How often is it that you come across a book that deeply, and very strongly, touches you? When you feel like falling to your knees in wet grass and crying out to God, tears streaming down your face, thanking Him for the power of words, of language? When you feel outrageous pity for the people who do not give themselves this gift of experiencing something so powerful, yet delivered simply through words? God bless language. God bless words. God bless the people who have the power to write, and God bless those who can do a brilliant job of it.

Triggered by a visit to the food court nearby for 'Prata' for dinner, I am here to write the first of what I hope is a good series of memories from university. Fondly (!) called 'PP' by the Indians in my univ, Prata Point changed from a place whose very name I sneered at in the beginning to one where I go quite often (that even my mom asks if I had prata!).

Be it the plain (kosong!) prata or the yummy chilli-cheese-onion prata or the funny banana version, pratas have become a refreshing change to both canteen food and my cooking :) [Ah, my cooking deserves a whole special post of its own!] Ordering the prata with sambaarrr and not sambal (chicken curry!), watching the stall guy earnestly speak Tamil to my non-Tamil speaking friends, the smile he has for his regulars, the cigarette stench of the place, the nonchalant men with their bottles of cheap beer, people of all kinds with plates of steaming food, the plump drinks stall ladies asking us if we'd like anything to drink, have all become so normal it's tough to think of them as something acquired more during the last year than earlier.

But whatever said and done, pratas will remind me most of the irritable lady in one of the canteens who chops chicken and pratas alike in the same chopping board before giving them to the customers, and my angry retort when I realized she does that: "Don't touch my pratas with that knife!"

Little wonder she always barks at me.

Pratas. Not parathas, not paranthas.
Pratas.

Thanks to blogger hautestuff for the image.

The blog's THREE! She's growing :D

During her first year, she was a place where I dumped random thoughts - reading them now, I feel like an immature kid excited about a space where others could read her.

Second year was when I realized I could probably put up my stories!

Third year became just a place for me to rant about things that worked - and those that didn't.

And now, hmm.. a sudden thought.. this being my last semester in university, if I have the mood and time and everything else, maybe I might put up things about the university that were so important to me in the four years here. Let's see.

On the last day of 2007, a few desperate minutes before the day ends, I realize I don't want to leave the blog archives without the link 'December 2007', so here I go!

2007 was good, to be fair. Internship was torturous, but the team was lovely; Ahmedabad was amazing, yet we left it and came back to good ol' Chennai; the final year's first sem troubled me to no end, yet there were so many fun moments;

2008 is, right now, the most important year in life! 2008, hey, you better be good.. FYP, the Honours degree, a job, and so many things I can't think of now with my sleepy mind, all better turn out well - oh, they will, Nadakkapovadhum nandragave nadakkum!

Happy New Year, people! May this year be the best yet for y'all too!

My hands shiver. My head pounds. I look around at the people around me, at the posters of the Tennis greats punching the air in victory. I’m here to watch a Tennis match played by my favourite sportsperson in the world. I pinch myself hard to see if I actually am here. I want to scream out loud, in joyous rapture, as the guy starts to talk. And I just did. Scream my heart out. I’m here, I’m going to watch them play, my first favourite with my second. God bless, one of my dreams is just coming trues.

So I wrote at the stadium, hands shivering as I wrote on the backside of the ticket of the ‘Clash of Times’, Pete Sampras vs Roger Federer. ‘Clash of Titans’ would have been better.
I’m back, my throat hurts and my head spins. I’m giddy with happiness from watching Sampras play, and even though he lost, to me, he was the clear winner yesterday – after all, the whole stadium gaped in awe at his play, at his tenacity to hold on against someone reigning today, 10 years younger than him.

