Can anyone guess what this is?
Found it on my recent trip to Kolaba Fort...
Monday, March 26, 2007
Kihim, Nagaon, and Alibaug Weekend Getaway
Last weekend (March 24 & 25) I scooted off to Kihim beach for a quiet getaway. It was good. Nothing compared to Goa beaches, but good, nevertheless. Heh, you can't expect to get anything better once you've seen the best :P
Uploaded some pics on FlickR (go forward in the photostream from this link).
Thanks to Dubey, I've learnt to click silhouettes on automatic digital cameras as well! You'll see LOTS of them in my current pics :P
Saw Kihim beach, Kolaba fort, and Nagaon beach. Kihim beach was a bit boring -- no frikkin' beer shops anywhere in sight. What's a beach without beer, I say! Nagaon was HUGE! And the winds were pretty knotty. Check out the video on YouTube. The ground is not inclined. It's the fucking wind causing the beer can to roll like that!
The best parts were
a) the ferry ride (a first for me),
b) the dare-devil loading and unloading of bikes from the ferry,
c) the lovely sunset at Kihim beach,
d) walking through the marshes in low tide to reach the Kolaba fort,
e) the vast expanse of Nagaon beach.
Select pics...
Uploaded some pics on FlickR (go forward in the photostream from this link).
Thanks to Dubey, I've learnt to click silhouettes on automatic digital cameras as well! You'll see LOTS of them in my current pics :P
Saw Kihim beach, Kolaba fort, and Nagaon beach. Kihim beach was a bit boring -- no frikkin' beer shops anywhere in sight. What's a beach without beer, I say! Nagaon was HUGE! And the winds were pretty knotty. Check out the video on YouTube. The ground is not inclined. It's the fucking wind causing the beer can to roll like that!
The best parts were
a) the ferry ride (a first for me),
b) the dare-devil loading and unloading of bikes from the ferry,
c) the lovely sunset at Kihim beach,
d) walking through the marshes in low tide to reach the Kolaba fort,
e) the vast expanse of Nagaon beach.
Select pics...
Sunday, March 18, 2007
I Run Maidaan...
After years of wait... after so much of hype... it turned out that a local college circuit band was better than the Beast! A classic case of ghar ki murgi daal baraabar!
Seriously, I thought Parikrama, who opened to Iron Maiden, were better than the Beasts themselves.
Maiden was opened by three bands:
1. F.T.N -- winner of some all India college band competition
2. Parikrama
3. Cauren Harris -- who?
F.T.N. were acting like a bunch of wannabes on stage. And I never quite liked the growling kind of music anyways.
Parikrama rocked with an all original line up. And the lead singer made a snide remark on the critics calling them a "cover band" at the end of their show. They're coming next week to Bangalore again. In an IIPM (yes, the same Arindam "Dare to think beyond the IIMs" Chaudhari's IIPM) college fest. Wonder who'll go to listen to them again!
Cauren Harris was a blood sucker. Straw laga kar ek litre khoon choos gayi sabka. She was like, Britney Spears Learns To Rock! The crowd was continuously booing her off stage with chants of "Fuck Off", "Fuck Off Bitch", "Cauren, Cauren, Who the Fuck is Cauren?" But she continued her torture for a full 45 mins!
After half an hour of that... Maiden came on stage to a cheering and ecstasic crowd. With blinking red lights on stage, and a sea of blue mobile phone hues in the audience. All jumping, craning, and stomping on the hapless fellow in front of them to capture THE moment.
Three new songs from "A Matter of Life And Death" which I did not know at all. Add to that a FUCKED up sound system. Seriously. I'm not joking. And I was not the only one who felt that. I had recently been to the Roger Waters show in Mumbai. And I was literally surrounded in a sea of sound. The sound quality at the yesterday's Maiden show was like a good quality college fest. What a let down.
I don't know. Probably I'm getting old. Probably my music taste is changing. Saala paaglon waala enthu nahin bacha in sab cheezon ke liye... But fuck I came down from Mumbai for just this gig. It was okay.
Seriously, I thought Parikrama, who opened to Iron Maiden, were better than the Beasts themselves.
Maiden was opened by three bands:
1. F.T.N -- winner of some all India college band competition
2. Parikrama
3. Cauren Harris -- who?
F.T.N. were acting like a bunch of wannabes on stage. And I never quite liked the growling kind of music anyways.
