Yellow Boots? Ugh...

K.C. College ( phew! 6000 students in one smallish building near Churchgate Station - that is what I call space and time management!). That's where I spent my morning, addressing the bright, young first batch of the Media course, which offers a master's degree after two years. I found the kids very charged up and well informed. It was a pleasure interacting with them... and ha ha ha ... they got to hear a pretty candid account of what it's really like in this mad business. I hope I didn't disillusion those sweet idealists too much! Of course, they should go out there and change the world!!
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This appeared in Bombay Times.... with due apologies to Nancy Sinatra!

These boots are made for walking….

I watched “….Yellow Boots,” and exited the multiplex with my brains scrambled! What the hell was it about? And pray, in what way did the colour of the boots have anything to do with the bizarre story, which went nowhere?There’s something mad and annoyingly self-indulgent about a certain set of self-declared arty, over-hyped,intellectualised film makers these days, who make films that seem to be specifically designed to befuddle ( and NOT in the ‘Inception’ way). Viewers who don’t ‘get it’ start suspecting their own sensibilities, others who claim they’ve ‘got it’ , come away feeling superior. But the truth of the matter is, not even the film maker ( in this case Anurag Kashyap) has actually ‘got’ anything.But again, this attempt is sweeeeet – it’s a besotted man’s ‘tofaa’ to his new wife (Kalki Koechlin), who has co-written the movie and is the girl in those damned boots! I heard a viewer comment, “This lady Kalki should change her name to Kinky! Man…. This movie is just so twisted and weird!” Perhaps , after the artistic success of Dev-D, Kalki has figured out her brand positioning in Bollywood – she gets to play all the kinky roles that mainstream heroines shun. She plays them convincingly, too. Her obsessive character in “…..Boots,” is in search of a missing father. While she looks for the guy, she works in a sleazy massage parlour and offers ‘hand jobs’ for an extra thousand bucks. Several transactions later, viewers start feeling queasy at the sight of all the discarded tissues in the waste bin. But ‘Ruth’ ( that rhymes with a certain unmentionable Hindi gaali), soldiers on ( she is on a mission, remember?) with what she euphemistically calls ‘handshakes’ or ‘happy endings’, till we hurtle towards the (anti)climax. In between, a whole bunch of caricatures with no relevance to the story, bob in and out of the film – a druggie boy friend, handcuffed to a window grill, who is forced to pee out of the window. And an adorable baddie Chittiappa from Karnataka (Gulshan Devaiya), who prefers his ‘handshake’ through a thick towel. But the real star of this kinky-indie, is Puja Sarup, the cell-phone addict who runs the seedy parlour. Despite all these obvious flaws, I still didn’t mind the 350 bucks I spent on this pointless tale about incest and child abuse. Kalki definitely has a future.Kinky is ‘in’.


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The movie I am holding my breath for is ‘My Brother Ki Dulhan.’ Our ‘Kat on a Hit Tin Room’ has outdone her own Sheila in this role, going by the promos. Guns, guitars and roses coming up!
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Jehangir Sabavala passed away as quietly and discreetly as he had lived.Elegant and refined even in death. I loved the story about Jehangir as a student, turning up at the J.J. School of Art in his stately car, with a personal valet carrying his paint brushes and palette! He sliced through the boring stereotype of an artist starving in an attic , clad in shabby clothes and sporting a scruffy beard. Sabavala was India’s cravat-wearing Dali. But unlike Dali, Jehangir’s precise, subdued paintings reflected his aristocratic approach to art as well as to life.They really don’t make them like him any more!