Adieu 2008

Another year, three hundred and sixty six days and probably some million minutes & milliseconds are gone with the year 2008. Some hopes, some learning, some misunderstandings, some loving moments, some cheerful nights and of course, some lonely nights – everything was there what life & death can offer. Shutter of the mind kept on shooting each moment with a greater clarity every day and the sorrowed side is heavier, if I divide the snaps.

The mid-year storm of loosing someone close to my heart was the most terrible time and the fag-end of the year made a friend a distant one. Someone’s melancholies and someone’s suppressed depression – both are worth giving another look; but who has time even if the feelings are more prominent than the presence of the human beings. Life takes it all, the million milliseconds, all three hundred and sixty six days…one complete year!

Ghajini: another entertainer

A man can only remember incidents of last 15 minutes; he is searching the killer of his fiancée, but doesn’t know how he looks like. He always carries a camera, keeps photograph of each place & person he comes across and also takes the photograph of the person he killed – just to confirm if he is ‘Ghajini’!

What a fantastic storyline, but finally the film turned out to be another entertainer movie which has a new face actress, couple of songs and loads of bloody violence. After the release of ‘Taree Zameen Par’, serious movie lovers kept a lot of hope from this Aamir Khan starred film, but the director couldn’t keep that.

Sanjay Singhania (Aamir Khan) is the chairman of a mobile phone company & is a high-flying business tycoon who falls in love with a small time model Kalpana (Asin, the newest face in bollywood). The first half of the story reveals how a businessman like him could fall in love with a small time model who just does couple of ads for some small time brands. After the first 30 minutes of the beginning - where the director was able to keep the viewers with straight back; the flashback starts.

And finally the second half of the movie goes in finding Ghajini and at the end - the revenge! The director is successful in keeping the secret of ‘what happened on 1st January, 2006’; but that pulled the movie to quite a length. Had the editing been little compact, viewers would’ve enjoyed the movie. At times it felt like a prolonged revenge story.

Asin did a good job taking into consideration that it’s her first film. Aamir is very matured and given his best to bring out the role. Kudos for his eight pack abs which he did for this movie and it worked well. Music has nothing great to remember.

Aamir, we’ve lot of expectations from you and surely you can make films beyond a mere entertainer.

Lodha: the unprivileged community

It isn’t far from the sub-divisional town Jhargram in West-Bengal. It isn’t far from the streets where high-voltage halogen lights kiss the roads every evening. It isn’t far from any amenities of a civilized society. But this distance of few kilometers has taken ages for all those bare minimum necessities to arrive to the community named Lodha.

They are the original son of the soil of this part of West-Bengal and they are present in all available history on the western border of the state. We are independent for more than 63 years now and even then we couldn’t empower them to live a respectable life. Here are some images which will talk about their current lifestyle:

The eldest daughter of the family would be around 8 years old whereas the youngest one would not have seen her first birthday yet. Both the parents work at somebody else’s paddy field work as a daily labor…and that’s their way of earning for living; that also just in this harvesting season. As there’s nobody to take care of the youngest child, the eldest one brings her to school along with a milk feeding bottle for her. Most of us cannot even think of that 8 years old is taking care of 8 months old even at her school! At times it makes me think – is it really a school or a safe place for both the kids to spend the day!

Here’s a lady of Lodha community who has not crossed her teens and has multiple kids. At the temperature of around 8 degree centigrade, she doesn’t have a minimum woolen stuff to cover her youngest kid! With minimum or no education, this community arranges marriage of their daughters when they are just around 14 years old. Very recently a local NGO has put their step forward to make them understand that it’s not the right time for their daughters to get married. But alas, nobody can answer that how the poor father would feed his daughter if she doesn’t get married. Their daughters’ marriage is nothing but getting rid of one person from his list of endless dependents…nothing else!

Here’s a closer look to a house of family belongs to the Lodha community. Made of straw & mud, it doesn’t have a door which can stop the chilling wind at night! The entire house would not be more than 250 square foot which consists of a kitchen & a bedroom! They are apparently happy, get married in this house, give birth to nothing less than 5 kids (the number reduced after lots of meetings with the NGOs), they grow up & again settle down somewhere nearby. This is getting repeated generation after generation in this community and we preferred to be more content with other more important things of life like stock market, growth of GDP and the list goes on…!