And they are married!!!

I love Hindi movies and one of my guilty pleasures is to check out movie information on Rediff. I love to read about who is dating whom, which movies are coming out when. I don't get to watch Hindi movies the way I used to in India or even in California--part of the reason is accessibility and the other lack of time to actually sit and watch a movie alone without kids or husband.

So the BIG news in Bollywood has been the Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan wedding. And Rediff went all out with pictures and news--the blow-by-blow account of what happened. For you non-Indians, Ash and Abhishek are like the Brad and Angelina of Bollywood. They were even dubbed Abhiwarya.

These two actors act in the cheesiest Indian movies, say the weirdest dialogue, show skin (lots of it lately) and yet they're religious and instead of heading for a honeymoon full of monkey sex, the couple went to Tirupati, a big and renowned temple in southern India. The dichotomy of these actors living a sinful life by all accounts--money, fame, fortune and other unspeakable stuff, and yet praying at every temple they can find feels a little contrived. In any case, if you don't know anything about Bollywood, check out the Ash-Abhishek wedding at www.rediff.com/movies/ashabhiwed.html.

Aishwarya is as pretty as can be and Abhishek is rather nice looking, but he dude will always suffer in comparison to his father, Amitabh Bachchan, the man I had a crush one while I was growing up. He now has Sean Connery's appeal on steroids--the man is huge in India. The Big B as he's called is way cooler than his son.

So for the past few days I've been watching stuff on YouTube about the wedding, going through articles on Rediff, it's been very entertaining.

What's your guilty pleasure?

The loss of a sense of security

It’s official, violence is now in our everyday lives, get used to it.

I really don't want to write this blog entry. I want to pretend that everything is fine and write about seeing the new James Bond on DVD. (Craig Daniels is one good looking man.)

But I’m completely baffled at what happened in Virginia, horrified, and devastated thinking about the families who lost a loved one because some guy went cuckoo and feel compelled to write thid. (I think it's time for a serious gun debate in the US—but I'm not sure this is horrific enough for politicians to touch that with a ten-foot pole.)

Violence is encroaching into our lives with every news report we hear about shootings, bombs, and death. Over 165 people died in a bomb attack in Iraq and over 150 were injured the day Cho Seung-Hui decided he'd kill a few people and destroy their families before he killed himself. Every day, people are dying in Iraq, brutally, yet it's the 32 people in Virginia my heart aches for, why is that? Is it because it's happening so much in Iraq that the media isn't covering it with the same reverence as it covers the Virginia Tech massacre? Or is it something else, something insidious that until it's happening in our neck of the woods, we don't worry about it? I don’t live in a place like Iraq, so I don’t have to worry about their problems; but I do live in the Western World and if kids are shooting other kids here, this is a matter of concern for me.

I'm getting tired of all this violence, real and televised. With every such news story, my sense of security slips a couple of notches. I was talking to someone in Denmark and she told me that her son lost a few teeth and had his jaw broken outside a bar, while he was waiting for a cab. Three men approached him, two held him down and one guy beat him. Then when some people noticed what was happening, the men ran away. The police said there really wasn't much they could do—for some odd reason, Danish police doesn't patrol areas where violence of this type occurs.

Once someone broke into our car and stole our DVD player, right outside our house, in our driveway. We called the police and they said they'll send us the report for insurance purposes but they can't help us any further. They also admitted that where we lived, there had been cases of such theft (ours is such a suburbian neighbourhood that suburbia will want to throw up). So my husband asked what they'd do about it, the answer was, "There's nothing we can do. No one has gotten hurt yet."

It feels like everywhere I turn, I see my sense of security stripped down. How is your sense of security braving this violent world?

Let's talk about The Namesake

I have to admit that I bought the book when it came out and just couldn't get into it. I came to the part where Ashima was thinking about wrong it was to have a baby without her family present and shut the book. I couldn't read another immigrant angst novel.

