No Bollywood for Middle Aged Women !

There's an old saying - art is reflection of the society! 99% of Bollywood movies are certainly an exception. Interestingly the India film industry aka Bollywood has two clearly defined categories - Stars and Actors ! Stars are evergreen, media friendly, people savy stalwarts, usually adept in marketing and PR activities.  Ironically very few women have been able to achieve stardom in past 100 odd years of India cinema. 

Until late 1970s, heroines, as we usually prefer calling them, had a well defined role, character and attributes. In addition, mothers and sometimes sisters too were important part of the Bollywood stories those days! The divas of 50s, 60s and 70s gracefully retired as they hit mid 30s, though most of them were married in the same fraternity,i.e. no dearth of opportunity.  Why only the women/ the heroines take a sabbatical to raise their kids and then they slowly move into obscurity forever? Why women from these wealthy and seemingly liberal entertainment industry powerhouses only become the scapegoats of the double standards? Some might say that the choice was theirs, but how free, how unbiased that decision was !

Those days going to a theater was not considered a good manner, so women rarely went to theaters. According to my guesstimate more then 90% of the Directors, Producers, writers and the technical staff was and is male. So there were genuine reasons for not casting middle aged women those days, i.e. no market for women oriented movies, very few women representatives to hoist the flag !

Cut to 2012 and the situation is still the same. Unfortunately not even young, educated, outward thinking, highly smart, international competition winner and even talented heroines are not able to demand, command good script, well written characters except those of confused love birds. The superstar actresses of 90s and early 00's are already forgotten. The mothers and sisters are no longer relevant in the mindless movies made for weekend multiplex audiences. What a wastage of talent ! 

I think the reason for current state of affairs lies in a box, infact two boxes. The one box is what you are currently using. A significant % Women in 40s and 50s in India currently are not yet Online. So they are not able to voice their opinion, voice their demands unlike their teen kids. This box has done one more thing. Because the teens and the young kids are constantly in touch with their friends and the rest of the world, so they dont miss the middle aged women anymore in personal and virtual lives and even movies. 

The other black box, is our good old, earlier known as Idiot Box. The Indian Television Industry has been filling this vacuum for past 15 years. It has preserved and reserved the Prime Time for Indian women and served them quiet adeptly. Infact the Television has provided good opportunity to showcase talent to several middle aged hero and heroines who were good actors but couldn't achieve stardom in Bollywood.

However I am slightly perplexed here. What happened on the Television screen was the cause or the effect of what happened on the Silver Screen ! Perhaps the reason lies in our expectations. We the viewers always expected our heroines to be beautiful, young, elegant and sexy. We are/were not interested in their acting and so couldn't accept their growing wrinkled face or disproportionate vital statistics ! 

Let me know what you think...

Information Pollution !

Sometimes we tend to believe that by reading everything, by writing whatever we want to and sharing whatever we like, we are exercising our fundamental right to free will which is also reinstated by the founding fathers of our nation via document publicly known as constitution.

You and me, i.e We, want to take unbiased decisions out of our own free will. We want to process all the information available to us and then would like to decide, what is right and what is wrong for us, them and everybody else around us. No matter how much powerful we think our brain is, at least the conscious brain has some severe limitations. It can only process X amount of information at a time and only a total of Y amount of information every day and after analyzing and processing all that information, it needs Z amount of rest.

Today anybody randomly can generate Data by touch of a button. And randomly we keep feeding, harping and sometimes even critically analyzing those pieces of irrelevant information.

What happens next! Fatigue, tiredness, sore eyes, loss of appetite, headaches, cramps, never seen/heard/ experienced before cravings, liquor as we gain weight on our way to Consumption Nirvana !

I am not against consumption, don't get me wrong. Infact I think that's the purpose of our lives. This post is only about the by-product of Consumption Revolution, i.e Information Pollution.

Marketers, Media and a very less know, but perhaps world's best know marketers knows about this Information Pollution very well. Infact they are sitting at the helm, with desire and power to worsen this pollution, create a hazy cloud of information always in front and even behind our eyes, so that we see what they want us to see, dont act and always react, so that they can make hay even when the sun is set. Yes, I am talking about our age old friends, our so called representatives, who are here to serve us, so that their interests are served to the maximum, our friendly, but not living in neighbourhood anymore Politicians!

