Maranam Aayiram ...!!!

PRELOUGE: One week after the film, The author is still terrified at the sound of the word “Daddy”. He prays for justice to be done upon him.he laughs heartily till he cries inconsolably....he seeks divine intervention..he laughs again..he cries again.....!

 The film opens with an elderly man walking around the house spitting blood and speaking in a voice that sounds like he had just swallowed a scew-driver. No he is’nt a Dracula or something (common this is a goutham menon and not a steven speilberg film) this is our very own Mr Krishnan aka naina Surya the cool old screwed man playing his part flawlessly. A perfect exotic start for an audience so frustrated with their own life’s realities who came looking for a dreamy utopian world full of 6 pack suryas and sizzling hot sameeras. 

One look at the man and you feel he just ran out of a middle school fancy dress competition with his weird beard and a funny wig still sticking on. He is flanked by three woman who look anything but English but for some strange reason cant speak anything but English! Yeah, even when their captain courageous is well on his way to his heavenly abode. The point that some of this movie’s staunch defenders who call this a reflection of the “upper middle class urban Chennai” lifestyle seemed to have missed is that we are tamil speaking people who tend use English at times and these are English people who tend to use a word or two of mispronounced tamil at times! This becomes a dangerous reflection of reality because even the less than 5% of the audience at whome all this circus is aimed at fails to relate to it.

At the end of this gruesome death sequence of the unusual English man the screen flashes out and flashes in back as two overloaded helicopters struggle to take off from some god-forsaken corner ofIndia. On this very copter is Major Surya on his 3hr and 45 mins jolly ride to a rescue operation which he very effectively utilizes to recollect half a dozen love stories, a little over a dozen songs and oodles of romantic interludes. True to the theme of the movie he starts off with his dad first. The man whose greatest accomplishments in life was to have successfully wooed a pretty woman, ensured she lived a horrible life all through and motivated his son to do just that. How much more inspiring can a dad get? And to top it all off he calls his 25 yr old over grown army major son a ‘kido’! 

At this point the screen goes blank again, just when the audience start looking at each other anxiously fearing if this was the end of the movie or something the dracula surya alias Krishnan strikes back with vengeance with his ‘inspiring’ love story.

This is perhaps the fastest part of the movie, Scene 1 – surya sees simran and falls in love. Scene 2 – simran sees surya and falls in love and scene 3 – both start running around trees singing “mundhinam partheney…” . Wow!! That was a text book definition of a “breezy love story”. But gautham needs to be given some credit for a couple of things here, the detailing of the 80s set and the obviously more challenging accomplishment of turning simran and surya into a teenage couple and still making sure Sim does’t look like his akka. 

At this, Goutham(or may be it was the producer who thought the unnecessary flash back was getting rather too expensive who) pushes the fast forward button and brings us all back to 2008. But even after 28 yrs of fast forwarding Mr and Mrs Krishnan don’t seem to have gotten out of their hangover. The wise old man goes darling… darling for anything and everything and the good old lady can just not get finished with her own narration of how a man actually managed to fall in love with her and sustain the odd feeling for 28 long yrs! Aww struck by his mom’s inspiring bed time stories, Surya develops the ambition of his lifetime “to be able to find a woman more beautiful than what his dad found and successfully woo her into his looser life”, Sounds too soggy to be a hero’s lifetime motto? Try its latin version“Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur”. Cool huh? For some strange reason we are all so used to believing that all latin motto’s and Chinese proverbs carry a very deep meaning in them. 

Loaded with this ambition and a couple of other useless advices that his father gave him while dropping him off , Surya enters his 4 yrs of college. This is when the movie once again starts running at a breakneck speed as though it was on steroids. Before you even realize it is song 1, song 2 and boom, end of college. When college life ends so quickly in a movie you obviously know Surya has had no luck with his ambition. But according to his ‘inspiring’ dad, by virtue of being his son Surya should be ‘lucky’ with love. So there is just one last train journey back home before this virtue turns into a paradox. So it is imperative for our hero to find a hot looking gal and fall in love with her overnight to prevent his life from turning into an unsolvable paradox. This could have been a great suspense point to break for interval but the director some how seems to have missed it and struggles for the rest of the movie to find another such situation.   

Burdened with this thought Surya reluctantly boards the train. This is when you start wondering if this was some loverboy equivalent of Hogwarts express going to Gonmonaland or something! Wondering why I’m saying this? Sample this, what is the probability of finding a stunning hot girl sitting right in front of you on a train from trichy to Chennai who blushes everytime you ogle at her ??? 1/10^infinity I guess. Its like finding Pamela Anderson on a MTC bus going from mylapore to nochu kuppam! But before you realize all that, you are mesmerized by “nenjukul paydhidum maa mazhai…” taking you to the second high point of the film and you become almost numb to Goutham’s stupidity for the next half an hour or so. 