After a plethora of shows of Malaysian culture, I screamed my head off as Sampras entered the stadium and spoke. Bloody hell, I’m seeing him and I’m hearing him talk. Live. Sampras, visibly older (what with the bald patch and the receding hairline!), still exuding unimaginable charm. He chose to serve first after winning the toss, and I held my breath to see it – this was it, Sampras’s absolutely-brilliant-out-of-the-world-unbeatable serve. As the game moved on and I sat at the edge of the seat in danger of falling off, watching the ball simply glide off his racquet and go straight into Federer’s court, I simply couldn’t speak. Many a time, Federer was simply struggling to return his serve (ACE!), or returning it awkwardly in a failed attempt to prevent an Ace, (OUT!) and sometimes, managing to hit it. What I initially thought was a horrible side to sit in (where I thought I would only be able to watch one of the player’s back), was a brilliant one too – though I was only 5 rows away from the last, I could watch the game beautifully.

Sampras, Sampras – he was in a mood for fun. Be it the celebratory jig when he won a difficult point, or the comical slap on his forehead thrice, or the wanton funny miscommunication between him and ball boys, or even the silly fight with the line umpire for a point – he was a person whose mannerisms I have never seen on court from him before. Charming, absolutely.

And the strength of his serves, goodness! While Sampras regularly topped at 210 kph and over (peaking at 218 kph), Federer’s best was just 200 over. And the grace, oh, I could just fall on Sampras’s feet.

Sampras was calm, cool and easy, and so was Federer, playing a natural game. Guess both knew they were here for fun, just that at the end of the day, it looked like Sampras had had all the fun, and Federer, the winner, a serious game.

Of course, needless to say, FedEx was great too, managing to win the tie-breaker both the times. As Sampras said later, he saw Federer use volleys that he had never seen or used before – and this, from a player who is said to be the king of Serve and Volley! I’m still bloody surprised Federer didn’t manage to break Sampras’s serve .. Sampras wouldn’t let him, haha. And for Sampras, that speaks volumes of his quality of play. Why Federer won yesterday, according to me, was the sheer strength and stamina his age afforded him. I don’t know if he wasn’t taking the game seriously and that’s why he didn’t play an aggressive game, and God forbid, no, the match wouldn’t have been fixed. It wasn’t exactly a game where Federer particularly had to display much class – all of it was clearly stolen by Pete. I have to admit that as much as I love Pete, I expected he would lose earlier (and easily) to Federer – thank God, that wasn’t bound to happen on a day I watched him play. Sampras, is truly a class apart. Federer might just beat Sampras’s record in less than 6 months, but it’ll be years before there will be another Sampras. Or perhaps, there might never be. Thanking God a million times for giving me a chance to watch them play, to watch a demigod I’ve known ever since I was 5 give his best against the reigning champion.

Saawariya? Nalla kaettan. Konnutan, SLB.
I have to warn you there may be spoilers ahead, and.. oh, wait... there's hardly any story. Never mind, just read on if you will.

Not so long ago, there was a director who made movies which were critically acclaimed, winning National Awards, and so on. And then he made Devdas, a glitzy, filled-with-grandeur-and-big-stars-and-similar-sounding-songs, nevertheless-wildly-successfuly movie, which (unfortunately) beat many other good movies to be India's selection to the Oscars. And he bounced back with Black, brilliance. And now he's back with a miserable fare, just yet.
For those of you who may not know yet, the story is an adaptation of Dostoevsky's 'White Nights', a short story written by him in 1848, of a young lady waiting for her lover to return. Right, it's a short story that has been tortorously stretched to a 2 1/2 hour movie by SLB.
For those of you who have seen Iyarkai in Tamil, trust me when I say that movie was a brilliant adaptation with the same storyline base. What a budding director could do in Iyarkai, SLB failed because of his emphasis on all the wrong things.

So where do I start? At the mind-boggling frequency at which the actors break into a song and dance, at the tenacity of the lead actor to irritate you with his I'm-like-your-son-Lillipop-trust-me and oh-I'm-happy-you-loved-me-at-least-for-a-moment-dear kind of dialogues (seriously, when will Hindi movies grow out of such sentiments??!!), at the sets that make me wonder whether the movie was set in Thailand (there's a huge Buddha) or Baghdad (the mosques a la the Alaadin cartoon's city) or the bars (as in the 1960s or 70s) and yet people appear to be speaking in a more contemporary tongue (I swear, Okay Bye and exchange contemporary Indian currency), or.. phew, you're getting tired, I know.

