Two of the best!!!!

HUGE thanks to Tomato Peeleepeena and Shrenik for making introducing me to these 2 fantastic videos.

Now this first video contains a very dignified gentleman of South Indian origin. He's a hit with the Idli munching, hip crunching sexy sirens from southern India. If I was a girl from Chennai, I'd wanna jump the guy now. Enough said.



And this second one... well - younger South Indian bloke. He's brash but has the moves. His gyrations make Benny Lava eat papaya (watch the video)!!

V.IMP If you ever go to the Philippines embassy!

Somebody sent me an email with a bunch of "guidelines" to keep in mind before you go to the Philippines embassy (italicized parts are my own comments):

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Visitors are requested to come appropriately attired. The Embassy will not allow entry to skimpily attired and barefoot people (so if it's just one of these you're ok??) or those wearing the following who are deemed to be inappropriately attired:

1) Shorts with cuts of more than three (3) inches above the knee;
2) Slippers; (WHY???)
3) Mini-skirts with cut of more than three (3) inches above the knee; (makes you wonder why they netted out at three (3) inches... why not two (2) or four (4)... Plus - with the height of the average filipino woman, you're probably talking about getting very close to the general punani(!!) region three (3) inches above the knee - so there goes the no-skimpily-dressed-people rule)
4) Underwears (briefs, panties, bras, boxer shorts, kamiseta) (ok - now you're not allowed to wear underwear to the embassy????? I'm getting some mixed messages here!!!!)
5) Shirts/blouses with plunging necklines; (especially for males with man-boobs)
6) Shirts/blouses that intentionally show the belly button/navel; (so if you show your navel by mistake you're ok!!???)
7) Pants/shorts with very low waistlines that reveal portions of private parts such as the buttocks; (BWAHAHAHAHA!!! Ass crack alert)
8) Transparent shirts and pants that show undergarments.

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Now I know this is unbelievable... so you can check it out on the site yourself:
http://philippine-embassy.org.sg/index.cfm?GPID=10

The 4th thing I hate about Harry Potter

Carrying on from a few posts ago (3 things I hate about Harry Potter) - now JK has just given me a 4th...

Her announcement that Albus Dumbledore was gay. Where did that come from??? Why does it matter?
(a) It had nothing to do with the story.
(b) The series is done and dusted.
(c) The guy was dead before the last book came out.

Few possible reasons she did this:
(a) She was bored (looks a likely theory given she doesn't have much to write about after Harry had his babies)
(b) She wanted me to make Mahogany react to her announcement, put up a great post loosely related to discrimination against gay people, so that I could make a point to Shrenik in the comments of my last post (something tells me this theory is unlikely)
(c) She's branching out into her next series which, staying true with Hollywood trends will be kind of a prequel to Harry Potter - a throwback to Dumbledore's younger years - Discover Dumbledore!

Whats next..... Snape and Date Rape - scandal - Harry is really Snape's son!??

Well - I guess this blog post is testament to the fact that she's keeping people talking about it.

Monkey business

Provocative thought... Racism, in large part, is a fabrication of the paranoid.

Disclaimer... I'm not saying it doesn't exist or it's ok to have it. If it's a cause for limiting opportunity based on the color of someone's skin or where they come from then it shouldn't have any place in any sphere of life... but in large part, we make too much of a small thing.

Take the recent uproar in cricket against the monkey chants directed at Andrew Symonds (Australian player) during the Vadodra one-dayer (and again in the Mumbai one-dayer). Now here's some perspective - the average Joe (in Vadodra, he'd be the average Jayant) does not understand that calling someone a monkey is racist at all. Young Jayant feels Symonds looks like a monkey - it could be his size, his hair, his body language.. whatever - and so he called him a monkey. BIG DEAL! We all give people labels based on how they look... she looks "hot", she's got a big nose, he's built like a truck, he's fat! Just like that - he's a monkey. Jayant has nothing against where he comes from, where he's going or the color of his skin. And by no means is Jayant capable of limiting Symonds' opportunity to beat the crap out of the Indian cricket team (which he comprehensively did!).

Separately - a certain part of India prays to monkeys. Heck we have an elephant god and we worship cows as well. Having said that, if Jayant, in the course of exploring the hopping night life in Vadodra calls a woman a cow, he doesn't have too much of a shot at getting into her pants (or sari!), but it's not like he was trying to get into Symonds' pants either. So yep - it's rude, it's mean, but not racist.

Another interesting fact - in Australia, Indians are referred to as "curry munchers" very commonly. Never understood why this was racist. Pakistani's are called Pakis... I only recently discovered this was considered racist... i always thought it was short for Pakistani. SEAsians and the Chinese are called Yellow... for me it's just like calling a tomato a tomato, a car a car, an African American black.... it's just a label. And that's not such a bad thing!

Discriminating against a label is the real issue... not the label itself.

Thoughts?

James Bourned - Action packed weekend

This weekend I watched 3 movies - This post is about 2 of them - Casino Royale (the latest Bond flick and Bourne Identity - the first edition of the Bourne trilogy). Review of the third one (Lost in Translation) to follow.

