Krazy Kochi

A wee bit accusatory, the cleaning woman’s sly question: “You don’t hang a star or put up a tree?!” I wanted to be blunt and say it has become one big bore. But instead I shrugged and let the question pass. It is not just Christmas but all festivals have become aggressively predatory. The festival is packaged to entice and lure the unsuspecting stupid believer and then it closes in to make the monetary killing. Once upon a time Christmas was simple. Life was not easy but the real fun was there and that was long before the ersatz fun became packaged ware. Planning began months before. The pinecones were collected from hill stations then painted silver, gold or left plain and painstakingly wired into the wreaths. Bright red suede with green leaves and dry flowers tucked into it became table runners and pretty candles entwined in tinsel became centre -pieces. We even borrowed Christmas decs when we had a dinner and that was about wowing and sharing and wowing again! Ev...

There is certain fallacy in the assumption that grizzled hair makes one wiser. And a personal example kind of endorses that statement: My beautiful grey hairs have done nothing for my grey matter. And even if I am warned a million times I succumb so daftly to the great Hope. I guess age only tweaks the gullibility factor. The case I am making out here is the great e-mail spam trick. The e-mails that flood my mail box have subject heads that are ambitiously disguised to entice an opening. “ You have won a lottery!” “Check this”, “Urgent”, “Re”, “It’s Me” even an audacious "Thanks for last night!" and a million other heads that have all seen nothing but the trash. I have been quick to delete without even the slightest peek. Very clever of me! But sometimes Subject heads beyond my wildest dreams lead me into temptation and deliver me into ….. Here is a mail from the Volkswagen Automobiles Company that had me clicking hard on the mail to open up. The subject said: File for you...

Hey, It's Rambo in a Tux! That about sums up the Casino Royale effect. Is it a genre shifting of Bond? It sure is. The makers have given the pure cool headed impeccable Bond who could come out of any situation wholly intact – as cool as a cucumber – the royal snub and instead is the miserable amalgam of Rambo and Bond. A bloody Rambo who does not do it the Rambo way and a very uncool Bond who does not get his Bond right. The new Bonding effect – all that gore and the less mint attitude - is disconcerting and hard to swallow. The Big Chase An African runs up the steel frames like a lizard nay a Steel Monkey (high rise jockey?) and you begin to wow the guy. Then you watch Bond in a floral shirt in hot pursuit and your jaw drops. Its not the style, but the lack of style that makes the jaw drop. Bond sloppily scrambles up after him- more like the canine in the Hutch ad. Tsk, tsk! Cut to another scene- Bond chases the bad guys and smashes up his car real bad. And he deserves all the...

A few years ago I interviewed India's legal ace Ram Jethmalani when he visited Kochi. He was really sweet to talk at length to me. One of the questions that I posed to him then was: Why he does he defend people like Indira Gandhi’s assassins? Ram replied: There comes a time in every lawyer’s life when he is called to defend such people. I consider it is as my duty to defend such a person if I am approached. The brouhaha erupting over Ram Jethmalani defending Manu Sharma seems so silly. The man should be admired for having the gumption to defend such a person. Never mind the fact that I think Manu Sharma deserves the worst punishment if he did commit the crime. It is not this eminent lawyer (a shame some said on TV) who should be blamed for callously defending this criminal ( that's his duty) but for the fact that a 100 people saw Manu Sharma pull the trigger and yet there is no concrete evidence. That speaks a lot for the people and our system. And it was funny to ...

According to Wikipedia Classmates is the highest grossing Malayalam film ever! The ‘House Full’ sign outside a theatre is perhaps the best advertisement for any film and “Classsmates” has worn that tag for every show for more than fifty days now. Half past nine in the morning, soon after breakfast is an awkward time to run to the theatre but I did it to check out what was drawing the crowds…… Review The lights dim and her laughter of arrogance echoes through the darkened cinema hall and his smirk suggests, ‘no one can get the better of me’. She- Thara Kurup (played by Kavya Madhavan) the daughter of a MLA is a dancer and he- Sukumaran (played by Prithviraj) is the SFK leader- both final year students of the BSc Chemistry Class of ‘91. Two strong personalities are out to get each other and the scenes rapidly unfold to tickle you with their mishievous inventiveness. You know they are destined to fall in love but meanwhile only Thara seems to have the guts to stand up to Sukumaran’s bull...

Book Review The End of Innocence By Moni Mohsin Almost immediately you will hurtle into a love story- one that is hectored by adult wisdom and succumbs to the inevitable consequences. This Bildungsroman nostalgically takes a peek into the affluent world of a curious eight- year -old Laila and her best friend Rani, the dreamy granddaughter of a maid. Rani is busy cavorting in her love story that gets briefly elevated to the cinematic kind by nothing else but the vehicle of her imaginati on. A child herself, fifteen- year -old Rani plans her marriage and gets her dowry ready: “six glasses and a jug and four sets of new clothes. Oh, and shoes, golden and shiny, with heels-like brides wear-and maybe even some lipstick.” It is a secret that Laila promises to never reveal to the adult world further cemented by the fact that Laila and Rani are partners of a game called “Terrific Two”. Laila swears to never betray her partner. But in that innocence there lurks the hint of betrayal that is prop...

My Corner: Transports me to wordy realms: Just me, a book and my imagination. Book Review King Of Ayodhya By Ashok K Banker The complicated art of epic telling and retelling makes it an entangled mesh of imaginations. And the protagonists- their foresight has to be accommodated too. The protagonist of the epic, Rama, the future King of Ayodhya, hardly knows whether to smile or sigh as he crosses the living bridge of leviathans into the realm of rakshasa, “ he was resigned to the knowledge that virtually everything they did would be turned into lore and legend, with all the accompanying flights of imagination and exaggeration that poetic licence allowed .” As Rama, traverses the making of his own legend he seems almost amused by what story -tellers would make of his feats as the defender of Dharma. Thousands of years later, Ashok K Banker’s retelling of the epic in the modern idiom only underscores what Rama had already envisaged. Even if you have grown up listening to the Ramayana, e...