More movie reviews

Red chillies :

Here Mohanlal is the all knowing intelligent underworld phenomenon, who kills cold bloodedly, but has a good soul (as usual). The movie features a gang of deranged girls (the red chillies), running an all girls FM radio (sponsored by hero) and there is this song “mala peyyanu” sung by them in a pub which fused my cranium… now whenever I see that song in TV, it goes mute. Thanks to the director – no romance for Mohan lal this time – what if he danced again? Anyways the movie was mysterious and the mystery still continues – why did they make such a movie? Why did we watch it?

Ayan :

Here our hero Surya is the pet of his mom as well as the street he lives (as usual) – an educated young man who don’t want to pursue a normal government job, but does international smuggling for the kicks – he does impress us by the tricks deployed to smuggle stuff through the air port screening. Naturally parents might be tempted to ask whether smuggling is a good message for the younger audience – all the philistines please understand that our hero smuggles only harmless stuff like pirated movie CDs, diamonds etc... and whenever he gets free time, he helps customs/narcotic guys to bust illegal drug trafficking. Now the movie has some good action sequences, gory drug trafficking methods, and of course love at first sight – One interesting change we noted is that now-a –days the romance song locales have shifted to Africa. The movie has some really really funny scenes, provided you know Tamil :( - When we asked Rajumon why he was laughing uncontrollably, he could not provide a convincing answer most of the time – sadly none of us are proficient in Tamil. Hero kills villain in the final scenes and gets a government job in narcotics department on special recommendation for his genuine skills and lives happily ever after with our heroine Tamanna – may be its okay to kill bad guys.

And finally the best of three : Sagar Alias Jacky

Only similarity we noted with Ayan is that our “Reloaded” hero Mohan lal also does not support smuggling of drugs or arms, only diamonds please!!! The plot was already familiar to all of us due to a funny email which was circulating among us friends in the past weeks – We knew it was a killer movie and watched only because Amal was paying for the tickets. The email had warned us that the whole movie is about Mohanlal walking from his car…then shooting…again walking from plane….stabbing…again walking…hitting goons...Jyothirmayi dancing…again walking…it rains….Lal continues walking under umbrella…. Bhavana and Lal performs a love duet (Thanks again - no dance)…walking…shooting…walking…slitting villains neck…walking….blast another villains boat (in between one can listen to upbeat techno background music and get to see all the latest luxury cars and four wheel drives). While leaving the theatre Cijo was laughing hard (infact the rest of us were crying hard) when he overheard the comment of a fellow victim, that the reason why Mohanlal is smiling at us smugly in the final stills (when the credits were scrolling) was because we had paid to watch this movie. sigh...

RTA never knew

All the aspirants giving a driving test in the UAE will have one to three stories to share (on an average) about their triumph - Its one of the most popular ice breaking topics between strangers meeting in the emirates. I really don’t want to narrate my sorry story here. My graduation from the transport authority was only after the 6th successful failure, spanning exactly one year from my first failed test. The waiting period for the forthcoming test is the most excruciating affair - rest all was a typical cycle - pay-fail-blame RTA(Roads and Transport Authority)!!!

Why would I blame RTA?? Well, I will share some interesting driving lessons I had undertaken in rural Andhra Pradesh - in a village called Ulavapadu. Ulavapadu is a coastal village in Ongole district, which falls in the Chennai-Hyderabad route. That was my first civil engineering job, with Simplex Concrete Piles (I) Ltd. I had a life changing exposure to a myriad of people & cultures during my short time in Simplex!

I and Bini had joined Simplex in August of 2002 and our project comprised construction of some 72 kilometer roads/bridges, as part of the prestigious Prime Ministers Golden Quadrilateral initiative, connecting the four metros of India.

