Why did SRK make RaOne? (The story you didn't know)

“Why did he have to do this?! Why, I say!”

I had gone to watch RaOne with a bunch of friends. The show got over and we squeezed ourselves out of the movie hall, and were now recasting ourselves into what we actually looked like and catching some lost breath to regain composure. Some of the kids who had come to watch the movie seemed to go back happy and excited, but many of my friends were asking questions. “Weren’t things going fine for him; why did SRK have to do such a movie?!”

“Why did SRK make RaOne?”

These questions seemed to echo deep within my head, and I felt like some high frequency movement inside my brain. Like small cubes being tossed all around my cerebrum causing a virtual particle wave that translates into a real-time sensation called ‘pain’. This sensation increased steadily to a peak, and I was getting geared up for a black out in case of system collapse, but surprisingly there seemed to be a localised blackout inside my brain and it appeared as if I was staring at a pitch black screen, so grand in size that I could see no other thing. There was a single source of light that looked like one from a movie projector. The story unrolled and I could see it.

Only I could see it.

The year is 2006. The place looked like a very modern robotics research lab. Something intuitively told me that it was located in India. Perhaps it was the whole arrangement of the place or the big ‘Om’ symbol on the wall, but there was not single explicit evidence about its location. The lab and the project that was running there were owned by Mr.K. No one knew the real person behind this masked man wearing robotic overalls and appearing to be around 6-7 inches taller from five feet.He seemed to have been educated in one of India's top engineering colleges and cut off from the world completely. His identity was a secret more than the project itself.

Mr.K ‘s project was aimed to destroy the self-proclaimed king (or emperor, the person in question was quite confused!) of a virtual kingdom and thus conquer the kingdom of Bolly-wood all to himself. Coming back to the lab, there was a white board on a stand that said- ‘Project Dhan’. Yes, it was planned to destroy the king by attacking his wealth and to accomplish this feat, the team had just successfully devised a super villain robot that was closest to invincible.

The robot was the most advanced one on the planet. It had Advanced Adaptive Learning, Instinctive Strategizing, Well Evolved Lability Level (‘AAL IS WELL’); skills that made it unique and indestructible machine. But the team had not come up with any name for him. It was decided to call him Duryo-Dhan, in short D-Dhan.

D-Dhan could influence anyone into doing anything, but he was meant to influence only one, and he was already on his mission.

Early 2008, SRK was in his Mumbai apartment taking a break after the success of Om Shanti Om. There was a discussion going on about a cricket league centered around Indian cities. The short, round-faced Bengali person who was trying hard to convince SRK dada took his hands in his and reassuringly tried to persuade him to choose the Kolkata team in the league. In a matter of few minutes, like a Midas touch, the obstinate SRK was magically convinced and he signed the franchise for Kolkata. Kolkata, which had another prince who would not bow down to kings and queens of the real world, a prince who revelled in the arrogance and authority of his leadership, a prince who would charge in spite of successes or failures and most importantly a prince who is loved selflessly by the people of Kolkata.

D-Dhan had begun his work thus and SRK immediately put in US$75Mn into the team and called it KKR with the prince being its ‘senapati’. In time, D-Dhan ensured that SRK lost quite a bit of his money, his team flopped and he fell out of favour with the prince whereby falling out of favour with the people of Kolkata. Before he could recover from the fall, D-Dhan returned to him in the form of a friend with a Bollywood science fiction story.

SRK decided to produce and act in this movie, and D-Dhan took the shape of Ms.Pia from Mr.K’s lab and made herself a part of the whole scheme to be in constant touch with its development. Money was pumped into it as continuously as water flows in a waterfall. D-Dhan could instantly make himself look like any person he wanted to, and took various peoples' forms in these days to ensure the successful execution of his strategies.

