Rang de Basanti

Alright alright... I know I am late and I know that a million people have seen the movie already and have their views all set about it and what I have to say about it probably won't matter.. But here goes anyways..

Well, to be honest I did expect the world of it... having had my friends rave all over the place about it. And Naresh couldn't speak of anything else to me for a week! (Well, he pestered me to buy the audio CD when I was on vacation n I didnt relent..hehe) All that done, I had a bunch of people who were hooting at me for having not seen it thus far.. And well, I honestly tried downloading it three times, each time just before my 4hr oncampus job shift started, hoping that te 700 odd MB would download by then (UC has a 100 Mbps LAN connection... but the damned site would download at 30Kbps!!!) In fact I once had Ali to keep moving the mouse of my laptop so that it didnt go off to sleep! And tragically, each time the connection would get reset! Talk about bad luck! And so while I was walking past 544 Baldwin on Friday evening, as usual purposeless, I heard the loud n clear 'Lose control' from within... That meant the ISA was playing the movie (I'm the treasurer.. well, I know thats hard to believe... but I am anyways and I had NO idea that they were going to play it else I wouldve definitely been there!) As luck would have it, next morning, as I was Krogering and sifting through a pile of capsicums (ok.. green peppers if you'd prefer!), I heard the familiar voices of Tejas and Niranjan(ISA President!) To cut a long story short, I was armed with RDB in DVD! My dinner movie was decided and no Veer-Zaara this time.. ha!

So, that night we played the movie at home and I remember in the first half, we were cackling from some Aamir antics and enjoying ourselves... though I had to tell myself this wasnt a sequence of F-R-I-E-N-D-S played at a stretch (though it had the essence of that.. all fun n no substance). The real movie began after the interval and there was a dramatic change of pace and tone and everything and in the end though many many people had told me that everyone important dies, seeing it happen in the movie was something else! I was saddened! The way Karan (Siddharth) and DJ (Aamir) went to their deaths really touched me.. And in someway, I felt that we the youngsters of India had to do something for our beloved country.. (I'll get to that in another post..hehe!) And in some ways the movie maybe, just maybe had misrepresented things... I am not even going to question the corruption in politics.. thats out there for everyone to see... But in a real-life scenario, would there be a shoot-at-sight order for 5 kids who'd owned up to their crime? What happened to the normal judicial procedure? That disturbed me... And I donno why...

Indeed that night's dream when I finally managed to doze off at 5am after thinking up an unbelievable amount of stuff that we, the people could do for our country was a rerun of Ajay Devgan's 'The Legend of Bhagat Singh'. At some level, I realised that RDB was a success, simply because it had provoked me to think.. instead of ignoring it as just-another-movie... Hmmm...