Column

I told her it was too late now to catch a flight to Chennai to eat low-cost idlis. “But what gives Karnuandhi the right to mess with idlis?” I wondered aloud. “I mean, there is no evidence that idlis originated in Tamil Nadu!

I read in Wikipedia that the earliest mention of idlis is not in Tamil but Kannada literature! And the earliest idli recipe was found in the encyclopedia of a Karnataka king! Maybe I must alert some Karnataka politicians and this should be enough fodder for a political turmoil far worse than the water dispute between both the states!”

Once again, I couldn’t help but recall a line in Sarkar Raj. “The people of this country don’t want development,” says one of the bad guys. “They want entertainment.” How true! One chief minister slashes the price of idlis, another decides to build a larger-than-life statue of herself. And many others have transformed the hike in fuel price into a big political tamasha of bandhs, rail rokos and morchas that threaten to eclipse the entertainment provided by the IPL games.

But coming back to Sarkar Raj, Ram Gopal Varma provides us with some excellent tips on cost cutting in these times of fuel hike and rising inflation, His film about a power plant and power play is mood-lit like a Frank Miller graphic novel to the extent of only one light shining on the actor’s face which is seen through a camera placed between someone’s legs, behind a coffee mug or under a hospital bed. I suspect the electricity bill for the entire shooting must have been less than my one month’s power consumption.

And just when I thought Ramu was about to blow up a Mercedes Benz, all I saw instead was Abhishek Bachchan falling and getting up in slow motion before being shown the burning debris of what looked anything but a Mercedes Benz! Nevertheless, it was one helluva scene!