Tag: kareena kapoor

Aamir Khan and Alcohol Buddies

Over the weekend I was watching Koffee with Karan, the episode featuring Aamir Khan and Kareena Kapoor. It was one of the better episodes in the season, along with the one featuring Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt (I did not finish watching any of the others, they were damn boring).

The thing with Koffee With Karan is that it is highly dependent on how interesting the guests are, and not all bollywood stars are equally interesting. Even in this episode, Kareena Kapoor came off as a bit of a bore, refusing to answer most questions, but Aamir Khan was great.

In the early part of the episode, both Kareena and Karan accused Aamir of being “boring”. “You come to a party stand alone and just leave; You catch one or two people and just hang out only with them for the full party”, they said. And then a bit later, one of them (I now forget who – possibly Kareena) said “when I meet you in small groups of 5-6 or less you talk a lot and you are such an interesting person, but why is it that you are such a bore at parties?”

Then Aamir went on to talk about a party at Karan’s house where the music was so loud everyone had to shout to be heard. Nobody was dancing to the music. Nothing was happening. “What is the point of such a party?” he asked.

My friend Hari The Kid has this concept of “alcohol buddies”. These are basically people who you can hang out with only if at least one of you is drunk (there are some extreme cases who are so difficult to hang out with that the only way to do it is for BOTH of you to be drunk). The idea is that if both of you are sober there is nothing really to talk about and you will easily get bored. But hey, these are your friends so you need to hang out with them, and the easiest way of doing so is to convert them into alcohol buddies.

Bringing together this concept and Aamir Khan being “boring”, we can classify people into two kinds – those that are fun when drunk, and those that are fun when sober (some, I think, are both). And people who prefer to have fun when drunk consider the sober sorts boring, and people who prefer to have fun sober think the “alcohol buddies” are boring.

Aamir, for example, appears to be a “have fun when sober” guy, who likes to hang out in small groups and make interesting conversation. Most of Bollywood, however, doesn’t seem to operate that way, hanging out in large groups and not really bothering about conversation.

Yesterday, my wife and I were talking, after an event, about how if you are the sort that likes to hang out in small groups and make conversations, large parties can be rather boring. The problem is that you would have just about started making a nice conversation with someone, when someone else will butt in (hey, this is a party, so this is allowed) and change the topic massively or massively bring down the interest level in the conversation. Every conversation ultimately goes down to its lowest common denominator, leaving you rather frustrated.

And if you are the types who likes large parties and alcohol buddies, small conversations will drain you. You struggle to find things to talk about, and there are only so many people to talk to.

PS: Alcohol and good conversations are not mutually exclusive. Some of my best conversations have happened in very small groups, massively fuelled by alcohol. That said, these have largely been with people I can have great conversations with even when everyone is sober.

Romantic Comedies in Hollywood and Bollywood

Assumption: The median age for marriage in urban India is much lower than the median age of marriage in urban United States of America

Hence, romantic comedies in hollywood, usually end up having characters who are older than corresponding comedies made by Bollywood. Thus, Hollywood romantic comedies can be made to be more mature than corresponding Bollywood romantic comedies.

Data point: Serendipity was remade as “Milenge Milenge”. I was watching the latter movie a few days back (couldn’t sit through more than five minutes of it, as I kept comparing each scene to the corresponding scene in the original). In Serendipity the protagonists are around 35, and thus show a maturity that corresponds to that age. You can see that in the way they behave, go about things, etc. And here, in Milenge Milenge you have Shahid Kapur and Kareena Kapoor singing and prancing around like Jackasses. You can’t watch too much of that, can you?

Tailpiece: My all time favourite romantic comedy (across languages) remains Ganeshana Maduve, starring Anant Nag and Vinaya Prasad. I’ll talk about the virtues of the movie in another post but I can’t think of any other movie that even comes close to this one. Meanwhile, if you haven’t watched this movie, get hold of a subtitled copy of it and watch it. Now.

Dreams, daydreams, movie scripts and Jab We Met

The last time a relationship I’d invested considerable time and energy in didn’t happen, my mother told me that it had to do with my dreams. And my daydreams. And the “movie scripts” that I would often make up and tell her. Most of these would have a similar ending. The boy and the girl will end up deciding they will just be friends. And to move on in life. Typically, the movie scripts would end with one of them walking away into the drizzle. Or both of them walking away in opposite directions in the drizzle. It was because of the kind of scripts I would “write”, my mother would say, that similar things were happening to me in life.

Two and a half years down the line, I don’t seem to have changed. I still feel the same about a number of scripts. I don’t daydream anymore, at least not as much as I used to a few months or years ago. I don’t write movie scripts for fun any more. If I think I have an idea for a movie script, I start thinking about it from a commercial aspect. And end up ruining it. And though I continue to dream, and dream heavily, I don’t seem to remember too many of them. However, I’m sure that this kind of script still occurs once in a while in my dream.

I was reminded of this when I was watching Jab We Met earlier this evening. I thought it was a fantastic movie. Though Shahid Kapoor was playing a Lala, I could fully identify with his character. The first half, or maybe three fourths, was brilliant. The way his initial exchanges with Kareena Kapoor have been written is awesome. The entire bit starting from the time he walks away from his car till he is back in his company was compelling. At that point, the movie held so much promise that I was kicking myself for not having watched it for almost a year after its release. (rest of the post below the post. spoilers are there)

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