Parikrama rocked with an all original line up. And the lead singer made a snide remark on the critics calling them a "cover band" at the end of their show. They're coming next week to Bangalore again. In an IIPM (yes, the same Arindam "Dare to think beyond the IIMs" Chaudhari's IIPM) college fest. Wonder who'll go to listen to them again!
Cauren Harris was a blood sucker. Straw laga kar ek litre khoon choos gayi sabka. She was like, Britney Spears Learns To Rock! The crowd was continuously booing her off stage with chants of "Fuck Off", "Fuck Off Bitch", "Cauren, Cauren, Who the Fuck is Cauren?" But she continued her torture for a full 45 mins!
After half an hour of that... Maiden came on stage to a cheering and ecstasic crowd. With blinking red lights on stage, and a sea of blue mobile phone hues in the audience. All jumping, craning, and stomping on the hapless fellow in front of them to capture THE moment.
Three new songs from "A Matter of Life And Death" which I did not know at all. Add to that a FUCKED up sound system. Seriously. I'm not joking. And I was not the only one who felt that. I had recently been to the Roger Waters show in Mumbai. And I was literally surrounded in a sea of sound. The sound quality at the yesterday's Maiden show was like a good quality college fest. What a let down.
I don't know. Probably I'm getting old. Probably my music taste is changing. Saala paaglon waala enthu nahin bacha in sab cheezon ke liye... But fuck I came down from Mumbai for just this gig. It was okay.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Free Speech.
Rashmi Bansal says in her post titled "The Orkut Party Ends"
Completely agree.
But you don't need to be forced to apologize for hating India.
...or loving Pakistan.
...saying you don't like the political views of Gandhi.
...speak out against the reservation politics.
...lashing out against the latest Deepa Mehta flick (no one ever went to jail for that!)
...joining the "I Hate Himesh "Nasal Drops" Reshammiya" on Orkut.
...or being prosecuted under the law for "hurting national sentiments" if you think that playing the national anthem in movie theaters is a stupid idea.
The only good that can come of this law is that, people who fake identities -- putting up a fake profile of a girl, putting up a fake profile of a teacher, etc. -- will get caught faster.
But what's stopping the next political leader from jailing the moderator of the "I hate XYZ Political Party" tomorrow?
Nothing. Exactly.
That's why this is bad. Very bad.
[...]you have to be responsible for what you say online[...]
Completely agree.
But you don't need to be forced to apologize for hating India.
...or loving Pakistan.
...saying you don't like the political views of Gandhi.
...speak out against the reservation politics.
...lashing out against the latest Deepa Mehta flick (no one ever went to jail for that!)
...joining the "I Hate Himesh "Nasal Drops" Reshammiya" on Orkut.
...or being prosecuted under the law for "hurting national sentiments" if you think that playing the national anthem in movie theaters is a stupid idea.
The only good that can come of this law is that, people who fake identities -- putting up a fake profile of a girl, putting up a fake profile of a teacher, etc. -- will get caught faster.
But what's stopping the next political leader from jailing the moderator of the "I hate XYZ Political Party" tomorrow?
Nothing. Exactly.
That's why this is bad. Very bad.
Monday, March 05, 2007
Why Microsoft is Bad for Computer Education.
I used to be a fanatic anti-Microsoft (or anti-M$ to some) spokesperson. There was a time in college when I used to hate everything Microsoft. Soon after I tasted Linux for the first time during (yes during) my 12th standard boards -- and managed to get X working on my SiS VGA card -- I uninstalled Windows from my machine. And have taken pride in the fact that since then Windows ke liye mere computer ke darwaaze hamesha hamesha ki liye band ho gaye hain!
But later, during my job, I realised that there are places that still require Windows. Some places where Windows actually does a better job that Linux (operatibility with LCD projectors, one; presentation software, two). Therefore I found myself shifting to Microsoft Powerpoint on a Windows machine for making a client presentation whenever I needed to.
However, I still held the strong opinion that Windows users are on average "dumber" than Linux users. And I don't mean dumber in the IQ kind of sense. I mean "dumber" because they don't know what's happening under the hood. It's just like you and I, or the average person off the street, would be dumber about cars than an average car mechanic.
