A Movie Today

In India one major craze and past time for most of us, after cricket and gossip, is a good movie. Every one, or at least all most everyone, loves their weekend out watching a movie. Its the time for families to spend time together, for friends to meet up and have some fun together. But now its also a time where, thanks to modern day technology and the oblivious nature of our fellow Indians, you can find out what's going on in the life of the person in the seat next to yours, and thus gain some knowledge about the life of a total stranger, whom you don't care about one teeny-weeny bit.

Most people would get annoyed by this behavior, and many make their feelings evident especially when confronted with squealing little girls, who actually turn out to be in their 20s, but i look at it in a different light. Since these days, its getting harder to enter a movie hall and not encounter a specimen belonging to either the 'chatting idiot' or 'squealing girl' categories, you could say that its becoming an integral part of the movie experience. In fact I would say that movies these days would seem incomplete without the presence of these extra effects and dialogues.

For example, when the floating mountains of Pandora are revealed in the movie Avatar or when Puss-in-Boots does his cute helpless kitten look thing in the Shrek movies, you probably remain quiet and don't show much of a reaction, even though you're probably thinking stuff like "AWESOME!!" or "how cute he looks!", so no one knows what you're thinking, after all, at the most, you'll be sitting with your jaws wide open, so how can anyone know what you think? Don't worry, your neighbors in the hall are always ready to help you, with yells of excitement or giggles followed by a loooong "awwww.." they sum up the feelings of almost everyone in the hall. It adds a whole new dimension to the movie, making it a completely immersive experience, i.e. it fully immerses you in the nonsensical blabber and noise of your neighbors. Ahh.. a perfect use of a few hundred rupees, isn't it?

Oh and another advantage of this new enhanced experience, for covert operations is that spies now don't have to waste time snooping around in buildings and others files, all they need to do is spend a couple of hours in cinema halls around a city, and they'll have all the info they could ever need. So everyone gains something thanks to this new movie experience, but somehow i still long for the good old days where there were no extra effects in the movie, called me old-fashioned, but that's just the way i am.

The Celeb Obsession

One of the growing problems in our world today is the obsession with celebrities. Different people in many different parts of the world may not have anything in common with each other... other than this obsession with the lives of celebrities, and this is spreading faster than a secret told to a woman!

Want proof? Well check this out, two people killed by some gangster-turned-MLA's motorcade, this gets one 6 line paragraph, but Deepika Padukone meets Ranbir Kapoor once, and its a whole god-forsaken half-a-page affair! Or lets say, people get robbed and killed by armed robbers, and some Scarlett Johansson gets a tattoo, which isn't any tattoo.. its supposed to have some secret meaning. Which one gets more space?

Obviously, the meaningful tattoo.

Its reached such a stage that when a celebrity wriggles a toe we have columnists writing long stories about how. when, where and why this act was conducted, while our very own home-grown astrologers take out their charts and make solemn predictions about how this act, because of being conducted at such-and-such time will affect their careers! So of course when an accident occurs, injuring or killing a few mere mortals like us, who cares? It'll probably get a small sentence somewhere, or maybe a full paragraph, if its gruesome enough.

Of course I understand that there is always a separate section for everything, national news, global news, sports news etc. But thanks to some creature called the paparazzi, which apparently chases celebrities and makes life hell for them and as a result gets bashed up by celebrities (which is quite understandable, i pity the poor celebs), these celebrities and their scandals or outbursts against the paps are all over the news, infringing even on the global news space!!!
So now everyone will know that a deep-something pad-u-cone met some Run-beer guy somewhere, but very few will know hat the Great barrier reef has been damaged by oil leaks, or that an oil slick was spreading in the Gulf of Mexico.. or even rarer still, that there was a bomb threat in New York.

And this is what annoys me the most, the things i read, and hence talk about are alien-speak to most of my neighbors, so they just keep ignoring me like they would a mad dog, and continue with their 'highly important' discussion about some Ranbir Johansson's scarlet tattoo