(no subject)
THE DAY NITI ALMOST DIED
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HISTORY: Niti had fought tooth and nail to be posted at Delhi with IBM. After multiple rounds of interviews with various senior folks from the organisation, her position at Delhi was confirmed.
LAST THURSDAY: The HR person in charge of our deployment, after speaking with Niti, wanted to speak with me. So Niti handed me her phone and headed back to her seat.
After I finished with the HR person, I headed back to Niti to return her phone. As I neared her, I put the now disconnected phone to my ear and said, "No! No! She really wanted Delhi! She was adamant about Delhi... Yes, she is the one who wanted to go to Delhi; she does not want Bangalore..."
Niti's face was a sight to see! It's a miracle she didn't kill me when she found out it was a prank!
ABHINAV GUPTA AND THE SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION
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Abhinav was in Bangalore for a small lay-off before heading off to what sounds like an incredible job at Trivandrum. He will have a ten day on-the-job training "session" after which he's gonna be roaming the country meeting up with people. All the meetings will culminate in his visiting the States for a conference on behalf of his company. What's more, he is sure to have a senior management role in a couple of year's time.
We met up at the McDonalds at Forum and then headed over to his friends' place in Koramangala. A light dinner and a long chat later, we were on our way home. Not before, however, we managed to extend the chain of connections even further. Abhinav's roomies were all seniors of some of our batchmates in training at IBM; and, in fact, Reddy himself knew a couple of people there!
You hear a lot about how "you can network" once you hit a B-School; but you only get the full effect of that statement once you get stuck slam-bam in the middle of it.
KAAL
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A few of us went yesterday to Swagat in JP Nagar (or is it Jayanagar?) to watch Kaal. The tickets cost us 100 each and we had to fight our way through the hordes of nutcases surrounding the place.
Was the movie worth it?
Let me put it this way, if somebody PAID me to watch Kaal in the most comfortable surroundings, it would not be worth it. The whole movie was crap, from stern to aft! Not only that, the entire movie was so predictable.
There was no horror because there was no mystery.
There was no fear, because there was no horror.
There was no fun because there was no fear.
And, most of all, there was no sense and there was no story.
Well, maybe the camera-work was not so bad. There were a few nifty shots taken in the dual-subject model; where there is one subject close by in the frame and the main subject far behind on the other side of the frame. Of course, the director did lift heavily from the Michael Douglas/Val Kilmer starrer "The Ghost and The Darkness" for various shots (the story is nothing alike, though)
The SRK/Malaika song comes with the opening credits and the Vivek/Lara/Esha/John song comes with the end credits. They have absolutely NO connection with the story!
Lara Dutta, I have no idea why she even agreed to do this role. She's been shown as extra baggage throughout the film; and who wears a denim miniskirt while running away from the perils of the jungle anyway?
Esha Doel was there, I think, simply because they needed a fourth person to complete the set of characters.
Vivek Oberoi was this amazingly arrogant, irritating character. His dialogues consisted mainly of: "What Crap!" and "Main tujhe jaan se maar dunga" and "It kills".
John Abraham's character is also devoid of meat. The only purpose he serves is to teach people the correct way to light cigarettes. He's supposed to be a NatGeo journalist, but his character knows surprisingly little of the jungle.
Ajay Devgan gives his trademark smouldering looks and air of ease. However, there is that something missing which makes his performance a very boring one, too.
I have no idea why NatGeo and Sony agreed to team up with this bomb. If I were the management of either of these organisations, I would be cringing in my seat right now, hoping to be far far away from the stink this mess creates.
Kaal is so bad, that I preferred Kal Ho Na Ho, K3G and KKHH to it; and those movies are at the top of my all-time hate list!
The good news, however, is that I finally got to see one promo for Aamir Khan's "Mangal Pandey"
It was a short trailer, lasting only 10 seconds. It showed a chained, battle-scarred and defiant Mangal Panday walking up a slope towards the camera, allowing it to pan him from his long-maned head to his barefooted toes. The scene was accompanied by a clip of stirring classical music.
June 2005. That's when I will definitely be going for a movie, no matter where I am.