Missing my girlies!

"Friends are people who go conspirational shopping together, dipping in and out of shops that are totally beyond their price range and end up eating oozing cream cakes with only just enough money to get home"

Read this somewhere and got pangs of heartache. Why must it be so hard to make good girl friends!?

I believe that when you learn to laugh at yourself, you learn to love yourself.

Ps - I got this from Everyday People, which is terribly funny and oh so real. I love it! Do check it out.

The greatest show on earth!

Last friday, Golls and i finished our work - whatever there was that we had to do - by 5.30 pm, and just like a majority of the world's urban population, settled into our comfy couches, with drinks and munchies, in front of the TV, waiting with bated breath for the Opening ceremony of the Olympics 2008 to begin.

Golls is a regular TV and sports buff, so this was not out of character for him. I on the other hand, usually don't watch TV. As for sports, I enjoy watching some sports but in moderation and not like a maniac, and as far as the Olympics go, i have previously only managed to follow the progress - opening and closing ceremonies included, through the evening news or highlights. So this time it was different for me. One, Golls' enthusiam was infectious and i found myself actually looking forward to following whole the Olympic drama live. Two, i have for the first time, real free time - so why would i pass up the chance to watch the ceremony (and later the contests) that promised to be grand to say the least.

The point of this post however, is to just document what happened on friday as the opening ceremony unfolded.

What happened, was pure magic.

There is just no other word that i have, to describe how we felt about the spectacle. One expected China - keeping in line with their cultural richness, their pride in all things Chinese, and their unrepressible and deliberate rise in the global economic matters - to stage an exoctic and beautiful show. Also becuase China and the city of Beijing made no secret of the fact that they spent a good part of the last half decade primping and pruning, leaving no stone unturned to look and feel as rich, as posh, as cultured, advanced, modern and formidably sophisticated as any other from anywhere on the globe. One read, heard of or saw pictures of Chinese soldiers at their parade practices with needle-attached-collars in order to get their posture right, about their proposal to Steven Speilberg for art-direccting the opening ceremony (and the subsequent fallout), about their English-lessons-on-TV, about the dog-meat-ban in order to respect the sensibilities of a large part of the world's countries, and assorted other reports about the relentless Chinese efforts to get their Olympics credentials right.

Plus, at least for people like me - the awe generated by their impossibly graceful, deceptively serene, gravity-defying martial arts heroes in movies like 'Hero' and 'Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon', also contributed to the expectations being very high.

Yes, expectations - mine, and everyone else's - very real high. And yet, what we saw, blew our minds!

This was by far - the most, most awesome show that i have ever seen. And i'm talking about seeing on television, which i am sure is not a quarter as good as watching the real thing in person. But even so, it looked marvellous. Ethereal. Humanly impossible. Such faultless precision and syncrony, at such a humongous scale - is really to me a task fitting of gods, not humans.

It really is not possible to describe in words how brilliant, brilliant the show was. So i let the pictures speak. I was too busy gaping - popcorn-holding-hand mid-air - to take pictures. So these are not mine... but from a brilliant news-website i found. Find it here, especially since they have large and beautiful pictures.

If you missed the show, please do yourself a favor, and look it up on YouTube or whatever - but do watch it. Olympic ceremonies are usually spectacular, but this one will stand out as being head and shoulders above any that have been ever attempted. This one, is going to be a real tough act to follow for any one - for a long, long time to come. Do watch it.

Here is my list of personal favorites:

1. The first/ opening drill with the 2000+ drummers, especially when their drums light up. More like CGI than human effort.

2. The lighting of the olympic couldron by the 1st ever Chinese gold medalist Li Ning. Very dramatic, very clever.

3. The huge inflated-and-lit globe with images flashing on its surface and athletes wearing cat-suits and elastic harnesses floating round and round it in concentric circles.

I only wonder what the morning after was like in Beijing, a city that has anyway been struggling with unhealthyly high pollution levels, what with several rounds of fireworks worth several million dollars lighting up the city during the 4 hour show.

But hey, you know what is my one takeout from the whole experience. I'm convinced, more than ever now, that those Chinese guys really could fly.

Nice ad

If you've seen the other more popular Dove film 'Evolution' and liked it, chances are you'll like this too. I do.

Although, part of me (the part that abhors self-righteous preaching) feels what is this at the end of the day, but another ad? A message. Whatever. From a brand of beauty products. So, a case of the pot calling the kettle black? You decide.

Trivial musings of a creative young homemaker

Hey, if i asked you to name the 1st two names from Hollywood that spring to your mind, who would you name? Not your favourite stars... just 2 names that come to your mind immediately for whatever reasons.
Chances are you’d say Brad Pitt (if you’re a normal woman of any age between 3 and 105), or George Clooney, or maybe if you’re a teeny bopper, Tom Cruise. From the men (i hope there are at least some men who read my blog!) i expect to hear Anjelina Jolie (same logic as Brad Pitt), or maybe Jessica Simpson, Scarlette Johansson, or maybe old-timers like Meg Ryan, Audrey Hepburn etc. Or maybe you’d throw at me some unconventional names. Like for example... Whoopi Goldberg... or Denzel Washington. Or umm...i don’t know...someone more unconventional.
Well, if you asked me, my answer would be Helena Bonham Carter and Edward Norton. And why them? Because, it seems to me that they are the most visible faces in Hollywood-land; the ones who seem to be doing the max number of movies. No, really. How else do you explain the fact that they seem to pop in every 2nd movie i watch these days?

You see, till recently i had no idea who Helena Bonham Carter was; or even that she was an actress. And then, I saw her in, get this, not one, not two, not three but in FOUR movies in quick succession! What kind of a weird coincidence is that?!
It started with Sweeney Todd – a couple of months ago, when Gollums & i went to watch the movie at Prasads. As is his habit, he kept feeding me with bits of interesting info/ trivia about the movie and its cast before and sometimes during the movie. That’s when he told me that the attractive Mrs. Lovette was HBC, who enjoys quite a reputation in the period drama kind of roles.
And as is my habit, i heard all that he told me, without really making a note of it, and naturally forgot everything pretty much as soon as it was told to me.
A few days later Golls decided enough was enough and that it just wasn’t acceptable that i hadn’t seen Fight Club, and sat me down and put on the DVD. And very soon, there she was again... this time as the quirky Marla. “Hey, it’s the same Sweeney Todd girl”, I exclaimed, hoping to impress him with my memory. But of course it takes much more than that to impress G when it comes to movies. Anyway, I decided i quite liked her, but her name still didn’t stick in my head. But hey, i loved the movie! And what an ‘Ohhhh!' moment the movie has... clearly beats The Sixth Sense in that department. Amazing!

Then, another day we were watching Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (don’t ask why!) and there she was again – this time in a brief and supremely evil role of Bellatrix Lestrange. I decided it was time to memorize her name, seeing that she was perhaps the most popular actress in angrezi fillums!

And then last week this sweet movie called the Wings of the Dove was on TV, and guess who was there! Yes, Helena Bonham Carter, again! In another one of those 19th century England movies. Very nice indeed.

And pretty much the same thing happened with male stars. Edward Norton was just a familiar name, one that i had seen no films of, though . And then suddenly he was everywhere and in all the movies i saw for a while!
First i saw him in The Incredible Hulk, and then in Fight Club, and then in American History X. Liked him in all three, the most of all in AHX. It’s such an amazing, amazing movie!

So there. Now you know the answer you could get if you asked me to name the first two names that spring to my mind. Not George Clooney or Brad Pitt, but Helena Carter and Edward Norton.
Actually, what lies! It would take more than 3 films to replace Brad Pitt from his no. 1 position in my mind. Yup, Edward Norton’s cute, but Brad Pitt rules. No doubt about that! :-D