scan artist

so you are one of those old enough to have started out with an yahoo account. remember your surprise when you found that you could upload photos to your yahoo account and get a snazzy url where you could point your relatives and enemies to suffer roll after roll after roll of vacation snaps. signing up and waiting in line till the sole scanner in the computer lab becomes available was an experience. as was taking up residence in the lab for the rest of the night so you could scan rolls beginning with "My first birthday" to "when vetti boys toured chicago - yesterday". yup those days are gone

yahoo closed its photo shop and invited several folks who still had photos there (me) to migrate to one of many choices (flickr - yahoo's new photoshop in case you just woke up after a decade long sleep, shutterbug etc). i was only happy to oblige. i hadnt visited those in ages and looked quite unrecognizable in some of them (ok that one was the sears tower not me). i proceeded to choose flickr as i already have an account there that i occasionally post somewhat ok looking pics to. the photos got uploaded and what do i see. a tiny little icon that says "pro" in sweet blue. that is apparently yahoo's way of saying "sorry we caused unnecessary nostalgic feelings by making you go through your old photos and then made you move them". this is something that i have been resisting for a while now. i dont take as many photos as this $24.95 yearly investment warrants but if you give it for free i am more than happy to take it. it only lasts 3 months though. so lets see if that ups my photo count. quite sneaky of yahoo though. in all probability i'll end up signing for the yearly account. if u want to test those flickr goodness before you take the plunge, look in your inbox for that mail from yahoo and migrate your scans to flickr. your snaps will be happy. for 3 months.

passive voice

i hate sore throats. suddenly my room-mate and maybe my neighbors too are happy that i am no longer singing (yup no quotes around that - typed or finger) when i cook. several people are delirious with joy that i have not called them in a while and overall the world is feeling perky despite all the other miseries. i had to find some way of ridding myself of this condition and others of their happiness and landed upon a pack of halls. its working..slowly..i'll have a voice soon.

that obviously drove thoughts back to vicks and the sway it held over me when i was young. chocolate was always there and one had a myriad assorted sugar treats that you could invest in and let dentists reap the benefits years later. but i had a thing for the vicks pill. first off it came in a neat till packet unlike the twisty wrapper. it was triangular in shape - far more geometrically attractive than the usual, boring cylinder and it had one awesome ad going for it. i still remember vicks ki goli lo kich kich dhoor karo and the animated kich kich monster that would rotate and shrink to a point as a glossy,brown molasses like vicks screen descended down the magnified throat . everytime that commercial came on i wished that i had kich kich and given a choice would've picked vicks to be distributed in class on my b'day over any of parry's offerings.

now i am troubled by that stupid kich kich monster on a yearly basis. each time that happens i pop in a zillion mentholyptus pills and as one of them slowly dissolves i realize that i may have something to write about in the next summer blockbuster post. coming soon to rss readers near you: prickly heat powders and the image of cacti and thorny bushes on people's backs.

sivaji the boss

so after the long wait outside the theater we were let in but not before several imaginary guards frisked us. they removed things that may hinder us from having fun - logic, reason, the ability to comprehend gravity or any physics for that matter. those things have no place in mythology. you dont question anything when gods reincarnate even if it is only on a theater screen.

every frame is a technicolor fantasy where each pixel has been carefully choreographed to display a precise combination of red, green and yellow. the background music/rap mix adds a dose of adrenalin to some stunning fights. all i'll say about the music is that it has been composed by this guy called a.r.rahman. the camera angles and lighting nearly perfect in every scene, song and fight, causes the already outlandish costumes to shine with a new resplendence. did i mention the colossal sets yet? they were colossal. and while all this brilliance jousts for space on the screen, the style maven, who made millions grow their hair longer just to brush it back like he does, takes center-stage and rules the movie. he dons wigs, imitates other stars, woos his woman and fights with the energy of a sprightly young star in a 3 hour sequence where he is rarely off the screen.

there is a plot somewhere and it is as old as the sherwood forest. it is about one man creating his own government from the black money he reaps in dubious ways. who cares about that when style looking like a million bucks is bouncing chiclets off villain's foreheads and tossing coins laterally. the dialogs witty and clever in the first half are delivered with the timing that only vivek can manage. in the second half they burst out like bullets when the superstar utters them in his inimitable style. the scene i liked the most is the one in the tea stall with thalaivar eating vazhakka bajji with the villain. just awesome. the songs were spectacular though for some reason athiradee reminded me of smooth criminal more than desperado. some scenes could've been removed from the first half if only to shorten the movie but it looks like shankar decided to give the fan his money's worth knowing fully well that the black ticket costs are going to soar during the first few days.