SLB might as well have made a theatre production instead of a movie! What's with all these sets? Always dark, gullies as in cities in India in the 70s, a picturesque bridge in the middle of nowhere, boats a la Venice taking people from one end of the water body (river? lake? *shrugs*) to the other, roads like in Rome with those huge stones and all, seriously, what was he thinking! It was beautiful in the beginning, and I was awed, but after 20 minutes, it seriously was becoming an eyesore. And the number of times it rained in the movie, oh my God! As my friend put it, 'I think this place is in Meghalaya!' And the shining bulbs and the artistic lighting - as friend said again 'They must have spent at least a crore on electricity alone!' (It's these comments that kept me up through the movie :) )

The hero, Ranbir Raj, 'you can call me Raj'. God, what an agony. Be it his sentimental dialogues, the irritatingly-sticky way he kept pursuing people, his constant talking, and not to forget his semi-nude dance in the towel (an item song for girls, as the friend put it) where he dangerously brandished his towel and let it slip so we could see his taut backside (excuse me!), he was unbearable throughout the movie. And uhh, he looks girly. If not for his semi-nude-towel-act, I wouldn't have gotten a very good opinion of him (nicely toned body! :P).
All the girl did was to cry or laugh like a maniac. I mean, she's worse than me when she laughs :) There's Rani Mukherjee too, as a prostitute, and SLB has spent in gorgeously making up all the women in the red light area, and making them look a little scary, too. There's Salman Khan too, and he looks like a terrorist. He's the mystery man, who impresses the girl because he's sitting in pouring rain and doing his namaz dutifully :) No, girls don't get impressed with just such things in life, before men start getting other ideas.

The music (except, probably, the title song) hardly stayed on in the mind. So much for the lead being a 'rockstar singer'. The dance sequences and songs, typical of Bhansali, were very grand and very theater-ish. Okay, I haven't really seen an opera really, but I've seen them on TV, and this is what they look like. I'm sure this was how Bombay Dreams would have been.

It's just sad that somebody capable of more than this has given such a disappointing movie. His movies, if nothing, at least had very strong characters - the brilliant near-childish and tenacious Ash in HDDCS and her slightly-anguished yet willing to bear it husband in Ajay Devegan, an egoistic drunk in Shah Rukh, a strong-willed deaf-mute-blind in Rani in Black, and of course Amitabh in the same - where did this strength go in this movie? The characters are weak, and not once are you able to sink in with them in the movie, or feel.

I have been really critical and all that, but seriously, I spent three hours on this when I had to be studying for exams, and it's totally not worth it. Sigh, how will I make up for these lost hours!

My advice: Don't spend your time. If you're really a grandeur fan, watch it on DVD later.

It was the last day of internship. Oh, those good old last days of internship in June.
I'm delighted, everything looks rosy, I'm grinning from ear to ear. I walk to the bus stop at 7 40 am, for the last time in months to come, to be an organization's employee.
An Indian guy comes to the bus stop, someone I don't know. Postgrad student, I tell myself.
I'm smiling away to glory anyway. I sit in the bus stop, waiting for my friend to join me, munching on my toast.
Some minutes later, the guy looks at me, and asks,
'So how long have you been here?'
I stare at him, totally puzzled. What a weird thing to ask when you're speaking to someone for the first time in your life? Nevertheless, I decide to answer.
'3 years?' I say, throwing him a quizzical look, wondering why on earth he wants to know.
'What?!' He looks damn surprised.
'Oh, oh,' he says, after a moment's understanding. 'I meant in the bus stop?'
I burst out laughing, but I want to bash him hard for his amazing question at the same time.
'3 minutes,' I say, and both of us aren't embarrassed, as we are convinced the other is dumb :)

P.S.: It's study time again! I'm sitting in the library and blogging instead of studying :) Feels great!