Thanks Steve

From the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates talk together (must watch video):

You and I have memories
Longer than the road that stretches out ahead.

From the Beatles song – Two of us.

Incidentally, I was at Bercos today. Reminded me of an afternoon.

The Horror – 2

Its been almost a week since I saw Apocalypse Now. But it keeps coming back to me. This one line in particular.

Kurtz: I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That’s my dream. That’s my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight… razor… and surviving.

The next line is in because I was watching a documentary on the word “Fuck” yesterday, with Tera Patrick in it (Hell Yeah), and all I could think of was this line from Brando. Am I going insane?

Kurtz: We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won’t allow them to write “fuck” on their airplanes because it’s obscene!

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City of God

I have been watching a lot of movies with blood and gore lately. City of God is no exception. Directed by Katia Lund and Fernando Meirelles (of The Constant Gardener fame).

Based on the real life story of journalist Wilson Rodrigues, it is based in one of Brazil’s biggest ghettos, Cidade de Deus, and is a story of a young boy Rocket and Ze. Rocket is a honest boy while, Ze is a pshycopath who wants to become the City’s biggest gangster and loves bloodshed. The movie is narrated in reverse fashion and is directed impeccably. Though Wiki tells me that most of the cast were rookies and many from the City itself, it seems hard to believe given the awesome performances of most of the cast. The movie gripped my attention, despite the subtitles which were bad at the best and pathetic generally.

The most disturbing scene was at the end when you see a group of kids, the Shorties, killing Ze and proclaiming themselves as the new bosses. Remind me of Blood Diamond and the children soldiers, and how they get sucked in to the entire thing without really knowing the consequence. Also, the scene where Steak dies and you see Knockout Ned remembering how he says:

“Listen man, I smoke, I snort… I’ve been begging on the street since I was just a baby. I’ve cleaned windshields at stop lights. I’ve polished shoes, I’ve robbed, I’ve killed… I ain’t no kid, no way. I’m a real man.”

Insane. A definite must watch for everyone, though you need to tolerate a lot of blood.

PS: Alice Braga is so hot!!

May the force be with you!

30 years have passed since the day the first Star Wars movie was released. Rediff asks you about your favourite scene. I am listing down mine.

• Princess Leia in the gold bikini – Hell yeah!!
• Dooku vs Yoda
• Vader vs Skywalker
• Darth Sidious (Chancellor Palpatine) talking about good and evil and the Sith in the “Revenge of the Sith”

The Horror – Its Awesome

“We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.” – Francis Ford Coppola on Apocalypse Now.

When I had watched The Deer Hunter I was convinced that it was the ultimate war movie ever made beating Saving Private Ryan. That movie was so real. Apocalypse Now, however, is surreal. You journey in the movie not just through a river, but a gamut of feelings, begininng from aversion to war which slowly but convincingly changes to hatred for war and the related insanity. It is the darkest movie I have ever watched. You know Colonel Kurtz is evil. You pity him. You love him. You want to forgive him. As it is said in the movie, he is a broken man. Yet he acts as if he is God. A genius. A flawed genius.

The actors are outstanding. Martin Sheen as Captain Willard captures your imagination right from the word go. Robert Duvall is exceptional as Colonel Kilgore with his now immortal lines.

You smell that? Do you smell that? …Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for twelve hours. When it was all over I walked up. We didn’t find one of ’em, not one stinkin’ dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like… victory. Someday this war’s gonna end…

But for me Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz is a tuor de force. He blows away all the previous performances, and from when he enters the movie, its only him, till the end. His monologues. The look in his eyes. “The horror.”

Col. Kurtz: Did they say why, Willard, why they want to terminate my command?
Cap. Willard: I was sent on a classified mission, sir.
Col. Kurtz: It’s no longer classified, is it? Did they tell you?
Cap. Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
Col. Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
Cap. Willard: I don’t see any method at all, sir.
Col. Kurtz: I expected someone like you. What did you expect? …Are you an assassin?
Cap. Willard: I’m a soldier.
Col. Kurtz: You’re neither. You’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.