while all the supernova references and "god returns" cliches bounce around the blogs, it may be tempting to leave out Shriya. she didnt have much of a role but boy was she hot. and that girl can certainly act and dance. hopefully we'll see more of her on the screen after this. shankar is the man behind the whole show though. he proves yet again that he is a master showman. if at all any god chooses to reincarnate, i am sure they will choose this man to orchestrate their entrance and manish malhotra to design their costumes.

we finally returned from the land of the dancing maharaja at 1.55 am and regained enough logic and sense of gravity to start our cars and drive back home. the 3 hour experience was quite unlike any movie i've seen in the recent past. and yeah i realize some lines could've been removed from all this if only to shorten this paean of a post but then i wanted to give you your free subscription's worth.

from the newsdesk, wherever that may be

the word 'sivaji' has become the word that was transmitted most via text message in a given period of time. earlier the record had been held by 'happy' followed closely by 'new' and 'year'. several people in chennai reported that they had typed the word so much that their fingers were refusing to type anything else. over across the oceans and mountains, recipients of the text messages interviewed in the U.S liberally cursed the senders (mostly good friends) in their mother tongue(mostly tamil, followed by telugu) for not thinking about the high text message rates.in a cruel twist of fate several recipients were forced to seek employment in theaters showing sivaji in order to pay for those charges. incidentally the second most transmitted word record is now held by 'super'

in other news, the CEOs of Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, even U.S.Cellular submitted a petition to the Super Star asking him to act in at least one movie a month. they also suggested his movie names be longer than the single text message limit.

how loud is too loud

every man has a breaking point..mine came when the electronic sounds that form the start of athiradee started to pour out of the speakers. i stood up to dance and didnt really sit down again.actually i dont remember much of what i was doing after that. the decibel levels rose to near ear-splitting levels and caused droves of demure desi damsels to change into dancing queens. the men werent far behind. many ran up and down the aisles forming trains and others who had been sitting were dancing in place (like i suddenly found myself doing) with arms and legs flailing trying to keep up with the beat. and try doing that while also screaming your lungs out. my voice is gone, my ears are ringing and legs ache. all side effects of experiencing rahman's music live. an awesome experience. now i am properly primed for sivaji next week.

the ipod of t-shirts

damn it damn it damn it..in the recent past at least 2 of my ideas have been lifted from my brain by some clever folk and used in their posts. the best one was to screen print tees with Che-like imprints of thalaivar and it looks like ravages in collaboration with mdeii posted something very similar like 2 months back. how they did the time travel and read my thoughts can only be explained if we assume these two are the time travelling japanese guy and the mind-reading cop from heroes. well serves me right to not write as soon as the idea strikes

i shall go ahead and post this anyway cos i have nothing else to post about. so the idea was to market to rajni's fantastic following. ok so he lacks a name that rings so well with Che as does Cho but you have to accept that his style is pretty revolutionary. commemorative t-shirts would celebrate his hold over the masses. the images would be from his movies - thillu mullu could be represented by the title scene where rajni pokes his head through a 'wall' and the back could say "IAK Chandran" and have a varsity-letter style number like one of those sports jerseys, basha could have any one of his poses and then just "ULLE PO" on the back or any one of the words of wisdom from that flick..and of course one from Sivaji..all to coincide with the movie release. u get the idea.

those tees priced reasonably (ie below the rs.500 range that tantra sells in) will sell like those hot cutlets one gets near adyar signal. we would blitz the market. coupled with a decent non-profit it can actually also do good while making money. (see i am not all that greedy).

p.s i'd like to apologize to any person who in the future will think of such an idea and curse me like i am currently cursing ravages (more than mdeii as I dont know him as well)..

did i miss anything while i was gone?

thats it. after a long, hard struggle i've finally given up trying to become a film snob. my computer was plotting to kill me after i put it through movies like Z, rashomon, to kill a mockingbird, following. i even saw the start of an orson welles movie called the trial. turned out to be the best over the counter soporific you can order for me.in its defense i watched it after a slightly heavy meal. and so it was that i landed upon chennai 600028.

