Ra.One : The Review (Damage Assessment)

(MAJOR SPOILER ALERT. DONT READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVE ANY INTENTIONS OF WATCHING THE MOVIE RA.ONE. HAVING SAID THAT, I WOULD SINCERELY ADVISE YOU TO PROMPTLY GIVE UP ANY SUCH PLANS AND WATCH IT ON SONY TV TWO MONTHS LATER. 

THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN THIS POST ARE THE AUTHORS PERSONAL THOUGHTS. NO VANDALISM HOOLIGANISM AND BAD-WORD-ISM FROM SRK FANS AND SUDARSHAN SRIDHAR WILL BE TOLERATED.)

When I went to Sathyam at 5.30 AM on Sunday morning to stand in that long serpentile queue to get a ticket of Ra.One, the guy standing behind me annoyed me by laughing through the length of the queue. His point - What kind of a guy wakes up so early and stands in such a long queue to get the ticket of some random "saettu" movie. I ignored him, got the tickets, elated. I was going to watch SRK's film in theatre, On the FIRST DAY! The day has passed, and so has the movie. From this end of the equation, I laugh at myself - I mean what kind of a guy wakes up so early and stands in such a long queue to get the ticket of some random "saettu" movie that finally turns out to be this bad? Ra.One has been my biggest movie disappointment since birth. Maybe because I expected so much out of it, or maybe because of SRK's own doing - the intense hype that he created - the film just didnt take-off for me. 

Ra.One("Raavan") or Random Access One is the most powerful villain ever made - an invincible villain - born out of a Video Game maker, Shekar Subramanian's urge to do something great for his son, Prateek (Armaan Verma), who feels that the best video game ever made will be the one where the villain cannot die. In an attempt to make the villain even more stronger to conquer, Shekar adds some "Artificial Intelligence Programming" to Ra.One that gives Ra.One the ability to think beyond what normal video games can, to avoid losing the game. Soon he develops an ego because Lucifer, Prateek's vitual world alter-ego, has defeated him in two rounds, and wants to come out to the real World to find and kill Lucifer. In the ensuing battle, Shekhar dies, and the only thing Prateek can do to save himself and his mom is to bring G.One or Good One, the hero of the video game built on Shekar's personality and looks, to reality too. Then begins the eternal Indian quest of the victory of good over evil and the film shows how the biggest battles are one, not by power of the body, but by the power of the heart. 

Impossible science apart, the premise is pretty great and different from the sci-fi films seen yet. But there is no flow in the plot and the film is poorly scripted . The bad screenplay could've been made up with good direction, but there again, direction is a huge let down. This is probably what SRK's ghost directing the film did to it. 

However, there are some reasons to cheer the film. Excellent graphics and awesome stunt scenes keep you engaged in the movie even when there's nothing else to watch out for. The Background Music though out of place in one or two scenes is classy throughout. The Vishal-Shekar duo has done an amazing job with the soundtrack of this movie. The Soundtrack has a couple of chartbusters and they make their mark in the film. 

Music overall is a strongpoint that this film has, and Vishal and Shekar are maturing by the day, getting lots better. A great reason to watch the film would also be Arjun Rampal, though he has been virtually reduced to a guest appearance, appearing only in the last 45 minutes or so - good enough to make an impact as the cold, dreaded villain. Kareena Kapoor, far from her size zero days, looks awesome, though has nothing to do at all apart from use up the glycerine they stocked up for the film! 

So where does Ra.One crash ? It has a seemingly good premise, and though not a very good plot, Bollywood movies rarely run on a great story anyway. It has great music, excellent World Class graphics, so then what exactly went wrong for Ra. One ? There are a couple of reasons, first of which I feel is SRK himself. The films got too much of him, to a point where you cant take it anymore. SRK features in every scene of the film and tries to become that Super hero. It is a noble attempt, no doubt, but it gets boring after a point of time. Comparisons to Endhiran (Robot) are expected initially, but you must know, Endhiran was a far better movie, in terms of both the entertainment quotient and a lot more sensible script.

