையில
சீனித்தண்ணி ஆச்சுதடி


It does look like there are going to be a lot of follow-up posts on this because there is so much left. Lets see if I get to post the rest. :) But nobody wants to miss their most favorite and here goes mine.


வெள்ளாவிச் சீலயின் உவர்மண் வாசனைக்குக் கீழே சின்னதாய் - சன்னமாய் - உரிமைக்காரன் மட்டும் உணருவதாய் - நாப்பத்தஞ்சு வருசமாய் நாசியில் படர்ந்திருக்கும் அனுபவமாய் - புடவையின் வெந்து போகாத அடிமடிப்பில் இன்னும் ஒட்டியிருந்தது அழகம்மாவின் அந்த வாசம்.


After his wife dies, the protagonist makes the washer man to dismantle the boiler to collect her saree mistakenly given for washing; with the saree half-boiled, he feels alive-from-dead to be able to smell her in the saree. I don’t know how many of you would agree, but I believe its very true, we do know our close people’s smell. In fact I remember my dad’s smell even now. When I was a kid if I’m not well, I used to take 2 medicines, one is an allopathic medicine and the other is a deep sleep hugging my dad. There were quite a lot of things where I could relate to and to me that makes it very very special. 


If you can read Tamil, please do grab this one and read, I’m sure its worth your time and effort. Of course, have Panchathanthram or MMKR ready with you, you will need those to cheer you up after you complete :). For those of you who have already read this and didn't recommend it to me, don't tell me that you have already read this. ;) 


P.S: Those who know Tamil and English well, forgive my translation ;)

Honesty is the best policy !

 I was watching the movie "Salangai Oli" yesterday. I felt it was 2 quality hours of time spent on it. The best part about epics is that they give a fresh thought and a new perspective every time we listen to it. Sometimes they even make us change our own perception.

I still remember the last time I watched the movie, that was back in 2005, when Kamal had just started becoming as my favorite actor, I was watching lots of his movies. I loved the movie for Kamal that time. Till then, I had liked the movie mainly for its brilliant musicality and intensity it carries throughout.

But this time, after the movie had completed, I was thinking about something I've never realized, some thing my thoughts hadn't  gone even remotely close to. That is on why the character Balakrishna gave up on his love even when the woman is in love with him. He could have been silly enough to believe that he shouldn't be marrying a woman who had a dark past. Else he could have wanted to do what he felt was the right thing to do. But ultimately, it didn't help him much towards his success. In fact, that sole thing led to his failure in his life, giving an inconsolable pain in heart. I guess he wasn't honest with himself. Even though he wanted to be with her, he gave up, the reason being anything.

I have seen myself in situations where I chose to do what is right, not having my heart fully convinced and some of them really hurt. Fortunately they were not about love coz I believe its very hard to undo those scars that we cause through love. I don’t think doing the right thing helps at all times. I guess we need to be voluntarily wrong sometimes to match our imperfections.

How important is to be honest? I have personally felt that it is almost impossible to be 100% honest to everyone in this world. We certainly need to lie some times, some times to stay social, at the bare minimum for good causes. But its surprising that being true to ourselves is equally difficult, which is not supposed to be. Once in a rare while, when we are down in confidence, we see such moments reminding us the regrets. Of course the optimist will be up and saying to us “Come on, there's nothing much we could have done about it”, without which we would never be able to move on.

If a scenario comes where doing the right thing is not going to help keep our soul happy, we shouldn't worry much about not doing the right thing. It just kills, one not being true to themselves. But as we see, there is no way to roll back time. The best we can do is to start again and hoping to do it well this time.

Inspiration

I have a few well-wishers at my work place, teammates of my previous project in which I was for about 4 and a half years. I wasn’t very much loaded in my final 6 months in those 4.5 years. So we used to have a lot of technical and non-technical discussions, regularly go out for movies and food etc., Even in this 1 month, if there is one thing that hasn't changed, it is our communication. Except that now the discussion happens through gmail chat, we still discuss about a lot of things.

Just as usual, I was chatting with one of my teammates. On the course, he was saying about people we respect not accepting their mistakes, making them uninspiring. For e.g. in a technical discussion, if we ask opinion from one person who we believe is good in what we discuss and turns out later that their opinion is wrong, we respectfully notify them that their opinion was wrong. If they aren't honest about it and disagrees with what they had said earlier, isn't it real bad? We kind of consider them as our teachers and they promptly demoralize us. Doesn't that sound horrible?.

