Variety is the spice of life

 First thing that attracted me to this movie was its title - very cute and easy to say. But was bit hesitant to watch it for almost every single member of the cast were new except for the inspector. But wow. If there ever were a crop of new bunch of actors who are so apt and super natural to watch, this crew would be it. Each person are so apt and perfect for their role that, it felt like a candid camera of real life personalities. The mousy vulnerable yet pure at heart village guy who is so smitten in love with his newly wed wife, of whom he had only shared couple of sideways glance during the wedding rituals, the unbelievable-that-such-kind-of-innocent-girls-still-exist kind of a character performed by one of the leading ladies who looks so innocent and vulnerable on screen that one actually wants to help her somehow, the sharp witted other bride who gets mixed up with the innocent one, the casting has been so perfect that, even on mute you can make out from their expressions. Lovely

 I am not able to recall the exact series, but guess it was surely after Steve Waugh's retirement, for i remember him sharing his views on cricket coverage. Whether it was part of a commentary or an interview, that i am not sure, but the point he made was, how advertisements have began to eat up on the coverage.  It was an ODI series where India was playing Australia i guess, where either the first ball of the over or the last ball of the over would be overlapped by ads!! If it happens to be a wicket taking delivery they would force a replay else it would be more of a match with 250+ deliveries rather than the standard 300!! And even during the rest of the over, the screen space would be shrunk to a smaller square with a "L" shaped window being used for ads!! It felt more like watching cricket in between ads, literally and when Waugh made those comments, there were criticism as well, saying the Westerners are jealous of the growing clout of BCCI. Cut to circa IPL (well, I

Ever felt like your heart is about to beat itself to a bursting stage in pressure? You are so much stressed out that you feel like the weight of the world is on your head and shoulders and whether you shrugged or not, it is going to crush you into a pulp, one part of soul at a time? The power of fear and how all encompassing it can be making every sane thing scarier and scarier things deadly?  There is a saying that you can measure the brightness of light and can increase or decrease it but the same never applies to darkness, for its simply the absence of light. To my knowledge there is no measure for darkness. But few weeks back, i felt i had found the measure of it and it deals in sanity as its unit of measurement. When you feel suffocatingly stressed out, you can actually see darkness in bright sunlight. In times like this, mind seeks divine intervention when logic rules omnipresent, unleashing the darkness or rather not making you look for ways to get out of such situations. I happ

 March 5th is a date i wouldn't forget in a hurry. If i make a list of top ten days of my professional career where i felt low, this would be right on top of the pile. The news that came in that day, was cushioned a bit by the other discussion that happened earlier that morning. It was as if, your heart would give in at 5 pm and you get a new heart for transplant just hours before that news break. Off late i've been thinking a lot of my post life situation and scenario for no reason and that incident made me think even more of such possibility. Eventually we all have an expiry date, which as Rajini says in a movie, "Saagara naal terinjitta vaazhara naal naragamaaidum" (if you know when you will die, every single living day could become hell). And if people realize that we are all eventually going to die, the amount of crimes and wrong things they do will definitely come down. But if we keep looking at that target date, we will forget to live and that universal thought

If at all there ever was movie that is a potpourri of southern languages, this would be it. A mallu movie, with a telugu-ish title, with lead character studying in Salem and most of the story happening in Hyderabad, they almost cover the full circle of south India. There are many dialogues in tamil and some in telugu as well!! But this is not the USP of the movie. It is neither a ground breaking or first of its kind ever story line or nor does it has extraordinary scenes and situations where the characters act their skin off or have ultra high octane action scenes. In fact, the movie is the ante thesis of all this and is as simple as it comes when it comes to rom-com's with the treatment similar to hindi movies of the late 90's or early 2000. The title of the movie crops up right when the hero sits dejected after his love proposal rejection during the last day of his college. He is as clueless as any average college pass out, without any ambition but counting on moving abroad t

I should've updated "Trip Wire" as the next in review in the series, but felt that book to be quite tedious and for an almost non-existent story it dragged for close to 300 pages. And the ending rivals "Balayya" movies, with Reacher getting shot right in his chest, only for the doctor's in all their "surprise" claim it to be a "medical miracle" that his pectoral muscles literally stopped a bullet and Reacher survives!!!  But "Running blind" the next in the series, more than made up for it. With Jodie, the lady who gets introduced in previous book, having a continuation in this one as well as designated girl friend of Reacher, also doubling up as his lawyer, the series actually get a second character who has a running storyline other than Reacher. The story begins with a bar fight that is settled by Reacher in his own way. Only for it to balloon into a controversy involving FBI, who somehow profile him as a potential and almost c