And my opinion was reinforced last week. Microsoft is bad for computer education.
I had recently gone to a college to recruit freshers for the tech team at Cleartrip. (It wasn't any of the IITs or RECs.) We were interviewing final year BE students (IT/CS/EE streams). A few were with a work ex. of one year or so.
I was stunned, and I mean absolutely STUNNED, when people who claimed to have worked on their college website did not know what a URL meant when I asked them for it! When people who had claimed to work on e-shopping carts could not tell me exactly how sessions were maintained.
And these are not your typical B.Com. + GNIIT kind of students. These are people who would, in a matter of months, be passing out with a computer engineering degree. They would become part of the so called "talent pool" of India.
Out of the 15 people I interviewed (there were about 45 divided amongst three interview panels), not a single person was able to write a program that generated the Fibonacci series!
No one was able to tell me what IDE they use to write C/C++ programs. After a series of indirect questiononing (what are the steps you do before you start writing your program, etc) only some were able to tell me that they used something called "tc" (Turbo C). No one had heard of "bc" (Borland C). I didn't bother asking about BloodShed.
Apparently, their college lab had only Windows installed. For four years they had been fed on a staple diet of .Net, ASP, C#, VB, VB.net, and what M$ technology have you. Where you simply right clicked on an HTML form control and set its property to hidden instead of learning that was happening under the hood. Where you didn't care what cookies or URL rewriting was – the session object just worked.
No one had seen a Linux command prompt ever, despite of having done a theoretical course on Unix.
Average Joe users can get by without knowing the innards of a computer.
Computer engineers can't.
Had the students been exposed to the Linux command prompt, they would've been introduced to an IDE, after they would've gone through the pain of writing a C program in a powerful text editor (like emacs), and then compiling and linking it by hand.
Had they been writing CGI scripts in Perl or web programming in PHP, they would've known how HTML forms work; the difference between GETs and PUTs. Some of them might've been exposed to more than one broweser, and the bad world of browser inconsistencies out there, and how to get around them (and over a period of time, most websites would work!)
Microsoft has kicked in a vicious circle of dumbing down the users. I'm sure the students were so clueless partly because their teachers were. And guess what OS the teachers had used in their college days?
I'm not saying that Linux is absolutely bare bones and you get no level of abstraction on it. It has multiple desktop systems. It has good IDEs. It has pretty mature WYSIWYG office suites. It has the best browser :)
You can raise dumb users on Linux. But it would be goddamn hard to do it.
Linux induces a sense of play. A sense of adventure. It encourages you to look under the hood. Millions of lines of open source code are an invitation to the inquisitive minds of college students to come, play!
And I'm not saying that you can't raise smart computer engineers Windows. But it would be goddamn hard to do it.
The evidence proves it.
(PS: We're still looking for freshers, or people with under one year experience to join our tech team. Drop me your resume nanda at cleartrip dot com in case you're interested, or know someone who is. )
But later, during my job, I realised that there are places that still require Windows. Some places where Windows actually does a better job that Linux (operatibility with LCD projectors, one; presentation software, two). Therefore I found myself shifting to Microsoft Powerpoint on a Windows machine for making a client presentation whenever I needed to.
However, I still held the strong opinion that Windows users are on average "dumber" than Linux users. And I don't mean dumber in the IQ kind of sense. I mean "dumber" because they don't know what's happening under the hood. It's just like you and I, or the average person off the street, would be dumber about cars than an average car mechanic.
And my opinion was reinforced last week. Microsoft is bad for computer education.
I had recently gone to a college to recruit freshers for the tech team at Cleartrip. (It wasn't any of the IITs or RECs.) We were interviewing final year BE students (IT/CS/EE streams). A few were with a work ex. of one year or so.
I was stunned, and I mean absolutely STUNNED, when people who claimed to have worked on their college website did not know what a URL meant when I asked them for it! When people who had claimed to work on e-shopping carts could not tell me exactly how sessions were maintained.
And these are not your typical B.Com. + GNIIT kind of students. These are people who would, in a matter of months, be passing out with a computer engineering degree. They would become part of the so called "talent pool" of India.
Out of the 15 people I interviewed (there were about 45 divided amongst three interview panels), not a single person was able to write a program that generated the Fibonacci series!