That was the time of the year, when tropical cyclones attacked occasionally in the coastal areas where our road project was being executed. Within the first couple of weeks, I was notorious for bringing ill luck to the two new sites I was initially assigned to - both sites were temporarily closed due to rain and flooding. The highly superstitious elder men looked upon me as a harbinger of doom. The third site had an even dreadful fate! Heard they discovered the foundation pcc after the floods in an archaeological excavation under thick layers of sludge. This was a skew bridge over a twisted brook falling in the highway alignment. To my great solace, the site clearance had revealed remains of a lost cemetery (to be specific, skulls and bones) and great variety of snakes (so much for flaura and fauna) - I would be dropped in the site office every morning and will be picked up in the evening. The site office was a tent with few basic amenities like tables and chairs, overlooking a beautiful mango orchard and a semi dried up brook. I had to endure a whole day in the jungle all alone with one or two excavators to stare at. In a very short period, I developed heartfelt feelings for guys sentenced in jails. Though I sensed stagnation, I had made up my mind not to give up early, this stage was probably insignificant in the big scheme of things ;) - it was indeed.

I had plenty of time at hand and nothing to do then - In a bid to save my sanity, I indulged in doodling and designed car prototypes in my notepad - sadly no one in automobile industry knew about my existence then. Once I got bored with cars, I became friends with the Telugu Hitachi operator Ramu (Ramudu oka manchi baludu ?= Ramu is a good boy) - a slender fellow, hardly in his teens, and made a deal with him to teach me to operate the Hitachi. He was more than glad to educate his great site Engineer and soon I learned how to operate this complicated machine - actually it’s more like a video game - joystick for rotating the cabin/boom - another joystick for moving the stick and bucket and simple push-pull lever for moving forward or backward, but you need practice to use them all synchronously - I even loaded few tippers in the waves of enthusiasm. Thankfully no major accidents happened. After the foundation concrete was poured, the floods saved me from there and I ended up in a normal half a kilometer long bridge site (Paleru Bridge).

Unfortunately RTA examiners never knew about my versatile skills, and confused me with one of the ordinary. Each failed test made me more humble, humbler, humblest? After the tests, though one will be sure of the outcome intuitively, I never gave up hope and waited till the four letter word (fail or pass) was written on my assessment sheet. One of the test examiners wrote "fali" instead of "fail" in the sheet and how I yearned to point out the misspelling. I refrained from doing that only for being a firm believer of Murphy's Laws - God bless, somehow i didnt fali in my seventh test.

Emirates

The first face that comes to my head when I see an Emirates flight is ? Yeah most of you guessed wrong - it is not one of the sweet cabin crew the flight is famous for ;) ...but one of the gentlest persons I have ever met in my life - Mr. Sunil. We had interacted hardly for 4 months while I stayed in Qusais, but his great company helped a lot to endure the ‘hardships’ of those days in a composed manner. Hey, talking about cabin crew, once I flew with Emirates - Trivandrum>Dubai - it was so plush - excellent hospitality - in fact I take great care to avoid the forced hospitality in our motherly air India flights. Most of those aunties are so concerned with hospitality that, passengers often have a gut feeling to adopt all emergency precautions, including wearing life jackets and sit with a blank face! Phew... some of them are so serious - their way or runway!!!

Sunil deals with aircraft maintenance design issues - and so he always had cool anecdotes about one of my most adored inventions of mankind - air craft’s. And thanks for him in making me aware of how fragile an aircraft is ....sigh!!! Being an eloquent story spinner/teller Sunil always kept me entertained - for instance, one of the horror story I remember is about how the pilots of Air Transat Flight 236, glided and landed their air craft safely with an empty fuel tank and no power supply - the flight ran out of fuel over the Atlantic Ocean with more than 300 passengers aboard. (YouTube has a terrific video recreation of this accident - highly recommended). And Sunil also cleared most of my naive doubts like whether an air craft has a reverse gear etc...(Air craft has no such gear - for reverse maneuvers a towing vehicle is used). Okay I did not trust all the numbers he quoted, once I had a bad experience of sharing the number of pilots and flights in Emirates, with my two other genius friends who started arguing and later we had to negotiate and reach a settlement :P

