Saturday, May 19, 2012

Those Little Moments of Victory


When in school we were always made to believe that what we study now will hold us good in the future. It’s been ages since I had passed out of school and college, and I am still waiting for that moment when I can use integral calculus or Einstein’s theory of relativity in my job of transferring data from one cell of the excel sheet to another, or even using trigonometry to find the angle of elevation of my office building at 3 P.M on a hot afternoon. I was an average student in school who had issues in concentrating on the same page for too long during exam preparation time. I prepared smart rather than preparing hard, instead of studying every important question mentioned by the teacher I would go for the ones I felt were the most important. Which were hardly a dozen. Out of twenty chapters. So it was when in the exam hall blankly staring at the question paper that nothing made sense would I realize that there is another way of preparation–the idiot’s way. To pass in an exam paper of 100 marks, 35 was the minimum. I being a scrapper by nature who even licks down the last remnants of bournvita from the glass of milk, used to scavenge for marks through the complete question paper that would total upto 35. This meant :

Answering a 12-marks question in 3 lines hoping I would get one mark for each line.

Answering a 5-marks question that I did not know an answer to with up to three pages, hoping the examiner would be impressed with my efforts of providing a detailed answer which was nowhere related to the question asked, and grant me marks just for the pain I took in underlining the subheadings and making diagrams with sketch pen.

In a section where one had to answer only eight 2-mark questions out of ten, I would answer all the ten hoping the examiner would forget to count and grant me marks even for the extra questions I had answered, in the process getting 4 extra marks. Each mark used to make a difference, the essence of which only those who flunked by 2-3 marks would know. 

(I had earlier mentioned that I was an average student, I guess I should change it to horrible.)

And still If I was not confident enough of passing, I would make sure I used up a total of 40 pages hoping I would get one mark for each page. 

I made sure that the outlines to my answer sheets were neatly decorated, people believed in underlining and highlighting the main points to a question. Something to which I did not concur, since I would not want examiner to focus on my answers which were wayward, beat around the bush and in most cases had nothing to do with the question asked.

My confidence level as I left the exam hall would be three times more than the time that it was when I had entered it, and even left the brightest minds of the class flummoxed at my cheekiness. But that cheekiness only lasted till the exam results were announced.

In short, my answer paper was like a high budget Bollywood movie–it was beautifully packaged only to house a pile of crap inside it.

Since passing out of school and college never have we felt a really serious challenge to memorize anything, no theorems, no equations, no historical dates or numbers, no prose or poetry. Recently at work while browsing I had come across the A, B, Cs of radio call signs, the ones they use in military and in action-oriented video games. A for Alpha, B for Bravo, C for Charlie, D for Delta…. and so on.

Having grown up on a steady diet of war related movies and games like Black Hawk Down, Tears of the Sun and Call of Duty, the whole idea of memorizing the call signs gave me something worthwhile to do whilst pretending to work. Also it could come in handy while discussing office gossip just in case we ran out of code names. And as I kept mumbling the names over and over, repeating again from the start whenever I missed out an alphabet, I realized that I had gone back to being a six-year old memorizing his multiplication tables, one of those rare instances where I am exerting my will on the brain to remember something, a list of alphabets no matter how useless they were and could never be handy in real life had to be remembered because there had been nothing worth putting the effort to memorize something in a long long time.

All our office related processes have a manual to it­–a set of do’s and don’ts, a SOP written out in word document which can be referred to when in doubt. It does feel good to do all that is not written in MS-WORD or carved in stone, to go old school and write it down on a piece of paper, to memorize stuff that tests your patience, that oils down the rusted mechanism of your brain. Sometimes we live our lives fighting the larger battles that we forget to celebrate our own little moments of victory. Sometimes it’s not about getting into the Hall of Fame or being the Employee of the Month. Sometimes it’s just about just trying.

R for Roger Out!

Monday, May 7, 2012

Don Ko Bardasht Karna Mushkil Hi Nahi…..