No one was able to tell me what IDE they use to write C/C++ programs. After a series of indirect questiononing (what are the steps you do before you start writing your program, etc) only some were able to tell me that they used something called "tc" (Turbo C). No one had heard of "bc" (Borland C). I didn't bother asking about BloodShed.
Apparently, their college lab had only Windows installed. For four years they had been fed on a staple diet of .Net, ASP, C#, VB, VB.net, and what M$ technology have you. Where you simply right clicked on an HTML form control and set its property to hidden instead of learning that was happening under the hood. Where you didn't care what cookies or URL rewriting was – the session object just worked.
No one had seen a Linux command prompt ever, despite of having done a theoretical course on Unix.
Average Joe users can get by without knowing the innards of a computer.
Computer engineers can't.
Had the students been exposed to the Linux command prompt, they would've been introduced to an IDE, after they would've gone through the pain of writing a C program in a powerful text editor (like emacs), and then compiling and linking it by hand.
Had they been writing CGI scripts in Perl or web programming in PHP, they would've known how HTML forms work; the difference between GETs and PUTs. Some of them might've been exposed to more than one broweser, and the bad world of browser inconsistencies out there, and how to get around them (and over a period of time, most websites would work!)
Microsoft has kicked in a vicious circle of dumbing down the users. I'm sure the students were so clueless partly because their teachers were. And guess what OS the teachers had used in their college days?
I'm not saying that Linux is absolutely bare bones and you get no level of abstraction on it. It has multiple desktop systems. It has good IDEs. It has pretty mature WYSIWYG office suites. It has the best browser :)
You can raise dumb users on Linux. But it would be goddamn hard to do it.
Linux induces a sense of play. A sense of adventure. It encourages you to look under the hood. Millions of lines of open source code are an invitation to the inquisitive minds of college students to come, play!
And I'm not saying that you can't raise smart computer engineers Windows. But it would be goddamn hard to do it.
The evidence proves it.
(PS: We're still looking for freshers, or people with under one year experience to join our tech team. Drop me your resume nanda at cleartrip dot com in case you're interested, or know someone who is. )
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Friday, February 09, 2007
Indian Website Usability Report
JuxtConsult has come up with a report on the "user friendliness" of Indian websites. The Business Standard reports:
Before I go ahead with literally bashing this "study", check out the way JuxtConsult has defined the "User Friendliness Index (UFI)" and "usability" (emphasis mine):
The top item on their list of usability features is branding! Would anyone please tell me just how can branding be a part of website usability? Sure, branding can play a huge role in buiding website popularity and thus the user base, but surely not usability.
The second thing on their list is the vaguely named "navigation structure and added features." Kudos to them for considering the navigation structure of a website in determining it's usability, but added features? Any designer worth his salt will know that a multitude of features, does not add up to usability. Anyone stuck with a feature loaded mobile phone (2 megapixel camera, MP3 player, FM radio, games, bluetooth, infrared, etc. etc.) will know how fucking hard it is to send a simple text message or update the contact book. Getting to the much touted camera or MP3 player in a Nokia N70 which I happened to play with recently required much fiddling and up to five clicks! IMHO the "One button" Nokia phones were the most usable of them all -- Nokia 1100 being the best.
Sure, you can't roll out a product or website with limited or lame features. But blindly adding features over your competitions is not going to make your website more usable. This "Feauritis Curve" from the Creating Passionate Users Blog sums it all up:
How did "contact responsiveness" feature in a website usability study? Contact responsiveness or availabilty of customer service representatives can be used to measure a customer satisfaction index (CSI, if you please) -- but not a frikkin' UFI! The classis case is Cleartrip, where the website is miles ahead of its competitiors (Yatra, TravelGuru, MakeMyTrip, etc.) in usability, but the customer service (or contact responsiveness) simply sucks. That's because the customer care numbers given on the website are mostly engaged. Now, just because the customer care sucks how can you pull down the website for its usability?
(Disclaimer: I work at Cleartrip in the tech team. I know the customer care numbers are usually engaged because we are working with a lesser number of telephone lines. We will shortly be increasing the number of telephone lines after which, even that will change.)
