Vacation reflections

Exactly a week ago, the winter break ended. As a working adult I feel privileged to have this 'break' in winter. My employer shutsdown for a good one week between Christmas and New Year and normally we take a trip to India meeting family. This year we decided to do the trip early and chill at home over the winter break. And this has been one of the best decisions in past several months !

I decided to completely unplug from work ( have had a hectic past 3 months and needed a clean r n r to rejuvenate). So I set-up an OOO and moved onto setting up a personal to-do list. I manged to complete over two thirds of the to-dos all the while taking time out to get back to reading and tv. No, no this wasn't the mindless TV watching at the end of a routine day - this was deliberate, considered choices of movies and books.

I read 'Still Alice' by Lisa Genova. I have not watched the movie and the book thus maintained an unfamiliarity that was enough to sustain my interest. The story gives a rare first-hand look into being a patient of mental illness. The story is so detailed into the science and so true to what the person going through the situation is feeling like it almost makes me wonder if the author is in Alice's head. It feels like this can't be fiction.  Loved the book and all the characters - Alice,
her husband and of course her actress daughter. I have decided not to spoil it for me by watching the movie. Not yet, anyway.

Hell or high water - Having just taken a road trip across the entire West Texas area, watching this movie was looking at people I recently got acquainted with. It was tremendous acting all of by the lead characters, especially Ben Foster. This neo-wild wild west story is true to to the spirit of all those heart-wrenching westerns that appealed to the male and female emotions of audiences. Highly recommend this film to serious audiences. These are the kinds of movies we need to see more - ones that deal with real people. I am sick of the science fictions and action thrillers. Bring on the story people !

I didn't want to watch Fuller House S2 until after Thanksgiving, so did that during Christmas time. The first seasons was a bit cheesy, but I loved this second season. While I did enjoy the nostalgia and throwback scenes, I  thinks what will make the series stand on its own again , and not just as a re-union one-off, is to carry on those themes of developing honest kids and what goes into it. In this time of social media and narcissistic crazines our kids can really use that. Even adults can.

Lastly, I tried Game of Thrones. I guess I am late to the game, but gotta admit I am happy being late. It did not look like I've missed out on a lot. I really don't understand why people are so ga-ga for GoT. Yes, there are some really good characters, but I've seen better. And the excess violence is too much of a bargain for a select scenes. The story itself is soooo slow! I frankly feel that shows like The Tudors, The Whtie Queen have done so much better in carrying on plots and plots of royal carnage and politics. And they did not need a dragon to make it that interesting. I watched until mid Season 3 and I'm never going back.  I'd rather read the books.

That is the resolution, for 2017, read more books - more than 2016 at least. 

Movie Review - Under the Tuscan Sun

I started watching the movie with the presumption that I would hate it as a 30+ year old who is much more of a feminist that my won 25 year self. It’s just that the idea – a divorced woman finding herself in a new country – is so beaten to death over several movie (remember Eat, Pray, Love and so many more such ones). But I finished that movie experiencing that feel-good emotion, sorta like you feel at the end of a great day.

I loved the screenplay’s treatment of the original story. Even though it starts with a dejected woman taking a trip to Europe to catch a break, it explores depths of her that you don’t expect. The film shows that fulfillment is not always realized through one’s own accomplishments rather it is sometimes obtained by helping others accomplish their desires.

I also loved how the director shows the movie not from a touristy perspective of Tuscany and Italy, rather from someone trying to live there. There is not more than couple scenes with the popular spots such as colosseums or cathedrals. The majority of the movie sticks around Tuscany countryside. It is also different in its perspective since it doesn’t limit the viewpoints to the many wineries of the countryside. It goes beyond that.

Diane Lane is such a great actress. She can make you fall in love with the most plain, silent and shy characters. I wish she starts acting in more films in the coming years; can’t remember the last time I saw her in a contemporary film. 

