From shadows to the stars

Bollywood's trend of adapting the lives of popular sporting heroes to the screen continues. In 2016, M S Dhoni and Azharuddin's lives were portrayed on screen. While these two movies received only modest response, the true winner was 'Dangal', the biopic of wrestler Mahavir Singh Phogat. While Phogat himself was a wrestler, the story is about his ambition to win an international gold medal (for the country) through his daughters. I enjoyed the movie. Unlike most times when I have watched Indian movies, I didn't feel the urge to scream or hit my head against the wall. Of course, there were some problems with the depiction. Some of the more serious issues have been identified and critiqued. Here, I will talk about some other issues that I found in the film. Phogat's elder daughter Geeta is sent off to the national training camp and loses her path a little. The film links a slump in her performance levels to her interest in being more fashionable. As G...

I think I should start watching Telugu movies. Not because I find them to be fascinating or interesting, but because I think that the content they present should be critiqued when they are still in vogue. I hold no delusions about my power to convince people that what passes for humour and morals in these movies is actually bigotry and prejudice. But I still think that my loyal readers (both of them) and I would effect more dialogue immediately after the movie than, say, five years down the lane. I watched a Telugu movie. Predictably, the feelings that followed were frustration, anger, astonishment and an urge to beat up the filmmaker. The movie in question is 'Seethamma Vakitlo Sirimalle Chettu'. It has many cringe-worthy scenes, but I will single out one. The hero (Mahesh Babu) and his entourage are in a mall, where a girl walks up to him and 'proposes' to him. Mahesh Babu makes some wise cracks about 'Bharata stree' (Indian women) and makes fun of the gi...

I like being meta. Therefore, when I wanted to write about my obsession with pop-culture references, the first thing that came to my mind was a quote from Fight Club. In the movie, Tyler Durden says, “We're a generation of men raised by women.” Perhaps I belong to a generation raised on pop-culture. Or is it just me? For someone whose introduction to pop-culture came quite only in my mid-teens, I think I am still very overdependant on pop-culture. I would imagine that most people draw inspiration from popular movies or books in certain real life scenarios. Don't you like the thought of proposing during the sunset, on a sand kissed beach. Who doesn't want to go on a road trip to exotic locations, on a journey to discover oneself? It feels so wonderful and it happens all the time in movies. It goes far beyond that for me. Whenever I'm entering a zone in social conventions that I am not properly trained in (and that zone is quite expansive), I immediately fall back on...