Please go through the list of websites they have put under the 'just about satisfactory group' and 'need definite improvement group.' Yahoo email? GMail? Cleartrip? (Yes, that one's personal!) Youtube? Yahoo Portal? (THE Yahoo Portal? In the 'definite improvement group'? Who's tabbed homepage design is being poorly copied by the indian portals out there!)
And special mention to Wikipedia, which is in the 'needs definite improvement group'. It's a fucking Wiki! It brought in a whole new paradigm where anyone could edit anything on the web. It's in the 'needs definite improvement group'! I mean, what the fuck?!
And compare these to the list of "user-friendly group" websites --
Had these JuxtConsult fellows gone through at least the Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design before coming up with such a report, they wouldn't have put SimplyMarry in the top 26 most usable websites. I rest my case.
Of the 26 user-friendly websites, 12 websites - Shopping, Shaadi, Yatra, HSBC, Jobstreet, Ebay, Spicejet, Travelguru, SimplyMarry, Citibank, Reliance and Samsung - are in the ‘best practice group’, scoring more than 95 per cent points. Websites in the 85 to 95 per cent range qualified in the ‘user-friendly group’ included Naukri, Amazon, Bharatmatrimony, ICICI Bank, HDFC, NSE, Timesjobs, Rediff shopping, SBI, Indiabulls and BSE.
Of the remaining 95 websites tested, 45 websites’ (37 per cent) performance was average, qualifying in the ‘just about satisfactory group,’. This group also has some of the most popular sites, including Hotmail, Yahoo email, Gmail, Air Deccan, Jet Airways, Kingfisher, Monster, Jobsahead, Makemytrip, Cleartrip and social networking sites like Orkut and Hi5.
Nearly 42-50 per cent websites performed below-average and were classified in the ‘need definite improvement group.’ They included recently acquired website by Google, Youtube, besides online majors like Yahoo portal, Wikipedia, Indian railway booking site IRCTC, banking site ICICI Direct and content sites, Money Control and Times Of India.
Before I go ahead with literally bashing this "study", check out the way JuxtConsult has defined the "User Friendliness Index (UFI)" and "usability" (emphasis mine):
User Friendliness Index 2007 is a study to evaluate and classify top 121 highly popular websites in India based on their User Friendliness Index (UFI). UFI of these websites was calculated by evaluating them on 32 individual criteria grouped under 6 different ‘usability' aspects. The 6 usability aspects are ‘branding', ‘navigation structure and added features', ‘website design' ‘company and contact info', ‘contact responsiveness' and ‘technical parameters'. The findings compare each site's UFI score within their own individual category as well as against the entire universe of 121 highly popular websites on each of the 6 usability aspect.
The top item on their list of usability features is branding! Would anyone please tell me just how can branding be a part of website usability? Sure, branding can play a huge role in buiding website popularity and thus the user base, but surely not usability.
The second thing on their list is the vaguely named "navigation structure and added features." Kudos to them for considering the navigation structure of a website in determining it's usability, but added features? Any designer worth his salt will know that a multitude of features, does not add up to usability. Anyone stuck with a feature loaded mobile phone (2 megapixel camera, MP3 player, FM radio, games, bluetooth, infrared, etc. etc.) will know how fucking hard it is to send a simple text message or update the contact book. Getting to the much touted camera or MP3 player in a Nokia N70 which I happened to play with recently required much fiddling and up to five clicks! IMHO the "One button" Nokia phones were the most usable of them all -- Nokia 1100 being the best.
Sure, you can't roll out a product or website with limited or lame features. But blindly adding features over your competitions is not going to make your website more usable. This "Feauritis Curve" from the Creating Passionate Users Blog sums it all up:
How did "contact responsiveness" feature in a website usability study? Contact responsiveness or availabilty of customer service representatives can be used to measure a customer satisfaction index (CSI, if you please) -- but not a frikkin' UFI! The classis case is Cleartrip, where the website is miles ahead of its competitiors (Yatra, TravelGuru, MakeMyTrip, etc.) in usability, but the customer service (or contact responsiveness) simply sucks. That's because the customer care numbers given on the website are mostly engaged. Now, just because the customer care sucks how can you pull down the website for its usability?
(Disclaimer: I work at Cleartrip in the tech team. I know the customer care numbers are usually engaged because we are working with a lesser number of telephone lines. We will shortly be increasing the number of telephone lines after which, even that will change.)