This marks a showcase entry for the ravishing Sameera, the saving grace of this movie. Off late you get a feeling that tamil directors are all turning masters at this craft of showcasing actresses. Aishwarya Rai in Jeans, Shreya in Shivaji , Kajol in Minsara Kanavu and Asin in Gazini were all arguably the best portrayal of their careers.  I guess it must have been a realization of sorts for these woman themselves to discover this stunning side of them revealed so artistically by our very own brand of directors. Its perhaps the frustration of growing up in Chennai that turns these ordinary men into masters in this craft. How I wish these guys could do something about the girls in my college as well J  

 The next 45 mins of the movie is a breeze. The director all of a sudden transforms from “Memoirs of gheisha” mode to “Fifty first dates” mode. For a moment you feel the poet in Goutham has over powered the sadistic story teller in him. He actually takes you into a utopian world where people build successful business and large mansions overnight. Lover boy surya suddenly turns entrepreneur over a period of one song (For the uninitiated “the period of one song” is a popular unit of measuring time in tamil cinema. One unit of “period of one song” falls somewhere between one year and one light year units. This is typically the time taken for a protagonist to go from rags to riches, riches to rags, coma patient to Olympic runner, shepherd to industrialist or simply lover boy to entrepreneur as in this case). This is not all, after making loads of money its now time to make some love. Off goes surya to San Francisco where over a period of a couple of more songs avar matter ah mudikiraaru ! (sorry guys, just couldn’t find an English equivalent as precise and fitting as this ;-) 

 Just when you think all is well about this movie, the sadistic story teller strikes back again and strikes hard this time. With one mighty blow to the sceenplay he takes away all the happiness from the lives of both Surya and the audience. But thanks to some “revolutionary thinkers” like bala and ameer, tamil audiences these days have kinda become numb to tragic climaxes. We have started accepting it as a way of life in cinema where some director’s like goutham build their female lead’s role so skillfully that beyond a point they don’t know what to do with such a goddess of a character that they have built and end up killing it for the sake of convenience. But the real tragedy is yet to strike. Just when you are trying to come to terms with tragedy part1 but at the same time are quite satisfied to have watched a reasonably good movie considering the kinda crap that you are forced to watch these days and are waiting to see the “The End” coming up on the screen you are surprised with the tragedy part 2. The screen reads “Interval” ! You get bamboozled, you clinch in your seat wishing this was some sort of a spelling mistake or something. But hey, nowhere in the world do they misspell ‘the end’ as ‘interval’ no, not even in China. Then what the hell is this all about? Is the director not done yet?  What more does he have to say? And how could he … what the.. common… ahhhh…!!! By the time you come to terms with yourself its end of the intermission(you have just missed your golden chance to escape unhurt) and Surya and Goutham are already back to haunt you once again.

This is when you get reminded once again that Surya is presently on his way to a pani poori shop  errr..!! I’m sorry a rescue operation in his overloaded copter and still has several hours to go and several stories to tell. Goutham shows some ingenuity here by characterizing his terrorists as very patient human beings eagerly awaiting Surya’s arrival to shoot them all down. This gives our hero enough time to recollect some more soggy stories from his and his father’s life. After “memoirs of gheisha” and “fifty first dates” its now time for the doping act. 

Surya calls back home from SF to announce “operation success but patient dead!” and he is now on his way back. Enter, the bald ‘good samaritan’ who gives up his business class seat from SF to India for a seat next to our depressed hero so that he could have some free entertainment over the long boring flight(how sadistic!). He is one of those signature Goutham Menon characters that you would find only in his movies but surprise surprise his name is not Ezha Maaran or Anbu Chelvan this time. And glad there is no “kavalai padathey saghodhara ….” type song on the plane. This helps Surya save some precious time to get home and get back to business quickly. Not the company that he once started, that has now been abandoned for the sake of convenience. This time it is the doping habit that he has just acquired. This is the moment when the movie starts sagging. Though the portrayal of Surya in these sequences is laudable and his acting commendable this could well have been a movie by itself. By the time we get done with all this trauma the audience is dead and out. They need to be on steroids to be able to sit up and watch anything after this. But our director is far from done yet. 