He suggested shooting several scenes of the movie in the UK so that the cost of production wentup. He took up the role of an advisor who helped SRK and his friend with the plot. After a really poor opening scene for SRK, they zeroed on having a Tamil character as lead, where it was completely irrelevant. He also scripted the dialogues and shots in such a way that any south Indian who watched the character in action would want to puke on his face for his unbearable representation of a South Indian family man whom they all knew so well. (He also coaxed SRK to eat noodles with curd in this pretext, and now the Chinese government is planning to lodge a formal complaint against him for insulting their cuisine in public!) To rub salt on injury, D-Dhan recommended the inclusion of Rajinikanth in the movie so that the south audience would all make a trip to the theatres to catch a glimpse of their superstar, thus increasing their movie’s collection. Impressed by the idea, it was decided to cast Rajinikanth as his latest successful science fiction character ‘Chitti’. Now, D-Dhan scripted the action of the other characters sharing the screen to be so much overacting and the music too in a way that to many a viewers they appeared to be ridiculing Rajinikanth in that shot. All these ensured that SRK’s fan base in the south dwindled to abysmal levels.

Then came the part of giving the movie a name. D-Dhan made sure that they picked a name that he wanted them to, and managed to pass through the name ‘RaOne’ that sounded very much like ‘Ravan’ the latest Maniratnam movie with Idea mobiles ad star Bachchan Jr. He did this so that this movie did not get a unique identifier and if he could somehow manage to make the movie less impressive than the Maniratnam flick in the long run, SRK’s would NOT go down the annals of history as the original ‘Ra-v-an’ and shall always be referred to as ‘the other ra-one’ or ‘the not-so-good-ravan’. Smart of you, D-Dhan!

Once RaOne was made, and D-Dhan was inching close to the completion of his mission by having made the script weak and easy-to-be-forgotten, sequences mediocre and the whole experience debatable for most audience, he decided to put together his final act in the form of SRK ‘s promotion campaign manager. In this final role he managed to direct SRK to make a big-time predictable fool of himself going around the world like a door-to-door salesman so much so that social media was abuzz with rumours that SRK had turned himself into a domestic help in order to promote ‘the easy-to-handle, user-friendliness and perfect command reception skills’ of his superhero gaming character in the movie. For someone who could lower himself to the level of an annoying salesman (oh c'mon they show up everywhere!) in order to promote his movie, even his staunch fans were now made to wonder if the movie was not good enough to market itself! SRK spent close to US$30Mn on the movie.

While all this was happening, the media had begun to get clues about Duryo Dhan the super villain from the generation after RaOne, and were trying to trace up to his makers. Though no one had established who the primary instigator of the whole mission was, it was believed to be a product of the Khan rivalry. Nothing more could be said now.

Arr---j-j-u—uuu--nn..... Thud! Thud!

(Snapped back to reality) It was my friend who shook me up from ... what shall I say, my dream? I was there in the movie theatre, everything was normal. No one knew about D-Dhan or his plots. They were still cursing SRK for making a movie like this, and our friend Deepak for volunteering to reserve tickets for all of us.

Why did I come to know of it? Does Duryo Dhan actually exist? I am confused to say the least.

Then suddenly someone came up to me and started talking. I wasn’t listening, but.

“Arjun, you are dreaming again?”

‘A-R-J-U-N’, it struck me. If there is a Duryo Dhan there must be an Arjun to defeat him in the battle of the next generation. Yes, I am the new superhero who fights the super villain! When the story of RaOne continues, you know where things are leading to and you also know who’s gonna be the super hero in that super movie.

‘Arjun’- Me! Duh!

The Value of Freedom

My latest article for 21 Fools. Though it has been there for quite a while now, just realised that I never posted the link on my blog. So here it is - The Value of Freedom @21Fools

It about how a soldier realises the value of freedom from his old father, and why we must understand and appreciate the value of the freedom we have.

Hope you like it!

The Show That Stands

Steve Jobs was a phenomenon, much more than just another successful CEO. He is one among those visionaries who proved time and again that persistence on a chosen path can lead to reverential success.