Please go through the list of websites they have put under the 'just about satisfactory group' and 'need definite improvement group.' Yahoo email? GMail? Cleartrip? (Yes, that one's personal!) Youtube? Yahoo Portal? (THE Yahoo Portal? In the 'definite improvement group'? Who's tabbed homepage design is being poorly copied by the indian portals out there!)
And special mention to Wikipedia, which is in the 'needs definite improvement group'. It's a fucking Wiki! It brought in a whole new paradigm where anyone could edit anything on the web. It's in the 'needs definite improvement group'! I mean, what the fuck?!
And compare these to the list of "user-friendly group" websites --
- Naukri? (Hey, where's the job ad? Oh! It's there! Right among a gazillion other banner ads, and text ads! And oh, what's this -- I've got a billion new windows open?! Ah forget it, I'm just fine with this job...)
- State Bank of India -- I would request the reader to please go to the SBI website and search for the SBI branch in Lower Parel, Mumbai. Was it easy? Was it frustrating? Do let me know.
- Indiabulls -- the last time I checked many of my friends who had been lured into an Indiabulls life time free trading account were abandoning it in droves because of their utterly non-usable trading tool. (Runs as a Java applet)
- Bombay Stock Exchange -- Another website which forces the user to start of a Java VM every time they visit the home page. The bloody home page contains a Java applet. (Note: Java applets are bad, for starters, because they slow down the website from loading. And making the users wait is bad usability IMHO. Making the users wait for the home page to load, is harakiri! Try the BSE website here.)
Had these JuxtConsult fellows gone through at least the Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design before coming up with such a report, they wouldn't have put SimplyMarry in the top 26 most usable websites. I rest my case.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Fighting back!
Two hard hitting blog threads in one day.
Hawkeye and his wife fight back against a "goonish" milk vendor for overcharging and then harassing customers who dare to question his behaviour. Read about his ongoing battle here. Very inspiring. (Currently there are seven posts on his blog giving updates on the situation. Use the archive links on the right bar to go through all of them).
N has a complete update of how she fought back against sexual harrasment in her office. Read about it here. (Scroll down to the post entitled "The Right Kind of Strong" and read upwards from there).
Hawkeye and his wife fight back against a "goonish" milk vendor for overcharging and then harassing customers who dare to question his behaviour. Read about his ongoing battle here. Very inspiring. (Currently there are seven posts on his blog giving updates on the situation. Use the archive links on the right bar to go through all of them).
N has a complete update of how she fought back against sexual harrasment in her office. Read about it here. (Scroll down to the post entitled "The Right Kind of Strong" and read upwards from there).
Monday, February 05, 2007
Review: Guru
The very first thing I noticed about this movie was the atrocious music. Seriously, the music sucks! I couldn't believe that A.R. Rehman could come up with such tracks. I always think about how many number of distinct musical tracks can there be in the world. Probably Rehman has exhausted his quota of the good ones.
The second thing I noticed was, that all the songs were simply not required. They were not woven into the plot and were probably added on later. All of them, except probably the one which plays in the background whenever Abhiash ( :-) Immense Pleasure Arises) are sharing an intimate moment onscreen.
Abhishek has rocked the movie. Though, I think his character has been a little underdeveloped in the beginning. How does the bijnis bug bite him all of a sudden? He refuses a promotion and salary hike at Shell just like that? The peculiar mannerisms that he's picked up for the character -- standing with a hand on his hip with the coat pushed back, laughing/chuckling with a slight tremor of the shoulders -- are also very well done. The four minute thirty seconds (somebody please time it!) monologue at the end sounds a bit too much like his father, though! Was it meant to be?
Mithun Chakraborty is a good actor. He just has prior commitments to keep the entire Ooty film industry occupied for the rest of his life. He's portrayed the editor-in-chief of "The Independent" wonderfully. A pleasant surprise - kasam paida karne waale ki!
R Madhavan is good too. I found him really irritating in the only other movie of his that I remember (Rehnaa Hai Tere Dil Mein). But he has acted well in Guru. And is looking good too (and I'm not gay!)
The biggest surprise in the movie is Roshan Seth. With hardly 10 mins of screen presence he has delivered such a power-packed performance that it's unbelievable. Is it because he naturally fitted the role so well or is it because he is a very good actor? I don't know. But he simply rocked!