the movie and its characters are out to have some fun and do so without taking themselves too seriously. there is not much of a story. team a loses to team b in the beginning and then wins over them in the end. in between, you meet team a. the screenplay is what makes the difference. nothing path breaking but some regular scenes get treated in a way that made watching them quite enjoyable. there are some that use old music in a different context - in particular a retake of a song from manvasanai. the cricket commentary had me in guffaws.

i'd only recently been tricked into taking up cricket for a day. i thought it was a tennis ball match but was asked to wear the full gear and face the cherry. watching this movie after that match was quite enjoyable. it scored close to 100 considering my recent watch list. me, i scored 3 and came home limping on a really stiff knee. i think i'm also giving up on my dream to make it into the US cricket team.

flaws of motion

motion is inevitable. speed is addictive. control however can prevent bloody,scraped knees. i learnt this first hand as i went through an out-of-cycle experience rounding a corner on my sister's bsa slr when 10. tired of falling off my sister's bike i quickly graduated to several first rate spills from my own bike. slowly balance was achieved and by that time my sis had upgraded to a moped. i took to it like a fish would take to a motorized fin. it could go faster and i didnt have to change the chain as often.as a bonus i also learnt how to steal petrol by watching the helpful petrol bunk attendants. my sis then went and got herself one of those kinetic hondas. being a speed demon, i decided to one up her and grace my dad's scooter with my lead wrist. there was one small hitch though.

left hand back brake, right hand front brake. right? wrong. the more variables that are introduced into a problem, the tougher it becomes to solve. i now had one break in hand, one beneath my feet, a clutch that could rotate clockwise, anticlockwise and otherwise in the other hand and a lot of confusion in my head. carry over the fact that the scooter is perhaps the most unbalanced piece of machinery ever invented and you got yourself a lot of problems on the street. the result was that between balancing and changing gears, i was sufficiently scared off geared vehicles for life.

(one has to take time out of life to ponder the strangely asymmetrical beast that the scooter is. now is not the time though.)

still peer pressure is a rather coercive thing. it makes people do things that they didnt think themselves capable of. i, for instance, joined a driving school after Ux started taking lessons. i didnt learn much with the instructor controlling most of the drives using his set of pedals. but after sitting behind the wheel for a month or so i entered the driving test stage of my driving life cycle. the guys who assess driving tests must be descendants of the vikings. how else can one account for the courage and sense of adventure that causes them to repeatedly get into a 4 wheeled metal shell of terror under the control of someone whose hand-to-eye coordination skills are hitherto unknown. i slowly started in the first gear, didnt stop or make my car buck like a horse, went into second and was just starting to dig my spurs in when i was asked to stop. that was it. the metamorphosis from relatively harmless on ungeared two wheeler to homicidal with one foot on the clutch had taken abt 100 meters and 3 minutes. fortunately for scores of pedestrians i didnt own a car and the few times that i drove Unhygenix's it was in iit where even the deer would hide knowingly.

i conveniently chose an automatic when i bought a car. none of that clutch nonsense for me. Unhygenix, ever so trusting, did let me try his bimmer here a couple of times - the time that it spun its wheels like crazy without moving an inch was the last. the burnt rubber can still be seen on a section of I-90 somewhere in indiana. the drive continues however sans any clutch or shift but with a lot of control including that one incident where with total control i skillfully guided my vehicle's left side onto a stationary pillar. my next objective is the space shuttle. heard that there are no gears on that ride(must be easy). i wonder if i can get underground parking though.

the woefully short

disclaimer: music, a subject that i know nothing about yet write up one pretentious post after another. anyone who knows better (i.e. everyone) please feel free to school me.

this one is about short tunes..the dittys that have so much potential to fill a full 5 minute slot yet wrap up in a minute or so and pretty much leave us wanting for more. i have no idea why they are so short. maybe the studio owner chased the crew out or the producer didnt pay the music director's entire fee. nevertheless here is a short list of my favs:

en jannalil therivadhu ( mozhi) : a spanish guitar, a simple rhythm and karthik's voice - this song just takes off in one small minute

hari gori ( majnu) - slightly longer. the indecipherable words lend a mysterious aura to it..seriously though, if i remember right it also fit in really well with the situation.

