People

A rather rare photo that has ShishunaLa Shariff and Govinda Bhatt. I captured this from a photo at poet H S Venkateshamurthy's place.

Note: The quality of photo ain't that good.

Going by the description on the photo, ShishunaLa Shariff is the second one from right - last row.

It is more 'noise' than news these days on National News channels. The only few that were exceptions have also joined the race. Whether this is a useful trend, we will have to wait and see.

It often is outrageous to see well respected artists making generalized comments about Indian Cinema without actually even considering the impact of it. Beeb [:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6369621.stm|has a story] quoting a criticism from the very respected actor Naseeruddin Shah.

Quote:

He was speaking after the Bollywood film, Rang de Basanti (Colour Me Saffron) failed to pick up an award at this month's British Academy of Film and Television Awards (Baftas). It was nominated in the Best Foreign Film category.

"I really don't think we make films that can match those from other parts of the world. And I am not referring to Hollywood - we make copies of Hollywood," he added.

What people fail to realize is that Indian Cinema is not necessarily all about Bollywood. There's Cinema in India beyond Bollywood. There are bunch of good films coming out of Southern states and also the Marathi ones. Not that their ain't experiments being carried out in Bengal and other places. There are, probably even in plenty. Good Cinema might just be going without grabbing attention of the scale Bollywood films usually do.

Catch Kumara Sangakkara on this [:http://content-ind.cricinfo.com/ci/content/current/story/281454.html|very nice podcast on Cricinfo]. Sangakkara talks to Sanjay about the Cricketers entering this World Cup and his opinion on who might make it big (he leaves out himself, obviously)

Sangakkara seems very eloquent and also forthright. "I was average at both" he says, referring to his wicket keeping and batting. "But my father helped me improve".

In the run-up to the World Cup, media is coming out with all sorts of special features to grab the attention.

"Dumped" List

CricInfo has an article today titled "They dumped me". As the names suggests, it is about those players who were dropped from the team. The article tries to guess the reasons. And it is quite hilarious.

The part about Runako Morton is specially hilarious for those who don't know yet:

In the course of his career, Morton been expelled from the squad in 2002 for lying about a grandmother's death

Read the complete article [:http://content-ind.cricinfo.com/wc2007/content/story/281201.html|here].

Media Campaigns

IBN-Live (read tv18) has started a "[:http://www.cricketnext.com/features/2007/cheerindia/|cheering campaign]" this time. It doesn't need to be mentioned that Indian team doesn't have time to listen to one billion cheers. Maybe this one is for them to read after their retirement (There are going to be many after this World Cup, anyway).

I caught up [:http://www.wired.com/news/technology/medtech/0,72675-0.html?tw=wn_index_24|with this news article on Wired] only today. The article discusses on how organs are being sold in India in violation of the [:http://www.indialawinfo.com/bareacts/transplant.html#_Toc498337709|The transplantation of human organs act of 1994].

Quote:

More than 500 people across the state of Tamil Nadu say they've sold their kidneys to organ brokers, in violation of a ban enacted in 1994.

The articles goes on to reveal the helplessness of the authority concerned quoting an anonymous source:

"We do everything in accordance with the letter of the law on paper, but we know that almost all of the documents we see are false,"

Can't get myself to believe that [:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shyam_Benegal|Shyam Benegal] actually liked the film [:http://don.indiatimes.com/|Don]. In the outlook article, he mentions,

Don was extremely well made, used technology with a great deal of sophistication. SRK was superb. I think Farhan Akhtar is one of our shining stars. It was the film I enjoyed the most.

Don was not as special in any way, and looked sort of messed-up movie. Farhan Akthar, in my opinion, did a better job on his last two movies with a downward gradient on his performance, elegance graph. :)

No wonder Shyam Benegal has lost his old touch with films he came up with, like [:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0255713/|Zubeidaa] and [:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0349878/|Netaji Subash Chandra Bose].

There's also an epilogue piece (might well be an editing time jumble for Outlook standards) which says:

"I don’t see the bad films."

I'm smelling irony here. :P