There are readers - indifferent, random. And there are readers for authors – for Dickens, Naipaul or Amitav Ghosh et al. And then there are readers like me disavowed by either – for defecting fronts brazenly. This indiscriminate reading particularly did make me read some of most fascinating writings in my life so far. And that fact more than justified my being and remaining an unpatterned reader forever!

I believe in serendipity. Sometime when I was experiencing the fabled reader’s block, unsure of what to pick and what not to, a well-read friend lent me ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’...something that launched my lifelong association with rebel Seagulls and humans. Until then I neither knew Richard Bach nor his great Gull!

Book Review, being a subjective exercise, liberally allows the prerogative to share one’s stand however weird it may sound. And that’s what made me take a bottom-up view of this timeless classic...and reflect if it were the sheer juvenile urge to revolt against authority or some other lofty idea, that couldn’t be realized having conformed to norms, which made Jonathan an outcast, though a glorious one...and eventually return to the ‘Breakfast Flock’ to forgive…and leave a legacy. He knew how a Rebellion varied from Insubordination. 

The business of freedom does not flourish in haste, brooks no compromise. I feel the reader needs some handholding around the storyline. It’s about Jonathan the Seagull who, seized with a passion for flight, defies the limitations of seagull life what eventually leads to his expulsion from their society. Undaunted Jonathan continues his flight to soar higher. He, an outcast, joins a society where every gull enjoys flying as much. Here he tastes the ‘unlimited idea of freedom’. Jonathan then returns to the Breakfast Flock to forgive and share his immense experience. Jonathan leaves his legacy through Fletcher Lynd.

I would have merrily agreed to Roger Ebert’s stamping this novel as ‘banal’ had it ended with Jonathan’s departure and his aspirational joining of the new flying club. But it didn’t. What startled me more than anything was his conscious return to his flock to share his wisdom. Forgiving was an obvious ‘Passing condition’. His conversation with Fletcher, his protégé, starts with ”Do you want to fly so much that you will forgive the Flock, and learn, and go back to them one day and work to help them know?” – a lesson he learns through life and vigilantly passes on cased in a query. Almost everyone is Jonathan – but in parts. Some revel in knowing they can fly, some really fly, some fly beyond and some fly beyond to return to root. And those who return consummated become Jonathan the Seagull. The breakfast flock would always be around!

Read the novel…and if you have already, be Jonathan!

Death is theraputic.It seems through 'Death' Rajesh Khanna could reclaim the fabled stature he lost long back - something that made people bury legendary professional hatred, estranged acquintances return...and a nation cry. 

I've always been more fond of the ladies he danced with than him...specially Mumtaz. Ransacked papers for some byte from Tina Munim (his cure during mid-life-crisis) but didn't find.

Enlightenment happens on Treadmill - on a surreal aimless walk when the endless stock of music shuts you out of the noisy without...you keep on treading an unending path yet stay stationary, anchored...that's what enlightenment is...funny!

The vision of 'the woman' varies irreconcilably across men (being a masculine thought I suppose and I don't mind being wrong)...took a closer look at Billy Joel's lyrics of '...she's always a woman to me' or Holmes' unusually unflinching deference for Irene Adler ('To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman') and surprisingly found them to be hardly different. One always looks for matching unlikeness. Interesting! It is always wise to keep 'the woman' and 'the beloved' apart...is it?

Meditation is a journey within. Wonder how does it help when done in a crowd. Is it a meditation fair where all can put up stalls? Or is it all about saying that 'hey, I can do it alone and with some thousand others too'? What a funny feat! 'Cos when you are within, you become your sole company and that's what meditation essentially aims at - aligning one with 'oneself'. 

Can we think of a world without excesses...emotional, material or physical? Is not Beauty a creation of physical excess, is not Art a fallout of creative excess, is not love the prettiest manifestation of emotional excess? 

People desire a taut frame and magazines abound with tricks on shedding that aesthetic flab. Centres are erected to prune curves...and ground fantasies perforce!
What a pity! Doesn't it render the world flat, flabless, unvarying, dull? Conceive of a world where people only execute and don't dream - as dreaming is a luxury, excessive, prohibitive pattern.

Amazingly Spiderman...

The next-door boy spends long hours on rooftop, will keep a close eye on him!

Let me say it all before I forget - loved dated, saggy yet sweet Sally Field, her pairing with elegantly handsome Martin Sheen as Uncle Ben (and his modified speech on 'Responsibility'), portrayal of so very american Peter Parker by Andrew Garfield and the classically fantastic Rhys Ifans as Dr Connors(Lizard). 

It was disenchanting yet so unforgettable!
Don't expect Sam Raimi's magically poetic Spidy and whom you end up seeing here is the nondescript neighbor boy who greets you everyday and you instantly forget. Amazing Spiderman makes us experience the Spidy saga differently (quite in Batman's line) wherein Peter, along his quest to know his deceased parents better, unwittingly confronts the person supposedly responsible for his parents' death. That's but a subterfuge to set the movie rolling before it takes the usual course of having Spiderman ridding the city of evil of some superlative kind...and it was great watching him doing his job so well and spectacularly!
We loved superheroes 'cos they are wear brief on slacks! Period. Amazing Spiderman blatantly disregards that notion and introduces us to someone as tardy, feeble and fickle as you and I - and who doesn't always make promises to keep!
BTW, Spandex should ceremoniously launch a secretive section for clothing Superheroes. 
...loved the movie!

