Topical Anchors - User participation experiment

An acquaintance of mine, Aditya, from college, is conducting a very cool experiment on Topical Anchors. You can check out an extended post on the same on Mandar's blog.

For those of you who would wanna go straight to the experiment page and participate, here's that link.

I would urge you to go ahead and take part, it is a very cool experiment and would give Aditya a fine set of answers on which to base his further studies on the same topic. It is only till the end of this month I suppose. On a off note, I went for the 100 questions long review! Hee haw!

Its electric!

Song for the mood: Coming Back To Life - Pink Floyd

I finally bought what I wanted to for a very long time! An electric guitar! \m/

Its a Samick AV3 Greg Bennett Avion. You can read a few reviews here

Eric Clapton, here I come!

A Wednesday

Song for the mood: I am Awake - Qi Mono

"I am just the stupid common man ..."

cannot be said in a more poignant way than Naseeruddin Shah's character says in the movie 'A Wednesday'. However a common man must the character have been in the story, Naseeruddin Shah is no common actor, and this is no run-of-the-mill fantasy drama. This is brutal honesty which is just too rare on celluloid.

To summarize the movie, it portrays a day in the life of a city being held at ransom by a man, Naseeruddin Shah, wanting the handover of four terrorists. Oblivious to the populace, the man claims to the police to have planted 4 bombs in busy locations of the city which he will blow up killing thousands of innocent people, if those four terrorists are not handed over to him by the end of the day. To prove to the commissioner, played by Anupam Kher, that he is not kidding he leads them to a bomb planted right under their noses, in the police station itself. The day then unfolds with the police trying to trace this 'mastermind' in vain but finally having to succumb to his demands and handover the four terrorists. What happens after the terrorists are handed over is something worth spending the 2 hours that the movie spans.

"What do you do when a cockroach enters your home? You kill it. That is exactly what I am doing. These cockroaches have entered my house and made it dirty. I am just cleaning my house today ..."

If the idea of a common man out to get revenge for his friends and family does not make you even blink, watch 'A Wednesday'. Its not gonna make your eyes pop out because that is not what the movie is about. This movie will make you think and that is hard to expect and much harder to deliver.

"My wife calls me every one hour to ask if I have eaten, if I am feeling well, if the travel has been all right ... she is infact calling to check if I am alive"

Not all that fantastic really. Its quite true, quite honest. How many bomb blasts have we seen in recent times? How many innocent people have died in those dastardly acts committed by misled morons, be it Mumbai or Delhi or Bangalore or any city of India? How many times have we had to just pick up our lives and get on with it? Imagine for a moment what would happen if one of us decides "enough is enough" and you have the premise of this movie.

Watch it. That's all I am going to say.

My picks from the movie:

• Naseeruddin Shah. What an actor! I have new respect for you sir. He is no doubt our finest.
• The story. Very realistically set even if the main thread is a bit fantastic. Someone please make Johars and Ekta Kapoors watch this movie and then ask them to stop making whatever trash it is that they are.
• The conversation between Anupam Kher and Naseeruddin Shah in the climax of the movie. The common man explains his side to the commissioner of the police. Anupam Kher turns in a really fine role himself.

Will end with an excerpt from the same conversation.

"I am not able to understand you or your demands. They are strange."

"My reasons and my demands are strange, are they? Why? If they kill two hundred like me its ok but if I kill just four of them it's strange for you? But it isn't your mistake. It is after all what you are taught to expect from us isn't it? Live like a common man, bear it all like a common man ... and die like a common man"

This is no common movie ... period.