chupke chupke

roughly translated-"secretly secretly". ya i know the repetition kills the punch but cant help it, thats what hrishikesh mukherjee thought would be suitable name for his hilarious nd sweet(ya thats right sweet) movie. Before you start judging my tastes for movie let me clarify that i am not much into hindi movies( quite frankly i cant stand most of them)as a matter of fact i have seen most of the top 150 hollywood movies of all time listed on imdb.com but there are a few hindi flicks which stands out!!vaastav,ab tak chappan,black friday,ddlj,munnabhai are among those that i thoroughly enjoyed.Among the oldies chupke chupke along with golmaal are my all time favourites.Theres something so sublime and simple about these movie that one is left in awe of the director and the actor's immence talent.More on others later cause this one's about chupke chupke.

lets see now where do i start,I always enjoy coming across an Indian comedy that doesn't rely on the slapstick and shouting that tends to characterize the genre and that isn't really to my taste. Chupke chupke is a funny, cute comedy that works because of a wacky script, the natural direction of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, and, most of all, because of the engaging and adorable charm of its leads.
Parimal (Dharmendra) and Sulekha (Sharmila Tagore) meet on a hill station holiday in which Parimal, a professor of botany, impersonates hill station's caretaker in order to give the real caretaker a few days off. Parimal and Sulekha fall in love and marry - they are joyful and playful in marriage, but Parimal finds himself half-pretend jealous of Sulekha's brother-in-law Raghav (Om Prakash), whom she idolizes. So Parimal hatches a scheme - with Sulekha's full cooperation - to play a practical joke on Raghav, whom he hasn't yet met. He poses as a driver and gets himself hired to work in Raghav's household. Then Sulekha comes for an extended visit - ostensibly while her husband is away on business - and together they fool Raghav into thinking that they are having an illicit affair. Parimal has a couple of friends who are in on the joke - Prashant (Asrani), a Bombay businessman, and his colleague Sukumar (Amitabh Bachchan), a professor of English. Wacky hijinks ensue - Sukumar turns up impersonating the real Parimal, and falls in love with Prashant's sister Vasudha (Jaya Bhaduri). It's a massive prank for the ages.
It's a totally stupid plot, and that's part of what makes it so funny - the other part is the utter good-enough-to-eat cuteness of the characters. Dharmendra and Sharmila, as Parimal and Sulekha, have a delightful tenderness and mischief that just bursts out of the screen every time they give one another a naughty look. It's clear that they have fun with the pretense,all the indiscreet sneaking around turns them on, so making their hosts think they are having a reckless and improper affair is easy. Parimal sneaks into Sulekha's bedroom nightly, once "accidentally" leaving his monogrammed hanky outside her door where Raghav will find it. And they gallivant openly in front of their hosts' five-year-old daughter, knowing that the little girl will tattle on them. The film is full of cute moments like that - the best of them is the song "Ab ke sajna sawaan mein," in which Sulekha sings a passionate song of longing to Parimal while Raghav looks on, vibrating as though he is about to pop a gasket.

Amitabh is also wonderful as the nerdy, shy intellectual Sukumar. I love Amitabh's trademark angry young man persona, but even more than that I love his early roles where he gets to really show his range in a role that is different. Chupke chupke is one such - Sukumar is bumbling and bookish and not at all comfortable with the charade he's taking part in (unlike Parimal and Sulekha, who lie through their teeth with natural ease), and he's simply adorable.
Adding to the comic absurdity of the whole situation, Raghav wants a driver who speaks perfect shuddh Hindi (why is not entirely clear - perhaps to protect his young daughter from the rough tapori spoken by the laborers available to him in Bombay) and the erudite Parimal, in his charade, is more than happy to oblige, offering language so pure and high-tone that others in the household can't always understand him - he takes Raghav's desire for pure language and throws it back in his face, with hysterical results. Dharmendra completely stands out in his performance plus his greek god looks would put all the john abrahams of today to shame.

As enjoyable as it is, Chupke chupke isn't perfect. The songs are fine, but they lack the wacky energy of the most sparkling portions of the film. Moreover, there are a couple of spots where the pacing is off - the opening scenes at the hill station could have been expanded to show more of Parimal and Sulekha's nascent romance, while other parts drag with needless exposition. But when it fires on all cylinders, Chupke chupke shines - the weak parts are only so-so, but the good parts simply outstanding.

