Losing the Plot

Recently, it appeared in the newspapers that Bollywood scriptwriters had decided to go on strike. This piece of news totally took me by surprise: how many of us knew that scriptwriters actually existed in Bollywood? Personally, I would think that this should affect only about 10% of the movies that get made in Bollywood.

Sunny Deol and Bobby Deol, in particular, would join me in expressing total shock at the information that scriptwriters exist in Bollywood. “I don’t even know what I say. I just scream and look very angry and disgruntled. And then I go out and beat up dozens of people. I do this for three hours – occasionally I try to dance. What do I need a scriptwriter for?” exclaimed Sunny, when asked for his take on the scriptwriters strike. You better take his word for it – else go watch Jo Bole So Nihaal or Jaani Dushman – Ek Anokhi Kahaani, and then tell me if anyone could possibly WRITE that stuff. Sunny Deol movies just happen – you’re at the wrong place if you’re expecting a story to develop in any of these movies. Over the years, he has perfected the art of looking angrier, screaming louder and beating up more and more people – with the peak being reached in the mega-hit Gadar where he single-handedly defeated the entire Pakistan Army with nothing but a bore-well pump as his weapon.

While age did mellow him down and tempt him into the odd misadventure of a romantic film (with disastrous consequences), such mistakes were duly corrected and he soon went back to his tried and tested formula. Today, if you happen to chance upon any Sunny Deol movie on TV, you will in all probability get the feeling that you have already seen that movie even if you haven’t – such is the familiar pattern that he has stuck to in each of his movies. Only when you see different songs would you realise that the movie is one you actually have not seen before.

The case of Bobby Deol, however, is a far more complicated one - the total lack of a script playing just a small part in his career. In truth, Bobby Deol would probably prove himself to be unremarkable even when provided with a script, although none of his movies yet display any evidence of a script. Here is a man who has tried his hand at all possible types of films that Bollywood can provide – action, comedy, drama, romance and even children’s films – and turned out to be a miserable failure in each one of these. Carrying upon his shoulders the burden of the Deol tag, film makers automatically assumed Bobby would make the grade as an action star. Despite Bobby’s best efforts at displaying his obvious lack of talent in each of his movies, new roles kept being thrust upon him. And when it was finally accepted that Bobby was no good at action movies, other genres of roles started being offered to him. Bobby duly obliged with a string of unremarkable performances in each of these genres, even going as far as acting terribly in a children’s film!

“I like to try my hand at different roles and genres. Just because I failed as an action star does not mean I cannot fail as a romantic lead. Just because I failed as the hero does not mean I can’t fail in a negative role. My career is fraught with peril – not too many actors have acted in this many films and not managed a single hit. There is always the risk of the odd movie, however bad it may be, turning out to be a hit. That’s all I need to kill my reputation. Yet I have managed to deliver a flop each time I was part of a movie” says a proud Bobby. His track record is ample proof of this – from Bichhoo to Dillagi to Nanhe Jaiselmer to Jhoom Barabar Jhoom– each one a bigger flop than the previous one.

This is indeed a remarkable lesson in persistence for all of us: If film makers can still pin their hopes on a case as hopeless as Bobby Deol, there is no reason for us to be giving up on any cause that we undertake, no matter how hopeless it seems.

Let me super-poke you!

This is something that has happened often enough for me not to dismiss as mere coincidence. Each time I log into Facebook (generally once in two weeks), the next 2-3 days I receive at least half a dozen invites. How does this work? Is it that each time I log in, Facebook sends out an alert to everyone “Argha Sarkar logged in yesterday. I guess you know what this means...you better send him an invite”? And how does Facebook decide whom to send these alerts to?

Around a year back, social networking seemed a simple enough task. Everyone I knew seemed to be jumping on to the bandwagon by creating their Orkut profile, scrapping people left, right and centre, and discovering the surprising existence of long-lost acquaintances. There was the simple pleasure one derived from watching one’s female friends receive random requests along the lines of “Will you pliz make frendship with me?”, “I was luking thru ur profile. It seems we have a lot in common, will u be my frend?” or “Hi. I liked ur profile. I am also from Bangalore. Let’s be frends.” As a response, said female friends would remove their profile pic from Orkut and replace it with a random object, or a very arty-looking pic that however gave no indication of what said female in question looked like.

As a guy, the only unsolicited scrap you’d receive would be along the lines of “Hi. I noticed that your interests include Bavarian wild boars. I have started a Bavarian wild boars community on Orkut, where like-minded people such as you and me can discuss our passion for Bavarian wild boars.” Any visit to the community would have you come across fascinating threads of discussion such as “Why Bavarian wild boars are superior to Hungarian wild boars?”, under which some passionate Hungarian wild boar fanatic would’ve interrupted a wholesome debate on the merits of the Bavarian wild boar with a comment such as “Bavarian wild boar suckzzzzzzzzzzz. Hungarian wild boar RULEZZZZZZZZ!!!!!!! Go rot in hell, you Bavarian wild boar lot!” (to put things mildly). At this point the discussion would degenerate into angry chants asking Hungarain_WildBoar_4life to go mind his own business, with the choicest of expletives being hurled at him.

