"Dammu" Movie Review (Telugu)

“Dammu” means “stamina” in Telugu. Supposed to be short-hand for the box-office charishma of the short-statured, short-tempered NTR Jr. He ropes in Boyapati Sreenu who delivered monstrous hits for Balakrishna ("Simha") and Venkatesh ("Tulasi"). And two heroines  - the in-form but ageing Diva Trisha who looks glam despite puffy eye-bags and tired looks, and a not so cute but taller than NTR Karthika. Does it all add to the magic of NTR? No, it fails miserably.


Reasons are manifold like root causes for food price inflation. A hackneyed story set in a village with two families who war with each other for generations. A screenplay that’s jerky, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, overall disappointing. Violence that is inescapable and unreasonable – even fans and Karate Kids and youth won’t clap for one scene of too many that gnaw your brain away. This madness has to stop one day and it looks NTR is still in no mood to wish violence away for family audiences who come to see his films. Characterisation that grossly under-utilises talents like Kota, Brahmanandam, Suman and Venu (“Hanuman Junction”). What redeems the film is the string of punchlines written by M.Ratnam - they may regale the fans for few moments but the excessive trappings of Balakrishna become too much to handle for NTR - he is not yet mature enough to handle such roles of "Samarasimha Reddy". Music by MM Keeravani is average. Only one song "Sri Sri Raja Vasireddy" evokes awe.

NTR definitely scores a fine performance with impeccable dialogue delivery, designer moustache and improved looks. But its unlikely this movie will be well-received by fans as there are too many flaws and inconsistencies that make it tortuously long in 165 mins. Almost every other hero – Nagarjuna, Prabhas, Mahesh, Allu Arjun – experiment with makeovers and crossover roles. But NTR still thinks his surname and family fan base will get him far notwithstanding weak scripts and incredulous storylines - which audiences in villages are also tiring of – two heroines, thigh-slapping, sickle head-chops, whatever. He is too talented for doing just Balakrishna remixes at his age – he can go very far with his “Dammu” if he leaves the beaten path of this “Dammu”.

"Ee Rojullo" ("Nowadays") Movie Review (Telugu)

"Ee Rojullo" means "Nowadays" in Telugu. Thats the name of a movie supposedly shot on a boot-strapping budget of just Rs.30 lacs. I went with low expectations thinking it is another "facebook"/friendsbook kind of a movie. Debutant director, a heroine who looks like half Trisha, half Shamitha Shetty and a hero who wears spectacles in even sleep. Unconventional to say the least. And the plot gets t...hicker - a software engineer and his "Bawarchi" buddy hunt down a service apartment. He lies to the landlord that he is married and his wife away, expecting and all that.


Then a sweet romance unfolds between the landlord's daughter and the bespectacled guy. Running the girl's errands, solving her "blues", texting her at odd hours towards a blissful state of mind. In the interim, the director takes the audience on a realistic voyage into the world of today's youth - their mental makeup and their attitudes to love and life, work and wi-fi, warts and all. These guys are there everywhere - girls who don't mind hugging male colleagues for a treat at the Chocolate Room, guys who multi-task in relationships at each turn of the day, guys and gals who transact in love for getting from point A to C.

The movie is amateurish towards the end, but largely achieves the objectiive of the director to clearly show what today's teen-and-early teen crowd live for and live upto - they are shockingly short-term, brutally frank, elegantly flippant, and yet obsessed with getting ahead in life than getting even with the past. Director Maruti has delivered an entertaining script which keeps the audience of probably all generations glued mostly. The humor is embedded in the storyline, the characters played by the lead couple and others look thorough and real, and the pace is good, sometimes fast.

The music is a bit loud and hurried and over the top and despite that, the movie is uproarious and upbeat. The Film Development Corporation usually specifies the length of a feature film to be minimum 14 reels. This film is done with in 75 minutes. Everytime I see a film which twinkles like this with raw talent and above-average entertainment caanned in less than two hours and incredulous costing, I see a glimmer of hope for Tollywood. Future is brighter.

Pulitzer Prizes

There is only one gold standard of writing in English methinks - Pulitzer. You have many literary awards for Writing in English (WiE) like the Man Booker, FT Awards etc. but none come close to the award instituted by the Columbia School of Journalism - for writing in English. I keep throwing my savings to acquire the collection of Puliltizer prize-winning entries. Ever since I got to know there is somebody called Joseph Pulitzer and there is an anthology called Pultizer Prize collection, I have been buying since 1991. Of course, I perfectly agree there is outstanding literary output coming in non-English too every minute but Pulitzer is up there for American Writing in English and their standards are too rigorous. Most of the American writers we revere since 1917 -the legendary Christopher Hitchens, Paul Krugman, Dave Barry, Nicholas Kristoff, Joe Nocera, Mitch Albom, Maureen Dowd, Anna Quindlen, Art Buchwald, William Safire, Russell Baker and Roger Cohen - they were always feted here first and cited and celebrated before they became icons of English Language Writing.



