Ginger & Cardamom

I got a chance to attend a wedding after a long time. The last wedding before this one was way back in 2000 of my cousin. So when Varun, one of my very good friends from my school days, got married. Many of our teachers who had taught us during our school days were invited.

I was present with many of my friends from school days. We were standing in a group all the schoolmates when our teachers (surprisingly even a prime minister becomes an ex prime minister, a boss becomes an ex boss, even a girlfriend or wife becomes an ex girlfriend or wife. But a teacher always remains a teacher he/she is never an ex teacher may be because you can always learn something from him/her no matter how much you grow)

They saw us came to meet us, and it felt so good. But I had my Eureka moment when our teachers were trying to recognize us. Of course they didn’t remember most of our names (it’s been 10 years since we passed out and they would have taught us like 12-15 years back). My teachers saw me and they were like “Prateek, You were the computer whiz kid”. It felt so good when people who teach 500 students in a year and they remember you after so many years associating you with something which you really cared about. It was such a pleasant surprise that all of them recognized me, not because I was a brilliant student which obviously I never was. But because I had a passion for something and everyone in school knew that. The passion was computers, programming, hardware, software, anything related to technology. I used to bunk the games periods to sit back in the computer room, I know how weird it sounds but that use to be my craze for computer if not till late then at least till class 10^th when I got my own personal computer.

I look 10 years down the line I was the whiz kid on the block, a computer champ, a solid programmer.  Suddenly I work for one of the most reputed IT companies in the word; I have become an engineer & MBA by qualification and a consultant by designation. But in this whole gamut the passion for the computers stands lost and defeated. The fun of writing a code and see it almost working and then spending nights to debug to finally see it working as it should has dwindled in the glow of corporate ladder and hierarchy.

This is a very incoherent and lost post. Just trying to tell myself how life has changed and things have gone haywire in a meaningless tryst. 

I have always been a gadget savvy guy. Be it the new music player on the block or the new phone launched or yet the latest model of a new PC. You would generally find me updated with specs, performance and more than everything else an opinion. And sometimes I do go overboard in buying one of these gadgets. One of these days when I decide to pamper myself with something awesome, and my partner in crime was Adi who as usual is always a chirpy party animal. I was on the edge of making a thoughtful negative decision when she pushed me over to a yes. I could hear my New Year resolution of managing my finances (read expenses) getting broken down in pieces with crystal clarity of every shattered piece falling on the ground. Why so? Because this is what I bought-

I have always hated Ekta Kapoor and the likes that produce intense daily family drama serials. But I never knew or had any objective reason why I did.
Surprisingly, today talking to one of my very close friends I realized why. They are the competition; I have it in me to create all those soap operas. Thanks to her that I got a brilliant idea of producing this serial. This is how the Eureka moment happened-
My friend was telling me that she had visited a Fortune Teller (Jyotshi) (yeah, don’t mind she is from the Jupiter) who studied the lines of her palm and told her that she would not get married before she turns 29. She actually believed it, and she shared her concerns with me. This was the Eureka moment which had the potential to change my life. As this is what I came up with in response to my friend let’s call her Jupiter (though she has quiet an enlightening name but let’s keep that undercover lest she might decide to kill me before my TV serial completes 10000 episodes) for a while-
Dil main Pyaar ki talaash
Aankhon main Piya se Milne ki aas
Kya Jupiter badal payegi apne haath ki
Lakeerein
Jan ne ke liye Dekhiye Lakeereinnnnnn roz 8:30 pm Colors par.

Now the whole thing is ready for the 10,000 episodes I have to just fill in the small details starting Jupiter’s life from 12 years when she had her first crush till 95 when he grand daughters’ daughter gets married just ensuring that she looks 28 and a half years old throughout the 12 to 95 year journey and allowing a series of accidents, hospital scenes and plastic surgeries as and when the star cast increases their price. Now that I have a script for the next big thing on the Indian Television, I need financers. Takers anyone????

Some professions have since times immortal caught the fantasies of the kid. I am sure there would be many little boys who wanted to be a fighter pilot and little girls who wanted to be teachers at one point in their lives. Another such glorified profession was scientists, you always wanted to be a scientist when they taught you inventions and discoveries back in class 3^rd. I also got the same bug when I was 8 years old studying in class 3^rd. I also wanted to become a scientist and my ultimate purpose of living was to make a time machine. I dropped the Idea when I saw the thickness of the books which an uncle of mine read being scientists. After all I didn’t have any use for the time machine. And till date I regret the decision.

If I would have made a time machine, I could have traveled back in time and talked Sarat Chandra Chatarjee out of writing Devdas. I am sure I could have convinced him to write a futuristic lifestyle novel about 3 looser kind of guys who screw up their life in IIT to sneak out question papers. It would have been a win-win situation. Our beloved writer would have earned better amounts in royalties and a times in history for predicting accurately the lives of Engineering students and I would have saved myself and the human race from the 3 degrees of torture Devdas- Dilip Kumar, Devdas- Sharukh khan, and the last and the most excruciating DevD.

I always thought I am one of the people with quite an appetite and patience for movies. I can enjoy almost any kind of crappy movie, even the ones starring Rakhi Sawant, Fardeen Khan, or Harman Baweja. But the league of Devdas is something so painful that it just beats the brain into a pulp, I am sure if in Ghajini, the villain had forcibly shown Aamir Khan all the 2 Devdas and 1 DevD whatever was left of his 15 minutes of memory also would have faded away. Thank god for Aamir that DevD wan’t released then.

I mean why since so many years people are hell bent upon glorifying the biggest losers. Think of a guy who is a jerk of first order and insults the dignity of the “Pure Love” and dumps his childhood girlfriend (I don’t understand why Ram Sena doesn't bans “DevD-asses” for propagating under age romance which also is dead against our so called culture; at least I will have one cause to support them). Then later he finds he was wrong, the girlfriend marries someone else and our loser turns to drinking. I mean what a lame story and there were people who made movies on this, that too thrice. The only change being Dilip Kumar & Unknown Liquor, Sharukh Khan & Whiskey, and Abhay Deol & Vodka.

Coming to DevD the most hilarious part is when actually Anurag Kashyap comes and tells on TV & radio that DevD is a different movie from Devdas, yeah Mr. Kashyap, it is indeed different it has unique blend of a prehistoric lame story and newspaper headlines of DPS, RK Puram MMS scandal and Sanjeev Nanada BMW scandal. What a thought, who did you hire to write a script a page 3 columnist. I also understand that DevD has a different ending, a positive one where the loser quits drinking and marries the s**t(well, I don’t like using the world but you used it in your movie too). Now let me make this clear, if you wanted to send a message across you could have made an ad film 30 sec long, okay make it 1 min long if you feel so much about the issue where you could have written in bold “DO NOT CONSUME LIQUOR, IT MIGHT RUIN YOUR LIFE” that would have sufficed. Our health minister would have arranged for the government financing of your film through tax payers money if you would have brought the topic to him over a round of drinks. Why the hell you needed to make a 3 hour long nonsense epic to torture us, to tell this. If you were thinking that you actually made a sexually stimulating DevD by your build up by showing the characters so desperate to have sex, trust me the c-grade porn movies have a better build-up than DevD. I mean who shows a bedding spread right across the green fields and a girl desperate to make out and a guy who is feeling cranky (Oh please, I was talking of Anurag Kashyap).

So guys anyone of you who has an access to the time machine for the sake of mankind please fly back to 1917 and beg Mr. Sarat Chandra Chatarjee not to write about failed love and the Drunken Men.