His antics as Shekar Subramanian dont help matters much. The character is a Tamil stereotype, one that is not likely to go down very well with Tamil audiences (me included). A particularly bad example is how he eats noodles mixed with curd. That's lame. I do not eat noodles with curd. And I am yet to find one Tamilian who does, so what's he trying to do? It is in this kind of a background that he brings in his half hearted tribute to the Superstar, which though awesomely greeted and excellently executed, doesn't have the kind of impact it deserved because of the Shekar Subramaniam fiasco. 

These factors apart, the biggest reason why I feel Ra.One fails to impress is the hype that he himself created. This is the best example of a mega promotion backfire. For the first few days, Chammak Challo was okay, but soon he went overboard trying to dominate every single space of advertising, giving interviews to Jaya TV and all, and that just collapsed. There were so many people I can think of who went to the theatre to watch the movie, already fed up with the whole Ra.One galatta. 

Ra.One was a heartbreaker. But a heartbreaker with a heart. I wouldn't watch it again, nor would I recommend it to anyone, but it was an attempt to offer something no 10 year old Play-Station Lover has ever seen before. And as I left the theatre, my grandma was happy. She called me and said it was a very nice film and SRK was awesome in it. I couldn't help acknowledging the fact that Children and SRK fans will love this film. I smiled and told to myself - I am an SRK fan after all. 

Rating : 2.5/5

Might've been 3 if it had been Shekhar Kapoor or Rathore instead of Subramaniam, 

3.5 if Arjun Rampal appeared in the first half of the film. 

Thats as good as it gets. 

Confessions of a Shopaphobic

It was under the dimmed lights over the jeans section at Westside in Express Avenue, that I took a look at my watch. It was 7.30 and as my mind quickly processed the data, I realised that it was the longest one and a half hours of my life (including having to listen to Chemistry from 1 - 2.30 in the post lunch session). I mean I could have sworn that the minutes clock hadn't been moving for a long long time, but that was against the fundamental principles of watch-ticking - the minute hand and the second hands always stop at the same time - and so I didn't really have a go, but admit for all badness in the world, that I was a complete fail shopper.

I instantly felt depressed. I mean in this Era of hyperactive shopping and consumers rights and shopping malls, it is not bad to be a mass-murderer, but its criminal to be a complete fail in Shopping. The gravity of this crime is evident from the fact that Samuel Johnson deliberately avoided listing an antonym for the term 'Shopaholic' while  compiling his first Dictionary of the English Language. I mean that's so mean. Screw that man!!

But trust me, since times immemorial, I have never really seen a point in walking around kilometers of aisles and  stacks and stacks of neatly/unneatly, folded/unflolded/hung clothes to pick up that one piece of sewn fabric that you believe will make an average 20-year old look any less hideous than he/she actually is. I mean its ridiculous to even think that clothes have that ability. If anything, good clothes reflect  a good girlfriend. And if that is a social prestige you intend to show off to the World, then shopping is for you. Not for me... no.. I still dont see the point.

I belong to the 'gang' which believes that shopping was awesome when you just had to sit at home and watch Tom and Jerry while your Mom and her sis and that neighbour aunty and their daughter akka all went out together and when they came back got back orange colour shorts and baniyan from a kids shop. Back then shopping was so entertaining!! I dont know when suddenly the transition happened from orange shorts from a hosiery to trousers at Lifestyle, from watching TV while waiting for waiting your mom to call you and put on the baniyan to going to the trial room and trying them out yourself.

I mean look at the average process chart for shopping and you ll know why I dont appreciate shopping much.

