Tuesday, January 27, 2009

And... ACTION!

It's been a hectic couple of weeks since my last post. I was in Hyderabad for a few days after pongal. Spent some time with my cousin and her family. Good fun, although I didn't get to see too much of the city. I'm a total flop as a tourist, so no surprises there. But what I did see of the city, I like. Naidu did a pretty damn good job sprucing up and streamlining the place while he was in power, and it still shows. It makes infrastructure in Madras seem very outdated (which is no surprise, since MK only has time to change the Tamil Calendar, hold the UPA for ransom, stick up for Stalin and write movie scripts. Who has time to actually govern a state after all that?)

Our college annual day is coming up in two weeks, and I'm directing four skits for it. After Hyd, the days have just disappeared in a blur of meetings, classes and rehearsals. (Meetings, because for a while it seemed as if the function wasn't going to happen at all. Strictly speaking, this isn't an annual day. It's more of a fest for students in all the different campuses of my college. So, cancelling it would be a pretty major blow.

Anyway, it's happening as scheduled so I'm going to be pretty busy for the next two weeks. I just hope I don't reach the point where I stop caring SO THAT IT ALL JUST ENDS!!! The upshot is that all this hard work is going to give me new "insights" into the way people behave, so look out for new posts.

I'm off now. A director's work is never done...

P.S. Many thanks to TheDropper for the list on how to deal with a 1/5th life crisis. I rather like the voodoo doll bit

Monday, January 12, 2009

Very hand-waving, but that's what most comeback posts are

Happy New Year! Yeah, it isn’t exactly New Year, we’re already two weeks in. And I’m sorry that there’ve been no new posts for over a month now. It’s just very easy to go M.I.A. when I’m on vacation.
It was a pretty great vacation though. Hectic, but good fun. We had a class reunion type thing. My dad’s old college batch had a reunion. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to meet estarra, soupy and a lot of others. I didn’t get to some things I’d planned to either (I didn’t finish more than 4 chapters of the Compulsive Confessor’s book). But I can’t say there were too many dull moments in the last month. Especially not after I started playing Ultimate Frisbee with the gang at evam.

I was working at evam again through most of last month. Went with them to Bangalore on Christmas day, where they premiered their latest production “The Importance of Being Earnest”. Made some new friends, got some pointers from the actors. All in all, good fun. If you’re in Madras sometime this coming weekend, try to catch “The Importance…” You’ll get discounts on tickets at their website.

Now that I’m back in Pune though, things are going a lot slower. I watched Quantum of Solace and Goldeneye this weekend. Quantum… has a somewhat complicated plot, and it didn’t help that I got a very poor print, which had half the dialogues missing. Goldeneye, though, is just plain lame. Frankly, I’m happy they made Bond grittier, less gadget-y and with fewer lame comeback lines after Brosnan.

I’m off for now. Happy pongal y’all!