Friday, December 28, 2007

Sandipan Bollywood Awards 2007


Continuing with the tradition of Sandipan Bollywood Awards from 2006, here we go into our new year.

Disclaimer: Be prepared for a typical Sandipan awards, for there will be plenty of partialities. After all even Oscar and filmfare is not without favoritism. And a close second award will be awarded in some cases. There will be a special category of Razzie awards as well. This year it will be more towards anti feeling towards some than favoritism towards a few. Also, I have not seen many movies this year

Here we go. Let me start with the BollyRazzie awards.

Worst Film: Jhoom Barabar Jhoom. From songs to style to story, everything was pathetic. RGV ki aag doesn’t get this award for 2 starcasts: Urmila and Sushmita

Worst Actor: John Abraham, in Goal.

Worst Actress: Konkona Sen for her various movies. She is terribly overacting nowadays.

Anyway now I come to The mainstream awards.

Best Story: Possibly Taare Zameen Par.(Haven't seen the movie yet though)

Best Song: Sajna di wari wari from Honeymoon travels Pvt Ltd (For the awesome horn effect in the background) and "Om Shanti Om" song with all stars (Esp Juhi and that famous dance step by Rani)

Best Music Director: A.R. Rahman , “Guru”. who else?

Best Singer(Male) : Shankar Mahadevan, Maa from Taare Zameen Par.

Best Singer (Female): Shreya Ghoshal, Barson re megha megha

Best television interview: As an Obituary and posthumous award to Benazir Bhutto in Devil's Advocate especially the way she pronounces "Pakstan" with missing 'i'. The second one goes to Rani in the Madhuri Dikshit KWK interview.

Best Item Song: Mayya Mayya Mallika Sherawat


Lets move on to the main awards now.


Best Comedian: Tabu, Amitabh and Sweeni Khara in Cheeni Kum.(Wittiest movie)

Best Supporting Actor: Mithun Chakrabarty in Guru. Not very sure about this though. Open to better suggestions

Best Supporting Actress: Sweeni Khara for Cheeni Kum.

Best Villain: Shilpa Shukla as Bindiya Nayak in Chak De India

Best Newcomer (male) : Prashant Raj Sachdev in RGV ki aag.(Award given because of lack of better choice)

Best Newcomer (Female) : Sagarika Ghatge (Preeti Sabarwal) in Chak De India.(I hate the eggface Deepika)

Best Actor: Shahrukh Khan for Chak De India (Unanimous).

Best Actress: I don’t want to give this to Cat Eye Kareena (has animosity with Bipasha and dumped Shahid) and neither to Aishwarya (I hate the family of Pati, Patni, Woh(Amar Singh), Beta and Bahu). So the award goes to Soha Ali Khan in 'Khoya Khoya Chaand' for so much looking like her mom.

Best Director: Aamir Khan for 'Taare Zameen Par'


Best Film: Chak De India for creating the enormous impact. The T20WC may be attributed to it.

Comments Welcome!

Monday, December 17, 2007

On Taslima Nasreen

Does it matter? Is everybody supposed to have an opinion on the Taslima issue? Ideally it should not. But somehow I could not stop thinking. I felt the need that I have to have a stance on this issue. But I was confused. Unlike the majority of the blogger society or the news channel projected this to be a violation of artistic freedom, somehow I was never satisfied with the answer.
Another thing is that we should forget the political colors that has been surrounding the entire issue. As for that, there can not be any separate opinion that the political drama was of 3rd grade.

But let's come to the issue of writing something which may hurt the sentiments of certain people. Being an ardent fan of Jane Austen, I feel you need not take the shelter of hot and controversial topics to show off your literary talents. But whenever I think that, the much highlighted term of "Artistic Freedom" keeps poking me. I begin thinking about what would have happened if there were no artistic freedom? Would the world still have been flat? Would the sun still have rotated around the sun and could Archimedes have ever said Eureka? When I think along those lines, I take my view back. This dilema had been haunting me for almost a month now. But suddenly the week before last, I got my answer. And this time it was form Shobhaa Dey in Sunday Times of India 9th Dec.

The gist is this: Let's define the people. If a person is writing controversial thing, it got to have a purpose behind it. Simply writing controversies is a cheap tactics of money making. Noway better than yellow journalism. Let's say Taslima or Rushdie were not yellow journalists. Through their writings, they want to grab the world's attention to the atrocities they thing is a part of their religion with the hope that there will be some kind of action and world wide support which will help in abolishing this problems from the society.

The moment you think on those lines, you are no more an author. You are a human right activist or some rebel or some leader. Authoring becomes just a mean of expanding your net to attract more and more people towards the mission. So the bottomline is, when you write controversies, you should eventually atleast think that what you think will benefit the society and work towards it. Simply writing sensational stuff is a cheap act.

