Rain and strike..on a beautiful day

 

I had a wonderful day today. A bandh had shutdown the state of Karnataka today. All shops ,companies and public transport was shutdown. But the roads were free. And it was slighty drizzling all through the day.It was the perfect day for a drive in Bangalore city itself. Clean, traffic free roads all through the city. I travelled all the way to Whitefield, and went up to Electronic city, just because the roads were open. It was a beutiful experience cruising lazily across the city.

This may sound strange. I wish everyday was a bandh at Bangalore. And everyday was as beutiful as today.

Bangalore flooding

 

I was going to write about the incessant rains in Bangalore on the weekend, but looks like the rains beat me to it. After 15 hours of continous rain, Bangalore is now officially flooding.

The city is back to being the city of lakes, as two of the biggest lakes have started overflowing. But those living near the areas are trying to cash fish that the floodwaters have brought out. They even got the boats out for rescue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another city under flood attack is Gurugaon. And the media is still calling the city that name, and not by its ‘new’ name Gurugram.

Story of my life, at this moment

 

 

Kabali

20 minutes into watching this movie, I could feel the director's dilemma. How can one tell a credible story of a reformed criminal gangster, who now has a heart of gold, full of regrets, while still meeting fan's expectations of Rajnikanth, India's only true superstar. Well, he has mostly succeeded, but the director's ending , I felt, just ruined all the fun.

I have never done this, but it was my first Rajni movie, first day, first show. Don't ask me how I was lured, but maybe I just wanted to see what the hype and hoopla was all about. So I got to watch this movie from the 3rd row of an AC multiplex in Bangalore, at 9am on the first day itself. It was crazy. Fans were screaming, whistling, cat calls and claps. Grownups were behaving like kids. When we first see him, Kabali is a 60 years old, just released from prison, and he is soon surrounded by his loyal supporters, who now run a charity organization. But first, he visits the current leader of his rival gang and beats them all to pulp, for revenge.

This is the dilemma I was talking about. This contrast was too much for me to handle. During the first half, he is trying to find out what happened to his beloved wife, and just after intermission we find out that he has a daughter, and his wife is also well and alive. Ok, so everyone is alive. What is the need to continue this story then, when there is no need for revenge, the old man just got his family back. He should now just retire and spend the rest of his days with them.

Instead, circumstances cause him to return to his gangster way of life. More kills, more thrills. Sure , this is fun. But just when he has become the undisputed Don of all of Malaysia, the director decides to tell his story, and has somebody else walk in and kill him.

I could feel the shock of the audience when the credits rolled. No more claps, no whistles. I guess it was too much for them to bear. They all just walked out quietly from the theatre.

PS: That one hour flashback was like a one hour documentary. That should have been fully cut.

FullTextRssFeed is back . Again.

 

Today morning when I opened my RSS feed reader, I was intrigued by the higher number of articles to read. Then I noticed the new entries were coming from the dead feeds from FullTextRssFeed.com. Its  a free service which converts short summary RSS feeds to fulltext feeds, so you can read entire articles without visiting the feed site. This is specially useful to me, as I frequently try to read these from my company network, where my employer has blocked many good sites under other asuumptions.

Fulltextrssfeed feeds were not working for a very long time now, but its good to know they are back, and I can go back to my reading.