And of course, who could forget the communities of people with same names! Soon after you joined Orkut, someone else named Argha would send you a scrap saying “I could not help but notice that your name is Argha. Come and join the community of people named Argha, where we can discuss the merits of our wonderful name.” The threads in such communities would be limited to half a dozen members introducing themselves and sharing some interesting anecdote about their name, at which point there was nothing else left to say. If you think sharing the same name sounds like a flimsy excuse to form a community, you are horribly mistaken. You would probably come across communities in Orkut such as “Battlestar Galactica Season 4 Episode 8 is the BEST”, “Lovers of Judas Priest in South-Central Delhi” and “People who use a red towel on Tuesdays”.

You either fell into the category of people who initially showed a lot of enthusiasm for Orkut, rediscovered long lost friends, joined a few communities before slowly losing interest and reducing the visits to simply checking when one has received a scrap and replying to the same - yours truly being a prime example of someone in this category. Or you could fall into the category of people who would check their scraps at least thrice a day, dutifully reply to every scrap, send half a dozen scraps of your own, manage to wish happy birthday to everyone on your list, and maybe even start and maintain a community of your own, if you’re REALLY adventurous – I suspect both my ex-flatmates would have fallen into this latter category. The bottom line, though, was that Orkut seemed to be just one step beyond an SMS – albeit free of charge. But you understood everything, and felt like you were in control.

And then something sinister started to happen. First it was just one person, but slowly every second person would tell you “Oh, I’m not on Orkut anymore, I’ve deleted my account. I’ll add you on Facebook though...you have a Facebook account, na?” You decide to keep with the times and join Facebook – you figure it would probably be the same and you’d get the hang of it in a day or two. But lo and behold! Life just isn’t that simple anymore. Everyone around you is poking or winking at each other, someone has found out that they resemble Kareena the most among Bollywood stars, someone has super-poked you, someone has asked you to figure out which ‘That 70s Show’ character you are and someone has offered you derivates on the Peruvian Futures Index. And if you think that is where it ends, you’re sadly mistaken. The next time you log in someone has hurled a sheep at you, another person has rung a bell at you, someone has fattened a pig for you and someone wants you to participate in their coolest friend contest. Where do these people get the time to do all of this? Does it not feel like a full time occupation just figuring out what all these things are supposed to mean, leave alone participating in them? Yet, everyone seems to be doing it effortlessly and is still hanging on to their jobs quite comfortably. How?

And these are the same people who then start sending you invites to join Hi5, Gazzag and an assortment of various other social networking websites...how do they manage it all? For someone who finds it a challenge to even upload pictures on an Orkut or a Facebook, I wisely refrained from joining any of these new-fangled sites. Life is complicated enough with strange animals being hurled at you, you getting poked at, participating in sundry other quizzes and polls, you getting super-poked even though you have no idea what it means and why someone would do that to you. And then there’s Linked In, which I had joined a long time back under the naive illusion that it would be a good platform for creating some business contacts. Or perhaps that wasn’t an illusion, perhaps Linked In is useful...just that I’m not in the “networking” mode anymore. 

In the beginning...

“You really should start a blog, you know!”

“What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you write more often?”

“God has given you such a wonderful talent, and you’re wasting it. Shame on you, dhikkar hai tujh pe!”

While comments such as these make you feel special, that feeling disappears the second you realise that the friends who’ve made these comments aren’t trying to praise you. They’ve just ranked you one rung above pond scum in their overall ratings of all living species. So after all those false promises to start writing more regularly, here is what I hope will turn out to be my most honest and sustained effort at writing more often.

So where do I begin? Ah, yes! The economic recession/financial turmoil/monetary crisis that everyone’s talking about. And while everyone would be telling you “Man, the real estate/construction industry is SO busted. It’s going down...WAAAY down”; I beg to differ. Well, yes, if you are the average construction company owner who has lined up a few malls and residential projects, you might as well put that gun to your head or give a few melodramatic riches-to-rags interviews. But if you’re in the construction business in Delhi – nobody can EVER stop you from getting rich.

I’ve just come back from a two-week Delhi trip and if there’s one thing that hasn’t changed, it’s the never-ending construction (ok, and the unbearable weather). Over the last ten years or so, each time I go back to Delhi some new flyover has come up. Somewhere, some contractors are getting REALLY REALLY rich. One would think that they would eventually run out of flyovers to build...in that case, one could not be more wrong.

There seems to be two golden rules governing the construction of new flyovers:

1. There are ALWAYS bigger flyovers you can build. If you’ve built flyovers at every possible junction, start building even bigger ones that would help people bypass earlier flyovers.
   
2. Flyovers take time to build. So, at the time of commissioning a flyover, if X million vehicles are estimated to use it, by the time of completion there would invariably be X+Y million vehicles using it. Hence new flyover is already outdated. A newer one is needed. And so begins a vicious cycle.
   

Of course, no one is complaining. The roads in Delhi are better than any other metro, although that isn’t saying much considering the fact that three of these metros are Mumbai, Kolkata and Bangalore! But in these times of great financial peril, when you’d trust your local bank as much as you’d trust your local bank robber, it is heartening to know that there are still some avenues for making money, that get-rich quick schemes are still possible. So go ahead and head to Delhi, everyone!