Blogspot springs unpleasant surprises on me every now and then. Like now, for example. I was browsing through blogs, and came to my blog in the hope that someone had commented anew, or someone new had commented and my blog continued to show a depressing "2 comments" below my post despite a refresh. On clicking the link, however, I found I had had 3 visitors. I happily replied to their comments and found it a bit strange that my blog was unable to recognize its owner from the hordes who make up the traffic, and prompted
me for my password too. Then I decided to blog about something and found to my alarm that I was ushered straight to my dashboard, the assumption being that the user who had logged in as "robertfrust" a few minutes ago was the same as the user who now wanted to go to blogspot.
I see a security issue here. What if I go to several blogs, comment on one after signing in, and then go to another blog and then move away and let someone else use my computer for a while and that someone happens to be a blogger and he decides to blog about his day and opens blogspot and voila!
my blog innocently offers itself? Not that that's particularly scary and all, but it shouldn't happen, should it?
You see how I use certain words or phrases in my posts - I didn't need to end the previous paragraph with a question but I did. Then I began this paragraph with an address to an imagined audience. The question might have been rhetorical and the 'you' might simply indicate that I imagine I'm talking with someone (as opposed to
to someone?) or it might be indicative of some greater effort to involve the reader of the post. I know if I ever write a book or a play (lately I've read a number of enjoyable plays), I'm going to be very conscious of whether it involves the audience or not. I have read and sometimes abandoned books that have bored me to distraction. And these include mostly 'famous' and high-brow fiction and only very rarely pulp fiction of the bestseller kind. Readability and brevity were issues that the great often couldn't care less about, and that bothers me.
I did go to Legends of Rock a few hours after I wrote my previous post and I found it every bit as satisfactory an experience as I had come to anticipate from its reputation. It's such a pleasure when you build up to something and then find the end result justifying the build-up. LoR has three floors, with the last floor being a roof-top bar, and the two lower floors having music memorabilia on the walls besides huge LCD televisions showing concert videos of great songs, one after the other. It's also a great pleasure to be listening to great and
familiar music when you are drinking alcohol. My friend and I consumed what must have been more than three pints of beer between us and that coupled with the huge dinner that followed tested my digestive system a little bit, but the experience was totally worth the mild ache.
LoR also displays some cool T-shirts with Clapton, Morrison, Hendrix and a fourth bespectacled chap (not Lennon, we concurred) on the ground floor near the entrance and I immediately wanted to buy a couple for my brother, but deferred it till later because I figured I'd come here again. I even dreamt about those shirts at night, among other things. Somehow alcohol gives me a dream
ful sleep.
I read a few chapters of Three Men in a Boat and found it not as dated as I thought it would be, but dated enough to not completely take to it. I'm debating whether to attempt to finish it or not. This morning I started a new book, one that I first came to know something besides the title about through a quiz question in IIT, and that I've been meaning to read ever since. The entire conception is nothing short of brilliant, and if the start is anything to go by, so is the book itself. I hope I like it enough to recommend soon.
Saw bits of
Agneepath yesterday. I try to remain as unprejudiced as possible when I watch movies and I tried to like this movie when I last saw parts of it but I really couldn't help feeling irritation at Amitabh Bachchan's affected dialogue delivery and exaggerated mannerisms. It seemed to me almost as if he was playing a caricature of himself, much like I felt genuinely surprised when I saw a scene from one of Dharmendra's several movies done in the twilight of his career, with a nostril-flaring Dharmendra vowing to drink the villain's blood etc. I thought he was trying to fit the Dharmendra caricature in our popular culture. The caricature had come before the man himself for me, but of course in reality
he had given birth to the caricature and not it to him.
Coming back to
Agneepath, maybe I've evolved a little as a movie-watcher since some years back because I could appreciate some aspects of Agneepath that had been earlier obscured by my inability to digest an exaggerated AB, like its deliberate larger-than-life treatment of its protagonist, its use of many of Hindi cinema's enduring images and icons - the Mother, the Masterji, the child boot-polishwalla (evoking
Deewar, among others) - and its focus on style and treatment over logic and plotline.
I also have to admit my interest in the movie, which was initially limited to observing why it was
this performance and no other that fetched Amitabh Bachchan the National Award and did it truly better his performance in
Deewar, perked up after the voiceover (Siddharth Kak's, I think) on Extraaa Shots (Sony Max, obviously) said the character of Vijay Deenanath Chauhan (
"poora naam") was based on Al Pacino's Scarface. I guess it appealed to the trivia-junkie in me. Also, Scarface is never very far from my mind because the floor below where I work (and type this) in my office has an imperious Pacino reclining in his sofa on the lobby wall. The subscription says "Make Way For The Bad Guy". How's that for a tagline,
hain?
