Saturday, February 25, 2006

LIFE: HYDERABAD

One Step Away from Home

Choosing a second home is the toughest decision & that also when you are or think that your birthpalce is the ideal one to spend the rest of your life!

After believeing so for a chunk of my life in Calcutta, it was time & opportunity to move on & experience new horizons(as I believed).

I stepped out with my small extended family(my husband) for the adventure - to make a second home!

As we know India is a vast land of diversity - south India itself can be considered a seperate palce with different culture, language and customs - such bookish visions were badly stuck in our minds when we landed in Hyderabad.

Now we are one & half months old in this city - surprisingly it is already our second home.

Calcutta & its people have their peculiar nuances & surprisingly in a small way I discovered where lies the unity in diversity!

Both city has a laid back attitude to life - sense of timing is particularly very bad! Locals are in a confused state between MNC culture and their own strong traditions! The outcome is jeans & sneakers with bindi & gajra!!

The boom in hyderabad in terms of IT and MNC's is just fresh from oven - it will take considerable time for locals to adjust which is evident the way they go about on the road!

...................the love for food is also evident!.............generallly locals are shy & not much open to outsiders!

In all this confusion, industry state is hot & rising. To make a career in IT no better option with all the big ones present here. The civic sense of goverment is also pretty good with neat roads and decent atmosphere.

Overall, our second home is not proving to be painful to adjust! A lot also depends on how you welcome the city in return - & "be a roman in rome"!

Friday, February 17, 2006

Life: Rang De Basanti


The word "Basanti" is a definite indication of the color of India, color of youth, color of "josh" which is the ultimate message of the movie.

Although there is one unified statement in any art form which the creator himself conveys but I strongly feel any art form may it be cinema or painiting creates subjective connotation in viewers mind which may or may not vary.

On the same thoughts when I talk about an art form I insist that its my subjective opinion.
The movie tries to string up the pre-independance and post-independance days with the message that "nothing has changed". We are still slaves in our democratic country - slaves to a corrupt system, slaves to our own constricted thoughts that there is some third party responsible for our country's dirt!

This escapist concept gets broken in the movie - nothing changes by being inactive but one has to rise & activate the change.

The deep underlying message to India's youth is very well camouflaged with "masti, songs and dance" - this I would say a second message that today's youth does not hold patience for any serious message!

The only point where I disagree very strongly is that to get up & do something for this country does not require any personal grounds. Infact, the "learning from the past" message that is portrayed clearly shows that in pre-independance time our youth did not need personal reasons to rise up in arms.

Whatever the way, its the right time to "arise, awake and stop not till the goal is reached"(Netaji).