They Left...


The atmosphere was tense. Everyone was talking about it in a very low tone and looking optimistically at the end of the road.

"They may be here anytime!" Vidyarthi told her cousin excitedly. Vidyarthi had seen them all leaving the scene without a trace. She had silently endured the pain of separation. In a matter of one month, every single one of them had disappeared leaving the city in absolute gloom.

"This sounds too good to be true!" her cousin was almost in tears. She loved them dearly. All her future plans were planned keeping them in mind. And suddenly all of them had left right in front of her eyes. She could not marry her hearthrob Ashish Srivatsav who could not digest the fact that they had left and the myth that they had left for good and who had run after them trying to get them back. He was never seen again.

Vidyarthi held her cousin's hand. She knew what her cousin had gone through. Her cousin was not the only one. Everyone in the city was a victim of this unprecedented walk out by them. Newspapers talked about it. CNN analyzed it. George Bush sympathized with the victims. But no one could bring them back to the city. They simply had disappeared. No one knew where they had gone.

And now, there was hope in the air. Gossipmongers had been telling everyone in the city that they were coming back one by one. Some people broke down unable to contain the excitement. But a lot of them just waited silently praying God that the rumors should be real.

The eastern mist was clearing up and slowly they emerged from the haze galloping towards the city. "They are here... They really are here!" People started talking. Vidyarthi broke down on her knees. She laughed, she cried, she hugged her cousin and she knew at once that her bad days had just been finished.

Her cousin closed her eyes trying to enjoy their arrival. Suddenly there was a warm human touch on her cheek. She opened her eyes and saw Ashish Srivatsav in front of her. "I got them.. I am back." He shouted and lifted her up high in the sky.

The economy improved. The jobs were back.

Neeku Nenu Naaku Nuvvu : Telugu Movie

Neeku Nenu Naaku Nuvvu

After a hectic month in the office, I finally got a weekend free. And the result of a spur of the moment decision at 8:30pm, I decided to go to Jayaprada A/C near Mount Road to watch Neeku Nenu Naaku Nuvvu or N4 as it is affectionately called.

I cannot possibly write this review in a coherent manner because I am in a totally confused state of a mind now. Let me try to gather my thoughts. There is Krishnam Raju. I guess he is an industrialist. His daughter elopes on the day of her marriage. Suman is her sweetheart. (Now where does this guy come from? Thought he had retired long ago.)

So a furious Krishnam Raju throws all photos of his daughter into the sacred fire, declares that his daughter has "chacchipoyindi" and decides to adopt Uday Kiran.

Well, everyone grows up. Uday Kiran does too. Now the heroine, (I don't remember who she is.) comes back from London(? Does it ring a bell?) and joins Uday Kiran's college. As per the good old Indian movie script, they quarrel, they tease and they fall in love. (How innovative! And you can't say a girl can't marry her uncle. Happens all the time in Andhra Pradesh as long it is the maternal uncle we are talking about.)

And lo! Surprise for everyone. This heroine (I still am not able to remember who she is. Perhaps I should get myself checked for Cerebral Thrombosis) turns out to be the daughter of you-know-who. (If you can't guess, you are not fit for viewing Telugu cinema) And this you-know-who is not alive anymore. Suman is still alive and kicking.

The rest of the movie deals with how Uday Kiran and Shriya (Eureka! I finally got her name) play some tricks, drama, melodrama etc to win the hearts of rock solid Krishnam Raju.

All's well that end's well. If you are reminded of KKKG, Yaadein, DDLJ please rest assured that there are many in your rocking boat.

This emotionally charged movie should have been made in 1995. Now it looks too dated.

If you don't want to subject yourself to third degree Chinese torture, stay away from the flick.

Clean slate.

I stared at it for a long time. It was clean and there was a piece of chalk right next it. Combined, they were tempting me to write something on the slate.

It had been quite some time since I used a slate and piece of chalk. So I wanted to use them. However I did not know what to write or draw on the slate. Unfortunately at that moment my mind was as clean and empty as the slate itself.

I took the slate in my hands. Felt the cold black metal. Put it down. Took the chalk. The idea of spoiling the black metal was met with some resistance. The metal would no more be black if I wrote on it. I was not sure whether I could write anything on the slate that would be as beautiful as the blank slate itself. If it was not, effectively I had spoilt the beauty.

Should I take the risk or should I not?

I could wipe the drawing with a wet cloth to make it black again. However that would leave a mark on my mind that I had tried but failed to create something beautiful and I would have to live with that failure for the rest of my life.

