Friday, December 31, 2010

Sandipan Bollywood Awards 2010

And the Awards go to:

Best movie: Rajneeti
Best Actress : Vidya Balan for Ishqiya
Best Actor: Salman Khan for Dabangg
Best Song: Pee Loon from Once upon a time in Mumbai.

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To make up for the time-stamp, I published the main list at 11:57 pm on 31st. Here’s the detailed one:

This year the awards might be a bit subdued. I really haven’t seen many movies thanks to my “No Pirated Hindi movies” resolution last year. The resolution continues though. So, I really haven’t seen many of the god movies including Pankh, Lamhe, Aakrosh, Housefull, Tere Bin Laden, LSD etc. So the awards might be a bit skwed but as usual please feel free to suggest the deserving candidates in the comments section and I will update accordingly.

For TV:

Best television interview: Nothing that I remember a lot this year. Actually Deepika and Sonam in Koffee With Karan was good. But for me the discovery of the year was Nita Ambani in Walk the Talk with Shekhar Gupta after IPL 2010. It was probably her first interview and she came across as a very positive person.

Most hilarious moment: Barkha Dutt crying like a baby in her own version of reality show in news, and then blushing on being called beautiful. The guy must be blind.

Now for Movies:

Best Story: I think it has to be one of Well Done Abba, or LSD or some such but as I haven’t seen those movies, the award goes to Prakash Jha for Rajneeti.

Best Song: ‘Pee Loon’. Not only me, but all my friends have been humming it for the past few months. Anything we like, becomes the part of this song like Gobi Manchuru, Snowuu… you get the point.

Best Music Director: Shankar Ehsaan Loy for “My Name is Khan”. The reason being this movie has all songs in the good/decent category. Rest all movies have only 1-2 good songs.

Best Singer (Male): When the best song is Pee Loon, the best male singer has to be Mohit Chauhan for Pee Loon.

Best Singer (Female): My favorite is Rekha Bharadwaj for ‘Ranjha Ranjha’ in Raavan. Better than Munni or Shiela for sure.

Best Item Song: Munni Badnaam Hui by Malaika Arora. Munni beats Shiela anyday.

Best Comedian: Salman Khan in Dabangg.

Best Supporting Actor: A tough one this year. I would give it to Arshad Warsi for Ishqiya. But here’s the list of all who are really good: Ajay Devgan in Rajneeti, Raghubeer Yadav in Peepli live and Ajay Devgan/Imran Hashmi in Once upon a time,


Best Supporting Actress: Prachi Desai for Once upon a time in Mumbai.

Best Villain: Sonu Sood in Dabangg. Full Stop.

Best Newcomer (male): Rajat Barmecha in Udaan. Don’t really know of that many this year. Luv Sinha was a dud.

Best Newcomer (Female) : Sonakshi Sinha. No doubt. Tere Mast mast do nain 

Best Director: Prakash Jha for Rajneeti.

Best Film: Rajneeti. The only movie to have story, songs, star cast.

Best Actress: Vidya Balan for Ishqiya. She dared to act opposite Nasirddin Shah and Arshad Warsi and she did it in style.

Best Actor: Salman Khan for Dabangg. Pure star power. What else do you want.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

You see what you want to see

Blogdosts,

Haha, that’s how Shobhaa De starts her blogs. For my case if the only dosts that I had were blogdosts, I would be a pretty loner in life. No agenda for this blog, but basically just getting back to the habit.

I had decided that there should be one post in every 2 weeks so effectively 26 posts a year but this is the first year I am missing that goal and that too by a large margin. November was hectic but I don’t think even with that in I could have made 26. It’s mainly my fault. But now with this post and the eagerly awaited annual Bollywood awards, 20 posts are assured.

I had been to India in November. It is strange how I viewed the country in a totally different light in every trip. Of course all of my trips always had a main motive (brother’s marriage, H1 stamping etc.) but there were also different angles to how I see the things around me. And I have come to the conclusion that we see what we want to see. Let me explain.

The first time when I came, I had heard from everybody how India has changed a lot. So I was looking for those signs of developments and I really felt that India has changed so much. Plus I had started looking for jobs that time and when I saw my friends in India already settled with stable jobs, things obviously looked rosy and nice in the country.

The second time I went, I had a job at hand, friends were getting married and I really didn’t care for how India has changed. So things looked very much the same. I was trying to tell people that my home-town (Barasat) was a village contrary to what the people of Barasat think. So I was looking around diagnosing what consists of a city look and what is a village look. In Bangalore, friends were getting married, brother had finally settled into his own flat. There was nothing really I was looking out for. But the thing that hit me was the price of things. Now that I had started earning again, I was comparing the prices and I was always shocked by how expensive Bangalore/India had become.

Now this time, I saw things in a different light. I was comparing lifestyles. And Bangalore to me looked like as if the city has only home returned NRIs. This ofcourse can’t be true and that’s when I realized, you always see what you wanted to see. Everywhere I go, I see only NRIs. I was so proud of the Madras shorts that I bought this summer, but every tom dick and harry there was wearing Madras shorts. It was not as if that was the current fashion in Bangalore, but it mostly marked the home returned NRIs. One of the shops I went to had Thanksgiving discounts. I was shocked. As for the lifestyle, I had a notion that people like to have way too much fun in India love hectic weekends full of movies, malls, parties etc. And that was a negative for me. So this time when I looked out for that, I was again pleasantly surprised. People/ my friends had actually calmed down. They did things slowly. Weekends were relaxing and everything was peaceful.

I guess it has got more to do with phases of life that makes you think how you view things. Generally a place essentially remains the same. Afterall comeon, the country is 5000 years old. Looking out for drastic changes every 2 years will just assert ones ignorance.