Ninaichu Ninaichu (sethu) - a love song on a rocket. maybe illayaraja felt it would not be able to sustain that speed so the flight only lasts 51 seconds

aathukulla athimaram (rajathi raja) - its an oldie and gets mention here as it reminded me of the other short numbers. this movie also has another ditty - ulaga vazhkayae - which never fails to make me grin when i listen to it.

ore nyabagam( minnale) - short and catchy

the only a.r.rahman number of comparable length that i really liked was the mangalyam bit from alai payuthey. though it is the slow paced version of endrendrum, its a good mix.

did i leave any out?

yuvan and his bling bling

yet another mutant offspring of tamil and hip hop snakes its way into the airwaves courtesy who else but yuvan. jalsa (remix) from the chennai 600028 soundtrack has hey-yo-yuvan dropping lines like fiddy drops bullets..wait that doesnt sound right. well neither does yuvan talking about riding his bimmer with the woofer and the tweeter. the lyrics still sound a little stilted. nevertheless yet another attempt by yuvan. the man certainly doesnt tire of trying this genre and as a nod to his western gurus, he manages a self-referential line ( "4 mixes in a row and i'm still in my game" what?) and even includes a diss at the end of the song.

though he regularly dips his toes into the rap world, he manages to restrict them to a specific genre of movies - the young, urban kind. for other movies he spins some pretty good numbers. check out thaaliyae thevaiyilla from thamirabharani or kadhal vaithu from deepavali. the latter with some fresh lyrics by na.muthukumar and a catchy tune is a rather nice number.a far cry from the cookie-cutter tracks that harris is rolling of the assembly line in his massive song factory. i am not getting into the debate of whether a cover is better than the original but it does get a little stale when you hear the same sounds over and over again.

here is a nice assignment though...identify the 4 mixes that yuvan has blended so far.. tons of extra points for using google...u will then shine like the sun and be number 1 like yuvan..rhyme unintended

ay dappankuthu !! uttalakdi !

i had a small chat with the roomie arguing that rahman would never win a grammy cos though his music rocks, he doesnt have hips...ok what i meant was that a shakira with her ruthless truthless hips was bound to hit the charts and have more exposure just cos she was more marketable than a reserved man from south india (that vande mataram video was awesome but was probably a bit too patriotic for an american awards show).

fear not for the desi sound though..hottest record of the world this past week on bbc radio 1's zane lowe show..mathangi arulpragasam aka M.I.A gets down and does the koothu at miauk.com

update: the video is on m.i.a's psychedelic site..Ux aka my legal counsel prevailed and made me pull the plug on youtube

plumbers wanted

at first there was dial up and the bits dripped to us through our ultra thin telephone lines like water out of chennai taps. then came tcp/ip connections or as we liked to call it "the one with more pictures of [insert covergirl/actress name here] than you would ever be able to see in your lifetime". these days the net is 'free' and i have a decent number of feeds in my rss reader. more than half of those go unread. lets just say that if the information onslaught were a snowstorm, it would take a while for us to dig our cars out. realising that bloggers like me might soon start misusing more weather related analogies, yahoo decided to introduce a spanking new snowblower called pipes

the pipes are a neat tool. quite like their unix counterparts. they are meant to let you create a sort of filter to retrieve the essence of the growing information stockpile. it took me a while to figure out that it does not work with safari or opera (the faqs mention it, i didnt think to read there first).but on camino/firefox i found it rather easy to hook up my blog to one of their 'modules', produce a stream of keywords from the titles of my posts and then pass it on to flickr which promptly displayed images that were not at all related to my blog. a quick search revealed that a hundred other folks had applied pretty much the same logic and so there are a lot of flickr related pipes already. tim o'reilly has more on this in a neat write up

pipes are new. the buzz will be enough to cause several bloggers suffering writer's block to chime in with their thoughts.they are still a little tied down in terms of what they allow one to do. but i'm sure they will catch on, more features will be added and ppl will probably clone that flickr pipe and apply it to youtube and google videos eventually creating seveal more ways to search for porn. but for the rather brief time that i tinkered with it, it made me feel a little intelligent. so get off that rss reader's scroll button and make yourself a nice, warm cup of filtered information. its a blizzard out there.

here is the link again: http://pipes.yahoo.com

slide show

a parrot riding on a monkey sitting on a cart pulled by a labrador. this strange menagerie working with such symbiosis is rarely spotted in nature. i spotted it in an awesome movie called durga a long while ago(and yes i watched it more than once to be sure). however this one is not about any of these species because there is one creature that above all is revered in the indian movie industry. it appeared in this movie too but i dont think it had a license or it would have also driven something.

