After days of frenzied traveling through Udaipur , Jaipur and Pushkar I have settled down in to the daily humdrum. And gosh!! I remember how the Italians, that I was traveling with, had chided me for not seeing Lage raho munnabhai….. Yes, that’s true. A movie buff like me and yet to see Lage raho munnabhai. I guess that is the price I have to pay during days of hectic business activity.

Anyway, here, with release of DVD of Lage raho munnabhai, I get a chance to see it finally and boy!! what a movie this Rajkumar Hirani has made!!!!. After the utter disappointment of Don and Umrao Jaan it is a relief to watch a well made film that doesn’t pander to base tastes of audience and instead levitates the audience to its high moral ground.

For all the hard work put in by Sanjay Dutt , Arshad Warsi , Boman Irani and the cast, the true hero of the film remains the director Rajkumar Hirani. Underachievement and disappointment are endemic to movie sequels and when you are trying to match up to something as well made as Munnabhai MBBS you are always climbing uphill. Yet the fact that Hirani manages to better on his previous work is truly a sign of the immense talent of this man. And why not he has come here the hard way unlike the Johars and the Chopras and this experience shows.

What had amazed me about Munnabhai MBBS was the economy of dialogue and screen time. No character received a second of screen time extra than the screenplay required and surprisingly the same holds true for Lage raho Munnabhai though here the threads are much more complex. Of course some of them look contrived but then Hirani is not God and I do not expect him to act like one. Deciding how much screen time is enough for any character is an art in itself and Hirani seems well versed in it.

That said, nothing can take the credit away from the super performances by the entire cast
especially Boman Irani. He plays a Punjabi to the boot taking care of those small idiosyncrasies and avoiding any stereotype and the same goes for Dilip Prabhvalkar who plays Mahatma Gandhi. Vidya Balan looks gorgeous and even betters her performance in Parineeta. Of course, Arshad Warsi and Sunjay Dutt deliver stellar performances especially touching is the scene after Munna slaps Circuit and then tenders an apology. Simply awesome!

And if this bounty was not enough, even the songs give you a sweet memory to ruminate on. Nothing pathbreaking but simply delicious in melody and picturisation and then there is the social message. No pushing down the throat, no preaching. Just a sweet pill of morality.

The makers could have certainly made a more hilarious movie like No Entry or the likes but instead they kept the emotional part and made it a product they could be proud of.
Hats Off to these guys.
Loads of inspiration for my business…

First a confession. I have been a computer geek all my life and entertainment outside the online world has meant an odd movie at the multiplex. But this week has been a breakaway from all those geek stereotypes, in true computer geek fashion.

Well frankly, I was sick and tired of the substandard movies dished out over the past two weeks and decided to opt for the ‘ white man’s way’ to relaxation i.e. Bagpacking. It is the art of surviving on bare minimum while soaking in beauty through all senses without being obstructed by who you were before bagpacking.
Actually I was coaxed into it by a group of Italian students who have descended on the house next to mine.

Pushkar is a experience that just pours into you through all your senses. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes and of course the intangible enthusiasm all galore around you in this world’s largest camel fair. No wonder these foreigners throng Pushkar every November. I did it all, lived in tents, mingled with locals, rode in Rang De Basanti style albeit on a camel and gave some Italian beauties a gala time, no pun intended. I was drowned in a riot of colors and a frenzied burst of activity and yet I feel so relaxed at the end of it.

Bagpacking is seriously a neglected art in India. It has much in common with the ‘tirthyatra’ tradition in India minus the ritual part. You can truly let yourself go and just enjoy the existence of the world. I am seriously contemplating forming a bagpacking group back in Mumbai and anyone interested please leave a comment here. We need not really travel together but we can certainly exchange a lot of information, a sort of a support group.

Even blogging seems pale in front of bagpacking. On second thoughts, just kidding.