Those of us who can, in order to save time, are busy buying gadgets and later on updating and upgrading them simply because we need them inside our toilets, cars and offices and bed-rooms. We are spending this saved time or whatever time left with us, in consuming more things and in the process generating more and more data about what we consumed today, who's the biggest consumer among us, what our friends must consume and what they should not etc.

We try to analyze all the advertisements, test, taste free samples and buy the most appropriate Cream or Mobile phone for us. We tend to believe that we have made a rational decision by buying the best product. I think actually we are simply buying the best marketer. All the shampoos and toothpaste available in the market claim to solve all your problems, yet none of them does solve anything. Perhaps we know it as well, yet we buy, consume something, because we have to. So is this A battle of creating most luring pieces of information (by the ways of advertisements, paid reviews, social media campaign, save the world campaigns, videos, news paper ads etc) only ?

Call it Irony or Travesty, but we don't realize Our mind works on the same basic principles on which a computer works. Yes, its widely know as GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out. No matter how much we try to be a Free Thinker,  we become what we consume !

They (the marketers,the media and our cute politicians) also know about an almost forgotten principle in an era of Quad-core processors, FIFO- First In, first Out!

That's why our cute politicians tend to chillax, make money day and night for the first four years of their tenure and announce some populist policies, attend marriages, opening and closing ceremonies and feed us with whatever possible, in the last year of their tenure, so that we recall them after we enter the Ballot Box. They know that Elections will happen on a hot, sunny day. Their will be a huge ocean of people behind each of us, and our GIGO mind will FIFO the candidates, confused by the plethora of information bombarded by several sources (including the neighbourhood uncle-ji, brother-in-law from Patna and Boss's sister's husband from Rai-Bareily) muddled with intrinsic desire to consume something as soon as we get back home, will take only few seconds to decide, push the button or put the stamp to handover our future in safe hands.

So next time, whenever you are thinking, think before thinking whether your free willy thoughts, your assumptions and even your seemingly innate desires to Consume and Act Freely are actually influenced and literally governed by this Information Pollution!!

Bollywood's CONfusion is in the AIR !

Please don't sneeze. After reading this post, you might want to take nasal spray to clear the air a bit in a hope to breathe fresh air someday, but let me tell you its futile.

I am lucky because I get some free time in the evenings and over weekends. However ever since I moved to Middle East my movie dose has reduced significantly. It has resulted in a loss of appetite, dry thoughts keep wandering across my minds rapidly accompanied by empty sand storms and a hollow tranquility.

But ya, living in Middle East has lot of advantages, more then I could have imagined. The best one and perhaps most important one is easy access to Indian T.V channels, ya all of them, at the almost same time and pace. After a long time, I decided to create a collage, thanks to the daily dose of Indian TV channels and through them easy and almost free access to most latest of the Bollywood movies.

After creating this collage, I realized that pictures do speak 1000 words. So I can afford to keep this blog post small, like the script and plot of the above Bollywood movies. Call it a coincidence, but I came across most of the above movies and many more, which I cant recall now with same story line, that of confused lovers. These in love people are either too afraid to accept their love or have find love of their life after getting engaged to someone seemingly boring but nice at heart person. Somehow the Music of all these movies has been great, in some of the movies even the performance of the actors under given scope was also good. But as we know our Bollywood Directors and Producers are famous for making the most while the sun shines, so they decided to make the most of this new age, gen Z, confused love bird stories. The big advantage is that the Directors and Producers dont have to spend much on story, sets, editing, costumes or even on the fee and remuneration of actors. The acting by the likes of Imran Khan and Deepika Padukone is so good and repetitious that sometimes I really wish and hope that they get rid of their straight faced confusion soon and can live happily ever after.

Back in 90s our beloved Rajs and Simrans used to invite us with arms wide open to fall in Love and now days we are getting emails with open invitation to fall in the confusion. I am married and so I can afford to remain confused, what about you ? Still searching for the Nasal spray !!

By the way, dear Directors and Producers of such confused character love hate stories, we had enough of these, we got the point, we appreciate the confusion and have full sympathy with your metro-sexual, wannbe successful, untalented, protagonists. Kindly stop making such movies ! Enough of CONfusion!
  