2012 awards have been announced - and their categories are as always varietal and calibrated - Pultizer for Explanatory Reporting (as in explaining "sub prime crisis"), Pulitizer for Breaking News, Puliltzer for local reporting, Pultizer for International Reporting, Pulitzer for writing on music, biography or autobiography, history, drama, commentary, feature writing, criticism, etc. A Pulitizer for poetry also - thats the respect and veneer the Pulitizer committee has for all departments of journalism and writing. If the standards are not met, NO AWARD. Surprise, this year, NO AWARDS for FICTION. (Howzzaat???) and NO AWARD for Editorial Writing. This is truly outstanding - why dilute the standards instead of giving to the undeserved? No other literary award matches these standards. Of course, it is Americana all the way - this is for American journalism/writers who are American Citizens. No wonder, Jhumpa Lahiri got it once - not Naipaul of East Indian origins. Of course, there is criticism that these awards are a jingoistic celebration of American Publishing phenomena - but thats the truth - they are the most literate society. India publishes 80,000 books a year but US publishes probably as many number in a quarter, if not more.


I envision a scenario where we will have over the next quarter century more categories of writing introduced by Columbia School to cover the invasion of web-based writing and the many faces of social media. Right now, Columbia School has a New Media division which has asked the US Library of Congress to archive every tweet that goes out of the 200 million user ids every nanosecond anywhere in the world. But I guess giving awards for tweets and facebook posts is tough and difficult. Good Writing is writing thats edited, as David Ogilvy used to say, atleast 13 times. That kind of luxury is impossible to attend on facebook or twitter or blogs without comprising on the qualities of relevance and immediacy. Anyway, whether or not that happens, Pulitzer will live on as long as American English thrives - and readership for elegant writing exists. Congrats to Pulitzer-prize winners - Surprise, no winners from "The Atlantic", "Harpers" or "The New Yorker". Are we getting there? I mean, shorter.

"Devasthaanam" Movie Review (Telugu)

Devasthanam" is a spiritually awakening film and soul-satisfying. It has a good starcast of actors in their twillight years - K Vishwanath (who directed "Sankarabharanam"), SPBalasubramanyam and Aamani. It is directed by Janardhan Maharshi, a writer who had his share of fame in the 80s; he even essayed a famous role as a living corpse-brother of Brahmanandam in a hit comedy film which I fail to recollect. What's good about "Devasthanam" is despite the religious name, it is not religious and not too preachy. It distils the most basic teachings of Hinduism which are secular in nature - love and live well the human life, live for others if you want to avoid the cycle of birth and death, don't chase money if you want peace and be responsible of the consequences of your actions and love everybody - rich and poor.


The story revolves around K Vishwanath who is a do-gooder and helps all in his circle of living and he bumps into SPB one day to take a promise from the latter that SPB should perform his last rites because he has no family. SPB believes in none of that stuff - he doesn't believe in taking a daily bath, doesn't go to temple wilfully, doesn't care a hoot about anything else except loving his ageing but beautiful wife. He also doesn't mind conning women customers who come to his Saree Shop with psychological tactics. SPB only believes in the theory of instant gratification, his immediate family and his business profits. Until, Vishwanath through his deeds and spiritual intelligence removes the layers of ignorance, attachment to the material things and selfishness to oneself and family. Janardhan Maharishi must be credited with working out a tough subject to explain with amazing clarity and conviction. The subject is so serious yet the treatment given is comical and light-hearted especially some scenes involving Kovai Sarala (the lady customer) and SPB and again mostly with SPB and KVishwanath. Such a story hasn't been on celluloid in recent times - of interweaving complex theories of Karma, Re-incarnation and Siginificance of Human life. Music by debutant Swara Veenapani is outstanding and divine sounding - no complex music arrangements just melodious notes involving raagas and simple percussions.

Ramanachary, the art-patron has done a cameo in the film with an effect that will haunt anybody who is having a roaring career and business without a prickly conscience. It takes guts to release this movie just before the Summer onsalught of movies like "Dammu", "Daruvu" and "Raccha". We went to Screen 5 of Prasads expecting a handful of people aside of the movie projector team - we were pleasantly surprised it was houseful. Towards the end, the movie becomes a bit sententious but thats the only way to end a movie with this character. Telugu used in the movie is quite extra-ordinary - not so simple and not so complex but enough to clear the wax in your ears. "Sasha Bhishalu" and "Nivrutti" are not words you read nowadays even in "Swati" and "Navya" - it will do your mother and mother-tongue immensely proud and happy to see this film. I wish other languages also get to see such films with sub-titles. Catch it soon with your seniors because it will be gone soon from the statistically-calculating multiplexes. Good movie to watch if you want small dosages of practical spirituality and art-of-living advice.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "The Book of Procrustes"