1. Find a shop
You can base your choice of shopping spot based on a variety of factors as listed below
a) How much scene you want to put (Over scene, go to Louis Phillippe and John Players. Less Scene, go to  Peter England)
b) With whom are you shopping ( If girlfriend, go to mall. If mom, go to hosiery shop)
c) Who are you shopping for (If Girlfriend, make some excuse like fever, cough cold, etc. Going there will be dangerous for your monthly budget. And in the extreme case, if you take her to Express Avenue for shopping, you either love her too much, or you have suicidal tendencies (Visit a Psychiatrist) For others - non-gf's - it is flexible)
d) Who will be buying (If you are buying, go to Pondy Bazaar. If someone else is buying, go to Lifestyle)

2. Decide what you want to buy - This could range from jeans and corduroys to flat front to pleated to khaki to mukka pants - a product of the acceptable social convention. Like for instance, wearing a mukka pant to play football is a great idea, but then it kinda looks odd in an office when you are wearing formal shoes, full hand shirt with a tie and all... Ew.. Just imagining it looks bad enough. Dress Sense is important.

3. Decide what you want to buy in whatever you want to buy - The "java-coupled-with-nuclear-energy-for-the-evolution-of-mankind" equation means that when you decide to buy any garment - like say jeans - you are only one step into the entire clothes buying process and thats the relatively easier part. Fashion has reached a phase where you have millions of possibilities for every choice you make, and as we can see today, dedicated data mining applications are being developed just for fashion retailers. Gone are the days when you could just walk into any shop that sold fabric and say "show me jeans", cos then he will ask you "straight cut ah boot cut ah basic denim ah washed denim ah acid wash ah stone wash ah dirty wash ah slim fit ah tight fit ah low waist ah mid rise ah ??" Asking for "jeans" in a garment shop is like asking for "alchohol" in a bar. There are too many subtle differences between the choices we have.

4. Look for the price of what you want to buy- In 1905, after the partition of Bengal, when Bal Gangadhar Thilak walked into a Levi's showroom (or maybe Pepe Jeans or even Wrangler, I dont know) in Kolkata, he was so horrified by the prizes that they had listed, the moment he came out, he started the Swadeshi movement to burn down anything foreign. His point - If the cotton was from India, the cost of the garment he bought should be affordable to the normal Indian too!
If the pricing of jeans is any indication of the timing, then trust me friends, it is the best moment for the Swadeshi Movement v2.0. There is only so much that the cost of a Tiruppur manufactured fabric can multiply before it becomes the final tee-shirt displayed in the Shopping Malls. But that isn't how it turns out, and when we decide to get ourselves cheated by the hi-fi looks of that showroom and buy that one small piece of transparent "Baniyan" which someone gave a fancy name "Round Neck T-shirt", it burns the proverbial hole in our pocket ! Who said imperialism died ? Go check out the shopping malls. At the current rate, it wont be long before we all start buying our charkhas and weaving khadi - that symbol of Indian technology.

5. If you still want to buy whatever you wanted to buy, you are doomed to use the trial room to check the size cos they "dont exchange goods once purchased"
The only good thing about modern day trial rooms in shopping malls is that they are not toilets- at least not by name. Toilets are trial rooms with one critical difference - people flush when they leave!! The condition of trial rooms is getting so bad that you will often feel that there is no disgrace in changing in front of a hundred people - at least you can escape from that door-broken, stench-filled, cockroach-infested, secret-spying-cameras-installed extension counters of Hell Inc.

6. Ok. You still want to buy it ? There's still the cash counter left. 

Cash counters serve a bigger purpose than what their name may suggest, which obviously is collecting cash and giving you covers. It is the shop management's way of saying "You still haven't learnt you lessons ? We will give you one last chance". Cash counters are among the worst places to be in any Shopping Mall because even after you patiently await your chance behind that rich spoilt lady who has literally bought out the entire shop with a bill for 50k rupees, you may still not be able to get your stuff billed cos their inventory system crashed. Then again there is this entire range of ethical issues of breaking the queue and letting the woman who has a flight to catch (and also looks sexy) ahead so you can spend a few more mintues waiting. Honestly, the billing counter of a clothes showroom is the longest you have to wait to lose money. I mean even at Tirupati, you can look forward to Laddus at the end. But nothing here. You spent all the bad time to pay money to that small boy at the counter so he can give you covers (again, for which you pay now)