Book Review :: The girl on the train

Suburbia is a favorite setting of authors and screenplay writers. I think of it as the perfect setting to explore what a person is truly made up of. When thrown from the carefree life of a working single man or woman into a responsible mortgage paying adult with a family to take care of, what does one really chose to become? It's easy for us to make bad or good choices when the life that we are part of makes progress day by day, there is a hope that things will get better - personally, professionally, even morally. But what choices do we make when life seems stagnate or seems like you've accomplished all that you thought of or even worser there is no hope of anything getting better at all?  It could get boring at times. It could make a person without a busy life go totally bonkers, annoyed, and even depressed. American beauty - a superb example of life in the suburbia. How seemingly perfect families you see through windows are not so perfect.

In The girl on the train, Paula Hawkins explores this concept. You see characters that appear to be ordinary turn out to be the most interesting ones you've met in a while. The entire set of characters, 5 main ones in total, are well developed through the book and reveal surprising things about them up until the end. Sometimes their behavior doesn't even make sense. You see them compare and contrast their past life to the one they are currently in. And none of the 5 seem to like it. So in that manner the character study is twice as much compared to books with one or two focal characters.  But this creates a depth vs. breadth struggle for the author. So eventually you see known patterns develop that make the book a little less interesting than contemporary mystery thrillers with fewer characters. But on the whole, Ms. Hawkins utilizes the plenitude of the characters to her advantage thereby having the reader take several guesses as to who the bad guy is.

The book does a great job of depicting a person's downfall, through Rachel for the most part. You cannot help but pity her and hate her both at the same time. It does the same with another character but I'll leave it to you to find out who. No one loves spoilers, right?

Called the next Gone Girl, rightly so for the similarities of setting (suburbia, missing woman, mind games) and the narrative style the book is a less thrilling and less mysterious version of Gone Girl. If you have read you fair share of mystery novels or watched enough romantic thrillers you will correctly guess what's happening about half way down the book. That kills the suspense a bit. Unlike Gone Girl this one doesn't have too many twists, so less of a page turner. Nevertheless a page turner.

I'll give this 4 out of 5 stars because of the character development. The reason it was a page turner for me was I kept wanting to see what this person does next or what they did in the past that was going to be disclosed on the next page. And with each fact that is exposed, each new situation explained you continue to make surprising discoveries about the characters. We all exhibit a little voyeurism, just like Rachel, and that makes the book interesting for the reader. Only in Rachel's case she took it to a whole another level.

Begin again....

I don't believe it! 6 years have passed since my last blog entry. Did life really get that busy? Let's see ... a double masters', a move, a house, a kid and 7 years of marriage....well yeah, I have been busy! But every now and then I had this itch, a nudge, a sudden remembrance of a missed (hobby?) habit. Writing on my blog. So here I am, trying to begin again.

Say anything

Disclaimer (July 2016) - When I read this post now, I sound judgey...not my proudest post on the blog. I guess I've grown a bit more mature and tolerant now. Everyone has their story....let's not judge them...but it applies both ways.

Have there been times in your life when someone was extremely rude to you and you were just too dumb-sruck to retaliate their rudeness? I've got plenty of such incidents in my own biograophy.

A few days back I went volunteering at a place in town. This is a huge non-profit and hence has a lot of volunteers working for them part-time. As it happened an elderly lady (app. 55 - 60 yrs) and I ended up doing some stuff together in the office. I tried to start a conversation with her. As the conversation progressed, I realized she was a unhappy kinda person. May be life was not exactly fair to her, but I felt it wasn't unfair to her either. Anyways, I told her why I normally volunteer and where my husband is employed(in an American-Indian IT services company) etc. After a few minutes she said that one of her friends was worried about losing her job because her work was being outsourced to, you guessed it right, India. And she said, "I hope it's not the company your spouse works for". For a few seconds I was stupefied! I was too shocked for her way of expressing dislike for "Indian companies stealing their jobs": saying it in the face of a stranger from India who was happy to volunteer her time, for free,at an American non-profit. I didn't think it was fair of her to be so direct, especially with a person she met just an hour ago. But I din't utter a word back to her. Later, I was so angry with myself for not coming up with a good response.

And then as time passed by she asked me strange questions about Indian culture: how she thought people in India force their kids for arranged marriages, how she thought we can't speak English and how people normally live with their parents. Here I took matters into my hand and explained the reality in India: how parents now-a-days trust their children to make their own decisions life partner or otherwise, how 80% Indians have their entire education from English medium schools, how we in India respect family and stick together till death.