Jobs was a visionary, I said, someone who actually changed the way people perceived something viz. Digital media! Years ago, there was another man- Dennis Ritchie who wrote some codes that laid the foundation for almost everything today including Jobs’ iPhone.

Ritchie is believed to be the father of C language and a co-creator of Unix (which later inspired many other things including Linux). We all knew about him as students. In fact some of us, like me, made it a point to buy the book he had authored on C language (it had a white cover page with a dull blue design on it, and much more boring content inside for an average newbie to programming) when we started learning the language in school. If parallels were to be drawn, there can be no dispute that Ritchie stood way too ahead of Jobs as the bigger visionary (who actually made deeper impact on the society and our life over the years).

Why would I draw such parallels? To those who haven’t seen it already on the news and social media, Jobs and Ritchie passed away around the same time. While one of them was given a heart wrenching farewell all over the globe, the other was simply overlooked. And it should not be a surprise that since we are discussing it here, it cannot have been the way that appears normal.

Yes, while Jobs was mourned all over the world, Ritchie largely drew no one’s attention on death. (Here I am reminded of an editorial that I read which said that it was surprising how Jobs was so popular in India when there was not a single direct Apple store and the i-products were so expensively priced that an average person was very unlikely to be in possession of one)

One of the images going viral on Facebook about this topic

Why did the world hail Jobs while many never remembered Ritchie beyond their school days (though we all still remember/use C or its direct descendent programming languages)? Ok, a quick quiz. Who was Dr.Martin Cooper? Who is Steven Sasson? What did Mathew Gray do in 1993 for the first time that changed internet forever? Any answer? Now match mobile phones, digital camera and search engines to the questions respectively. Do you see that we do not know who created some of the things that we have actually begun using as a part of us?

Remember the mega launches that Jobs held for all i-products? The gung ho over what could be the new Apple product, his routine jokes (‘there is one more thing...’), stage presence, drama over his role in Apple corporation etc. Remember the media appearances and books by Bill Gates at the peak of his success? Remember frequently seeing the face of Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia? The publicity stunts by Richard Branson? We do, of course we do! That could precisely be a major reason. 

If you are an exceptionally brilliant inventor your product will become famous. But if there is a story, a drama, a brand you build around yourself and most importantly continue to create news (good or bad, sometimes futile controversies) until your end, people will invariably remember you and your contributions. Because the more infrequent your face or name becomes the sooner you shall be forgotten! Not that we people are a thankless lot, but things evolve so fast that even five years mean a lot more than what they used to be. Five years back from today facebook was perhaps just a new idea, twitter was just about launched and there were no iPhones!

In such relative speed of time and technology changes, it should not be very surprising why Ritchie’s achievements and his adieu to the wonderful word he helped in shaping was lost in the smoke cloud created by the departure of this person who brought digital multimedia so close to the common man (which again was based on Ritchie’s codes to begin with)! 

After all, it’s your show alone that remains in people’s minds and hence only a showman for life shall get a tearful goodbye and boundless gratitude from people for all that he did for them in his life! This perhaps is what the management guys call 'Personal Branding'.

Happy Onam!

A new look for your old car

A quick thought about a new look for our cars.

I was traveling in an auto rickshaw through the rain stricken roads of Chennai when this thought occured to me. To those who do not know/ have not experienced the pathetic traffic conditions of this city, please have a look at one of my earlier post on the city.

Here the vehicles have very high rate of PDA and no moral policing applies for them, so you know they are an indisciplined lot. When my rick was bumped at the back by an oncoming car, I became desperate to find a solution for this recurrent problem.

I wondered how about having a very large car top carrier with edges fitted with rubber cushions or some other form of shock absorbers so that they protrude beyond the area of the car and thus ensure a safe distance between adjacent vehicles at all times?

