Raining Thoughts

There is no movie which I can finitely claim as my best movie or a favourite. The finality of superlatives scares me. I have three movies in mind that I watched again this week, as I write. Three planets I re-visited. Each a planet with a pull of its own. Sudhir Mishra’s ‘Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi’ , (Hindi) set in the times of political turmoil of the 70s in India,  is not just the movie that gave me the ‘Shiny Ahuja problem’, as my husband has been jestingly calling it for nearly a decade now, or a tale of lament over unfulfilled dreams. It is an intense struggle of identities as the characters grapple with their individualities, beliefs, emotions, dreams and realities on a shifting landscape, drifting ahead to where life takes them inevitably, changing them forever. A gem of a movie that I can never stop loving. Some stories blur the fine line that divides fact from fantasy. Hariharan’s ‘Ennu Swantham Janakikutty’ (Malayalam) beautifully does that. Janakikutty’s char...

                The stuff which Konthayum Poonoolum is made of is the stuff I’d like to buy a whole nine yards of, wrap around myself and go to sleep with…(with all the lights ON of course). Konthayum Poonoolum had me on the edge of my seat right from the beginning with two others comfortably snoozing away on either side of me and a third one burying her face in my bosom, busy with her intermittent whining to go home cum peeping into the screen from time to time. A first hand summing up tells me that the movie evoked diverse reactions from its diverse audience!        I loved KP for its affair with the disjoint aspects of life, death, faith, destiny, irony, belief, superstitions, fact and fiction. I congratulate KP for coming in as a fresh surprise, when in fact overall expectations had only amounted to nothing more than a formulaic hindu-christian love story or its clichéd likes. These presumptions, I must s...

               My three year old is currently drifting through the imaginary-buddy phase. And from time to time I find myself being dragged off from where I sit, to underneath some table or beneath the stairs or right to the middle of the room or to under some tree, where she expects me to have ‘a few words’ with the invisible ‘Suzy’ for not having food or for not sleeping or for not eating her medicines on time or for not sharing the color crayons and so on and so forth. Incidentally she also happens to have a Suzy in real-life, her best buddy at play school. But if asked whether both were the same, she indignantly shakes her head and tells me that this is a 'different Suzy'. The other day she totally spooked me out when she asked me to turn around and give some water to Suzy, who it seems, was standing right behind my chair with an empty glass! Heights of heaven! I'd now seriousl...

                                                        The year was ending with a twist. And the twist came in the form of rain. Trivandrum rains have always been a beautiful sight to behold, especially to the tired after-office eye. Most evenings were blessed amply with a fair amount of rain or at least a slight drizzle, which made my short walks from the bus stop to my home through the lane a pleasurable or a deplorable experience, depending on factors like the centimeters of rain received, wind speeds (to fly or not to fly with a flipped umbrella) as well as my ability to dodge the mud-splashes contributed by passing motorists.                               One evening it so happened that I was ...