jadoo
जिस जुनून से इश्क़ करते है जादू से कम नहीं
We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under.
The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public.
The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at…
“Baby I should hold on just a moment and be sure it’s not for vanity, Look me in the eye and tell me love is never based upon insanity,”
India: Ram Prabodh Yadav (b. 1970) is sub-inspector (deputy inspector) of police in Maner Block, Patna district, State of Bihar. Monthly salary: 10,000 rupees ($220).
The Open Society Institute’s latest documentary photography show, the most improbably delightful has to be “Bureaucratics,” by the Dutch photographer Jan Banning. “It started with the most horrible assignment I ever had,” Banning told me when when he dropped by our office yesterday. The job was in Mozambique; Banning’s editor had asked him to shoot pictures for a story on the decentralization of the administration of Dutch development aid. “That’s not something that makes your heart beat faster as a photographer,” he noted. To make it interesting for himself, he decided to shoot portraits of the bureaucrats themselves. Little did he know that this would be merely the first leg on an absurd odyssey that would take him through thousands of government offices, a world tour of what he calls “the shop windows of the state.” New Yorker
“If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.”
Sam Singh, a USA citizen, retired from Dupont as an engineer w/a dream to make a difference in India. Maybe start a school in rural India. His family thought he was nuts. People discouraged him from social work in rural India from reasons related to red tape, ignorance, corruption. Sam Singh had been a fool for lesser things. Singh invested his ENTIRE life savings into building a girls school on his ancestral property. He created an incentive for locals to send their daughters to school. He paid each girl 10RS/day to attend school set up in a bank account in the girl and her mother’s name. The money could only be withdrawn after successfully completing 10th grade. The school provides academic education but also vocational training in textiles plus money management, social & confidence building skills and education of legal rights, music and arts education. The school also provides 3 meals a day and a bus or bicycle as transportation; At the end of their education, girls who have attended most days usually have 30,000RS. savings, a vocational skill, and assistance in placement for higher studies or jobs. Tip of the hat to Mr. Sam Singh, changing lives in rural India, one girl at a time.
Wheat Ladoos
2 cups wheat flour
1 cup ghee (clarified butter)
1.5 cup powdered sugar
1/2 cup almond meal
2 tablespoon ground cardamom
broken pieces of cashew nuts.
½ tsp. ginger powder
Method.
1. Melt the ghee in a heavy bottom pan and add wheat flour to it and on a medium fire and stir for about 20 minutes, a roasted, buttery aromatic smell is a signal that the atta is well roasted.
2 After ghee and wheat flour mixture is well roasted, transfer the mixture to a bowl and allow it to cool thoroughly. The mixture should be soft and sticky.
3. After cooling, add almond meal, ground cardamom, cashew nuts, sugar, and ginger powder. Roll into small bowls.
Makes 28 Ladoos.
love the movie, love the ghazal. both movie and song are about requited yet unfulfilled love, two people breathlessly stuck without melancholy and despair, it fills me with awe.
Life’s what you make it.
Literary Lines of the Day:
“It did not do to think, nor, for the matter of that to feel. She gave up trying to understand herself, and the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters—the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy; they feel and produce discomfort wherever they go. They have sinned against Eros and against Pallas Athene, and not by any heavenly intervention, but by the ordinary course of nature, those allied deities will be avenged.
Lucy entered this army when she pretended to George that she did not love him, and pretended to Cecil that she loved no one. The night received her, as it had received Miss Bartlett thirty years before.”
A Room With A View
E.M.Forester
Chapter XVII: Lying to Cecil
Review: Love Aaj Kal Bahut Boring Ho Gaya.
I am a sucker for love stories. So Imitaz Ali’s new summer flick Love Aaj Kal didn’t have to be a revolutionary, insightful or different. As a genre-aficionado of the feel-good love story, give me a half-decent soundtrack, competent acting, and oodles of chemistry and I am already in love. As a romantic, I love the opportunity to indulge in cinematic escape from the persistent state of mid-life with my two kids in suburbia.
Unfortunately in Love Aaj Kal there is not much love between the sexy aaj and the sepia-toned kal.
Loves stories can explore so many possibilities: life-long friends who don’t realize they are soul-mates, two people hating each other only to discover surprisingly we don’t know love until we confront what we loathe, instant connections that defy practicality or a friendship that becomes bigger than its definition. There are so many angles and directions and nothing inspires more insight or entertainment than two people exploring common ground without a damn reason.