And the best lines of the movie according to me.

I’ve seen the horrors, horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me – you have a right to do that – but you have no right to judge me.

It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.

We’d left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t say. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile, a pile of little arms, and I remember, I…I…I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized like I was shot, like I was shot with a diamond, a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, ‘My God, the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure! And then I realized they were stronger than me because they could stand it. These were not monsters. These were men — trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts who have families, who have children, who are filled with love – that they had the strength, the strength to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill – without feeling, without passion, without judgment – without judgment. Because it’s judgment that defeats us.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, watch it. Rating 10/10.

Sad state of Indian judiciary

I am extremely sad and angry. 

A thing that any father and mother should never have to do. A couple loses their young child and go to a ghat to bury his body. The ghat is in a very sorry state with dogs digging up remains of buried bodies. Someone picks up the story and files a PIL. The Government promises quick action.

So what has enraged me. The lines below from the PIL (emphasis mine).

That the Petitioner being a staunch Hindu from upper caste with status in life and good family background along with his above mentioned cousin and family prepared the body of master Raghav for being taken to a crematorium for dignified and honorable cremation.

Doesn’t a Hindu from lower class without status is life, whatever that means, have a right to diginified burial for his/her child? 

First Love

This is the snap of my bike’s odo just before it hit 10k kilometers on Friday, May 12th. I had bought the bike on Feb 19th, 2006.

Web 2.0

This one from Hugh here to me signifies what Web 2.0 is all about. While at it go read The Hughtrain.

Kick Ash

From Scott Adams on the ashes of James “Scotty” Doohan which were lost from a rocket which was supposed to scatter them in space:

I also wonder if the people in charge of this mission are admitting their mistakes or trying to cover their ashes. Okay, I don’t really wonder that. I just wanted to write “cover their ashes.” And this:

Q. What do you call a crater left by a rocket full of cremated remains?

A. An ash hole.

Laree Choote

Nice song – From Ek Chalis Ki Last Local (which has some pretty interesting scenes as I found out last night at Ojas’).

जो होता है अच्छे के लिए होता है
ग़लत केहते है …

किस्मत का खेल है सारा
फिरता था में आवारा
ये क्या से क्या हो गया
चार दिन की ज़िंदगानी
हैर पल एक नई कहानी
क्या था में क्या बन गया

क्या हुआ जो लारी छूटी
जीवन की गाड़ी लूटी
ख्वाब है तो मुझको ना जगा
ज़िंदगी एक पल में साली
यूँ पलट गई हुमारी
झूठ है तो मुझको ना बता

मुंबई ..सुना था यहाँ आदमी
पूरी ज़िंदगी अपनी किस्मत स्लोव ट्रक्क से फ़ास्ट ट्रक्क लाने में निकल देता है
पेर ढाई घंटे में मेरी किस्मत
ऐसे स्लोव ट्रक्क से फ़ास्ट ट्रक्क पर
आ जाएगी ये मैने कभी सोचा नही था
सज़ा मज़ा बन जाएगी
ये भी कभी सोचा नही था
लास्ट लोकल क्या छूटी
साला किस्मत पटरी पर आगाई

कर लो जो भी करना है
होता है जो होना है
गुज़रा तो पल ये फिर ना आएगा
क्या बुरा है क्या भला है
वक़्त ही शायद खुदा है
हो जाने दो फिर देखा जाएगा

क्या हुआ जो लारी छूती
जीवन की गाड़ी लूटी
ख्वाब है तो मुझको ना जगा
ज़िंदगी एक पल में साली
यूँ पलट गई हुमारी
झूठ है तो मुझको ना बता

वो केहते हैं ना
जो होता है अच्छे के लिए होता है
सही केहते हैं