It was also shocking to see her recalculating the money she "loaned" to her sons! You know your life is a reflection of your actions, if you are calculative in lending money to your kids they expect you to live in a nursing home later in life. I'm not saying that people here are all like this. I've mets of tons of people here who take care of their parents in a better way than I've ever seen in India.

Relationships work only when love and respect are requited. And that's why the Indian family system works in my opinion. At the end of the day I just felt sorry for the dear old ladie, for it's her attitude, and not her pay at job or not her retirement benefits, that needs to change in order for her to be happy and peaceful in life. And I'm glad I am in a position to make this discretion.

movie marathon

So with the spirit of Academy awards last Feb, my hubby and I decided to embark on a marathon of watching academy award winning movies. Why this? First of all, for fun :).Second, I am curious to see the transformation of movies over the past few decaded. Third, I wanna understand the reasoning behind the academy of motion picture's picking a movie as the best-movie of the year? What makes a movie a best movie - is it story, is it the actors, is it the social message it carries, is it the relevance of the movie to its times?

So as I embark on this, I will duely report my reviews here. So keep watching people!

Romance for any season -Dirty dancing

I watched Dirty Dancing today. For the second time (yeah yeah, just the second time...). And I loved it all over again. Just a few days back I put 'Before Sunrise' at the top of my most-romantic movies list. But now I think it's a tie between Dirty Dancing and Before Sunrise.
DD has all the key ingredients necessary to make a romantic movie: music, sensual dancing, beautiful protagonists and an almost fairy tale like story. May be it was DD that created a benchmark in the first place. Patrick Swayze (may he RIP) is an amazing dancer, he is a trained of course. And the chemistry he has with Jennifer Grey is simply so real!It's hard to believe that they were both actually "not-so-fond" of each other when filming DD. But I love the way this off-screen animosity transltes into on-screen passion.
DD is a typical rich girl meets a poor boy story. At least it looks like that on the top. But underneath it's more than that. It's a story of the experiencing the pains of growing up and facing the truth about the real world. Jennifer Grey suits the role. I can't imagine any other 80's actress but Grey in Baby's role.
As for the dance numbers, I love all of 'em; starting with what has been described 'one of the most goose-bumpy movie dance sequences ever' , the climactic dance to 'The time of my life', to the parody of 'Love is Strange'.
Although it's referred to as 'the most watched movie by women ever' and 'the Star Wars for women' I think DD is worth a watch of any guy too :)

Pic courtsey:Wikipedia.org

Hello world- reloaded

I keep doing this...I hit the writer's-block once in a while and then say 'hello-world'...it's like putting an end to an ackward pause. Nevertheless, if any of you out there has been missing by blogs....there's good news for you. I'm gonna blog more frequently. Past one, sorry two months, have been busy busy busy. I moved across the country from the quaint beautiful side of MA to the dry but cheerfully warm west (AZ). New place, new apartment, new furniture blah blah blah - long story short I was busy. But am back now! So keep watching this space.

Worcester,je t'aime!

I look out of the bedroom window and see the snow-covered swings and toy-cars in my neighbor's yard. I know the scene will change soon. Spring is just a couple of months away.
I know the quiet Bean Counter on college Highland St will soon be crowded. The students of the university will soon come back and flood it.

But I won't be here to see it all.
It's time for us to move. I embarked on this journey when I first moved from my home-town to my college-town. Then to Chennai and so on. After relishing the charm of New England for nearly 15 months it's time for us to make our next stop. These days every place I visit in town makes me think, "Will I cross paths with this place again?". I've a lot of memories here. After all it's the place where I started my own family life. The city library, the place I worked, the parking lot I learnt to drive, the beautiful homes on Salisbury St, the small home on Old Mill Rd with its uncountable Christmas decorations, the Saturday evenings spent in the Border's cafe', the restaurants on the Shrewsbury St, I'll miss them all. But the excitement of the new voyage is keeping my spirits up. Who knows what's in store?