Why Career Planning Is Time Wasted

As they say an idle mind is a devils workshop.Guess the delay in infy's joining is taking its toll on me.So,I have taken to reading psychologically inclined articles these days!!That has rendered my psychologically a bit imbalanced.After reading loads and loads of crap this is what i have concluded about career planning-
Our culture worships planning. Everything must be planned in advance. Our days, week, years, our entire lives. We have diaries, schedules, checklists, targets, goals, aims, strategies, visions even. Career planning is the most insidious of these cults precisely because it encourages a feeling of control over your reactions to future events. As that interview question goes: where do you see yourself in five years time? This invites the beginning of what starts as a little game and finishes as a belief built on sand. You guess what employers want to hear, and then you give it to them. Sometimes this batting back and forth of imagined futures becomes a necessary little game you play in order to 'get ahead'.
"We want to make a decision all of our own, based on our own values and preferences."In reality, people frequently don't know what they want and psychology has proved it. That's why career planning, or at the very least just deciding what you're going to do next, is so unpleasant. It's no fun at 18 years old when people ask what you want to do. There seem to be so many different options, each with myriad branching possibilities, many of which lead in opposite directions, but all equally tempting. Surrounded by these endless spiralling futures, it is no wonder that many a school-leaver sticks with what they know and follows in parental footsteps. But we don't all want to trust the tried and tested, whether for good reasons or bad. We want to make a decision all of our own, based on our own values and preferences.
Midlife crisis
If it's hard at 18, it's even harder in midlife when people are theoretically better equipped to make their choice. In reality by your 30s wide-eyed optimism has normally been replaced by a more cynical outlook on jobs and the workplace. Now it's more clear what the downsides of certain jobs are. There's not only our own experiences of work but we also have friends at work, all of whom colour our perception of their careers. Everyone has their own internal trade-offs. How much routine do you like: boring but safe)? How much do you like travel: exciting but you'll be away from loved ones? How much do you care about earning more money: and taking a more boring/stressful/less fulfilling job? Whatever the outcome of all these swings and roundabouts along with many more, the reason that deciding what to do with your life is so difficult is that it involves predicting the future. There's many reasons why it seems we should be good at prediction what we want. If I know that I'm enjoying what I'm doing now, then I should enjoy it in the future shouldn't I? On top of this I've got years of experience building up a set of things I like - cinema, books, sitcoms - and things I don't like - trips to the dentist, severe embarrassment and flu, especially not all at the same time. If I've got this huge bank of likes and dislikes it should be easy to predict my wants in the future. And yet, it seems we are often surprised by what the future throws at us.
Miswanting
"We are poor at predicting what will make us happy in the future."The idea of making mistakes about what we might want in the future has been termed 'miswanting' by Gilbert and Wilson (2000). They point to a range of studies finding we are poor at predicting what will make us happy in the future. My favourite is a simple experiment in which two groups of participants get free sandwiches if they participate in the experiment - a doozie for any undergraduate. One group has to choose which sandwiches they want for an entire week in advance. The other group gets to choose which they want each day. A fascinating thing happens. People who choose their favourite sandwich each day at lunchtime also often choose the same sandwich. This group turns out to be reasonably happy with its choice. Amazingly, though, people choosing in advance assume that what they'll want for lunch next week is a variety. And so they choose a turkey sandwich Monday, tuna on Tuesday, egg on Wednesday and so on. It turn out that when next week rolls around they generally don't like the variety they thought they would. In fact they are significantly less happy with their choices than the group who chose their sandwiches on the day.
Prediction failure
This variety versus sameness is only one particular bias that people display in making predictions about their future emotional states. There is another counter-intuitive bias emerging from the work being done in positive psychology. This looks at how people predict they will feel after both catastrophically bad, and, conversely, fantastically positive occurrences in their life. For example, how good would you feel if you won the lottery? Most people predict their lives will be completely changed and they'll be much happier. What does the research find? Yes, people are measurably happier after they've just won, but six months down the line they're back to their individual 'baseline' level of happiness. So, in the journey from the sublime - predicting how we'll feel about winning the lottery - to the ridiculous - predicting which sandwiches we'll want for lunch - we are incredibly bad at knowing our future selves. And if we can't even decide what type of sandwich we might like next week, how can we possibly decide what type of job we'd like to be doing in twenty years?With age occasionally comes wisdom. Over time we learn, whether implicitly or explicitly, that we are not that good at predicting the future. At the very least we begin to recognise it is a much less precise science than we once thought.
A stranger future
This means your future self is probably a stranger to you. And, on some level, you know it. That's why it might be hard for an 18 year old to choose their career, but it's a damn sight harder for someone in midlife when limitations have been learnt.
This might seem like just another way of saying that people get more cautious as they get older, but it is more than that. It's actually saying that it's not caution that's increasing with age, but implicit self-knowledge. People begin to understand that the future holds vanishingly few certainties, even for those things that would seem to be under our most direct control, like our sandwich preferences.
Best guess beats careful planning
The argument about miswanting applies to any area of our lives which involves making a prediction about what we might like in the future. Career planning becomes painful precisely because it's such an important decision and we come to understand that we have only very limited useful information. The best strategy for career planning is this: make your best guess, try it out and don't be surprised if you don't like it. But for heaven's sake don't mention this in your interviews.

so i guess 3 years from now i wont be an IIMA's last bencher after all!! :(

If It All Ended Tomorrow

What Would You Do If It All Ended Tomorrow?
Time Runnin Out, Ain't No One You Can Borrow
So Many Paths, which one you gonna follow?
What Would You Do If It All Ended Tomorrow?
Now, so I take a second look at my life
I made too many mistakes that I just couldnt make right
Should've been more focused than I take things light
When I'm gone this is what ya'll will say I was like
A fool, but no not that bad or cool
Just a big fish caught up in the shallow pool
He got lucky with all the fame
In two weeks aint nobody gonna remember his name
But I'm ready to go, 'am done
More importantly though, I proved everyone wrong
Its all over regardless what you say!!
Just lost,everyone's walkin away
I realize life is short so I'm markin the day
Now it's full speed ahead, I'll rest when I'm dead
And I dont give a Fuck what the next man said
I live how I wanna live
Buy what I wanna buy
Do what I wanna do
Try What I wanna try
Fear nothin, take chances
Not afraid to fail, always makin advances
So when I ride my last rites on the Highway
No regrets bitch,
cause I did it my way
so,What Would You Do If It All Ended Tomorrow?