7. Alteration Counter
Blessed are those who have a body that conforms to fashion apparel standards set across the globe. Cos if they aren't, they will have to spend an amount of time equal to the first six steps just to get their apparel to conform to the standards that their body establishes. The alteration counter is the first place where you catch the wind of unhappiness over your decision to buy clothes. Cos this wait is longer than the billing counter, only the wait doesn't end there. Its an hour or maybe two after you patiently walk through the length of that queue (cos the number of people with disproportionate body structures is more than just a few) that you get your dress back, stitched as you want and all.

Shopping at Malls is a direct exhibition of the Darwin theory - only the fittest survive. Only the hardcore shopaholics can get through these 7 steps of the intense struggle for clothes and I certainly have a long way to go before I join that order. Not that I want to, but an obvious role of the grihasthi would be to take his family out for shopping once every Diwali and there will be a time when I just have to give in to the demands of a social convention so unfairly set against shopping haters.

For now, I just picked up something that vaguely looked like a jeans (cos thats the most versatile peace of garment I've seen yet), folded at the bottom so that I dont have to get it altered and all, asked my mom to stand in the queue 15 minutes before I got back with the jeans so I could straightaway bill it when I was done with my selection and ran out of the shop as early as I could. My, my, we certainly learn how to twist our way through the system soon, don't we.

Oh.. and ya, what if Samuel Johnson doesnt list an antonym ? I Rohit Subramanian, hereby declare that anyone who does not like shopping is to be called a shopaphobic.(Haha..Yes. even I read the roots/prefixes/suffixes section in Barron's GRE).

Just remember, its not bad to be a shopaphobic. We are humans too.

B.E. Bunking Engineering

Whenever a new-born kid is doomed to Engineering in the 10th second after his birth by his parent (3 idiots style), he spends the next 18 useless years of his life praying that he somehow makes it to Sri Sivasubramaniya Nadar College of Engineering, more specifically to the Mechanical Engineering Department. This is because this is the only department in the World (all hi tech colls like MIT, Stanford, Harvard included ) where students join college because they dont ever have to attend college thereafter ! Yes, a study conducted by the Researchers in Motion institute, found that an average Mechie in SSN spends more time going out of college than coming inside and attending classes put together. Bunking is no joke. A lot of brains go behind every successful bunking schedule. And this is one science that we have tried to master over the four years of engineering.

In an attempt to document the various findings of regular bunkers over the past few years, I have attempted here to list the various fundamental algorithms that some great minds have developed after scores of bunking experiences. This is intended to help all future generations of bunkers, in SSNCE, and in colleges other parts of the World. 

1 : The NK Algorithm

Developed By : His Highness, Sir N. Kartheik

Principles: 

First Law of NK: Planning is the fundamental pre-requisite to success. 

Second Law of NK: Time>Money.

Pseudo Code:

Step 1: Start

Step 2: Plan the days you will bunk one week in advance

Step 3: On the planned days, tell no one, ask no one, just leave. 

Step 4: Walk to the Bus stop at the entrance, if no alternative means of transport available

Step 5: When at the bus stop, take the first bus that comes in the direction that you want to travel in. Even if it goes only till the next stop. Even if its an AC bus.

Step 6:  Check If You are at Destination.

Step 7: If Yes,Walk Home. 

            If No, Repeat Step 5.

Step 8: End. 

Advantages: This algorithm will take you home in the shortest time.

Disadvantages: This will cost you more than an average trip. 

Applications: 

If you have exams in the near future and you came to college to collect your hall ticket. 