P.S. For the first time ever I'm feeling nostalgic about something before being seperated from it :)

A song I love

My 50th post and I like it's this :)

Avatar - my review

So, the much awaited movie of the year was finally released last week and I hit the theatre to see it the opening weekend. My verdict - definitely worth the $(12.5+1.25) I spent on it.

Now that I'm in my late 20's I don't enjoy the thrills of sci-fi movies anymore. But 'Avatar' to me is beyond sci-fi. It's drama + sci-fi + one man's dream of creating the next step of cinema experience.
The story itself isn't new (remember 'Dances with Wolves'?).Cameron himself has accepted the similarities. But what makes Avatar unique is its ability to make believe its audience that there indeed seems to be a Pandora out there. And thanks to the stereoscopic film-making we almost feel we are on Pandora.
The creator has done a good job of casting not so famous stars in the movie (flashback Titanic). The performances nevertheless are laudable. You can't hlep but see the boy-next-door nature of the protagonist Jake Sully.
The film is rich. Am not talking about the vegetation on Pandora, am talking about the moments of drama, the CGIs, the almost real life forms of the alien tribe , and if you watch it in a IMAX the 'butt-kicker' experience - these are only few of the attributes of the movie. I think in a very long time has a movie truly attracted all age groups. My fav. sequence is the taming of the bird when Jake is under test.
For me the total 170 mins passed by like 60 mins. And for the first time I am really looking forward to going through the same movie experience all over again :)

Climate change - what are you doing?

Today is 2009 blog action day and a little over 9000 bloggers from 150 countries are blogging about this year's topic of blogaction 'climate change'. As one of the 9000+ bloggers, I have my 2 cents to offer:

I would be surprised if any of you haven't experienced the climate changes in the past few years. Gone are the days when summers used to be summers and winters used to be winters. We,on the earth, now have rains in summer and totally shortened spring season and what not! Most people like me who are just laymen in scientific climatic knowledge feel the climatic change but don't really know what the reason behind it is or if they can do anything to reduce it. I think it's high time that the leaders of the world-nations do something to bring attention of the common man to adverse climatic changes. Else we'll wake up one day like the people in that movie 'Day after tomorrow'. Beware, unlike the movie there might just not be a happy ending!

But I'm optimistic with the way things are moving in the right direction. Blog action day is just one of these awareness generators. I hope that the efforts of fellow-bloggers can bring more attention to the matter and help the leaders meeting at the Copenhagen climate change conferene to take some serious steps.

A little LH nostalgia

LH - My friends from college would immediately know what I mean.

A good friend of mine got married recently to her beloved,who also is from our college. I couldn't attend her wedding, although I really really wanted to.
When I browsed through the wedding pictures I saw all my friends from college days...all my co-inmates of LH and it just brought back all the sweet memories from my 4 years in NIT Warangal.
1 - How our gang always used to be the first gang to arrive in the mess - no matter how much we hated the food.
2 - How we shouted and scared each other during power failures
3 - How my room was the offical 'someone call' sight room
4 - The carzy dance in the midnight B'Day parties
5 - Silly walks around the Lawn
6 - Getting dressed up on festival days and making trips to 1000 pillar temple
7 - Shouting in the cinema halls of Warangal
8 - Going to Punnami at 8pm and running to catch the LH gates before they close
9 - Reserving bathrooms for roomates after we shower
10 - Chanting Rahul's name in the TV room (or may be Sachin's :))
....list goes on....
I'm just thankful to NITW for letting me have these amazing gorgeous talented and graceful women as my friends :D ...Love my hostel-mates

Spell-bound...

..that's the one word to describe my state after I watched 'I'm not scared' tonight.
I feel that if you really want to know how you would like a movie, the best way to form an opinion is to watch the movie without any background or review in mind or without watching any trailers at all. And with the same approach I happened to watch 'I'm not scared'.

The story is both dramtic and thrilling. The theme and the ending of the movie are so touching that you would've to be cold-hearted not to be haunted by them. The story reminds me of the innocence of childhood and how the things happening around us can or cannot change the virtues we all are born with. The choices the little boy Michele makes in the story will amaze us for sure. I wonder if I was as brave a child as Michele seems to be in the movie.

The story is supposedly based on a real life event. I wonder how I had never heard of this movie before. But this sure is going to my list!

