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

I was talking to my friend AB and Sonali about the good points about various cities. I told them how much I loved where they stayed and worked (Noida / Delhi), because of the crowd, but they disagreed. "Stay here for a few days, and you will start noticing how rude people are, how bad the traffic is", AB warned. Then, he said, "I just LOVE Bangalore", he liked the weather there. (He had been there for a day, I guess).He didn't know about the famous traffic jams of Bangalore. I hate those jams with a passion.

That got me thinking. We always like what we don't have. It seems attractive since we don't know it's bad points. Or, we have been away from it for so long, that we have forgotten / glossed over all the bad memories.

Sonali had given me a watch ages ago.... It had a sweet leather strap and looked awesome.


That was an impulse purchase right after I came out of a movie screening in Citi Center. I actually should have done the saner thing and replaced the strap, but this seemed more fun :P

Anyway, I thought I should do the sane thing so after a year of the old fastrack sitting in my cupboard, I finally walked into a Titan showroom at Hyderabad. The guy was about to put a leather strap again - sly bugger - I told him to put a steel strap. So now I have an awesome matt steel strap matching my original watch face.


The awesome has now become awesomer. My old titan has been replaced by this as my first choice watch. World, here I come!