A moo point, basically …

So there’s a guy who has the following characteristics –  

- muscular, popular, spectacular, single, dashing

- owns fast car(s), is filthy rich, friendly, smart

- ambitious, musically inclined (plays the guitar), holidays in France, extremely popular and kind

- can’t dance.

And people are making fun of him solely because of the 4th point - that and probably because his parents, in what must have been a pretty rare bout of extreme drunkness, went and named him Pappu. Some folks have even created a controversy over this (link via this), which is quite ridiculous – probably even intentionally planted by Aamir Khan, who talks to the media only when he has a movie release around the corner

I never knew being able to dance was so important. This song might have been written by the aam junta (average person) to make fun of the popular kid in class everyone secretly hated, but all it does is just make me plain depressed. I want to be Pappu! I’m 25% there already !!

Most movies crave for hype. Aamir was released without any hype or real promotion, but it picked up purely on word-of-mouth publicity, which is probably the truest test of how good a movie is. But by the time I watched it, the movie had been so trumped up, it didn’t seem to be that good.

<digression> I’ve often heard people say mouth-to-mouth publicity instead of word-of-mouth, and I have without fail imagined lifeguards in red bikinis coming to rescue folks. Every time. </digression>

The actor is a revelation – one of those few actors to go from TeeVee to MooVee quite effortlessly – although I must confess I’ve never quite seen any of TV series. The characters are played quite brilliantly by all actors (mostly Marathi actors, which is a sad reflection on the current state of Marathi cinema. Again I must confess, I don’t watch it much ). The story is quite standard but the plot is very nicely written (my English Lit. prof. must be so happy I finally understood the difference). Calling this movie a copy of Phonebooth is like saying The Thin Red line is a ripoff of Saving Private Ryan. The qawwaali in the movie is quite nice too.

And yet, the movie leaves you unsatisfied. Why? I explain with the help of my source of daily rozi-roti i.e. MS Excel.

Fraction of Movie completed	Stage in the movie	Nice? (Normalised w.r.t. Initial Hype)
-0.2	Initial Hype – Awesome!	1
0	Start (Missed first 10 minutes)	0
0.2	The first twist (Taxi scene)	0.5
0.4	The Dongri scene (filled with crap)	0.7
0.6	The tale of the two sisters	0.8
0.8	Retrieves bag (Refer Video)	1.1
0.9	Final twist in the bus	1.3
0.95	The slo-mo in the end	-0.1
1	Fini	0.7

In true analyst, here’s an overdose of the same information – but this time as a graph. 

Clearly, Average (0.667) < Hype (1). Hence proved.

I still give it 3 stars. And I do think that people should stop inserting redemption for kaum (community) in every movie with Muslim characters (e.g. Shaurya).

Ed: I’m not alone in the disappointment/ sense of being let down. PFC and J Ramanand concur too, apparently.

What would you expect from a gathering of around a dozen of the ‘brightest minds‘ of the country (Note: quote-unquote AND italics) when they gather in a dorm room of one of the best Indian MBA institutes? (Note: No quote-unquote-italics)? Do they think/ speculate/ ponder? Do they solve national, if not global problems? Do they contemplate the fate of Indian politics, or better still – contemplate the fate of Indian cricket?

Well, think again.

Your surprise is understandable if you see the aforementioned group (+ moa) sitting in Room 231 (i think) in Dorm 21 (i think) in IIM-Ahmedabad and watching with full concentration and in an infinite loop one of the most absurd songs to have ever surfaced in the Indian pop music industry in the past decade. Each one of these guys has a different facial expression – if one guy is grinning sheepishly (omg! i can’t believe i actually kinda like this), another one is gaping in amazement (this is so ridiculous, it is frikkin’ awesome), while another fella is just plain aghast, as he nostalgically thinks back to the time when people danced around in white shoes and tight pants around columns made of fancy pottery.

The song starts off with a petite dehati-types (villagerish) servant girl dressend in a french-maid outfit calling out to her master -

‘Naashta taiyyaar hai sir‘ (Breakfast is ready, sire. Come hither).

After that, the breakfast is entirely forgotten, and all the song focuses on is the ‘come hither’ part.

Watch and learn -

Don’t read further unless you’ve watched the song, else most of the hindi references might seem vaguer than they actually are.

It came as a real shock – kind of like the shock I got when I learnt that electrons don’t actually revolve around the nucleus in cute little ring-a-ring-o’-roses- when I came to know that this song was sung by one of India’s premier female playback singers Sunidhi Chauhan. I had to go through the five stages of dealing with grief (i know – i too thought there were just four stages, apparently there are five!). And then I had to go through a sixth stage of lingering astonishment (I think I’m still in it).

What could have possibly possessed Sunidhi to agree to being a part of this song at all?
> I like to believe that I know Sunidhi personally (hence the first-name usage) because she went to the same tenth standard tutions as a friend of mine; although it is true  that we never really met and also that she kind of left the tution classes within a couple of months of joining to go and sing. I unintentionally let it be known here that she hasn’t cleared Xth grade.

Anyhoo, because I know Sunidhi so personally, I simply cannot fathom what hold the the ‘Ishq Bector’ fellow had over her to force her into doing this.

Maybe she wanted to do something dumber than her elopement and subsequent ditching of her marriage (I told you, i know her very well ).

Maybe she lost a bet, and the choice was either to do this or to ‘maanj bartan-shartan poochha- vochha in Mr. Bector’s house roz-barabaar‘ (clean utensils-shutensils and floor-vloor daily).

Maybe she had a crush on the Bector guy *shudder*, which made her hope that he would give a ‘zor ka dhakka’ to her ‘dil ki rickshaw‘, rather to her ‘louwe ki rickshaw‘ even if he asked her to ‘foot-foot-foot-foot‘ as he had given her her due bonus.
Maybe she had a bout of what is one of the most popular used defences in all american legal dramas – temporary insanity.

Or – and this is the possiblity where she redeems herself in my eyes, making me want to be associated with her and be famous again by induction – maybe it was all about the money. And the chance to sing ‘Issshhhhh … lo naaaa ……… phoooooone!’