On the other hand, if I did not draw anything on the board, I would always be tempted to do so and I would have to undergo all this introspection every time I looked at the slate.

Just a tiny innocent slate causing a big turmoil in my mind.

It was driving me nuts. The clean slate was laughing at me. I could not bear it anymore. I had to take a decision.

I drank poison.

Pawan Kalyan : To Change or Not To Change

Pawan Kalyan : To Change or Not To Change

God once told me when I was dreaming about him: “Why should you worry about my dice playing capabilities. Why can’t you just accept things as they are and move on?”

Of course I am sure He was referring to the Einstein remark there but I am sure He wouldn’t mind it if I applied it to the movies of Pawan Kalyan. God created Pawan Kalyan and gave him a distinct personality. However when it came to choosing Pawan’s audience and fans, God assumed they should be like the rest of the mob. No different.

The result is pretty apparent for everyone who has been following Pawan Kalyan since his Tholi Prema. Pawan Kalyan’s era is divided into two parts now. Post Tholi Prema and Pre Tholi Prema. The Pre Tholi Prema version of Pawan Kalyan was not someone you could write home about. However the paradigm shift in his image and the quality of his movies started with Tholi Prema and was perfected by the crew of Khushi.

So that was what God might have said during Genesis. “Roses, Roses and More Roses” for Pawan Kalyan. However what is life without a little sinusoidal reversal of fortune?

He roared, “Let there be a Johnny”. And there was a disaster. The rose marathon had ended. It had given way to the thorn. At least that was how most PK fans felt.

Subscribing to a radically different school of thought (but not necessarily a superior school of thought), I found Johnny to be the best movie in PK’s career in terms of technical finesse, direction and treatment. The story had no takers in Andhra Pradesh but that doesn’t mean it was a bad film. Sometimes you have a perfect script and a perfect movie but the audience denounces it completely. Then you get into the dangerous art of introspection and come up with reasons why the movie did not work.

Almost all these introspections generally contradict the analyses in the pre-release reports. The pre-release report says that Scene-119 was great because it was handled different. The introspection report says that Scene-119 was the main reason why the movie flopped. The scene was handled messily.

Johnny suffered a fate it should not have. It went into the annals of history as a movie that didn’t and couldn’t. I would rather list it as a masterful movie that misguided Pawan Kalyan.

The reaction to Johnny made everyone sit up and notice Pawan Kalyan. Everyone was commenting how Johnny should have been made. In fact Jeevi of Idlebrain.com opined that the movie should serve as the textbook of “How Not to Direct a Movie”. The assumption was that the audience wanted a “normal” movie. Experiments were OK as long as they fitted broadly into the framework evolved over the years also known as The Formula of Telugu Movies.

Johnny challenged The Formula. It went against the tide. And it drowned. The unsinkable Titanic had finally given in. Pawan Kalyan registered a flop, one of colossal proportions and he himself was responsible for it. It was a great movie with perfect treatment and excellent performances. The only drawback was that the audience did not understand what the movie was all about. They wanted to see Pawan Kalyan and were disappointed because the script rose above the star in this case. The love story was tender not loud. The chemistry between the lead pair was remarkable but not flashy. It was a subtle expression of celluloid magic not the pretentious cacophony of cliché-ridden Formula.

The disaster of Johnny caused another twist to Pawan Kalyan’s career. He realized that he had to stop trying for the perfect movie. All he had to do was to come up with a movie which would be liked by his fans. He had this obligation. He had to satisfy them. Though he had never conveyed to anybody that he would follow The Fomula, he had to finally succumb to the pressure of his fans. In my opinion this was the greatest damage done by Johnny. The financials are of course important. However instead of persisting with the new wave of cinema and making a bold statement to the world that he would not change, Pawan Kalyan chose to shun it all and try treading the beaten-to-death path.

Of course, nobody could change overnight. Pawan Kalyan also had some inertia and his next release, Gudumba Shankar, was at best described as a half-baked product which tried to do justice to both his heart and his mind. It was a clear case of confused loyalties. It was neither here nor there. Though financially it fared much better than Johnny, it still was a flop.

The public opinion was subtle but clear. No one shall rise above the Fomula. He should respect it. Gudumba Shankar was the last nail on the coffin of the creative genius in Pawan Kalyan. He went back to his Tholi Prema director to give him a face-lift. He stopped his quest for meaningful and creative cinema.