Sunil having spent most of his life in Abu dhabi, was relatively new in Dubai and had a great fascination for car navigation (GPS) and soon introduced that to me, I was impressed at how the navigation system would instruct you to take which lane, which left and so on once the coordinates were fed into the system. Pretty cool! And one day we set off with the voice assisted satellite navigator, to book a flat for him in sharjah . Poor navigator was at a loss for words, once we recognized that most of the roundabouts in the old map were now bridges - but luckily I knew the place in Al Khan, and we made it to the destination. Fascinated by GPS and its ability to locate spots like nearby petrol pumps, theatres, parking, shopping etc.. I had that in mind when I finally decided to replace my old phone with an N82 - but I stopped using that feature in the phone soon - I had enough pleasant experiences, me and expert navigator Anish once had a tough night in Abu Dhabi, lost in unknown desert roads trying to reach one place called Al Raha for a get together - Anish never figured out how the GPS in N82 worked but kept on assuring me that we were going in the right direction!! I started relying heavily on route boards since then.

Sunil has promised me and my wife a treat :) (of course once I get married). Yesterday me and Mahesh being chronic bachelors till day, were deriving inspiration from great men like Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam etc...who never married - and so guess you will have to wait for some more time Sunil ;). Mahesh (here in after called as Raju mon) plans to adopt an orphan baby and look after it.

Anish and some pranks

Another April 1st - Another Hero!

Let’s all give a standing ovation to......(pause)......one and only ..... Anish K Vijayan !!! The smiling dude in the picture above !!! (betwee the Kodak expression in the picture was when somebody asked him "ennaaalum nee itra valiya mandan aayirunnooda???"

This prank serves for payback as well.
I had once been to a 'matrimonial-meeting-the-girl-in-person-event' in Dubai - and it had turned a funny one. Few of us friends were on a weekend visit to meet old colleagues in Abu Dhabi - and I got these calls from home and from the girls relatives in UAE to arrange a meeting on the same day at their Dubai residence - By the time me and Anlal dropped all friends in their rooms, it was late night. Frankly i was not at all in a mindset for a pennukanal at that time as it was almost 11 pm and i was exhausted by the day - enduring a sandstorm in Marina and with all the driving that started from almost 2 o clock or so. Imagine, I even had to purchase new pair of dress and change inside the car itself for the ocassion...The whole episode turned funny with us becoming very friendly to the girls relatives too soon...and we were pretty sure about the doomed outcome :) - since Anlal had accompanied me and was witnessing all that happened, the story was in gulfnews on time...after 2-3 days i got a call from a strange number and the person introduced himself as "the girls uncle" - I was forced to speak to him with respect...only to find out later that, it was this very dude Anish - and from then on, whenever he used to call me, he introduces himself as this uncle.

Another time, for a dinner party, i had made another blunder at a valet parking - with all these trusty friends in a new car with its incredible push button start(read "naya system") , i made the mistake of attempting to explain the ignition 'naya system' to the experienced staff of the hotel. dangg!!!...the guy who parks Porsche's and BMW's on a daily basis smiled at me as i began my endeavor.........Anish never forgot this event and reminds me diligently whenever he gets a chance!!

So plan ke muthabik, I explained Anish yesterday about the (imaginary) prospective business oppurtunity available in my current project and asked him to meet in person today at my office - he had requested me to arrange some safety stuff for his sub contracting firm some time back - Today afternoon, poor Anish drove all the way from Jebel Ali to Al Twar(Opposite ends of Dubai).

I was just being God's instrument - cuz "ippolokke daivom appappo thirike kodukkum" - Morning Anish had played practical pranks with friends at his office - Worst was when he informed Naushad that another cable was broken in site! Naushad being in charge of the site has a tragic history of breaking five live cables despite the prevalent final warnings from department! He jolted to the site only to find a smug faced Anish there.

I did my role and did finishing touches by spreading the joy to his victims ( did some wise guy say - "happiness is for sharing??!!") ...But seeing his "laugh or cry ?? cry or laugh?? "face, I felt really sorry for him, though I was not able to suppress my laughter for a while. To appease my guilt I took him to the contractors store and lucky him - he got business in no time!!! But he has reduced the previously promised commission drastically, guess commission is no more a criteria here :P