Random Expressions

Well, not so much ‘meeting’ as it is ’seeing’ him.

But to think & imagine, that I’d ever be in the same room as the author I have adored, revered and often emulated, was - till a few days back - beyond thought and imagination. My excitement began building up the day I read he was in India, and it reached its zenith when I learnt he’d be visiting Landmark, the bookstore, just a few blocks away from where I live, on 20th May 2008.

In fact, in my eagerness I went to the store a day earlier than his scheduled visit only to return obviously disappointed. After all, that day was a holiday and I could reach on time. I had to twist my schedule a bit to make sure I reached on the 20th, which I surely did, but still thanks to the awful Mumbai traffic and a fire-fighting item that took up some talk-time, I reached the venue a bit late.

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God bless Juhi Chawla! The actor keeps getting more beautiful by each passing day. The grace & maturity with which she has handled age & motherhood is a rare phenomena in our industry. Not only is she looking absolutely stunning, she has also retained her inherent charm & elegance in a variety of understated (& often seemingly effortless) performances. And look the way she has carefully shifted gears from your usual heroine roles without compromising on either quality or quantity and yet not stuck in the mother/bhabhi/sister routine stuff (Bas Ek Pal, My Brother Nikhil, Jhankar Beats are some of her excellent post-marriage roles). Kudos, Juhi - you rock, and in Bhoothnath, your unobtrusive young-mother act is another shimmering example of how you can remain in the background yet ooze your presence…just like a mother in an average household!

In this film, she reveals yet another facet of her personality- that of being a very very competent singer. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that she has rendered the female portions of ‘Chalo jaane do ab chhodo bhi’ .

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There is absolutely no harm in showing attitude. This year’s top hit Race had oodles of it. Problem happens when there is no substance to support the style. Tashan - like Musafir - fails because the sexy swaggers and svelte styles has no back up in sense of script or soul. Leave soul aside, it even eschews a coherent story-line.

There is also no harm in simulating the seventies/eighties drama and melodrama and package it to suit the current sensibilities. After all, a sizeable audience slice still lives in the hinterland who feel alienated from the current trends. And dammit, we - the generation born in seventies - are not dead or transported to some other planet. We live too! So why not give us once in a while the kind of films we grew up with!

Farah Khan has delivered two bumper hits - Mai Hoon Na (a film I hated) and Om Shanti Om ( a flick I enjoyed) - keeping all those ingredients of the past painstakingly preserved ( in MHN, when the mother sobs in the climax, ‘ Mujhe mere dono bete zinda chahiye’ it was such a shining harkback to Nirupa Roy’s motherhood that wetted many a screens in the seventies) but gloriously packaged. There is a way of doing things and conjoining the two largely differing eras. There are films and then there are films. While OSO showed how to do it, Tashan spells out how not to do it!

Tashan is essentially a seventies/eighties film crash-landed into the new millenium and just doesn’t know what it really wants to be!

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