let's learn how to kiss, please

What I'm wondering is what will happen to Jai (Saif Ali Khan) and Meera (Deepika Padukone) once they do get married?

Their 'Aaj' love is so bland, their kisses so like the Rubber-Duck raincoats of school days, dry in a squeaky, rubbery way, the smell of rubber obfuscating the smell of the rain.

Jai seems like a man with no practice in kissing, and if he has had practice, hasn't learned much on the job. Doesn't forebode well for their marital life. (Or is it just that he'd rather have been kissing his beautiful girl, Bebo?)

I liked Meera only in the last scene when she cried with relief once Jai did come back, and then drew away from a kiss, awkward after the long separation. At least, she stopped smiling.

For the rest of the film, I was wondering about her parents, wondering what they had done to her that she needed so much to be so nice, so understanding, so 'smiley' all the time?

She was no less mute than the 'Kal' girl from a small town, Veer's (Saif Ali Khan) love Harleen (Giselle Monteiro). The 'Kal' girl at least metamorphed into ***** ******, and had a reason to be mute (Brazilian playing Punjabi, cut all her dialogues, please!).

Anyway, to come back to kisses, my friend Tanmay Agarwal, who's been having a set-to with the Censor Board for a couple of kisses in his indie film 'Chal Chaliye' has devised a table of censor guidelines set for a kiss. Check that out and more on kisses at his site http://www.chalchaliye.com/ and don't forget to take the poll.

it's called taking the piss

You've been doing a subtle version of the twist, jig and fox-trot for the last 13 & a 1/2 minutes. You've been loosening your facial muscles while contracting other ones in an effort to look normal. You finally manage to find a public toilet and then the gatekeeper demands that you pay up 2 rupees before you enter. You flap your hands wildly and nod your head vigorously and hiss, "I'll pay you later."

In the corridor, the gatekeeper's aunties and nieces in various stages of age, weight and nudity, are sprawled in large pools of water, washing themselves and their clothes. You leap and bound across all of them, in imminent danger of slipping into one of the pools, and adding the contents of your bladder to the soapy torrents of water rushing towards the drain.

Inside the toilet, there is no hook for your bag or your dupatta. Your sunglasses hooked on to the front of your kurta fall off, and you catch them just before they fall into the dodgy contents of the Indian style toilet, immensely relieved that you haven't had to face the moral dilemma of renouncing them or fishing with your hands to procure them back because they are so very, very expensive. Of course, the toilet door doesn't close, so you hold one stem of the glasses in your mouth, roll the dupatta round and round your neck, sling your bag across your shoulder, undo your pajamas, all with one hand, while keeping the other firmly on the door.

Then you semi-sit-squat-stand, and pee, grateful that you learned this trick long ago, much to the chagrin of your more conservative mother. 

And it feels more wonderful than anything else on earth. In your relief, you relax a little, and your hand falls off the door. You remember with a fond smile how your insouciant younger self regularly walked into a 5 star hotel in your hometown only to use the facilities. But the security checks at hotels now could be your undoing, you think. Someone pushes the toilet door from outside and jolted out of nostalgia, you push it back with a loud growl of proprietary anger.

Then you complete all the earlier manouvres in reverse, i.e tying up your pajamas, etc., with one hand and now with one leg thrust against the door as well. Ah, someone may say, "what about washing uhmm your uhmm or dabbing with toilet paper?", and you say "the least said the better, this is as far as things can go with one hand and one leg out of requisition".

You come outside, and your spine is a little straighter, and you could be humming if you didn't see the gatekeeper again signaling for the two rupee coin. "This is supposed to be a free urinal", you shout, pointing at the notice. The gatekeeper feigns a contemptuous ignorance of any written material. You fling a coin down and walk away, thinking well, you are going to be OK for a few more hours at least.

(Would love to see Paro's film 'Q2P')

gutter water and ajinomoto

I said to Hasan & Husein: "Why do you swim in the canal? The water is filthy."

Hasan said: "We find good stuff here. A plate, or a bowl. Sometimes a metal pipe. We can sell it for 100-200 rupees."

I said: "What do you do with the money?"

Hasan said: "We give it to our mother."

Husein said: "We play dhab."

Hasan said: "We hire a cycle to ride around."

Husein said: "I spend it on Chinese food. I like to eat fried rice everyday."

I said: "But don't you fall ill in that gutter water?"

Husein said: "No, we like it in there. I like being in the water all the time."

Hasan said: "We go and wash up with clean water at the Pump. We wash our clothes too."

Husein said: "Yes, we wash our own clothes."

* Dhab - A gambling game

the difference between plastic and tin

I said to Bai: "Do you know any other hut we can use, like the one we did for your interview?"

Bai said: "That was not a hut. That was a house. It had tin walls and a tin roof. You can't just pick it up and run. A hut is two plastic sheets that you can tie up anywhere. I can make you a hut anywhere you want in 10 minutes."

That's what it's come to, folks.

There we were, sauntering along, hand in hand, on our way to 'The Proposal'. We met a schoolmate of Dhanno's, exchanged 'hi's' and 'hello's' and carried on.

Dhanno said: "My friends always say, that we saw your mom and you walking around, hand in hand."

I said: "Oh!"

Dhanno said: "Yeah, they tease me, do you still need your mom to hold your hand to help you cross the road?"

I laughed.

Dhanno said: "I tell them, no, my mom needs to hold my hand to help her cross the road."

True enough.

and then what happened?

A relationship between a film maker and his subject and my two-pice at

getting up close

What, indeed!

Dhanno said: "Yeah, there's this guy in her coaching classes who likes Bijli."

I said: "And does Bijli like him?"

Dhanno said: "Naaah! He's ugly."

I said: "So if someone is ugly, you can't like him?"

Dhanno rolled her eyes and said: "So now you want us to look at the guy's internal beauty and all? Analyze whether he is marriage material? What, Mom?"

Mom effectively silenced.