if one were to slice the tamil/telugu movie industry pie based on species ( omitting homo sapien sapiens to avoid statistical skew and the use of mathematical terms), you will see that nearly the whole pie is taken up by the hisstrionics of various snakes (sorry abt the typo heh heh). there is a thin sliver that is occupied by the monkeys, parrots, dogs (all of whom were at one time or another called ramu) and the lone camel that bit goundamani in indian but i dont think they emote as well or contribute as much to a story as our reptilian friends do. u can watch any movie whose title has the 3 letter code 'nag' embedded in it and be assured of learning nothing about the reptilian life cycle. pretty much the only take home message from these movies is dont mess with snakes in heat. also beware of women wearing light colored contact lenses and forked tongues who love milk and steer you away from the mongoose cage at the zoo.

snakes have also appeared in several non-NAG movies. they would often play wingman to the heroes - frightening their lady loves and enabling the heroes to step in and display their courage. wont work as well if a cow or say a bunny were trying to scare the lady. they also play able henchmen helping villains to swiftly eliminate foes. there are very few folks who'd be scared of a villain with a monkey on his shoulder, unless it were a gorilla that is. you get where i am going. snakes are indispensable to a good movie.the ultimate movie however would pit a viciously venomous viper against the courageous captain. snake after snake would bite the captain and fall down dead while the captain would grin and say "paambu enna kadicha saak adichu sethu poidun" . would make the dog and monkey act look like a street act, i tell ya.

an open letter

someone (probably u current since u r the most recent export) call me and remind me how one sings A,B,C in india. my nieces have drilled the "now you know my abcs, next time wont u sing with me" rhyme into my memory and i cant, for the love of language,remember how we rhymed with Zed. and yes Ux, I have to go back and read that "Super Power Memory" book again. i forgot most of that book.

as an aside, i hope they are teaching all the indian kids to pronounce Z as Zee. i see a not-so-distant future where all the call centers move to china & other lands because they decided to teach the Zee and the indian schooling system daftly stuck to their british ways. wouldnt like the indian economic engine to lose steam due to a single letter.

 

tv with a twist

there are few things as irritating as knowing the end to a suspense drama. coming a really close second is knowing for certain that a twist is not what it seems. let me illustrate with the only example i know of. i belong to the average tv watching crowd. which means that i probably watch at least 3 unique versions of 2 different crime dramas(name these and pat yourself on your back- you've just toured the US from the east coast to the west), 2 completely opposite doctor dramas(one comic, the other acerbic), 1 insecure budding superhero saga and i can go on and on without ever reaching the end of my slot.

all of these except for the funny medico and the rookie man of steel are 1 hour dramas that have as their goal identifying either the murderer(a human) or the potential murderer( a disease). the trouble however is that to make things interesting, they introduce a villain about halfway through the show. the average human brain, being what it is, quickly calculates the time left (1 hour minus 40 minutes is roughly...wait let me open calc) and makes the logical leap to the fact that this cannot possibly be the villain. the villain has to be someone who is identified within the last 10 minutes of the magical hour. so one moment you are happily analyzing clues in ur mind and the next moment you realise that none of those are valid anymore.

a corollary to this is the crime drama that has an arrest in the middle but by then you see another apparently clean character played by an actor you know is more well known than the one who got arrested. case in point a law & order svu episode which has all fingers pointing to this indian doctor. when he gets arrested, you see Kal Penn in the background, as a janitor. any desi who is familiar with this actor of indian origin will instantly realise that he is the villain. he is too good an actor to play any role lasting less than 10 seconds.

my room-mate and i were discussing one possible solution to this issue a while back. just dont specify any time for these dramas. the show can end in the 21st minute or the 66th. of course we are yet to figure out the revenue stream from such a stupid idea. by the time we do that, you will all be downloading these random length tv shows into your iLens - the gazillion giga byte, Ultra Super Duper HD viewer, satellite communicator, 6 channel dolby surround sound stereo player, 5 giga pixel camera portable device that is actually a contact lens you can buy in green, pink, blue, white or black. your head will have a slight downward tilt when you wear it and you have to use iRenu to clean the iLens but gosh imagine your surprise when you discover who the murderer really is.

color me wrong

after hearing a lot abt the new opera browser (yeah the rock was heavy and it took a while to wake up and wiggle out) i finally downloaded the free version for mac and imported my safari bookmarks. running it thro its paces i quickly noticed something weird. my flickr page appeared rather dull. thinking it might be a browser problem, i quickly opened safari and camino to the same page. while safari makes my images look like they took a dip in a pantone river, the other two make them look like they've been washed by bleach.