How much credit do you get for a credit card?

I love hanging out at coffe shops, office canteens and now,sports bars....NO!!I'm not drinking yet my beloved friends and readers:). The thing about these places is that friends meet up and talk about a variety of stuff, right from who's their latest crush to what the new leader of the country should do.Last night at a hangout place, I couldn't but overhear the conversation of two adult men.No points for guessing their topic of discussion...what other can one discuss these days than money. One of the men was saying, "The only use the X Bank's debit card, after all I can't sepnd money that I don't really have"..Thanks my man!You are finally realising it.

The whole concept of credit was,I would say,marvelous and extremely smart and impacting...after all without credit one could never think of buying a home or a car or even for that matter go to college(this applies to colleges in the U.S...most of which are damn damn costly!). Hadn't there been no one to give us a mortgage or lend us money, we would just live life plainly...
While (!unemployed)
{
if (month-starts) get payckeck;

pay bills;

if (layoffs or over 60)
umemployed == true
}

In order to encourage credit-taking or borrowing, the US had come up with the concept of one's credit score, basically you borrow or take a loan from a bank or some other source and the time you take to pay it back and your promptness in paying it back, gives you a good creidt score out of 800 points.

But we being humans that err, took this whole credit cycle to such a phase where almost all the money that was was in the air floating as credit in circulation...I don't want to elaborate on how one thing led to another and we landed where we are today.I was shocked to know that the present day avergae credit of an adult in the US is $11,500 dollars and the average # of credit cards a student has it 5!!! While any form of credit could potentially go bad, the chances of credit abuse are more with a credit card than any kind of mortgage or bank loan etc.This is coz, once you have a card that could be swiped at places ranging from cffee shops to the Prada stores...we children of the God eat up all the candy we can afford with the allowance we were never actually handed out.

I'm glad the phenomenon of credit cards has not caught up in a country like India where the economy is stabilising finally.Forget the nationalised banks, no private bank would give a college student any credit card so easily, and it's good in one way. You teach the kids to spend resourcefully and judiciously. No wonder economies like India and Brazil are called more important than that of US (ref. on of the July TIME issues)the saviors of the current economy. As for the U S of A,I hope the current credit scare here stays the way it is , if not in a more paranoid state.

What should google do against the new bing ads?

The latest from the Google-Microsoft wars are the Bing ads.Check out one here.

For over a decade now , google has been the place to go to when you had an unanswered question, atleast for most people like me :).It became a synonym for 'search'. People started saying , "did you google it" instead of "did you search for it". It is acontemporary case of a brand-name replacing the name of the product itself, like 'Xerox' replacing the word 'photocopying'.

Now microsoft , in its ongoing competition with google, has launched Bing!
I haven't use Bing much, but its latest TVC (TV commercial) promises to not overload search reults onto the consumer , unlike google which gives you all possible things related to your search and lets you decide which of them is appropriate. My first impression on seeing the ad was 'Good point!'. But unfortunatley Bing doesn't stand up to what it promises.It ends up giving me results similar to those on google search.

So what should Google do now, should it continue what it's been doing so far:not advertise its products on the TV or should it comeback with a retort?
In case Google decides to do the latter , what should be its positioning?

When the light came into our house!

The title might seeming promising but this post is nothing philosophical in its content.If anything it's nostalgic. After spending a handful number of months in the Eastern part of the west(sorry I simply should say East coast of the USA :P), I have enjoyed every moment of my time here. I have to admit that I've even considered the thought of becoming an East-coaster , however self-contradicting I might sound to my good friends in saying that. With no complaints at all so far, I realised how much I missed things back home when we bought a white tubelight last night. All these days our home was lit with the so called soft-white light, which I hated. If you are from the urban populations of India and are relatively new to the US , you will definitely see what I'm talking about. I hate this soft-white light. It's everything but white. It has this yellow glow which is closer to the sepia mode of the camera. Finally last night we bought this white tubelight.And as soon as we lit it....wow I felt like I was in the living room of my home back in India :)

Silly as it may sound,it's these small things that bring back memories of good old days. The smell of the agarbathi, the aroma of Bru coffee, the samosa in Patel Groceries, an oil bath on Sunday.....the list goes on.

