Monday, January 30, 2006
Federer; Impeccable!
The man who is yet to be beaten in a grandslam open finals...
The man who has more than 23 consecutive wins in the finals of tournaments...
The man who can play almost all shots at ease and from nowhere...
Federer is a true champion in every sense. His humility, temperament and confidence says it all. I have not seen many players who are so authoritative in their forte, not even Sachin at his best or schumi at his peak...
Only a few sportspersons that I have seen are so great. Sampras at wimbledon, Steffi in mid nineties, Michael Jordan, Lance Armstrong and the one and only Valentino Rossi.
They are the true legends. And Federer is also in the same league. The ease at which he plays the winners, the way he lifts his level when required... I am short of words to praise him anymore... And you hardly see him giving vent to his feelings and emotions on court. A true professional, and a man with a big heart.
Hail Federer!!
Sunday, January 22, 2006
My Friend
The peculiar character of Amelie reminded me of one of my school friends. She was in my class for two years. She never talked to any of us unlessit is really necessary. She always had a smile on her face. Though she enjoyed observing the activities of her classmates, she never came forward and joined us. One can see her sitting in a corner of the class and reading a novel voraciously. But she always participated in extra curricular activities, and many a times bagged some prizes , depsite never really being serious about them. After I left the school and came to Madras for engineering, I totally forgot about her.
After four years of my stay in Madras, I came to realize that she also is in Madras! To my surprise, she mailed me, and then we had a few meetings, where we chatted over a drink.
During one of the meetings, I asked her: “You know, I always had a feeling that you were closely observing the things around you. You seem to have enjoyed those moments from outside. Why didn’t you come into the group then?”
Her reply was simply astounding: “I was very shy to talk in my earlier school days. So I found that I have nothing else to do in the class, and then I started reading and that really hooked me in. I kept on reading, and then I had little knowledge of what was happening around me. So later during my high school days, the things you talk were totally foreign to me! So I continued enjoying reading, and I have almost finished all the books in our school library!”
She also narrated a few funny incidents in her school life, where after getting into the finals of a running race, she forgot about it as she went back to the class and started reading a book!
Weird isn’t it?
Now after four years, she has changed a lot. Now that the college doesn’t have many books on literature and fiction, she needed to find something else. So she started making friends, going out with them and enjoying with them. But she is still the same old happy girl, who is very much satisfied with what she is and not at all worried or anxious about her future. That is what I am really looking for in my life on a long term basis. And this happy-go-lucky girl has found that out much faster. Great…
During these short meetings, I learned a lot from her. I learned how to be happy of what I am (One can be ambitious… not desperate), and how to handle the different phases of life.
Friday, January 13, 2006
Tiger Roars!
[Warning: I have always been a fan of Super Star Suresh Gopi. So this piece of writing might be heavily biased in favor of him.]
Yesterday night, Vimal, Sreejith (there is one more in our year in our college) and I went for the movie Tiger. It has always been a great experience to watch a movie on the releasing date, with all anxiety about getting tickets (well, that is really unnecessary in Chennai. You can get tickets any day for a Malayalam movie.), the response of crowd to every scene (the punch lines and passing comments from crowd were hilarious yesterday).
After a long time, the successful team of Suresh Gopi and Shaji Kailas is coming together in Tiger, an investigative suspense thriller (?). The protagonist is Tiger Chandrashekaran IPS from Crime Branch, given the duty to investigate the murder of a cabinet minister and former IG enacted by Murali, and Suresh Gopi handles the role with perfection. To assist tiger for this case, there is a specially trained officer Sudev (new actor) and Mr. Pothan (Sai Kumar). Besides these three, there are a lot of other actors roped in, with Siddhique and Rajan P Dev teaming up as the bad guys. Another important character in the movie is done by Gopika, who acts as journalist Suhara Ahmed.
Frankly speaking, there is not much suspense in the movie. The villains in the movie were quite obvious from the very beginning, and the director also didn’t try to conceal it. The emphasis is given on powerful dialogues delivered by the protagonist, where he makes scornful remarks about the politicians, the latest steaming issues in Kerala like Hitech city,
Finally, the only suspense boils down to the identity of the professional killer, and this becomes somewhat obvious at the end. But I should say, this twist in the tale was not expected in the beginning.
I rate Tiger as one of the better movies released this year, and being a fan of Suresh Gopi, I should say it is one of the good movies of him, in the lines of Commissioner and Mafia (not as great as them though) . For the Suresh Gopi fans, it will be a good experience to see him, coming back to his forte, setting aside his ideologies i.e. roaring with a gun in hand. Well done Suresh! For other movie buffs, all you can expect is the basic elements in a Suresh Gopi cop story namely powerful dialogues, corrupt politicians getting embarrassed in front of the public by the hero, some theri and some action. There are some scenes where you feel the director has tried to portray Suresh as a super hero, the scene where he cracks the hotmail password of Gopika being one of them. The funniest part of this is, our man asks her relatives about her conversations to them the day before she gets abducted, and cracks her hotmail account with those ideas. To add more fun, he logs in with the hotmail id, and we get to see the yahoo inbox lol. That was really not needed. Here the director completely underestimates the internet knowledge of an average movie buff. I think the director should have shown much more professionalism than this. Probably they could have used the concept of saved passwords or outlook express there.
Overall, it has been a nice treat, and I heard super star’s next project is named Lanka, where he acts as a black cat commando. In the meanwhile, there is also a serious movie of him directed by Jayaraj getting ready to be released. And the team Suresh Gopi and Shaji Kailas are teaming together for the next investigative story on chintamani murder case. It looks like tiger is going to have a great year.
GRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…..
Saturday, January 07, 2006
Eclipse
(Waters) 2:04
All that you touch
All that you see
All that you taste
All you feel.
All that you love
All that you hate
All you distrust
All you save.
All that you give
All that you deal
All that you buy,
beg, borrow or steal.
All you create
All you destroy
All that you do
All that you say.
All that you eat
And everyone you meet
All that you slight
And everyone you fight.
All that is now
All that is gone
All that's to come
and everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.
"There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark."