Men of Letters lolz burpie... that was a fun read. :D
now do one on smileys :P

Happy Days are Here Again shandana,
taaliyaan and badhaaiyaan. it might seem unreal to you but i think i can safely say on behalf of every one of us on chowk who`ve been privileged to read your writing that it comes as no surprise. someday all those agents and publishing houses are going to eat crow. i`ll now spend the end of the year obsessively checking amazon and googling your name. :)

The \'Ikes of March shandana - lovely read as usual and thank god for you! my mother tells me i can`t possibly remember the interviews that we all went through when i was your kid`s age but i do - they talk about how hard it is on the kid to be interviewed for admission into kindergarten but i remember having a good time while my mom and dad went through the third degree.

as for the pissed off contingent that have begun to appear - i hardly need to tell you to ignore them, do I?

Welcome to Desiwood my only acquaintance with carnatic music is from south indian bhajans such as those sung by MS. movies on the other hand, i know about.

Welcome to Desiwood dis childruns is awake ... but just. :( koi chai lao.

Welcome to Desiwood for some reason i thought Split Wide Open was directed/written by Rahul Bose. turns out i was wrong and I was thinking of Everybody Says I`m Fine which starred the excellent Rehaan Engineer. whatever happened to him? Its funny but Bose has been in a number of movies that i really enjoyed but were never quite ``all there`` for some reason. chameli, bombay boys, thakshak, jhankaar beats, mumbai matinee...

one of the things that really jar in indian movies made in english is the dialogue delivery. it always sounds like they`re reading off a page.

Welcome to Desiwood hey peepz... i think this thing is open as long as you want it to be. but one of us really should write something for the front page so we can continue in aman and shanti. i vote either swarrier or parihoonmain coz i havent seen artikuls by either before.

swarrier - (how do i shorten that?) i cant believe you fell for the crazy lesbian gypsy dance in mangal pandey. rotfl. aamir is a fine actor but his problem is that he treats every movie like its great cinema. ideally thats wonderful, but realistically it means when he acts in a hokey flick like mann or that awful kramer vs kramer remake with manisha koirala [maybe he just shouldnt act with her] he buys into the hokey-ness too. so the very thing that makes him deliver a great performance in lagaan or dch, makes him look like an idiot in all those indra kumar movies. yuck.
kairee sounds interesting. i`ll have to dig it up.

tinks - we could call you julia after julia roberts who played tinkerbell. or just plain pari? you choose, its gonna be your moniker after all. :)
ananthabhadram is right. i googled sivan and came up with his site, which is pretty decent. i`m one of the freaks that really liked Asoka - apart from its modern rock opera pretensions a la Baz Luhrman directing Romeo and Juliet. I thought the movie was gorgeous, Anu Malik actually justified his existence and there were some moments in the film when I was reminded that if you keep SRK far enough away from Karan Johar, he can actually act.

Kully - we`ll have to educate you on Bollywood. You`re not an indophile until you`ve caught the bollywood ka keera.

Welcome to Desiwood Re: # 51
parihoonmain - thank god! another person who thinks black overrated! i agree with every single adjective you used and i also thought that while whatever rani was doing was great, it wasnt a woman born deaf, blind and mute. i dont what that was. srk was great in his early uncategorized days - i remember the scene in maya memsaab where he closes the shutters on the train windows and he just leapt off the screen and i couldnt believe the charisma of the strangest looking hero i ever saw. and then... karan johar came into his life and he cant stop crying ever since. aamir`s movies fall into categories - brilliant or godawful. lagaan/sarfarosh was the former, mangal pandey/mann was the latter. ew.
i was really excited about the supporting cast in rang de basanti. they seemed like a bunch to watch. i`ve heard about that mal movie with the gujarati boy and my mother kept telling me to watch it but i somehow didnt. will do next time i`m in india. has anyone seen the mal movie directed by santosh sivan? i forget the name but it was apparently some kind of supernatural mystery or something, i`m excited because its sivan.

swarrier - i`ve seen kalliyattam and i loved it! i thought it was brilliantly portrayed and the guys who played othello and iago were perfect. wow.

thanks Majumdar - bemisal it is! i only saw it once and that too a pirated copy on cable but it kind of stuck with me.

Welcome to Desiwood Re: # 45
I think the mantle;s being taken over by vishal bhardwaj these days. i really, really liked maqbool and cant wait for omkara. i`ve also been hearing things about a whole host of first time directors like the ones who directed My Brother Nikhil and Being Cyrus. And your wife is correct about Amitabh`s slightly redemptive side. the only thing i like about SRK is that the women in his movies get to hog center stage. but yeah, amitabh`s a far better actor, esp in the movies he did with jaya bachchan and rakhi.
there`s a movie in which he calls rakhi ``sakhi`` and its one with vinod mehra. do u remember the name of it? its one of those weird movies that had very poor production values but the actors were so good that you kind of forgot.