Then when the movie came out, I saw some previews and got the book on Audible.co.uk. I was halfway through the book, not liking it much, partly because Sarita Chaudhary pronounces all Indian words like an American and that annoyed me. What also annoyed me was how I could hear the writer throughout the book, read her surprise at telling someone about this strange Indian tradition and that. Indian traditions aren't strange or exciting to me, I grew up with them, and they’re a way of life.

Then I saw the movie.

The scene in the beginning when Ashima is in New York for the first time and mixes rice krispies with mirchi powder and nimboo broke my heart. I started crying then. I cried a lot throughout the movie. The power of the story came through in the movie because of Irfan and Tabu. Ashima is two-dimensional, almost invisible in the book, in the movie she's alive, she has chutzpah--she is interesting. Kal Pen was an amazing Gogol and even the woman who played his wife Moushami was fabulous. The movie had condensed the book, squeezing out the beauty of it so that we could see it.

The book in itself I found extremely laborious. Jhumpa Lahiri told us about how people felt, but never showed us. I felt strangely detached from the people I was reading about (or listening in this case)--but not after I saw the movie. After I saw the movie, they became real.

I always tell people and even myself that I don't miss India. What I miss is the food, which is true, but after The Namesake I wondered if my not missing India is a defence mechanism. Maybe I don't want to go through the heartbreak Ashima and Ashok go through and have decided to not miss India. Or maybe email and cell phones have made the world smaller and I talk to my parents twice a week and don't feel that hole in my heart that Ashok and Ashima did.

So, I recommend the movie. I saw it with a friend of mine (she's ethnically Sri Lankan) and her parents came to the US around the same time Ashok and Ashima did. Her father is a neurosurgeon, but they started out in a small apartment in New York--she felt a tug on her heartstrings as well, felt a strong connection with the people because they felt like they were her own.

The book...read at your own risk. It was a good book; don't get me wrong, it's just that I expected it to knock my socks off, which it didn't.

The death of an American writer

I recently saw Kurt Vonnegut on John Stewart's The Daily Show. I thought he was funny, charming and irreverent, a lot like his books I'm sure. I meant to read more Vonnegut then and never got around to doing it. And now for some odd reason I feel bad about not having read more of his books because he's died—and it somehow feels disrespectful.

I never read Vonnegut as a child—growing up in India we didn't have a Vonnegut, Salinger childhood—it was more of an Enid Blyton, Mark Twain sort of childhood.

I read Slaughterhouse-Five after I saw whatsisname that kid from Dawson’s Creek carry it around in the movie Varsity Blues (you never know when and how inspiration strikes). The bombing of Dresden found new meaning for me, not only because I found out that Vonnegut crouched down in Slaughterhouse-Five while nearly 100,000 civilians died, but one of my close friend's grandmother was one of the civilians who survived. I liked Slaughterhouse-Five, it reminded me a little of Catch-22, which is one of my favorite books. The books are very different though they have the same theme about ridiculing war. Catch-22 is a dark comedy about war while Slaughterhouse-Five is a whimsical satire on war. Yossarian is not Billy Pilgrim, but I’m sure if they’d met, they’d have gotten along like a house on fire.

I can't say I'm going to miss Vonnegut because Slaughterhouse-Five is the only book of his that I have read (though A Man Without a Country looks very interesting and could be next on my list), but I wanted to say something to respect him and remember him on the day he died. Because even though I have only read one of his books, I have always known him to be a great American writer—I guess now, after he's died, I will make that extra effort to learn more about him and his writing.

If you're a fan, do let me know what books of his you liked best—and if you're not, maybe it's time to pick up one of his books and give him a shot; you owe it to the dead guy.

Ocean's 13

There are some movies that you watch because they make you think and there are some that make you laugh. Now, Jim Carrey doesn't do it for me, and neither does that Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller combo.

I used to not like Brad Pitt, but then I watched Ocean's 11 and fell in love with the movie. It was great. I watched Ocean's 12 and loved it too. Don't judge me!

And the trailer for Ocean's 13 has been released...check it out.

I mean, how can a movie with Al Pacino, Ellen Barkin (can anyone say The Big Easy), George Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Bernie Mac and...go wrong?

Enjoy the trailer!