I had gone home recently, and my bro whipped out a movie I had been meaning to see. 28 days later.



Here are the things that went through my head when I was watching the movie.

• Never let a shieking chimp out of a cage. Thats stoopid. Especially when the scientist says they are infected. You deserve to prove Darvin's survival of the fittest right, woman. This year's Darwin award goes to you.
• Running zombies. oooooh. OMG they r not running, they are SPRINTING. We're dead.
• Everybody's a zombie? Now what?
• HELLO? What the...?

Good movie, though :) Go see it.

3.5 out of 5 stars.

I never see movies at this time of the week - it's Wednesday. But, due to some strike or the other, my cousin bro Ankit wasn't able to go to med school in Warangal. So, we planned to hit Ninja Assassin, along with his dad. I have seen ninjas being portrayed in a bad light - The Hunted (1995) and The Last Samurai (2003); as well as cheesy - All the ninja turtles and american ninjas you can take. I was curious to see what would be dished out by a movie titled Ninja Assassin.


One thing you will see a lot of in this movie, is blood. Lots of badass fights and lots and lots of blood. The movie begins and ends with blood flowing like someone turned on the tap and left the house. Our hero basically is in a room, doing all sorts of crazy ninja training and then getting flashbacks of his life gone by when he was a kid, training in a secret clan called "the black sand clan", who kill their targets, but not before making them wail in fear by mailing them an envelope with black sand inside it.

So, basically, the movie is all about how this ninja clan is so secretive, and brutal - if you go AWOL, you basically are terminated with extreme prejudice. These guys supply their assassination services to people who have more than a hundred pounds of gold to give them.  Our hero is the star student, but he goes rogue when they kill his girlfriend who ran away during training. So, in spite of graduating at the top of his class, he doesn't get his diploma. He does get a death warrant though.

Ever so often Bollywood picks itself up by the bootstraps, rises above the typical "running around the trees" formula and delivers something so different, you simply get blown away. I was lucky enough to see an example of such an effort today.

Kurbaan is yet another proof that the Hindi film industry is maturing. Given a good story, and a good budget, you can do wonders. This movie is an attempt to show a terrorist strike, but the protagonists whom we observe this time are the the terrorists, and not the good guys. We get to see their rationale behind their acts. Saif plays a gray character who takes advantage of a girl to get into USA under the radar. The movie is frenetic, and I was beginning to think that they won't have a break in the middle, the story seemed to move from climax to climax.

Without revealing too much of the storyline, I can tell you that each character has been played beautifully.There are no song and dance routines to disrupt the story, the music is great, and camera work fantastic. Don't miss it.  4.5 out of 5 stars

SPOILER ALERT don't read further if you hate spoilers. My brother forwarded me some really funny imaginary tweets the main characters would have made were they in twitter. Read on and enjoy :D

This is a rant.

I hate idiots who add a twitterfeed to update every few minutes from their blog, or worse, from THEIR SUBSCRIBED RSS FEEDS, to their twitter account. I don't have ANY interest in your RSS feed. If I do have an interest, I don't want to read it via twitter. I use twitter to know what are you doing, not what your RSS feed is doing.

• I have a lot of friends from college in this city, and so I have been able to meet up with them, 
• I have my folks in Secunderabad, so I can drop in and meet my cousins anytime I want. 
• It's much closer to home - Kolhapur - which makes going home easier.

Basically, my time in Hyderabad has been much more awesome, so far, than Chennai.

So, extrapolating, it's really no surprise that I end up winning not one, but TWO contests on Twitter, resulting in yours truly being in the hospitality suite as a guest of Lalit Modi, watching the semi finals and finals of the inaugural T20 champions league. I won't analyze the matches themselves, that's part of history. Here, I will tell you about the experience of being in the ground and watching those matches.

The ITC hotel where the cricketers stayed in Hyderabad is next to the office where I work. So, its pretty natural that I bumped into a lot of cricketers when I came to pick up my pass for the matches.

I have activated google maps on my phone, which took me to the ground through roads I have never been before. Since I was in my first few weeks in Hyderabad, I had never been through MOST of the roads anyway. I reached safely, though.

View Way to cricket ground in a larger map