here take a look for yourself:


so if it seems like i get carried away when shameless plugging what (to you) looks like barely tolerable pics, it is cos safari fools me into thinking they look vivid. if u've read this far and are even remotely interested in how macs are fooling you(us), read this

p.s. it might be worth your while to follow the pantone link from above. link courtesy:the hold all

oka oorilo oka rojulo okamokka autos

so i went to hyderabad for a day about two weeks back and was shocked rudely. no nothing wrong about the city. the weather was fantastic. crowds just like madras and a delightful early morning auto ride through banjara hills were all rather pleasant. it happened when my cousin and i headed to charminar. we boarded this vehicle that was commandeered by someone who can only be called the caretaker of dharma. in madras we would call it the auto and the person driving it as a highway robber. getting down at the charminar, the meter* showed rs 51.80.. my cousin, new to city, handed out 55 rupees with trembling hands expecting a short course in choice hindi/telugu curses or at the least a rebuke. we instead got Rs.3 in return. shocked badly i walked straight into one of the minars, forgot several website passwords including the one from where i had to print my online air ticket and so nearly missed my flight the next day. despite my condition, my camera managed to snap these




*an object that based on wheel revolutions and some amount of timing correctly calculates how much it cost someone to go from point A to point B if turned on at point A - in madras it sits on the left side of the auto and is used to balance the auto because the auto driver usually drives sitting on the right edge of his seat...auto drivers in madras dont need it as they are expert statisticians who use a combination of approximation methods and actuarial sciences to determine the mysterious variable called "flat rate"..footnotes nearly as long as the blog post, only on this blog

p.s. google helped me find this article when i was looking for a meter photo. obviously the author has not visited madras

aaj ki rot

so many movies, not enough keyboards..don followed dhoom2 down the drain that my head is. don pretends to be modern with a traditional outlook..something we know cannot exist. despite being non-existent, it managed to irritate me to no end. farhan akhtar seems to have tried reversing the roles of the protagonists and managed to confuse my memories of the first movie. while srk makes don feel loopy and eccentric, everyone else in the movie tries to carry off the cool,silent,brooding type and fails. to say that the second half has twists would be misleading. the first half actually had more twists and many of these were by kareena. the "twists" in the second half are more like stop signs on a really bumpy road. at least one of them is utterly unnecessary and you are given so much time while navigating the bumps that you see the others coming from a few scenes away.
considering that i remembered more of dhoom2, don now slips to first place, in the "worst movies i saw during my vacation" ranking

spoiler alert: the movie will spoil your memories of the old don

special a 250 peaberry 250

fresh out of the grinder, here is a mix of moments from when i was in madras over the past 2 weeks

crazy kiya re

dhoom 2 is an assault on your senses. it is packed with sequences that are visually incredible, emphasis on the incredibility. thanks to mayajaal deciding that ppl paying 200 per ticket should get their full worth, the volume had been cranked up all the way up to "are you mad?". except for that and the lack of a story the movie was quite watchable..and i just lied. it was barely so.

hrithik is an international indian thief, baby b as before is a brooding cop. uday chopra is again a tapori cop and bipasha, who joins the gang, is a model cop, nope not an exemplary cop, she is a cop who also happens to look like a model. the kind of model with a really healthy bmi that is approved by madrid's regional govt. ash is supposed to be the second best thief. she still looks good at 34 but seems to think she is 16, uttering "like" , like, a gazillion times. after hrithik and ash team up, hrithik forgetting his life's ambition - to write really huge A's on the face of the earth with his heists - plays basketball in the rain with ash and on the pretext of training, bungee jumps off cliffs with her. he feeds her burgers+coke, plays russian roulette and finally bites her hard on her lips. to seek revenge she decides to love him and punish him by not turning him over to the bumblng b. how they all get out of it alive and manage to maintain their tanned skintone is explained by songs and action sequences that must've had a subtext that i could not read. because my head was hurting from the visual and aural assault.

uday's sequences were somewhat funny but before a cbse hindi educated tamil boy could fully understand his mumbaiyya ishtyle utterances, abhisheks sporting water scooters between their legs and roller skating hrithiks would burst out of the screen. i'm still puzzled by hrithik's extra thumb and the date based mathematical puzzle that abhishek solves with his left brain, included to confuse the geeks into thinking that there is a hidden puzzle a la da vinci code. here is a real puzzle for you though - who'll be there in dhoom 3? i predict dev anand will return as a jewel thief. any takers?