I decided to take a break today from work after an enormous amount of work I put in yesterday as described in my earlier post. So I took the liberty today of watching Umaro Jaan. So how was it you ask? Well let me put it this way. If there was ever a test to see how big an Ash fan you are, here it is. Go and sit through Umrao Jaan. I did.

I wouldn’t have gone for this movie in first place but yesterday I was enticed into doing it when Ash tempted me to eat the ‘forbidden apple’ while watching ‘Rendezvous With Simi Garewal’ and I regret it every bit.

J. P Dutta has made the big switch from war movies to musical and I think he fails miserably (in fact his talent at handling war movies also came into question with LOC).
Umrao Jaan (Aishwarya Rai) is the story of a beautiful girl who is forcibly sold into a brothel, falls in love with a young Nawab (Abhishek Bachchan) on her first dance and as events unfold looses her love. The Nawab’s father is opposed to their love and throws him out. But one fine day the Nawab dumps his love as hastily as he picked it up and returns to his palace and then it is upto her to win him back with the help of Faisal( Sunil Shetty) who is also madly in love with her. But she is again dumped by her lover, by her family and pretty much everyone else. Phew even my dumbest friend who applied for MS didn’t get so many rejects.

The point is that the story wants you to believe that they both are madly in love with each other when the screenplay has taken no pains at all to build such emotional bond. The plots seemed loosely connected or was it the slow pace that put me to sleep. But, what is sad is the fact that J.P. Dutta has learnt nothing from LOC. The era of three and half hour films is over and today good editing ( as recently seen in Lage Raho Munnabhai) is everything. And though this is supposed to be a musical the songs are rank mediocre. Annu Malik seems to be running out of inspirations.

As for Ash, yes she dazzles you with those looks but clearly its not enough to carry the movie through. After the movie I tried to remember one Ash movie that has turned to be a Box Office super hit and surprisingly there was none. I hope she gets her priorities right soon because she can’t ride this wave of popularity without results forever. Her age is going to catch up with her one day and then she would look like someone who was famous for sometime. Wake up Ash.

As for her die hard fans, my advise is don’t go for this movie unless they promise you a dinner with Ash or something like that.

I had been neglecting my site for quite sometime now. For freelancers like me, it is the only way to show our work and get more work. God has been great to me and as far as work is concerned things don’t look bad. However there comes a time in your life when you need to decide whether to take up client work or provide support to community, update your free stuff . For the last few months I knew I needed to look into my themes and solve many issues relating to it. With the release of widgets it became essential for me to provide support for it in all my themes. IE7 launched officially just some few weeks back. Checking compatibility of my themes with the new browser was of utmost necessity for me and for my users.

Like my other friends in theme community, I too get a lot of emails on a daily basis. Sometimes the question asked are repetitive . So finally I have decided to take a drastic step this month.

I have started work to update my themes. It’s a massive amount of work. I have around 40 themes to update (I think it would turn 50 soon ). I have created a separate domain www.kaushalsheth.info which would contain all the info related to the updated themes in a more precise , clean and perhaps more organized manner. I have added an FAQ section below each theme which I would start filling with the questions that are asked regarding the pertaining theme and answer to them.

Already Abstrakt, Abstrakt3c , Blue Horizon , Maple Leaf , Eastview , Anthosia , Aclide have been updated. If you are using any of these themes, its my sincere request to download the new version and update your theme to get the most out of it

This is perhaps one of the coolest Wordpress theme I have ever made. The theme is based on a totally liquid layout created by Arcsin. Its made in Shades of Gray and hence the name.

So what’s cool about this theme. Well I have added Theme Options to this theme. The admin of the blog would be allowed to choose the width that he likes for his blog. He can select from 3 options namely

1. Maximum Width
2. Medium Width
3. Minimum Width

The option page would be something like this.

Accordingly the theme would modify its width without breaking any content.

The theme also supports Widgets.

Preview:

Demo: here Download: here