End of days

If life on earth comes to a sudden end in the next few days, you could do worse than blaming it on me ("how can we blame you after life came to an end?" - well, aren't you the dickens!). I was at Landmark yesterday and as I was leaving, having paid the right amount (more on this in the next post), I saw cassettes and CD's of Bose: the forgotten hero placed strategically to make people indulge in impulse buys and I obliged. Bose is a Hindi movie directed by Shyam Benegal and scored by A.R. Rahman. Now why would that cause an end to life on earth.

Well, it was the first Hindi movie cassette I had ever bought. So what's the big deal you ask?. As a student in a CBSE school I studied (in a "to pass the exam" kind of way) Hindi for eight years. My lack of Hindi "skills" is legendary among friends. I passed Hindi exams for 8 years without ever learning to read (understanding what I read) or speak Hindi. I could write a little bit in Hindi (that is if I did not forget what little I had memorized the day before the exam). So I almost never watch Hindi movies and, while I have passed the phase of physically attacking friends who conversed in Hindi in my presence even though they could have conversed in English or Tamil, try not to subject myself to anything Hindi.

I bought the cassette because it was an A.R.Rahman score and because i read somewhere that the theme music was good. My first impressions about the score are positive. It is haunting and melodious (sometimes together) and makes me look forward to watching a Hindi film for the first time in my life. Also, Netaji was and still is a very interesting personality and Shyam Benegal is a well respected film maker. It would be interesting to see if he takes any creative liberties with regard to Netaji's disappearance and also how he deals with Netaji's contacts with the Nazis.