Then, I thought why not put this to some good use? Since I am hearing everything solar around me these days, it didn't take a long time for the thought to take form. Cover the roof with solar panels that will power the car's air conditioners. Now from the energy saver's point of view, this has added advantage.

Sun ->Heat -> Solar power->AC
No sun/No heat ->No solar power ->No AC!

If it is hot, your AC will work. Otherwise, it will not! Smart right?

Now, will this not make my car very expensive? Hell yeah! And hence I say the government must make this compulsory as part of PUC certificate. Because of this, the number of cars on the road will reduce drastically and with that the traffic as well. People will prefer public transport, so less polution and congestion!

Most road problems addressed in one single shot; Howzzat?!
[Poppin' my collar with pride, and yeah... NO BRICKBATS PLEASE! My insurance has not been renewed yet! :-) ]

Five Reasons Why Anna's Campaign will be a SUPERHIT

Anna Hazare and his team has invigorated a long laid back population of the country beyond any question of doubt. But ever wondered what is it that has made it such a viral success?

Is Anna the superstar of this campaign, or is its success irrelevant of the protagonist?

I gave it a thought, and this is what I found!

Reason # 1
The issue in question touches every individual in the country at the core of his/her day to day problems. You thought corruption? No... I meant MONEY!

I was amazed by the different ways the campaign was being presented- 'Prices will go down', 'Alcohol gets cheaper!', 'No tax for next five years', 'Low fuel price' etc.

For our aam admi who is used to working hard through the day as cheap labor and complaining about his woes all through the evening over bottles of local liquor, the prospect of getting rid of his financial troubles is more appealing than anything (perhaps not alcohol!) and if there is a movement for that he will be there... at any 'cost'!

-----

Reason # 2
The immediate target of the attack is The Government and the wider target are politicians across party lines. Everyone hates politicians... because they are meant to be hated! (Politicians and political parties are probably the most consistent villains in India's history- even Amrish Puri and Gabbar Amjad Khan did comedy roles at times! )

And the timing could not have come more worse for this valiant 'Tughlaqi' government that nailed its own ministers and officials recently on corruption charges and exposed their own world-class scams.

(Psst... Is the affected DMK party supporting Anna Hazare's campaign to bring down the government? :P)

-----

Reason # 3
An old man threatening a pachydermal institution (you can call it an empire) to fast unto death in Delhi... sounds very familiar eh?

Yes, his Nehru cap (note the irony! It is named after one of Sonia Gandhi's closest relatives) and Kurta apart, many people consider Anna Hazare as reincarnation of Mahatma Gandhi and needless to say, our parliamentarians as their British counterparts a few decades ago.

And in a style that our dear old Viru Sahastrabuddhe said, ' ... and this is World War... three!', Anna goes out to tell the people that this is second freedom struggle. Why would I not want to be a part of it; something that I missed out in its first part and then ended up reading about in big fat textbooks all through my school days?

-----

Reason # 4
The success of the Middle East uprising has set a lucrative precedent for people to come out and protest. A bunch of agitated guys with the help of facebook can bring down an entire government... Wow! And there's more... You get noticed and quoted in some of the biggest names in media!

And who knows, 'you' .. yeah you the reader of my blog, could also be India's Wael Ghonim and appear in Time magazine's list of influential people!

-----

Reason # 5
There is some kind of domino effect here.

-First a group of inspired people initiate the 'crusade'.

-Seeing them, a bigger crowd of people from across the country hop into the wagon (thanks to social media)

-A lot of sensation and buzz is created around the campaign, so the media hops in.

-Media is there and so much of action against the government, the opposition parties hop in.

-So many people, so much of agitation and unrest- time for some international policing and there you have the USA on board! (today they send wishes, tomorrow they send the military- even if that means some more debt!)

-----

Now you know that Anna's campaign is indeed set to become a blockbuster... chartbuster.... golden jubilee.. blah blah... (I'm lost for words.. i really am!) but we must remember that these are not 'watch now - forget later' scenes from movies!

