Facts n Fiction

Raj’s recent advancement towards Marathi movies in multiplexes met with a speed breaker from Ashok Chavan, our white-collared CM, as usual. The pillage at the multiplexes is still beyond my comprehension and does not appear justified. Neither did Ashok Chavan’s justification about why not to screen Marathi movies in multiplexes at prime time made any sense to me. Chavan says Marathi manoos cannot afford the highly priced tickets of multiplexes, and that a single day expense at a multiplex is beyond Marathi viewer’s reach. This is a necessitous king's mentality. That is not entirely true Mr. Chavan! The same Marathi manoos has the capability to spend on the movie, and he does it on a SRK or Aamir or a Bachchan movie, we often observe. Simply because, the Bollywood is more presentable and entertaining, which unfortunately is not the case with our Marathi movies. Also, Bollywood movies have a wider exposure, and high budgets for marketing & promotion. Most Marathi movi...

Kalmadi is all over the news channels and newspapers. I mostly had ignored the CWG scam news and everything else associated with it. I treated it as some rot that I did not want to waste much of my time on. Among many of the frauds and scams that the thick skinned politicians of our country keep executing, this was one of them. What drove me back to this news was Mr. Gill giving a clean chit to Kalmadi; maybe it was just a lame attempt to turn the focus from fraudulent practices to seeing the games being finally held. I do not intend to justify or falsify any of the claims made by either sides of the government or the general public. I am, however, confused, as I have always been to understand the psyche behind people doing such frauds, scams, and adopting to ill means to achieve what they want. To put it simply, I always wanted to understand, “how much should be enough”; the greed keeps increasing ever after. Even in my wildest dreams, I can never think about what I would do w...

Dear TimesJobs, I am tired of your pathetic service. Timesjobs.com is certainly not the best or No. 1 job service provider in the country, a thing that you shamelessly claim and aimlessly believe in. You do nothing but spam my email inbox. Despite my continuous emails, calls, and using the “unsubscribe” facility on your portal, I still receive job alerts, none of which are useful to me. Let me also inform you that your call center executives are absolute morons and dumb fellows who neither can understand anything said in English nor can comprehend what is being told to them in any other language. What surprises me? In spite of having unsubscribed, I still receive some idiotic job alerts. In that email I click on the “ Unsubscribe ” link, and then the portal takes me to a page where it says “ your profile is incomplete; enter the following details to complete registration ”. Now when my profile is incomplete, how and why do I receive job alerts, which I certainly don’t require...

I am happy, terribly happy. Relieved actually! I had been going through the sinusoids of fright, terror, disgust, and all such similar painful emotions ever since I had heard the rumour that “Abhishek Bachchan is going to play Vijay Dinanath Chauhan in a remake of Agneepath”. However, my heart beats got normal after KJo confirmed that Hrithik will play the lead instead. I understand that Agneepath is not an ancestral-dynastical-protégé , wherein it gets handed over from Yash Johar to Karan Johar, and from Amitabh to Abhishek. None of them could or can do justice to such a kind of film, considering that it’s a direct lift from a masterpiece – Scarface (let Bollywood make one million remakes, but I doubt anyone can match the magic of Brian De Palma and Oliver Stone , or even Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht – original writers of the 1932 film of same name). Yash Johar would have been insane to equate Vijay Dinanath Chauhan to Tony Montana . Amitabh did no wonders either; Rani M...

I have been smitten by literature bug lately. I have been searching and researching on Internet about authors of the 17th, 18th century. I had dug down deep into works of "Henrik Ibsen", "Friedrich Nietzsche", "George Eliot", "Daniel Defoe", "Voltaire", "Alexandre Dumas", etc. While navigating in those times of history, I also came across one good creation, not in literature though, it was in art. However, there was something that made me pull that piece of art and put it up here on my blog. What I found? Ah! I thought her to be Leonardo's Monalisa but she turned out to be - "arey he tar Deshpandenchi Monalisa" Ain't she...?

No! I am not going to offer any strategies on how to trade in stocks or options, or to reap heavy profits in the stock markets. Simply because I don’t believe in any such strategies. Those candlestick charts could never illuminate my portfolio, and all hammer & inverted hammer candlesticks have hammered me down enough. I don’t even pay attention to the stock analysts, who blabber something about technical and fundamental analysis – there is no such thing called as technical or fundamental analysis, it is pure simple gamble or luck or destiny whatever you want to call it; if it is your day you will make it, else best of luck – keep trying. I have been attached to stock markets (emotionally) since last 10 years, trying to understand the dynamics of it, but the bloody selfish stock market has kept me (financially) detached from it. I had opened my first Demat and Online Trading Account with ICICI Direct – just because I had liked the application interface, and also the fantasies t...

(Alert – this article contains contentious viewpoints with some harsh language; if this does not suit your taste, please refrain from reading further) Recently, I received an email from a friend about some interesting article to read. However, it turned out to be a boring stuff. I hate reading self-help and motivational kind of pieces; everything that preaches – “think positive”, “say I am the best”, “how to vent anger”, “how to achieve your goals”, and so on in an over obsessed manner. I have never been able to understand the need and important of such self-help kind of writings. The first form self-help or motivational writing that I read was “Who moved my cheese”. I read it as a story (like I read Coelho’s Alchemist) and it made no impact on my behaviour or thinking pattern. However, my disgust for writings of this genre began with Shiv Khera’s “You can win” and it continues till today for his “You can sell”. Such books and writings claim to improve confidence, boost moral, ch...