ayon's blog

 My daughter hated “ Rocket Singh, Salesman of the Year” and yawned away through most of the movie.
 My wife was not crazy about it either. But she could relate to it in most parts and so bravely held on till the end, lest her fidgeting upsets me.

“Mauri” ; 80 Kms south of Panaji
Goa, India
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The first thing that struck him strange when he first met Ahaan was that Ahaan did not use a surname. “Just Ahaan”, was what he said. Till then ,he had thought that a surname was a necessity to exist in this world ,a forcible identity thrust on you by virtue of birth.

They say that the first signals of aging are when you fail to communicate with people around you,or unable to intercept what they are saying or meaning to say.
 
By that definition, I am definitely aging. Take the other day's meeting for instance. It started with an innocent enough“meeting request” ,which is a nothing but a lotus notes application .
 

I have strange hobbies.

One of them is debating from both sides of the same subject. Gives me an option of getting under the skin of opposing people, passionately holding on to their particular opinion about something. And let me tell you ,it has it’s merits too. It can at times , lead you to completely reverse your initial opinion on a subject, once you let your mind wander in the opposite direction.

It happened to me yesterday as I re-discovered Aditya Chopra while debating in favor of his recent movie , after having myself written it off as a damp squib, a few months back.

I can’t really say when I became a fan of SRK. Maybe it was 1993,when he threw Shilpa Shetty off that terrace ,or when he copied Chewbacca’s(his then pet dog) expression while playing a haunting mouth organ melody in “Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa”, or when he stuttered his way to superstardom (while Sunny Deol kept mistakenly assuming that HE was the hero of “Darr” !).But what was a casual admiration of a movie lover, got seriously consolidated when DDLJ happened in 1995,and as SRK did a pied piper, leading to the globalization of Bollywood ,while his feathered hat and mandolin created a world wide frenzy, east and west alike.

“Pipli – 3 Kms
Puri – 55 Kms” 
,the milestone lifelessly informed the occupants of the speeding Innova on NH 24. Orissa was characteristically hot and humid even as October was drawing to an end and the 2- tier air conditioning was just about managing to keep Shweta and Ambarish from beginning to sweat.

I had never imagined that God would be such a dude !
 
I mean, we Indians have this image of our Gods as people donning golden head gear, having long hair tied in knots, a halo behind their head , folks clad in dhotis and some silk cloth wrapped around their torsos.
 

3rd January, 2009 Was what the calendar read. He was up 30 mins before his alarm clock was scheduled to go off , to announce the arrival of yet another day. When it did go off and was stopped short by him, he was into his 2nd of the daily quota of 5 cigarettes, sipping the final sip of his second cup of Darjeeling tea and idly glancing through the newspaper of the day before....