Taleb coined the term "Black Swan" and the phrase never ceased to be ringed out of our minds since. From Tsunami to Sub-prime crisis, from freak terrorist attacks to epic catastrophes, anything that's remote and rare to occur is being attributed to a Black Swan event - meaning a tail risk event whose probability is rarest of rarities to occur. A few years ago, apart from writing books such as "Fooled by Randomness" and "Black Swan" and other thick books on exotic hedging derivatives, Taleb assembled his lifetime of observations in a compact volume of aphorisms - both philosophical and practical. "The Book of Procrustes" is a joy and celebration of some funny and many fantastic insights into human behavior and the world at large.

No speculative gyaan, its pure reassuring wisdom - sometimes profane and sometimes profound codified into about 25 chapters. Each chapter is enticingly captioned. "The scandal of Prediction" or "The Implicit and the Explicit" or "Economic Life and Other Very Vulgar Subjects" are few examples of how cryptic and yet endowed with sutble humor they are. As Taleb outlines in the preface, aphorisms lose their beauty and cadence if explained to death. So, he retains the surgical length of an aphorism in its purest form - out of his ingenious mind and vast body of experience- both worldly and otherwise. "What I learned on my own I still remember", as one aphorism goes probably strikes a chord with all of us who remember what we learnt conceptually rather than by rote.

Some are downright emphatic and indisputable ("What I learned on my own I still remember"). Some appear to be uproariously reflective ("We ...amplify commonalities with friends, dissimilarities with strangers, and contrasts with enemies."). Sometimes, he leads you through clear concepts into something that sounds good but abstract. ("Knowledge is subtractive, not additive - what we subtract, not what we add." Taleb has an opinion on everything from Freud and Einstein to Education and Ethics, from stockmarket to banks - on which he makes lot of money for jam, bread and butter. Hear this nugget that seems to tell all without telling it all: "You can be certain that the head of a corporation has a lot to worry about when he announces publicly that "there is nothing to worry about". Or, this one on scams: "It is much easier to scam people for billions than for just millions." (inspired by Madoff episode).

You can make out he has scant respect for ideology, orderliness, equilibrium and prediction abilities of experts. He has a take on too big to fail banks too as well as on Government bailouts. "The main difference between government bailouts and smoking is that in some rare cases the statement - this is my last cigarette - holds true." On banks, he says ,"The difference between banks and the Mafia is that  banks have better legal-regulatory expertise, but the Mafia understands public opinion."

You cannot argue with a man like Taleb - he bares it all, warts and all,  and most of them have such  rhetorical rectitude resting on the fulcrums of logic, wisdom and timeless appeal that it becomes a gospel like a Pythagoras theorem or Aesop's Fables or Panchatantra. Greek Mythology goes that Procrustes used to be a slayer of people invited to sleep on a specially prepared bed - where if the sleeper's body parts are protruding outside the rectangle of the bed - those body parts - be they limbs or head or fingers were ordered to be chopped off. Finally, Procrustes was slain on his own bed by a courageous Theseus who beats Procrustes at his own game. Similarly, the truths and nontruths in this volume are made to fit logic, wisdom and knowledge and the bed actually is the reader. So, instead of fitting the wisdom nuggets in the wrong box, its made like an inverse operation of changing the "wisdom" to the bed-like situation in life.That, friends, that comeuppance or a chance to be proved wrong after what we accept as truth is the essence of what Taleb wants us to imbibe when we see life through our prisms, our paradigms and our ways of seeing. Its a blast of a book something I would like to read and ponder, re-read and wonder. It will keep us anchored to the unfathomable unpredictability of life and appreciate that life cannot be an equation to analyse. 

Gold Merchants of Venice?