Jay1 - tell you what... you can whine all you want. khush? was that the permision you were seeking? are you happy now that you`ve convinced yourself everyone`s out to get you? RUN! we might be just around the corner!
whatever.

Expression of Freedom: An American Invention Dear I-Dont-Know-What-To-Call-You-Anymore,

i really enjoyed this piece. i can see why Jang thought it lacked soul - its very clearly a history piece but then i got that from the intro so i knew what i was getting. as an overview it was great! dizzy gillespie`s bio comes out in april 2006 if you didnt know. i`ll be doing a review so this will come in handy. thanks!

Welcome to Desiwood Re: # 41
i have no idea about the ragas... just what i like and dont like. :)
dil diya dard liya was prolly one of the worst movies i have ever seen. i laughed my way through it and felt bad coz i love waheeda rehman. DK`s golden era was definiely in black and white IMO. the color movies seem like vanity projects. i saw a hrishikesh mukherjee directed meena kumari-guru dutt starrer (!!) the other day - sanjh aur savera. it was hardly his finest effoer but had some really sweet songs in it, including this bhajan that i had never heard before. i`m netflixing through hrishikesh mukherjee these days.

Welcome to Desiwood Re: # 36
thats it! Anubhav. lovely movie, lovely music. i didnt know kanu roy was her brother but i knew she had a brother who was in music somewhere.
mehboob khan;s movies, with the exception of mother india which i found way too shrill, were all a delight to watch. and then there were the bimal roy movies which were astonishing imo. bandini is still my favorite.
then there were those weird dilip kumar movies, the ones that were based on literature and were somewhere between trashy, enjoyable and horrendous. i was on bollygrounds.com and i was going thru their list of old movies and i saw ones like dastaan and stuff. there was always one song or two that captured my attention and then the rest were just so much filler. i think his Amar was prolly the best movie he ever did. just coz it played against stereotype.

Welcome to Desiwood Re: # 37
Its funny you should talk about logic because i dont see you even on a nodding acquaintance with it. To the best of my knowledge i`ve never asked anyone to take back anything anyone has ever said about me, even when faced with a gratuitous insult. instead i have always given as good as i got and i have never said, ``oh i am a woman, you can`t say this to me.`` in fact, i especially enjoy ppl of that mentality taking on pangas with me because it gives me a special buzz to grind them into the dirt when they do. if you are so concerned about the treatment meted out to women on this site then why dont you take it up with the men who do it instead of telling women what to do or what they might feel.

as for you being a bachcha, all you needed to do was kid the two of them back about what they were saying and there would`ve been an end to it. but with people as deficient in humor as you, i understand that might be difficult. i dont blame you for seeing it as an ``attack`` - your persecution complex is very visible, as is your need for attention and your complete awkwardness when faced with a normal discussion in which, as the rest of us know, it is quite usual to include a joke or two in a ``serious`` matter. of course, not all of us are interacting in the hope of flushing out a ``paki`` or two. this isnt a paki-injun issue or a men-women issue - its a YOU issue.

keep the moralizing at home. and if referring to you as a baccha in the third person is such a huge deal in your eyes, then i apologize. i had no idea it would hurt you so much.

Welcome to Desiwood Kully - mazaak sab ke saath nahin hota. rula diya na bacche ko? tsk tsk. i havent read your article yet but i will find it and then i`ll tell you how bad it is.

on a more serious note, swarrier, i have seen Anuradha and i thought it was a lovely film. I feel that way about most of Sahni`s films but this was such a simply told and mature movie. i think there were some really quietly told women centric movies right up till the eearly 70s when the amitabh juggernaut erased everything else, that were completely marvelous. there was this other movie with tanuja and sanjeev kumar that was lovely too. i dont remember the name of the song but its one in which there`s just the sound of the rain to accompany her voice and its fantastic.

Welcome to Desiwood Jay - I see you`ve met the Chowk gremlin... we all do at some point.

Kully - you wrote an artikul on jazz? kahan?

vaise all of you pls, go on with this discussion or, as jay said, write something. its a welcome break from all the braindead rhetoric on fp all the time about hindus and muslims and who killed whom and so and so forth.

San Serif funny stuff... i think subroto just wishes he`d thought of it himself. :)