Now what did Taslima do? Agreed, she was in mortal danger in Bangladesh and had to run away. But why did she stop her protests? Why did we never see her in the streets of London/ Kolkata / wherever condemning what she found out in the religion. But I didn't see her fight. Shobhaa just confirms the fact (in case there is some error in my judgement). Taslima should not have been afraid of death. She should have taken her cause to the streets of Bengal. It would have been a test for the cultural capital of India also fr it's reaction to her cause.

Now it falls in line with Galileo/ Leonardo Da Vinci etc. These people were severely punished. But they took their cause to the streets. They believed that the current believes are wrong and people need to change.

I don't think Taslima is brave enough to face the brunt. She is not ready to take her cause to the level when people can actually be benefited. And this is why, I think she is wrong. If you dare, come what may you should go ahead.

Well on a side note, if it were me, I would have chosen the easier way, avoid controversy. NOt the other way round..

Sunday, December 02, 2007

Kolkata Headlines ( 2 years from now)

I am tired of the headlines. Ideally I should have been happy because after many many years the news is more about west Bengal than anything else. But it’s all the wrong reasons: Singur, Rizwanur, Nandigram, Moon Das, Taslima and what not. So here I go, a few news items related to West Bengal which I want to be in the Newspapers soon.

Brand Ambassadors Ronaldo and Bipasha at the launch of Rs 1 Lakh Car by TATA in Singur

SMNA, Kolkata: Football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo and Bollywood reigning queen Bipasha Basu were chosen as the brand ambassadors at the occasion of Launch of the new Rs 1 Lakh car by Tata Motors manufactured at Singur near Kolkata. The event was aattended by who’s who world over including Mr Green Al Gore, Prime Minister of India Arun Jaitley, Hollywood diva Julia Roberts and ofcourse the extended Bachchan family: Amitabh, Jaya, Amar Singh, Abhi, Ash and their twin kids Karina and Vivek.


Buddha inaugurates Google Kolkata

SMNA Kolkata: Yesterday was another notable day for Kolkata as Google Inc. opened their Development center in Kolkata. Notable amongst those who were present at the occasion apart form the Google founders was N.R. Narayana Murthy and T.V. Mohandas Pai of Infosys Technologies limited who have just extended their plans of Kolkata office from 10000 to 20000. It might be noted that for a change Infosys will chnge their plans about horizontal establishmensts. The new building is supposed to be 50 storey with 6 storey of parking, an indoor stadium at the first few floors, and complying to the green policies they apre planning to have a garden every 5th floor.


L.K Advani at the opening of grand transportation project:

SMNA Kolkata: Home minister L.K Advani, (self proclaimed Kolkata hater) has changed his tunes kicked off the new transportation project in the city. The facilities include the following: Merger of Kolkata Metro and Suburban trains with Kolkata transport. The metro has been extended to Barasat and Barrackpore in the north and Jokha in south. Also it is no longer a single line and instead cris crosses the entire city. The suburban trains comply to the time and frequency has been doubled. The wooden buses have been removed. Instead swanky double decker buses will ply all over the city. As a new initiative of Woman’s liberation and equality, the ‘reserved for ladies’ seats have been removed in all the buses. The circular canal transportation project has finally started and people will find it both very hassle free and scenic to use this water transport facility.


World Fiction Authors meet in Netaji Indoor Stadium:

SMNA Kolkata: The 3-day World’s biggest ever Fiction authors kicks off at the new Book Mall at college street. Almost everyone amongst the living fictional authors has gathered in Kolkata for this grand event. This includes the controversial trio of Salman Rushdie, Dan Brown and Taslima Nasrin. The keynote speaker, the new rising star of fiction, Sandipan Mitra will give a lecture on how great books can be written even without controversial topics with generous references to the Austen books. Each day will have some famous book launches. The first day will be launch of yet untitled book by Khaled Hosseni about the fight back of Afghanistan against both the US troops and the Taliban. The second day will be the launch of Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘The sky and the Begonia’ which for the first time is not about Indians immigrated to US and instead deals about a forest with talking trees. Sources say that it is a satire on modern world politics. But ofcourse the star attraction has been left for the Last day. It is “Advanced Potion Making by Libatius Borage” actually written by J.K Rowling. This book will be 500 pages long. The copy will resemble the one that belonged to the half blood prince. A record 50 million copies have already been pre-booked all over the world.


Special zones for the lovers

SMNA Kolkata: The Kolkata mayor has finally relented to the wishes of the youth. It has made 40 tall walled parks in and around the city where they can carry on with the stuff they want and leave the beautiful places like Millenium Park, Science city and Swabhoomi for family crowd. However it has also been made sure that the minimum age in these parks is 16. Entry is through ID cards.



PS: SMNA is Sandipan Mitra News Agency