An unnecessary trip to Kashmir, child abduction in Delhi and all this followed by Surya busting a child trafficking network there in a very childish manner pushes our ability to sustain crap to an all new level. There is a whole new ‘Mahaanadi’ dimension added to the movie all of a sudden. Somewhere around this time I fell asleep and woke up after a while to find Surya doing some army exercise routine! I thought this was the second interval and they were playing the trailer of Goutham’s next movie which looked more of a sequel to Kaakha Kaakha (the military equivalent of it). To my horror I discovered this was all a part of this very movie. Though Surya is in amazing shape and he seems to have done a great job turning his family pack into a six pack and fits this new dimension to his role to a T, this is all unbearable after 3 hours of soggy story telling. This could well have been another movie by itself. To add to the mess is another romantic interlude with Ramya which feels anything but romantic. By now we have watched 5 different movies under one title and are not done yet.

All this is frantically topped of with the rescue mission that major Surya had set out on several hours ago where a caricature of Burkha Dutt is being rescued from the clutches of some Kasmiri militants (remember: those patient men we spoke about). This is followed by the quintessential home coming and reunion and with this the four hour long roller coaster ride finally comes to a grinding halt.

When the lights come back on the theatre looks more like the rescue operation site with people looking traumatized and distressed with what they just went through. You see in their eyes the longing for another army commando to rescue them out of this mess they have put themselves into. No, not Surya once again for god’s sake, anybody else would do. Yeah yeah even captain vijaykanth is fine.

This is like watching the entire Lord of the Rings series along with the matrix trilogy back to back. It is the cinematic equivalent of a rain intercepted test match. Perhaps the tamil cinema equivalent of a psychometric test where the ultimate mental ability of a person to take shit is plotted against the control he has over his emotions to determine his sustainability to mental stress. This a movie straight to the brain rather than a movie straight from the heart as Goutham fondly describes it. There is no one really who can defend the second half of this movie, nah.. not even the Indian Army!

The Lalu Express

A politico-economic saga on the Indian Railways ~ A comedy of errors !

11 AM on a super hot summer morning, traveling in the second class compartment of an Indian Railways train across the heart of South India is definitely not one of the most poetic set-ups for someone to feel like writing. But I still felt like doing it, not because the ambiance around enticed me to feel like that but simply because I felt like screaming on top of my voice to vent out the anger that was building into me for the past few hours and this was the only way I could do that without getting reprimanded.

As the temperature soured past the 40 degree mark and the man and his wife sitting next to me had just managed to conquer another quarter of my seat, I sat there hopelessly frustrated about not having an eject button and a jet pack on me to escape this insanely infuriating situation I was in. That man perhaps felt like he was 17yr old Alexander the great trying to conquer the world as he skillfully took over my seat inch by inch thereby making more room for his lazy wife to spread her legs and sleep and in the process almost successfully pushed me into the aisle. At the end of that exercise I was supporting my ass with one leg, one inch of seat and a lot of air!
But the truth of the matter was that sitting on air was far more comfortable than sitting on that seat which had a cushion that was skillfully crafted to feel a little harder than the steel frame that supported it. Talent is’t it? This is only one of those many rare talents that Indian Railways has not just developed but also mastered during its last 157 years of existence. Some of its other talents include designing fans that rotate at high speeds and yet don’t give any air and even more amazingly monopolizing train travel in a vast land where it is the only medium of transport for over 90% of its population and yet making loses for 153 of the 157 yrs of its existence !

If that was not remarkable enough, there is more to it. Here is a train which is one among eight trains that shuttle between the two most developed cities of South India everyday but yet looks like it was year 1947 and this was the last train to Pakistan. It is loaded to at least thrice its capacity i.e. excluding the business travelers. Business travelers here does not infer an elite class of travel or a bunch of corporate honchos on their way to a board meeting. But it instead refers to a unique segment of the Indian economy that thrives in the second class compartments of Indian trains. The aisle almost transforms into a mobile ranganadhan street. There is nothing really you cannot buy here, from pirated DVDs to nursery workbooks you can get them all.Giving the passengers a travel experience that even luxury trains have not been able to provide.

If all this still leaves some space to walk , it is rightfully occupied by the community that is easily the single largest majority in a country of such grave diversity, the beggers. They come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from a couple of days old infants to 100 not out senior citizens. Men, woman and the third sex. This is perhaps the only profession where the third sex not only get a fair representation but also enjoy being market leaders. You better be ready with some bucks to give them unless you belong to the rare species of people who actually enjoy being licked, cajoled and seduced by a eunuch in public. If you still insist not to budge you better be prepared for some horrific XXX entertainment at your own risk and loose your mental peace for the rest of your life as that horrific image flashes every time you close your eyes then on.

In short a train in India is its mini eco-system on the move. Except for a small glitch, the train reservation mechanism is yet to be influenced by the other reservation mechanism that rules this country. We can perhaps hope to see that taking place once Arjun Singh becomes our next railway minister. But it will be
Interesting to see if at least that reservation applies to our business travelers and beggars as well.