A Bird's Love !

I can do what I like,

For me people are alike.

I do love their distinctness, their individuality,

But I have my own version of reality.

I can see you in high and low,

Often, staring right across the window

While I am here right on my tree,

Unnoticed, happy and carefree.

And then I fly,

Up there high, very high,

In the serene, blue sky.

Under the Sun shine, seldom I shiver

Across the clouds, over the river.

Above the mountain all blue and white,

Shining bright in the day light.

And then with night, I come back

With growing moon light, I come back.

 Perhaps, on the same tree.

Where again its me, only me.

And then, I rest.

In my nest,

Feeding my kids,

Hoping for the best.

With next lustrous ray,

They open their eyes.

I set my sight

On the tranquil, Orange Sky.

And then I fly,

Up there high, very high.

Nothing more, I will never need.

For, this is everything,

I ever Loved.

--------------------

I started Writing this poem almost 8 years ago. I am glad that found it safe on my hard-disk (Don't ask how it reached my hdd, because I dont remember that :)) !

At last First !!

After a log hiatus, I came first !

Back in school days, when everybody clamored to grab the top spot, I was happy with top 5 and sometimes even top 10.  I had my own reasons then.Only later I realized that grades, marks and rankings do matter and it hurts the most, when you have everything else except those which matters.

Some wise man wrote this long ago- Success is Counted sweetest by those who never succeed !!

Definitely applicable to me. No lies, have never achieved anything exceptional, never came first but this time it was different. It was bound to happen someday and so it happened today, as if it was a part of a great plan. Whatever happens, happen for good, that's how my parents would console me, whenever I was not first. And so over years, I started feeling pity, not for me, but for them, those at the help of things, for their loneliness.

Things were about change. Something happened which never happened before and so finally I kissed the moment of glory. I made sure that I enjoy my loneliness to the full. Soon I realized what all I was missing by dismissing the desire and thus the situation of being at the top. When you reach the top, even in your own world , suddenly the people in that world start seeing and treating you differently. But the  fun does not last long. Either I had to do anything under the Sun to retain my lone spot or someone else will do something and soon my charm and karishma will vanish.

A rush of blood, dilapidating pupils and my moments of joy and glory were snatched away from me. I was helpless, I could have done few things, but I could sense the outcome, so I decided to save my energy. Once again I became the ordinary me, which I always deserved to be.

Damm it, I was last and so he denied the admission because it was overflowing with homo-sapiens. I was left with no other choice but to wait for the next Bus. Within fraction of seconds tens and almost hundreds of people started queuing behind me from nowhere.
   

5 Birds in the Tree !!

Question - There are 5 birds in a tree. A hunter shoots 2 of them dead. How many birds are left?

 According to Scientists - all 5, they all were still part of the planet earth. 

According to Perfectionists - depends on what time you are asking the question, if the 2 shot birds were falling while the other 3 have not taken off yet, only 2 in sky and rest 3 still in/on tree. A few seconds later all 5 could be found floating in the sky. Few more seconds later 2 of them were hugging mother earth and 3 alive were flying in the sky now! A few moments later the 3 surviving birds, lands again on the earth.

According to our smart journalists, reporting Live- Out of two birds who were shot, one was touched by Rajnikant once not very long ago. She managed to dupe the hunter and the bullet. In order to save her life, she faked her fall from the tree. She gets up happily and flies again. But our hunter was a master artist too. He was waiting patiently behind the tree. He shoots back again....

NOW tell me how many left?

The answer is 2. Ff the 3 birds who were not shot at earlier, one was atheist, she couldn't believe she survived and headed straight to bar for a drink. The other two landed in a farm few yards away. One of them was jumping in happiness while the other was basking under the sun, enjoying her luck. Back to under the Tree, the Rajini bird was surprised but composed. She duped the bullet once again (tough nut). The raging bullet went past the Rajini bird and hit the jumping bird while she was still in air. She collapsed straight on the other one who was taking sun bath beneath her. Both were hospitalized but as per our reliable confidential sources news both were declared dead a few minutes ago.

The hunter, aka Sulman Khan has been taken into custody. The atheist bird has joined Hare Rama society in Goa while the Rajini bird will be flying to Vegas to teach birds of Chuck Norris next year.