So long, champ!

This post was due for a long long time. Actually should have published when Dravid announced his retirement. Oh before I forget, I am going to jibber jabber about him in this post (those who feel strongly about sachin and bharat ratna in the same sentence can stop reading now). But I was caught up with my ‘saving the world’ work that I do on a daily basis which involves attending calls, writing mails and other important stuff I am damn sure you CANT do on a daily basis.

  But last night when I saw Dravid on TV screen, it struck me that this could be the last time he is seen on cricket field taking fairplay award because no one is actually sure of he will return for the sixth season, which I hope, he doesn’t. Because asking dravid to play in T20-20 is like eating carbide induced mango. It just doesn’t fit and you end up hating it.

  Basically there are two types of cricket viewers in India, a) those who like dravid and b) those who are stupid. I don’t consider myself a big cricket buff, heck I cant even sit through a 50 over match. But there are something’s I just love about the game, dravid being one of them. He represents probably the last generation of gentleman cricketers; the one’s who walk away if they think they have nicked the ball even before waiting for umpire to raise his finger.

  So the image on tv was not pleasant. Will miss seeing him on field but I am glad he hung up his shoes at the right moment. The slow motion videos of him getting bowled on Australia tour were very painful. I was not angry because he was unable to score, I was disappointed because he got bowled. Mind you we are talking a batsmen who made the whole Australian bowling attack consisting of likes of McGrath, Gillespie and Warne slog for the whole day in Kolkata without giving away anything. They had to resort to negative bowling (they positioned most of the players on off side and started bowling on off stump) to stop him.

  Every cricket critic you read agrees unanimously on the fact that dravid style of batting is the closest it comes to ‘textbook in action’, so I am not going in the details of technique. And since I have not seen Richards, gavaskar or border play, dravid is the man for me. The good guy, team man, perfectionist.

  Maybe, just maybe 20 years from now, while watching some match I will get to mouth the dialogue ‘you know in our times when dravid used to take field……..’ to my children.

  Honor was mine, sir! You will be missed. \m/oO\m/

Arjun: indian animation turns a page

Finally, I got to see Arjun. It has been in making for more than 2 years now. All thanks for Disney, without which, Indian cine-goers could not relish a home made animated blockbuster, which, for a change, doesn’t look like a drawing board of a 2 year old kid. Yes, despite being a fanboy of animation movies I have skipped all the good, bad and HOLY MOTHER OF GOD homemade animation movies dished out in recent times. 

 My love for animation movies goes back to my school days when I loved reading Nagraj, Super Commando Dhruv, Bankelal, Doga (I feel sorry for you if you haven’t heard of these guys, read up!) along with Spiderman, Batman etc. So while some of you were busy sweating it out in the field and getting into relationships, I was in my fantasy world of comic books, cartoons and video games. So much so that a stuck stage in Mario meant continuous slogging for hours. On related note, not being able to rescue or at least see the princess remains one of the biggest disappointments of my childhood, others involved something called marksheets(pfffft).

  This was before I had heard of Disney-Pixar or the likes. I love animated movies because of the freedom it bestows upon the creator. The only limit is the imagination. If you can imagine, it’s possible. The good part of reading fiction is you are free to imagine it the way you want to. The more vivid imagination you or the more interesting picture author paints, the more you enjoy reading it; and the sad part is when you see it reduced to mere mortality in live action movies. Ask any harry potter fan and he/she will tell you how disappointed they are with the movies, though personally not big on potter, i agree. Its actually tough to create fiction in a live action movie because of expectations and that’s where animation scores. 

  Now imagine what it can do to the epics like Chandrakanta, Alif Laila, Vikram Baitaal or a Hatim Tai. I did not add Mahabharata to this because they will require at least a trilogy to show it completely which doesn’t seem feasible right now. But you do get a glimpse of how awefantasticsome would that be, if and when, they actually decide to do it in the process of watching Arjun. You are left gasping for breath with the lavishness of the whole frame when the protagonist jumps in the pond to spear the goldfish. I could only compare it with what I saw in B R Chopra’s work , which wont be fair, because frankly speaking I wouldn’t have bothered with this movie if it weren’t for him. He made Mahabharata interesting for me with whatever means he had at his disposal at that time.

 

  Animation quality of Arjun however is generations behind Pixar’s other works like UP or Ratatouille but this has certainly set the wheels rolling. People that be, will notice animation movies as a sustainable market and who knows we might even get to see a full blown ‘Rajnagar ki tabahi’ featuring Nagraj and Super commando dhruv battling it out with Grand master Robo in a action packed 3D blockbuster or a KroorSingh in all his glory (YAKKOO). After all Toy Story was an experimental movie too.

  I have my fingers crossed. In the mean time, go watch it on the big screen. And those who are stick stuck with the idea of animation being for kids, GROW UP!  \m/oO\m/