By now the train had lazily covered one half of the 7 hour long journey to Bangaluru and I was just about half dead. So the balance seems to be impeccable. By the time I reach my destination I should be finished I thought. I started desperately looking around for some alternative methods of killing time as I was too bored of analyzing the people around me by then. I decided to fight boredom with music. Thought it would be the best way to make my awful situation a little better. Desperate for something to sooth my ear after listening to all the jarring noise from the grumbling train and the support chorus from its passengers, I wore my ear plugs and played some music from my cell phone. I was hardly 10 minutes into listening when I realized A R Rahman was not in the kind of magical touch he used to be at one time and that frustrated me more than the train, my neighbor , the fan, the seat and all the beggars put together ! I started growing even more restless and desperate. I punched my hand into my bag and started moving it all over to catch hold of something that could be my accomplice in killing time.

It was at this time that I got my hands on a book. A novel that I had bought just the previous day in anticipation of the disaster that was to follow today but had forgotten about it in my state of frustration. I pulled it out like I had just found Bill Gates’s credit card. It was a yellow black book and the cover read “The 3 mistakes of my life” by Chetan Bhagat . At that moment to find a book which on its very first page proclaimed that its author had already made three big mistakes in his life while I had made just one (boarding the train that is) was nothing less than a million orgasms. Excited and thrilled at the same time I started reading through the book. There are few things in this world that can match the excitement of finding someone who you know for a fact is a bigger looser than you.

The next two hours were killed quite effortlessly with the lethal book that I had found. By then I had realized that the one leg that was supporting my rather large body had become num. Five and a half hours of sitting still in an awkward position can num even certain parts of a woman’s body that are otherwise quite sensitive. It was crying for some movement (I mean my leg ;-). That was when I took a major decision in my life, to actually plough through the human mass that separated me from the restroom that was just 10 mts away in distance but considering the travel complexity was almost half a universe away. But the governing law of the universe is “necessity is the mother of all fuck-ups”.
And this was just yet another variation of it.

I gathered all the mental and physical strength I could and set out on this voyage within the voyage. After a grueling 10 minutes of walking on people and squeezing through some odd bulks of mass I reached my destination. No, not Bengaluru but the obnoxious little toilet at the end of the compartment. The expression on my face when I entered the toilet was the same as that of Ali Baba's when he entered his cave of treasures.

The thrill of reaching the toilet dint last a second after I entered it. I was horrified by what I saw. I had just discovered the only part of the train which offered a bi-directional view of the world. You heard me right, a passenger in the toilet can actually enjoy both the usual side view and also a rather unusual bottom view !!!! In other words the world’s largest railways still had the world’s most out dated human waste disposal mechanism!!!!

That sight had more impact on me than what a cover page of a playboy magazine could have aspired to achieve. It threw open a pandora’s box full of questions in my head. To the extent that I never even realized I had already ploughed through the human mass to reach my seat and meanwhile even the train had managed to touch Bengaluru City ! For the next two days my head was running a slide show of these agonizing images and therby forcing me to give this some thought .

If this is still the state of this organization, then what is all this buzz about the historic turnaround of the Indian railways by the great Lalu Prasad Yadav all about?, I thought. Did he travel all the way to Harvard on this pretext just to brag about how his organization “historically” made one million Indians shit on railway tracks every day ???? Is this the kind of service India’s now second highest profit making PSU provided to its 6 billion travellers with its 1.6 million strong employee strength which is more than the number of people required to run a nation, let alone running this inefficient railway system.

This is in-efficiency at its best, I quipped. The very fact that it took an uneducated milkman politician from Bihari heart land to turn this hugely loss making enterprise into a profit making one speaks volumes of its in-efficiency. I obviously do understand it is easier said than done to run an organization of this scale. Its in many ways like riding on a wild dinosaur, too difficult to control and maneuver but once you get it oriented in the right direction the impact of the success will be un imaginable. If a failed chief minister of India’s most backward state can churn out 16 billion dollars in revenue from it in just one year what could a Mukesh Ambani do to it ??

This success was not achieved by the managerial ingenuity of the railway administration but by simply piggy-backing on the booming Indian economy. Had there been some efficient governing coupled with these other factors, its success would have been far more profound. These facts kept gonging in my head and raised a trickle of hope for this god foresaken organization.

All is not over yet, I optimistically look forward to the days when this “goldmine” of an enterprise is run in true corporate style. With its 6 Billion strong and still growing customer base and wealthy employee and capital strength this sleeping giant can give any of the fortune 500 companies a run for its money !