If you are alone and dont have company anyway. (This is a paradox because no Mechie comes to coll when others dont come. Sigh they dont come to coll even when everyone else comes. What ?? Thats a paradox again. Everyone doesnt come when everyone comes ? Or they dont come ? I dont know.)

2 : The RamG Algorithm

Developed By : Dr. Ram Ganesh, The Great. 

Principle:

Money>Everything Else. 

Pseudo Code:

Step 1: Start

Step 2: Dont bunk

Step 3: If no class is happening, go sit in the Library or the Lab.

Step 4: If they are closing down the entire college and you have no other go, leave.

Step 5: Dont walk to the entrance. Wait for a college bus shuttle to come. 

Step 6: When at the bus stop, wait for the most direct bus. 

Step 7: Get into a bus only when it goes directly to your doorstep. Otherwise Repeat Step 6.

Step 8: End. 

Advantages: Following this method will rarely cost a journey more than 15 rupees. 

Disadvantages: By the time you reach home, it may be time for you to leave again. In other words, this takes an eternity for you to reach your destination.

3. The Viggy Ram Algorithm

Developed by: Vignesh "Soccer" Ramachandran

Principle: 

First Law of Viggy Ram: There are only two reasons to come to college.

1. To play

2. To leave home 

Second Law of Viggy Ram: Friend in need is a friend indeed. Your best friend is the one who is ready to leave with you. 

Third Law of Viggy Ram: Travel Direction is never a criteria to choose a bus.

Pseudo Code:

Step 1: Start

Step 2: Go play football

Step 3: If your gang is tired, play football with someone else

Step 4: When no one wants to play football, go play Table Tennis.

Step 5: When no one is playing anything, prepare to leave. 

Step 6: Scout people to leave along with you.

Step 7: If no one known friend comes along, take a random guy you've never met before instead. He is a new friend. 

Step 8 : When at the bus stop, take the first bus, whichever direction it goes in - EVEN THE WRONG DIRECTION IS FINE.

Step 9 : Whenever the bus stops, take another bus, preferably in the right direction.

Step 10: Hopefully you reach your destination

Step 11: End

Advantages: You get a chance to meet new people, make new friends.

Disadvantages: Your attendance is bound to suffer. As is your pocket money, cos you are spending it on bus journeys more than on food. 

Applications: Have a Girlfriend ? No better way to spend quality time with her. Last rows on MTC Volvo buses are among the most romantic places on Earth. 

4. The Irfaan Algorithm

Developed by: Mohammed Irfaan aka "Jack Fruit"

Principle : There is nothing wrong in asking.

Pseudo Code:

Step 1: Start

Step 2: Get ready to leave home - with or without company

Step 3: When at the bus stop, look for any kind hearted car drivers

Step 4: When you see a car, ask for a lift - even if the person inside the same sir whose class you will be bunking that day. 

Step 5: Travel for free, till wherever he can drop you.

Step 6: Take a bus from there to your destination.

Step 7: End. 

Advantages: Osi la travel comfortably in AC. 

Disadvantages: The Sir may screw your internals. 

Applications: Ideal when the car belongs to a person who does not handle classes for you.

4. The Adarsh Algorithm

Developed by: Adarsh Prashant (who has never been seen before)

Principle: You will have to leave home from college only when you come to college in the First place.

Pseudo Code:

Step 1: Start

Step 2: Dont come to college

Step 3: End

Advantages: No money waste. No time waste.

Disadvantages: NONE

Applications: Spend time on more fruitful endeavours like NFS, DOTA, CS, etc. 

These are the most widely practised methods of "method bunking". As we speak, several other algorithms are under development, and no doubt these shall dominate the scene in the years to come. I sincerely hope that this immensely benefits all future generations of bunkers. 

P. S: If you believe that you have developed a new bunking algorithm, please let me know, so I can add your algorithm in here. You shall also have the honour of naming it after yourself - the hallmark of any great researcher.