It's ironic how most people back home(of course I wasn't one of these 'most people' :P )hate the places they live in , stay dissatisfied and wish to escape from their surroundings.But take them away and put them in the best possible ambience and I bet ya ,they'll ask you when you are gonna send them back! That's us!

Gone baby gone - Review

Gone baby gone is not a new movie. It was released in 2007. Am surprised how I did not hear much about it. It was a matter of chance that I happened to see this movie, full of commendable performances, last night.

The film revolves around the kidnapping of a 3 yr old girl in the shady parts of Boston. It goes on touching issues of kidnapping, drug-dealing and abuse of children - all the ingredients of a social rather crime awareness movie. The story is something that can happen to anyone, yet is something you wish does not happen to anyone.

The protagonist (Casey Affleck) is a private detective living with his work-partner in our shady suburb. He is hired by the family of the missing kid to find her. Now one might ask why he and not the strong police is the protagonist in the movie. Well our guy happens to be brought up in the community and is just the right kind of person with contacts within the world down under, possible where our missing kid is. At times the viewer is definite to be thrilled with how a simple looking person like our man can go on and threaten all those biggies of the underworld. But it's carried in the movie in a convincing way.

Although I don't want to spoil your own experience if you ever watch the movie, am tempted to discuss about the ending. The climax puts you, the audience, in the midst of a question - is everything you think is right, really right? When you look back and see do you really think abiding by the rules of law was the right thing to do? What would you do if you had a chance to change a person's life by compromising on what you believe to be right?

Some of the scenes in the movie are haunting. They force you to come face to face with the horrible things we do to our children and family. At one point of the movie, the story makes you feel that you have reached the end , but suddenly it shifts by 180 degrees - a characteristic of a perfect mystery! The movie is like a page turner book, it makes you sit at the edge of your seat. Few references in the story reminded me of Mystic River. Only when I read the details of the movie on wiki did I realize why, after all they have a common author.

When the titles played on the screen I told myself, “Ben Affleck probably made this movie just to give his brother Casey a much needed big break after his small roles all these years”. But after 2 hours I could not stop admiring Ben for his directorial talent. The movie also has big names like Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman, who as usual deliver brilliantly however small a role one gives them. And Casey, well, I’m surprised we are not seeing much of him these days. He is definitely a gifted actor. I hope I get to see more of him.

What made last weekend good was...

...that I watched Breakfast at Tiffany's.It's one of those feel good romantic comedies. I'm a huge fan of romantic comedies , especially the ones with more romance and lesser comedy :). Anyone would agree that movies like When Harry met Sally , You've got mail, French Kiss or Breakfast at T.'s are sure to make it one's 100 movies to watch anytime to cheer oneself up.

I couldn't have imagined anything better to do this windy weekend than getting cosy on the couch with Breakfast at T's playing.Although I had watched it already, I wanted to see it again.You see that's the thing with these romantic comedies, you can watch them again and again. I hardly remembered Moon river, but as soon as the titles starting coming up on the TV with Audrey Hepburn eating her croissant in front of Tiffany & Co. the tune came back to me. After all a tune doesn't win the Oscar without being qualified as memorable!

Audrey Hepburn amazes me. 8 years after Roman Holiday she still managed to look the same innocent looking 20-ish girl and portrayed her role so convincingly. You can't help but sympathise with the poor little Holly Golightly. She makes you fall in love with her inspite of the facts like she absolutely deserted her family back home and ran off for her own reasons, accompanies men for 50$ bills and turns her back on her true love Paul.

Apart from the deliberate fun made of Holly's Japanese neighbour upstairs, the portrayl of which even the Director Blake Edwards regretted later, the movie is a memorable one. For me it will always be a one of the best things to watch on a cold windy dull day :)

Image source - thecinemasource dot com

Funny ads

Most of us hate advertisements. We hate them even more when they come when you are at the edge of your seat.But there are some ads which most of us have loved...remember the Dairy Milk ads-especially the one with the young lady dancing in the cricket match.Lately I've started to like the funny ones.Here's a Heineken ad that says Women:Clothes :: Men:Heineken - Perfect advertising - in a simple and impressive way.