I am an ardent fan of the playback singer Chinmayi and I visit her blog so often as mine. In one of the posts where she wrote about the misbehaving traffic in Chennai she had questioned if they didn't have any inspiring teachers. In another post she had said Gowtham Menon is such an inspiring director and why we don’t find such people in schools and colleges as teachers for us. At the start, it looked a little strange for me that she is so particular about teachers being an inspiration. But thinking about it and the people who have inspired me till now, its a surprise to me that a lot of them are my teachers, whether it is about how to be or how not to be. There is my mother, brother, a few ex-colleagues and a few ex-teammates and a few friends, except them, every other person who inspired me positively has been one of my teachers.

I completely agree with her that its very important that we have inspiring teachers. I have been lucky till now to get quite a lot of inspiration from my teachers. I’m sure this is one right time to thank all those people (both teachers and others) who have inspired my life so far.

Without you, my life wouldn't have been so good, Thank you all !

To be or not to be, happy !

This is very well a follow-up post on my previous post about happiness. I guess its becoming my habit to write follow-up posts.


This time as well it is triggered by someone’s status message about happiness. It said “Don't put the key to your happiness in someone else's pocket”. I am a firm believer of that. Those of you who know me well would be able to easily recognize that I do stupid, crazy things just because I wanted to do it that way and didn't want to change it for someone else. My lunch-mates know how much I trouble them not to have food in Andhra mess near the office.


Suddenly I see myself not very happy with the way things are going on. The difference is due to my job. I was very happy about my work as a developer, no silly mistakes, in fact very few mistakes. But in Technical Assurance in simple words donkey-work I’m not yet confident. It is about getting work done from someone you don’t even know and in a much higher position than you.


I have now got very high respect for all those secretaries who plan the meetings for their superiors so well. I see that it is complex and takes longer time to get a meeting arranged than the actual work that is decided to be done in that meeting.


With people of different cultures, the style of work, the way they use the infrastructure, even the simplest thing becomes very complicated. At the end of the day if I get the meeting arranged and got the information and documented it, that is a good day at work. When that doesn't happen, its a total mess. So I tend to kind of feel bad about not getting it done, simply put “not happy” about it.


Even though I know that I couldn’t have done much about it I get to feel unhappy. Does this mean that I have my happiness based on someone else? Literally, yes. Actually, not quite.


Still the difference can be made by accepting that its not my fault and letting it go. A typical mind immediately accepts “its not your fault” and have seen it many times with myself in the earlier times. I personally don’t like “its not my fault”. And letting it go is the most difficult for me. I tend to think “What better could have been done?”. But I think that is where finding room for improvement makes us unhappy. I still can’t decide staying unhappy is right or not in this case.


I remember someone saying “the food that tastes very good and giving you pleasure when its on your tongue is going to spoil your body most of the times”. Similarly if we are happy at work for a long time, we are going to be in a major trouble sooner or later. Anyway, I believe I have spent enough time in this world to understand that all days aren't sunny days.


Let me see, I hope that in the near future I will be happy about what I’m doing again. For those of you who stay in your comfort zone for a long time, please try to get out of it as early as possible.


Oh yeah, I still remember “No one wants advice, only corroboration”.

Happiness

Today, I read a status message of one of my friends which said “Being happy is not a matter of destiny. It is a matter of options.”. I had commented on it with “I think its more about knowing what exactly we want. If we don't know that, we can't always choose right from the options available, can we?”. Thinking a little deeper about it, I see myself having a contradicting idea as well. I think the idea of “what we want” continuously changes. Something we like today may not be the same tomorrow. So getting what we want always is too difficult, almost impossible. But even if we get infinitely lucky to get everything we want, will we be happy? I don’t think we will. After all, as Virumandi said, “சந்தோசம்னா என்னனு அத அனுபவிக்கேல மனுசனுக்குத் தெரியுறதில்ல, அது இல்லாமப் போகுது பாருங்க, அப்பதேன் !” (one doesn’t realize what is happiness when they experience it, they do only when it is not there). I too believe that it is the absence of happiness that makes us celebrate it when it is present. It's just not a matter of options. Its about the cycle. Life will be boring if we are always happy and its not worth it if we always sad !


If you want to watch happiness, watch this !
http://youtube.com/watch?v=m3w8Ldb4oSc