But once the couple confronts the overwhelming formality of Hindi movie love and the undeniable magnetism of physical attraction there is no going back to the before and certainly there is no hope of casual indifference.
Chemistry just can’t be hacked and the main loophole with Love Aaj Kal. There is no inexplicable chemistry between Love Aaj Kal’s hero and heroine despite looking fantastic and living so trendy.
This story starts between an already hipster couple Jai (Saif) and Meera (Deepika). Jai and Meera enjoy a youngling couple’s life in London: party, drink, make-out and dream about their prospective careers. Until Meera’s career as a restoration artist demands a move to India.
Early in the movie, Jai makes it clear, marriage has no future in his life but the moviegoer has no inkling how Meera feels about anything, marriage or her relationship with Jai. She is so ambivalent to their relationship that it left this moviegoer believing that Jai and Meera are really just having fun, the no strings attached kind (not that there is anything wrong with that either).
Jai wants to break up and Meera obliges like a good sport agreeing that marriage is for dorks and long distance relationship is bereft of any benefits. Ingeniously Meera and Jai host a break-off party with their large group of equally hip, trendy good-looking friends (none relevant to Jai, Meera, or the storyline).
A bye-bye party, a hug, and adios amigo, just like that Meera and Jai decide their relationship of two years has run its course and off they go into the world in different directions deciding to stay friends.
Thats the beginning of the movie: Jai and Meera break-up without the drama. Enters Veer (Rishi Kapoor) playing an adorable, extroverted spirited coffee bar owner who befriends Jai because he sees a younger avatar of himself in Jai and soon Veer and Jai share perspectives of love. Veer’s extracts of his heady days in love at first sight in the sixties of Old Delhi to a woman he sees but has never spoken nor touched. And Jai’s two-year ex-romance with a woman he has practically lived with and voila, they map their beliefs in a narrative that is the backdrop of Love Aaj Kal.
The direction is cute as Veer’s telling of story unfolds with Saif playing a younger Veer in the 1960s and then mapping it to what happened or is happening between Jai and Meera (who despite having broken up stay in touch and counsel each other in relationships with other people).
Will Jai realize what love means? Does Veer ever win his forbidden love in the lesser permissive times of history? All this unfolds as the plot of the movie goes between Veer’s story set in the 1960s and Jai’s in modern times.
Saif plays a competent hipster and a commitment phobic male reduced to a stereotype. We have met a Jai before, in real life and so often in cinema (he seems a cliche) and Saif plays the character true to the lines minus any complexity or dimension.
Deepika is just horribly rigid. Let’s just say Deepika can’t act because her dialogues, her presence, her dancing doesn’t fit the laid back Meera (my husband’s antics qualify him to be a thespian compared to Deepika’s coldness). Deepika suffers from model-made-only syndrome, she looks good but as soon as she opens her mouth the entire personality crashes. Deepika just can’t pull of an artist like Meera and as a result Meera’s personality never translates to the audience.
The script just doesn’t establish her character either. We just don’t know what Meera wants or the degree of her confusion. Does she want love or marriage or even Jai. Meera as a charcater is exists to give Jai a chance at realizing love on his own schedule.
Rishi Kapoor aaj aur kal is still the only lover boy if one is to judge by this movie. I mean even in a love story where his younger self in flashback is played by Saif he manages to steal the show. The Kapoor boy still has je ne sais quoi and his role is the only part of the story that evokes any trace of love in this story.
The script has it’s moments of fun and works to keep the narrative flowing.
The song sequences are forced even under Hindi movie norms they just irritate except possibly the track Chori Bazaar with its catchy composition and spontanteous apropos inclusion.
Overall the movie is okay. I was as ambivalent about the movie as the main characters are about being together. I frankly didn’t care if Jai and Meera made it to the altar or to Harrods for shopping.
If you have ever been in love, you know how incredibly free-falling and hard-hitting the experience. I have been in love, madly, crazily in that I will be 22-forever-kind-of-way and let me tell you love as a crush, unrequited, consummated, or otherwise has nothing to do with being practical.
My husband, always playing the devil’s advocate tried to make a case for modern love as depicted in this movie, his point being that modern love is practical laid-back since society has becomes more permissive, less judgmental. Hmmm, I don’t know if modern love is analogous to a stock transaction but if that’s the case, like Veer, I will constantly date myself when talking about love, old school.
Minus the soundtrack, high definition video, hipster hoods and homies, 12 years, two kids, there is still more chemistry and passion in my persistent state of mid-life than in Love Aaj Kal.
