Movieac!

When I was a kid, participating in elocution competitions was kinda cool. You had to speak about global warming and India after independence, which thanks to my competitive parents, wasn’t a tough thing to conceptualize about. I just had to mug up those long pages. My teachers were very appreciative of my efforts, but it didn’t take them a while in recognizing who had stayed up late to prepare for my words. I used to wonder how they’d catch me, considering the fact that I’d stage the speeches so well. Today after watching Jagga Jasoos, I understood why. I might sound too harsh, because for once I do accept that this is a comic book superhero, imperfect, bumbling and yet one who has tremendous stamina when jumping off running trains and tall walls to defy its super villain. And that Ranbir pulls off brilliantly (except the overdone stammering, yes). The movie asks you to not take itself very seriously, right from the “pictureshuru” (Oh yeah, Barfi again!). The first half ...

I’m aged 19 years, 4 months and 8 days old when I’m writing this, and I cannot argue with the fact that I still am not aware about what LOVE actually means. Infatuation for me is like cold and cough, something that repeats so frequently and recovers so easily, that I doubt my understanding of the actual differences that exist between love, and sexual attraction, if there are any. The sad reality is that sometimes I feel too exposed to certain brutalities breathing around me, things that are too complex for me to comprehend, questions whose shallow answers I’m constantly reminded of when I dig them out again. One such issue did linger in my mind for quite a while after I watched Aligarh. Directed by Hansal Mehta and written by Apurva Asrani, the biographical drama stars Manoj Vajpayee and Rajkumar Rao, both legendary artists. This piece isn’t about the plot of the movie, or the narrative structure or the character graphs; rather I want to speak about what I thought the movie had...