'tis the season to be jolly...tra la la la...

It's that time of the year, warm, fuzzy holiday cheer, Santa-claus, colored lights, smell of cookies and brownies and Turkey! It's like this quirky bird has the whole country wrapped around her paws. On TV, in supermarkets and just about everywhere we see...Turkey-o-mania! It's kinda fun, you know...seeing turkeys everywhere means the holidays are not far away. It's interesting how just about everything around you changes...Halloween starts it all off and even before you have finished your candies and taken off the scary faces from your office, Thanksgiving sneaks up behind you and you see pumpkins and turkeys everywhere and then white covers the shades of brown and reindeers and Mrs.and Mr.Claus are everywhere!

As a kid, having digested a healthy dose of Archies for many years, I always wanted to have a christmas tree! Reading about Christmas in those comic-books made it all seem all the more magical - snow flakes, Santa's snowy beard, glittering Christmas trees and brightly wrapped gifts with enormous bows under the trees...I would have lived in that world, in my head a thousand times. I remember one particular story (after all these years!) - Archie's jalopy breaks down and they decide to stay overnight in what looks like a haunted castle, inside the castle, they find toys all around with cobwebs around them, and we see the invisible mom and baby ghost watching the gang, the baby having died before celebrating it's first Christmas. The gang unaware of all this, decide to celebrate Christmas in that castle, so they clean the toys, light a fire and decorate the old Christmas tree in the house. After a few hours, they fall asleep and the baby happily plays with all it's new toys and the mom and baby hug happily and leave the place to...heaven.

I just loved that story...







Anyway, it is that time of the year and I wonder if I should go tree-shopping... :)

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Dog Dilemmas!

"You will keep it tied when you go to work, isn't that a sin? How would you like to be constrained like that?

"Who will take care of it when you go on vacations?"

"Have you thought about how much maintenance goes into handling a pet?"

"You have to feed it Non-Veg!"

"How will you handle it when it passes away? You will have a void in your life..."

"Three walks a day plus you have to clean up after it!"

Jeez! What does a (wo)man have to do to get a pet?!

(Yes, I could just visit the Animal Shelter, get one and then let all hell break lose...sometimes I think I should do just that and see what happens! No thanks to my husband who got his parents and mine to support him on this issue! You would think your own parents would support you...:-(

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Kabhi, kabhi...

What more can I say about relationships that weren’t meant to be, love that hurts and the inability to love, when it is clear there is nothing else to do but to share at least a bit of the love that is submerging, almost suffocating you? And yet that is the one thing that you cannot do. How much will you bend to the unfair, overpowering demands of a heart that won’t listen? And finally, when the heart has had its way, all that is left is guilt, shame and a clarity even in tears of what love can be but is not…

Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna is all this and more. Sappy, sentimental, long, the movie may be but it has also managed to handle a complicated, difficult theme as delicately and realistically as the Indian audience would allow it to be. I loved the movie, the NYC background, autumn leaves, snow that blanket a whole new range of emotions…we often see movies dealing effectively in love, romance, tragedy but few take up infidelity and even fewer movies dare to make such a relationship succeed; not commenting on whether it is karmically right for such relationships to succeed, but realistically speaking, some of them do…

Till the end, I kept waiting for something that would separate SRK and Rani Mukherjee, some contrived twist-of-fate ending where they can never live happily ever after and I was surprised by the ending. Also, Preity Zinta not immediately leaning on Arjun Rampal’s shoulders for support was a refreshing twist, so also Abhishek’s marriage to his American lady love. The big B took on a role that needs a lot more than just panache to pull it off without coming off cheap and he did a good job with Kiran Kher providing the right sensitive touch to their scenes.

Comedy was good, the bespectacled football-hating-kid was great, Abhishek as the doting husband evokes a tugging-at-the-heart sort of sadness...haunting music to go with all this and you have a blockbuster movie, alright!

So there, I said it, I really liked the movie! I would even see it again (oh, stop giving me that look, you should see the movie with me next time and then you’ll like it too :)

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