The one in which I resurface mysteriously after an unexplained hiatus and blog about nothing remotely funny

As the title of this post suggests, I have been gone for a bit, and no, I'm not going to explain where I was, because sadly, there's no fascinating story in there.

 

Well, okay. While I was away, I was recuperating. I tore the ligaments in my ankle and it has taken surprisingly long for me to recover. In fact, I think I may have recovered from my operation a lot faster. Oh, and I bought a car (yay!), and I put on weight (yikes!) That, though, that is an undisclosed amount of weight, but it is not a scary amount. I decided to wallow in self-pity because of my leg, and therefore I didn't bother to diet, and was totally unable to exercise, and that's my official excuse, people!

I have also finally started to watch TV (M got me a DTH subscription, and getting that installed was a horror story in itself, but not what this post is about). He was all like, "What??? You haven't watched TV for 8 years? Are you even HUMAN???" and made it his mission to break my defences down. He succeeded, and I'm now trying to decide which TV shows are my favourites.

While everyone has jumped on the bandwagon to run 'Raavan' to go to the ground, I must put in my two cents worth to defend it, and I do hope that @SrBachchan will honour me with a retweet for doing that(right!) No, I don't know why a North Indian village called Lal Maati looks just like a village in South India, or why the movie is even called Raavan, when nowhere does the character of Abhishek display ten-headedness (yes, I know that's not a real word). He behaves, in fact, like a lion's cub trying to act all mean and menacing and going 'roooowrrrr', but instead of scaring you, it makes you want to pat him on the head and go 'Awwww!' I also don't understand why the regressive Ragini proudly proclaims that her husband is a 'bhagwan' while he has absolutely no qualms about using her as bait to lead her to Beera. I wanted to know whether Ragini goes back to her husband after he has accused her of infidelity and suggested that she should undergo a polygraph test (Dude, are you serious?), and where the hell did Sanjeevani go to, after their camp was blown up?

In our post-viewing dissection of the movie, M and I were discussing the parallels between the Ramayan and the movie (no, I wasn't paying attention to the TV series when I was younger-I have a short attention span that way). He told me that Ram banished Sita from the kingdom because his subjects suspected her 'purity' and therefore, that was a call he had to take. Ram lost quite a few brownie points with me at the precise moment that I heard that, because, Dude, God or not, you don't abandon your wife because of some nasty hearsay. You stand up like a man and defend her honour, and tell the general populace that you accept her. And if they have a problem with that, they can shove it!

 

So, getting back to the dissection. Apart from the stunning visuals and the cinematography (which is why I went to watch the movie in any case), yes, I agree, that all the bad acting and Aishwarya screeching her way through the movie (they have waterproof mascara and lip-stain in the jungles? Really?) and the incessant rain (what's with that anyway?) got to me after a while. Not to mention the perfectly choregraphed tribal dance with a picturesque backdrop to boot. A terrifying outlaw who dances and sings too? I'm now waiting with bated breath for the musical, 'Beera!' In a perfect world where my wishes came true, Aishwarya would have thrown herself off the cliff for real, and not even had a tree to break her fall.

 

But forgive me for not thinking that 'Raavan' was worse than 'Kites', because if the choice is between-

 

a) an outlaw and a rain-drenched classical dancer who wears Sabyasachi, makes doe-eyes at her captor and falls artistically off a cliff, and a buff husband who wears Ray-Bans and likes a good shoot-up and

b) a bilingual, cross-cultural romance, where the protagonists have the chemistry of two lumps of stale cheese,one of  which spews guttural Spanish, and the horror of looking up Kangana Ranaut's skirt,

I'm choosing a) anyday!