The Khan full of Corn
 
I used to be a huge fan of SRK in school and in college, and then I grew up. While many of them still swear by his “powerhouse” performances it only makes me wonder if they watched the same movie as I did.  I had the misfortune of watching Don 2 the other day, at the end of which I thanked my stars that I had not wasted my money by watching it in theatre. The only good thing that had anything to do with Don 2 was its trailer, because you don’t get to watch much of Shah Rukh Khan speaking in it, and even if he does, you don’t get to see his face! It fools you into believing that technically well made films are SRK Ham proof. But I got news for you, no movie is SRK Ham Proof. Don 2 is quite nutritious, considering the fact that it has a lot of cheese, corn and ham in the guise of dialogues, acting and SRK respectively. He with his wrinkled skin who looks like Boman Irani’s father emotes like he has a hundred ants going down his pants, refers to himself in the first person, brags of how miles ahead he is of his enemies and often refers to Priyanka Chopra–who is nothing but the female version of SRK in terms of acting as “Jungli Billi” or loosely translated as “Wild Pu…” “Wild Cat”. He sniggers, heckles and delivers his lines with the sincerity of a B-movie actor in a film with A-grade production values. Imagine Viveik Oberoi as Bruce Wayne/Batman delivering dialogues in a Christopher Nolan like film, Shahrukh Khan is something like that in Don 2.

Technically the film is miles ahead of what is generally churned out in Bollywood, the direction is slick, the cinematography is splendid, the stunts are fantastic. But Farhan Akhtar at a crucial juncture of the film decides to play to the galleries and botches up by trying to redeem Don–the cold blooded criminal into a do-gooder. And it is by conforming to the Bollywood standards of trying to show a negative character who is played by a superstar into a good hearted Samaritan does Akhtar make a passable affair into something unbearable.

If you thought watching SRK walk around with a swagger mouthing of repartees that would make you cringe was hard enough to bear, you also have the ignominy of watching Priyanka Chopra play a cop who is after Don all the while trying to resist Don’s flirtatious advances at her. And as Priyanka Chopra shows us, it takes a large amount of level headedness to not fall for the charms of a 50-year old criminal who when delivering dialogues has as many creases across his face as your pants would have on a Monday morning. But all said and done, Don is way more awesome than you and your father.

        a) He breaks out of a maximum security prison by using a never imagined before idea of poisoning the food of rest of the inmates and making them fall sick. Whodathunk!

       b) He breaks out of a prison and does not lay low, he instead goes to a Malaysian night club to sing his own praises and shakes a leg with Lara Dutta in the process.  It does not matter to him that he is one of the most wanted criminal in the Interpol list. When the Don has to go to a nightclub, he goes to a nightclub.

       c) He gets into uninvited gala dinners by masquerading himself as Hrithik Roshan, he also increases his height by just wearing a mask.
d
      d)He is the only crime lord in the world who can do the tango.

      e) Even his backup plans have a backup plan.

f     f) He can make the Interpol grant him immunity and absolve him of all his crimes. Twice.

g    g) He is pretty good at detecting that Priyanka Chopra’s colleague has the hots for her. If only fathers were so clever couples wouldn’t have to elope to get married.

h    h) He can make even Ra.One look like a masterpiece.

        I wouldn't bother giving out the details of the storyline because you might have already watched it. But if you haven't seen it yet, here is a gist of what happens in the movie to save you from some misery. There is a heist which Don plans for which he assembles his team like Danny Ocean. After robbing the heavily guarded item in a scene that looks so original that you wouldn't be reminded of Mission Impossible, one number of expected betrayal happens by an arch enemy whom he had roped in to help him out. By now with the number of first person dialogues Don says, you would have figured that it is not easy to make a chutiya out of Don, although it is way easier to make one out of you since you have been watching the predictable events unfold for two hours now. So the smart-ass Don switches the stolen item with a fake hands the bad guy to the cops and gets an immunity in return and GTFO there with the real money printing plates that they had stolen.


        Now if you will excuse me, I have to go watch Gabtun Vijaykanth save the world in Narasimha. Gabtun may not be called to address those snobby Yale students, or they may not find enough amount of wax in the world to make a statue of his paunch in Tussaud's, but atleast Gabtun is not a pretentious douchebag and delivers the laughs which he never promises.