They have consequences, they have repercussions... So we must think broadly, decide wisely and act intelligently.





It is not about Anna, it is about India!

Chintu's letter to Obama mama ji

[Dedicated to all the Chintus in our society who have nurtured the great American dream since their childhood, and are now at a crossroads.]

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

‘Hari sona’ gaon

15 August 2011

Supremely revered Obama-mama ji!

Myself Chintu from India. You won’t know me, but I know you and all the previous Presidents of the USA very well. How is aunty ji? Last week in her interview to the Fox News she sounded like she was having a cold and throat infection. Ask her to take some tablet, and more importantly good amount of rest. Convey my regards to Malia and Sasha. Hope they are doing well in studies.

Mama ji though I was born in India I was raised completely American. No I haven’t travelled to the US without even an Indian passport in my name. When I was a child, my mother got American tinned baby food for me and milk powder that American kids (as the advertisements claimed) were being fed. When I went to school, my parents always spoke about Bittu bhaiya because he went to study in the US. They told me right from my infanthood that America was my destination. They drilled into me the great American dream even before I had learnt to construct my own small dreams!

But you know mama ji, it was far too wonderful to shun; at least when compared to the life back in my gaon. I learnt to grow with it. In schooldays, I had my room covered with everything American- the stars and stripes, statue of liberty, White house, the bald eagle and the liberty bell etc. I have watched more American movies than Bollywood ones! I knew everything about Tom Cruise and Leonardo Di Caprio, and felt it unnecessary to follow their Indian counterparts. I grew up listening to Bob Dylan and Micheal Jackson much more than Kishore Kumar or Kumar Sanu. I have sat up countless late nights and sometimes up to the next morning watching episodes of Friends, Two and a Half Men and How I Met Your Mother even when I did not understand most of the humour in them. When many of my friends fantasized girlfriends like Aishwarya Rai, Deepika Padukone and Katrina Kaif, I was dreaming and talking about Lindsay Lohans and Megan Foxes.

I may not know all the states in India (especially after they added a few more) or their Chief Ministers, but I can definitely name each and every state in the US and their capitals, and in many cases their governors as well. I have subscribed to the New York Times and I never fail to catch up with all the NBA action live late in the night (in India) even if that means going late to class next day or not doing my homework. I adore Kobe and will pledge anything I have to meet him in person. When we had to buy a car and we did not have the money for anything but Maruti 800, I was very depressed. At last I forced my father to take a bank loan (at high rate of interest) so that we could afford the latest Ford in the market. Now I drive it on the highways assuming I am driving down the countryside in the US, with loud American music blaring out of my stereo.

You know my list of most important things to do in the US have recently gone beyond 75 and are expected to touch a century very soon? I can’t wait to get there in a year or two!

But recently I read in the newspaper- whether it was in the Wall Street Journal or NY Times I don’t remember now, that the US is slipping into a double depression and that you are neck (or perhaps, head-) deep in debt. The people around me tell that the US and the great American dream will soon turn into a big fat myth from the past! Tears swell up in my eyes and I can feel the knot in my stomach, at the mere thought of such a thing. Do you know what it means for me mama ji?

It means that my twenty odd years in this world have been utterly futile! My one and only dream in life is shattered, and I will end up being a ludicrous loser in front of my friends and relatives. It could mean that I will remain unemployed forever, or take up farming in my gaon. I will never be able to visit those places I grew up dreaming about. It will be a very rude awakening from a pleasant dream that I have been living all these years!

Mama ji, I fall at your feet. Do not deprive me of my future. Save America! Don’t let it slip off. Shield it with all your might, for you know now that it is not just the American citizens who are Americans- there are a lot many of us across the globe whose dreams, aspirations, hopes and ambitions are pinned to the United States of America. So please bacha lo mama ji!

Pranams to aunty ji, and love to the kids.

Always indebted to you,

Chintu