Growing up, I was always a James Bond fan. Liked some of the Bonds better than the others... Sean Connery > Pierce Brosnan > Roger Moore > Timothy Dalton > George Lazenby..... and too early to talk about Daniel Criag and I've liked all the films. Really liked Casino Royale as well, although many elements of the movie surprised me.

It's been 45 years and 21 films since the first edition in this epic series and the character of Bond has never changed - he's suave, stylish, very British, drinks his martini shaken (not stirred), drives fast cars, sleeps with hot women and doesn't fall in love. Until now.

James Bond, with Casino Royale, has gotten just a little more soppy (falls in love with a woman who actually dupes him. Even worse - he's still moony eyed in love even after he discovers that). He's gets beaten up a couple of times and has had to perform rigorous action scenes to earn his bread like any other action star today.

Therein lies the problem (and the connection with the other film I watched this weekend). What makes Bond, well, Bond is the unbelievability of the whole thing with all the points I mentioned above. Now when you depart from that, Bond is like any other action star - like Jason Bourne!!

This past weekend, I also watched Bourne Identity (I guess I was catching up with a new breed of Hollywood action blockbusters which everyone in the world bar me seems to have watched... next up is the Oceans series). Really liked this film as well. Great plot - fast and fantastic - very Robert Ludlum. Jason Bourne is this super-human-esque secret agent who has lost his memory and the CIA is trying to kill him off as they think he's a rogue agent. In the meanwhile he's just trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Now there's nothing wrong with being Jason Bourne (heck, he makes a lot of money and is very very popular among the girls), but when you're James Bond, you don't aspire to be Jason Bourne. Jason Bourne aspires to be you. Put differently, its kinda like Jason Bourne aspires to be you. Jason gets the girls, James gets the women.

My opinion - Let Bond be Bond. James Bond.

On a not so separate note, after watching Casino Royale, E, V, L and I were pondering the possibility of creating local Bonds for the subcontinent - (a) Joginder Bhogle from Bhatinda, India, (b) Jeetu Bandaranayake from Colombo, Sri Lanka. That's work in progress. Will post a more fleshed out email once we copyright the idea... NOT.

October 7 - This day in history!

I was born on October 7, 1978 in a small nursing home in Central Bombay. Little did I know what a great day it was!! This is what I found on Wikipedia... and if they say it, it must be true!!! :).. Some highlights...

3761 BC - The origin of the modern Hebrew calendar(!!!)

1714 - Beer Tax riots in Netherlands (Go the Dutch!!! That's why Amsterdam is such an aspiration for me!)

1849 - Edgar Alan Poe (think of the Ramsay brothers with stiff upper lips) died.

1919 - KLM was founded (and interestingly - it's the world's oldest airline still operating under its original name!

1982 - Cats opens on broadway and goes on to run for almost 18 years!

2003 - Arnold "I'll be back" Schwarzennegger becomes Cali governer.


I also share a birthday with Vladimir Putin (Russian president), Genji Hashimoto (Japanese racing driver and my name-sake, Sami Hyppia (supremely talented Finnish footbal player), Zaheer Khan (rejuvenated cricketer - even born in the same year as me).

And just like my facebook profile says - I'm thrilled to be a year older, but not a day wiser!!!

The Shining - One helluva scary flick

I'd always wanted to watch this but just never got down to it until last night.

Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) is based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King and stars Jack Nicholson at his twisted best and Shelly Duvall (this was probably her best film) who fits the bill of panic-stricken mid western housewife to the tee. And it's one scary film. Not in your usual Ramsay (Indian's will know this) or even Evil Dead / House of Wax kind of way. The plot itself is scary to start with.

It's about a lovely family of 3 - Jack, Wendy and little Danny Torrance - who take up the responsibility to watch over an isolated hotel during the off season (think winter storms). Now this hotel has a bit of a history with a past caretaker who went crazy in the winter isolation and killed his family. The rest of the plot is predictable with Jack going crazy and Wendy and Danny left to protect themselves from someone who should be loving and protecting them.

Now this movie could so easily have been botched into another scare-a-minute-run-of-the-mill isolated hotel film, except Stanley Kubrick was directing it. As it turns out, he made yet another masterpiece. He handles been-done-before subjects like telepathy and dead people appearing very seamlessly and naturally. Surprisingly, that adds to the spook factor big time.

Jack Nicholson is clearly fantastic. Shelly Duvall was the perfect choice for the role. But the show stopper was the kid - Danny Lloyd. He's done an absolutely fantastic job at a very young age. Apparently the kid didn't know it was a horror film until years later when he was legally allowed to watch it (I don't buy this story, but what the heck... wiki says so!).

There are two scenes in the movie that are VERY memorable... "REDRUM! REDRUM!" and "HEEEERREEEEES JOHNNNNNYYYY"...... Click on 'em to watch the clips (you've gotta love YouTube)!!!

Check out the movie trailer here.

If you've already seen the movie, you'll love this...