Verdict: Minus the songs (specially the misplaced, mistimed, and mistuned drunken orgy after child birth) the movie would've been much better. A sure watch, nonetheles.
The second thing I noticed was, that all the songs were simply not required. They were not woven into the plot and were probably added on later. All of them, except probably the one which plays in the background whenever Abhiash ( :-) Immense Pleasure Arises) are sharing an intimate moment onscreen.
Abhishek has rocked the movie. Though, I think his character has been a little underdeveloped in the beginning. How does the bijnis bug bite him all of a sudden? He refuses a promotion and salary hike at Shell just like that? The peculiar mannerisms that he's picked up for the character -- standing with a hand on his hip with the coat pushed back, laughing/chuckling with a slight tremor of the shoulders -- are also very well done. The four minute thirty seconds (somebody please time it!) monologue at the end sounds a bit too much like his father, though! Was it meant to be?
Mithun Chakraborty is a good actor. He just has prior commitments to keep the entire Ooty film industry occupied for the rest of his life. He's portrayed the editor-in-chief of "The Independent" wonderfully. A pleasant surprise - kasam paida karne waale ki!
R Madhavan is good too. I found him really irritating in the only other movie of his that I remember (Rehnaa Hai Tere Dil Mein). But he has acted well in Guru. And is looking good too (and I'm not gay!)
The biggest surprise in the movie is Roshan Seth. With hardly 10 mins of screen presence he has delivered such a power-packed performance that it's unbelievable. Is it because he naturally fitted the role so well or is it because he is a very good actor? I don't know. But he simply rocked!
Verdict: Minus the songs (specially the misplaced, mistimed, and mistuned drunken orgy after child birth) the movie would've been much better. A sure watch, nonetheles.
Review: Salaam-e-Ishq
A little late to review the film, but what the heck?!
- Akshaye Khanna-Ayesha Takia: The best track IMHO, with Akshaye taking all the lines, screen space, and credit. He was simply amazing. Especially the part when he's recording his "break-off message" on the handycam. Hilarious! Ayesha was painted with excess makeup and since she ended up looking horrible, she was punished and asked to stand in the corner for the rest of the film! (One of my friends tells me that, both, Akshaye & Ayesha have worn a Mayo College t-shirt in one of the scenes. Couldn't spot it. If you do, please let me know/send me screenshot).
- Anil Kapoor-Juhi Chawla: This track was good too. The subject of marital boredom was treated very well for a Bollywood movie. And the "bollywood dance" by the "other woman" (don't know her name) was HOT! Age has finally caught up with Anil Kapoor, even though he looks good with his new look in the movie. Juhi's performance was good too, underplayed and subtle.
- Salman-Priyanka: This track was the bloodsucker of them all. Why, oh, why, I pray was this included in the movie? Chop off the entire track and it doesn't make one bit of a difference to the entire plot. I think this was added after the script had been finalized. In the climax scene, at the wedding, everyone's presence was well woven into the story except Salman and Priyanka's. What the fuck was Salman doing at the marriage in the first place? And will someone please tell him that apart from looking like a dork he sounds like a one too. (Checkout his fake accent whenever he speaks!)
- Sohail Khan-Isha Kopikar: The comedy track. Sohail Khan redoing the "Maine Pyaar Kyun Kiya" bit. But it was funny. Hurrr....
- John Abhram-Vidya Balan: Could've been much better had it not been for John Abraham. His entire repository of emotions consists of exactly two facial expressions. Watch him closely and you'll understand! The only movie he has passed off with some decent acting is Viruddh (which, in fact, is a must see). On second thoughts, the plot for this track was also a bit underdeveloped.
- Govinda-Shannon: Hmmm... is this the best track or is the Akshaye-Ayesha track the best? I guess it's a tie. Govinda rocks! He simply does! "Maidum" and "Saal we" was amazing. The scene on the Laksham Jhoola at Rishikesh reminded me of a trekking trip to Kuwanri Pass (we had halted overnight at Rishikesh, I still remember standing right in the middle of the jhoola and looking up in awe at the lovely sky and the number of start we could see). The way the track ended was a bit over the top, but what the hell, everything's fair in love and war; and love is blind; etc.
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