It's indeed delayed but definitely not dated! I watched the movie 'Tare Zameen Paar' for the umteenth time yesterday afternoon with a fear,almost bordering on belief, that the sumptuous spread I had in lunch would knock me down. It failed...and I impute it more to the unageing excellence of TZP than to my strong will to keep awake.

Believe me...every demand that I make carries a slice of my 'self'. All of them are not equally pleasing. I've vainly tried sometimes to sober them, hide them, rephrase them, fake them and always ended up dearly owning them, loving them. An apparently disorienting demand carries elements far beyond the obvious...something deeper, deepseated, undying, raw, uncivilized, rude, crude, deranging, yet real, pure! And I will never cease to have them.

Anyone hailing from kolkata would know how well does a ramshakle Bus double as rocking cradle to numberless office-goers...even today when my car moves next to any packed bus, I make an effort to stick my head out to see stooped heads swaying in rhyme with the moving bus on some bumpy road. The engine's sonorous rumble sings the lullaby and the rickety seats rock them to a shortlived yet consummate sleep. This sight inspires a host of philosophical thoughts.

I’ve often lost myself in the pleasant maze of delicate Shakespearean characters. There are so many. That routinely disturbed. And I wondered each time I floundered if it were I who failed him or him who failed me. To me Shakespearean characters have always appeared as representatives of emotions defined and delimited more by their distinctive psychic patterns than by the dramas they inhabited.

Fathers day...

It was celebrating and being celebrated at once...on this year's Fathers Day. I luckily and oddly had my Dad and son both beside me. That was great! Agreed that like occasions originated across seven seas and hardly have any oriental cultural significance.

recall the Great Kalidasa story when he was foolishly upto chopping off the branch he sat on and the context is Mamtadi's recent erratic behaviour...has she gone nuts? My being utterly apolitical does by no means disentitle me of the right to issue opinion. This lady is fatally and funnily obsessed with self-imposed righteousness what is perhaps to hold the country's political fate to ransom. Stop it!

Emotions predate words. Emotions are as primordial as Human existence. Then why the words try to delimit emotions, exactly in what capacity do they put any prudish fence around it? 

‘Rowdy Rathore’…served sobered and hot!

My celebrated penchant for Rubenesque frames took root almost simultaneously with the start of my growth as an incorrupible admirer of beauty. Ramp-walk always appeared to be a tasteless display of glorified Anorexia. Pray good thoughts prevail and feminine curves redeem their rightful place in human fantasy...and creativity!

‘Rowdy Rathore’, like many others, decidedly owes its plot to Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Yojimbo’- his trendsetting 1961 masterpiece with Toshiro Mifune, and thereby to Sergio Leone’s ‘Spagetti Western’ genre that churned a series of Clint Eastwood starrer blockbusters in late 60s. For the uninitiated, the plot revolves around a person’s valiant and violent mission to rescue villagers from the tyranny of crime-lords or some powerful person of disrepute.
Hey, let’s level! We aren’t here to suffer some senseless parading of scholarship on history of cinema. Excuse me, but that’s exactly the thought what crossed my mind while watching ‘Rowdy Rathore’…a movie that, besides doing justice to its time-tested storyline, is positioned to do many others at once – reviving Akshay Kumar’s tottering career, fostering crosspollination of regional cinematic talents et al…and it does it all though in varying degrees.
Enough talking around…let’s focus! ‘Rowdy Rathore’ is a cross-breed, hyped Hindi remake of a successful southern pot-boiler. The movie sets off on a comedic funny note and turns gorily serious abruptly. No sooner the thinking audience could come to terms with its fast-moving storyline than the ‘Intermission’ intervenes. The untangling laced with unapologetic violence in second half is tough and engaging though.
Broadly speaking, the story has it all to catch on – starting from the rustic, betel-chewing, lewd, lecherous villain pitted against a righteous Police inspector sworn to save the oppressed villagers, his ‘Rowdy’ urbane duplicate, who eventually transforms to an honest dude, to the curvaceous Sonakshi Sinha (and the apparently redundant first para is raised to her). One observation, in view of the enormity of the villain and his loyalists, the punishment should have been rougher.
The usual caveat for discerning viewers – leave your senses back home at a safe place! I have a simple funda, we all have our share of sadness in life and in movies we seek respite – that’s the raison d'être of entertainment. ‘Rowdy Rathore’ qualifies to be an entertaining movie on all counts.
I just set my expectations right (sounds familiar?) and watched RR. I was entertained. It’s a movie with a strong aftertaste.
And I vow to follow Sonakshi more ‘closely’ in future!

Reading and reflecting are often concomitant...but not always. When I read, I pause more, perhaps more than I read. And that pause turns out to be more 'reading' than reading itself...seems to be a perfect continuum...revisiting the words, the said, the unsaid, the intended...and finally building perception.

Attimes I sincerely try to slip into the chappals of Mamta and understand what exactly could have made her splurge on KKR from state exchequer...the win neither brought about any state glory nor benefitted it otherwise...is it only 'cos it carried the word 'Kolkata'. One of the Ohio state sports teams is named 'Cincinnati Bengals'(excuse if I'm marginally wrong)...hope to see Mamta doing something for them sometime!