Gold merchants are holding the entire country to ransom with their strike against FM's budget proposals to hike tax on import of gold, besides other taxing proposals on cash sales of gold over Rs.2 lacs etc.I feel the strike by Gold Merchants is irresponsible for many reasons. For centuries, these merchants have been fleecing the womenfolk with their bizarre methods of weighing,making charges, and under-billing and sometimes no billing ("Take "Estimate/Quotation" instead of bill madam"). Economics means looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups. Most of the fallacies in economics are a result of ignoring this lesson. You look only at the immediate consequence of an act or proposal and then look at the consequences only for a particular group to the neglect of other groups. Gold Merchants are looking at only their self-interest and not at what the FM wants to re-direct priorities to from this measure.
Let's keep aside the fact that Gold Merchants are inherently incentivised to cheat public and the government for decades due to lax tax policies and innocent women who "have to" buy gold. From the government's point of view, Gold is an unproductive import. In 2000, we were importing around $ 4 Billion worth of gold. That same year we imported $ 15 Billion worth of crude oil. While I don't know what our GDP was in 2000, I have been tracking the corresponding figures over the years of various imports we do which were leading to inflated current account deficits. Last year or so, we have imported about $ 54 Billion worth of Gold and $ 154 Billion worth of crude oil. That means, at the current GDP of $ 1.50 Trillion, we are importing $ 154 Billion of Crude oil and using up our precious dollars for driving growth. This is happening at a time when per capita car consumption is around 6-7 cars per 1000 people. Imagine what will happen over the next five or eight or ten years as our GDP jumps to $ 3 Trillion or eventually $ 5 Trillion over the next 10 years. We need to continuously import Crude oil and maybe other commodities priced in dollars like Coal etc. to drive our infrastructure and overall growth in the economy. In one stroke, the Govt. has imposed import duty to drive home the hard truth that Gold is unproductive and need not burden our exchequer when we can't live without other crucial items like crude oil, coal, energy etc. The whole country should stand in one voice against the irresponsible Gold Traders for taking up cudgels against the government for their selfish motives. They are basically dishonest, don't pay taxes even on 30 per cent of the gold imported or 50 per cent of the gold sold to the retail households, cheat on the quality, branding of gold, underpay the labour, under-report cash sales, generate more black money adding to the present woes, and never give genuine discounts to the public. Its always been a fool's paradise for them now that they are making a picture as if government is the culprit. We need to coinserve every dollar we spend importing crude oil before its cascading effect on the GDP. We have already about $800 Billion Gold reserves in the country's households (excluding whatever reserves temple excavations reveal). Thats roughly Rs.4 lac crores.
Whereas for every dollar of crude oil we import, there is a multiplier effect and more importantly, economy moves. (Of course, there is huge wastage of crude oil in items of conspicuous consumption but lets's park it aside). I personally invest in Gold too on pressure from wife and mom but detest the large-scale immorality rampant in gold retailing shops. I am no Nagarjuna to shout on rooftops with megaphones on the malpractices but definitely feel its high time somebody rein in the gold merchants into the tax stream. Import Duty and the cash sale tax is a progressive measure in that direction. Gold, in any case, is an honorable exception to the law of demand and supply. Generally, if prices rise, demand drops. But Gold has aspirational value besides scarcity and is well counted as an exception to the law of demand (Its called "Giffin's Paradox"). So, what are the Mackenna's Gold Merchants worried about? Pay your bloody taxes and get on with the sales. Don't give lame excuses and avuncular laments.

Paan Singh Tomar - Movie Review

“Pan Singh Tomar” is an audacious winner from Ronnie Screwala about an ill-forgotten hero from the 50s who becomes a runner of Indian Army pride, then national pride and almost of Asiatic fame. Then he retires prematurely, becomes a farmer and in a fit of family feud becomes a dacoit of dreaded proportions in Chambal Valley. The script sizzles from the start as director Timangshu Dhulia reconstruc...ts from the lesser-known pages of sports history, some memorable sequences in the runup to being a runner first, dacoit next in the second half. He brings out the authenticity of the era, the irony of the sportspersons (who don’t get to wear spiked shoes mostly), the psychology behind achievement, the deception and the treachery in games and later, dejection and resentment - when society discards the man behind the medals. Pan Singh eventually turns from an excellent sprinter who still had great civil potential into becoming one of criminal portents.
Even though the dialect is desi Hindi drawn from the hinterlands, the subtitles smoothen the viewing easily. The story moves at remarkable speed and every frame stands out for grandness of execution and class usually seen for top actors’ films. Irfan Khan gets a script that allows him to portray a wide range of emotions without missing ever, ever to make a point in his slurring, wry humored voice. His entry is grand and so is the exit in the end as he fights the police. There are many points in the film that make you whistle, clap, cry, laugh out and even stand up to give an ovation. It’s a rare cinematic experience to see a film so honest, well-scripted, entertaining and crafty enough to make you want to own a DVD asap.
Because the director fitted about 200-250 visually and audibly arresting shots into credible scenes and because of a narrative style that’s neither too filmy nor too documentary-like, you get an immersive experience that seems just a bit extended in the second half. I love the vision of Ronnie Screwala in encouraging bold cinema – cinema that’s rooted in lost fictions of history that brings out an aspect of a sportsperson that’s ironic – there’s a thin line between security and insecurity in a sportsperson’s life which the society never recognizes. Watching the movie in fourth week in a multiplex at midnight eve gave me joy to see full-house for a hero who deserves wider audience – Irfan Khan. Now that UTV Motion Pictures has sold off fully to Walt Disney, Ronnie should do what Walt Disney does in the US – get many characters like these out of the closet into the celluloid. Good cinema doesn't need advertisement, you get wind of it anyhow.