God has finally succeeded in changing him according to his fans.

Balu – ABCDEFG, a movie which is not half as good as Gudumba Shankar, tasted success at the box office. Finally the ordeal was over for Pawan Kalyan. He can now churn out meaningless Formula pictures and get hits under his belly. But there are some people in this world who love him for what he is capable of; who like offbeat movies like Johnny. And these people are going to be disappointed because their only hope had given in to the pressure of the box office. It is sad that Pawan Kalyan left it all after just a couple of duds.

Balu may be a sound hit. Balu may bring back smiles on faces of the distributors. However for serious movie fans, Balu is a routine movie and Pawan Kalyan has become a routine star just like his big brother.

Sometimes I want to scream, “If I want to see a mass thriller, I will go to a Chiranjeevi or Nagarjuna movie. I don’t want Pawan Kalyan donning those roles.”

God tells me as-a-matter-of-factly, “I don’t play dice my boy! I really don’t”. I want to believe Him. He really knows what He is doing.

Elements of Fear

William Parker slammed the brakes. It was intentional. He was certainly not in a mood to kill a five-year-old girl on a state highway at eleven in the night. She was about fifty yards away when Parker noticed her on the road. The car came to a grinding halt and the girl just stared into the headlights without moving an inch from the road.

He put the distress lights on and got out of the car. “Hey, Kid... What are you doing here?” She didn’t utter a word. She simply stared into the headlights. Parker looked around. There wasn’t any car nearby. She could not have come there walking. The highway was deserted. Sunday night it was. Christmas was two days away. Most of the people had already reached their destination. The traffic was very less. Parker was doing eighty on that fifty-five miles per hour zone. He was absolutely sure that there would be no cop on that road at this hour. Little did he speculate about a wandering kid on the speed lane of the highway.

“Are you OK?” he asked her suspiciously. She didn’t reply. She was a cute little girl... just about the same age as Martha Parker, his daughter, who would be eagerly waiting for him and the presents he was carrying. Parker did not know what to do. There was not a single living soul on that road. The nearest town was around twenty miles away. “How did you come here, Kid?” He approached her slowly making sure he didn’t scare the little girl.

She looked at him. Parker could find terror in her eyes. He at once knew something bad had happened. He knelt before her and stroked her head. “Where are your parents?” he asked her.

She started sobbing. “Momma… there” she pointed towards the bushes on the roadside. Parker was dumbfounded. He took her in his arms and slowly went to the other side of the road. It was pitch black and he could not see anything. He listened carefully to the sounds of the night trying to catch any human voice.

The night was just calm. It looked like a black hole. He came back to his car, started it and drove to the other side of the road. Then he focussed the headlights on to the bushes.

The wreck was clearly visible. It was a 1989 Buick. The front portion was totally damaged. The rear portion was relatively less mangled. He shivered. It was not because of the bitter cold.

Parker had never before been in an accident site. Blood and gore scared him always. He slowly approached the wreck. “Anybody there?” He shouted. No answer. He moved a little closer and looked into the car.

Ten seconds later he vomited. His head was spinning. The girl was staring into the car. He was sick. But his presence of mind suggested that the girl should be taken away from that site. He grabbed her and ran to his car. He entered the driver’s seat and tried to think logically. Five minutes later, he regained his composure. His cell phone did not catch a signal. The nearest facility that would allow him to make a 911 call was twenty miles away. He turned to the girl and asked her, “We will go to the town and get someone here. OK?” She just stared at him and said nothing.

He strapped her to the child seat in the back row of his Sedan and started the car. “What is your name?” he asked her. “Mary” her voice was barely audible. He nodded and stepped on the gas. He wanted to inform the police as soon as possible. Soon the odometer started oscillating near the 100 mark. “I hope you aren’t hurt, are you?” He asked her. She didn’t reply. There was a curve approaching. He had to reduce his speed. He stepped on the brakes.

It took him two seconds to understand that the action had not done what it was supposed to do. The car still cruised at one hundred miles per hour. The curve was coming near. Frantically he slammed the brakes once again. The brake pedal went in loosely. Sweat appeared on the forehead of William Parker. “Help” he shouted unsure of who could help at that time.

The curve was indeed a sharp curve and William Parker could not control his car at hundred miles per hour. The car jumped off the road into the bushes and smashed into a tree.

A minute later, the little girl got out from the backseat and started walking towards the road. There was a car coming at a distance. She went to the middle of the road and stared into the headlights of the approaching car.