Bangalore Theatre Update

Shabana Azmi and Farooq Sheikh will present Feroz Khan's 'Tumhari Amrita' on Thursday, November 25 at Chowdaiah Hall, Bangalore, at 7 pm.

Inspired from A.R. Gurney’s ‘Love Letter’, the play chronicles the lifelong correspondence between a pair of friends. An easy intimacy allows the two characters to slip into the roles of people who love each other for life, but, for one reason or another, remain apart. With a minimalist set and almost no physical action, this is a least demanding show of modern theatre. The two actors just sit at writing desks and read directly from their scripts. The script maintains lightness and does not overpay on melodramatic sentiments and is therefore is breezy and easy to watch.



I watched the play earlier this year in Bombay, and what appealed the most to me were the exquisitely beautiful use of hindustani, and the warm, affectionate humour sprinkled throughout the script.

In its 14th year now, 'Tumhari Amrita' is amongst the longest running plays in Indian theatre. There is indeed a sequel to the play now, called 'Aapki Sonia' that starrs Sonali Bendre with Farooq Sheikh and promises to present an equally delightful experience.

Supermarket of the Future

Metro has taken a flight to the future with its concept Metro Future Store in Rheinberg, Germany. The store is a testbed for technologies in retailing, hoping to create standards in the use of RFIDs, info-kiosks, auto-billing, inventory management and CRM applications that might in the future completely change retailing as we know it. Not unlike my own imagination of the RFID era that may be...

Check out the virtual tours on the site.

The Cola War. Gossip In'corp'rated ?

lazygeek.net guest blog: The Cola War. Gossip In'corp'rated ?

Ladies and Gentlemen, Presenting

The Best Indian Business School Blog!

Killer words in divergent series die of exhaustion

Read the sentence below carefully:

"I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications' incomprehensibleness".

This is a sentence where the Nth word is N letters long. e.g. 3rd word is 3 letters long, 8th word is 8 letters long and so on.

Enjoy!

RFIDs to Keep Tabs on U.S. Drugs

The New York Times > Health > Tiny Antennas to Keep Tabs on U.S. Drugs

The Food and Drug Administration and several major drug makers are expected to announce initiatives today that will put tiny radio antennas on the labels of millions of medicine bottles to combat counterfeiting and fraud.

Experts do not expect the technology to stop there. The adoption by the drug industry, they said in interviews, could be the leading edge of a change that will rid grocery stores of checkout lines, find lost luggage in airports, streamline warehousing and add a weapon in the battle against cargo theft.

Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense have already mandated that their top 100 suppliers put the antennas on delivery pallets beginning in January. Radio tags on vehicles and passports could become a central tool in government efforts to create a database to track visitors to the United States.

The labels are called radio-frequency identification. As in automated highway toll collection systems, they consist of computer chips embedded into stickers that emit numbers when prompted by a nearby radio signal. In a supermarket, they might enable a scanner to read every item in a shopping cart at once and spit out a bill in seconds, though the technology to do that is still some distance off.

Me turns a theatre buff

The seven-week ban on new movie releases in bangalore, together with the hangover of my final years at college, has turned me into a theatre buff. It took me some time to dig out solutions to solitude over empty weekends, once I was done with the essential pub-hopping and stuff... Bangalore threatened to bore me to death. Then I found a couple of cultural centres in town that host plays occasionally - Alliance Francaise and Max Meuller Centre. While by no means comparable to NCPA or Prithvi, I was happy to make do with 'em.

About a month back I watched a play at Alliance - Evam Indrajit - it was a brilliant brilliant play - a combination of an abstract theme, flirting with metaphysical dilemma captured by a script and performance in simple terms.. and it was very fast paced... The actors switched back and forth into different characters, yet their parts were effortlessly lucid and distinguishable.
...I could go on; you should watch it if you get a chance. The play has been translated from Bengali by Girish Karnad. It's a pity that there was so sparse an audience.

Another day I teamed up with Potty, Parul and others to watch another play called The Final Rehearsal. We took the front row, and while we were waiting for it to begin, there comes Girish Karnad himself and quietly slips into the seat right next to me! And i went paranoid.. checking my phone (which i had already switched off) every ten seconds to ensure it hadn't switched on by itself and wouldn't ring out loud in the middle of the play! :)) Guess Karnad is kind of a mentor to the actor-director of the play. Well, this one was a one-man play, brilliantly acting. It's not in the must-watch league, but was enjoyable all the same... you could check it out sometime.

Around that time the city was beginning to turn theatre-crazy, with a bounty of plays by groups from Bombay, and two back-to-back theatre festivals... A new dedicated theatre called Ranga Shankara has just opened in town now, which promises to be the Prithvi of Bangalore... And their month-long inaugural festival, backed by a tremendous publicity campaign by hutch people, is running to full houses. I couldn't get tickets to any english or hindi plays even a fortnight in advance. But there are some nice platform performances happening. Watched a couple of these last week.

More will follow from the theatre circles of Bangalore on this blog...

Gump Memorabilia

The Great's been egging me on for some time to blog more often. And now he's shown me t he highway to blogging through Blog This! It is only befitting that this post be a tribute to His Highness. And what better form of flattery could I indulge him with than imitating his own style myself.

Much inspired by The Great's recent post with favourite quotes from one (series) of his favourite movies, I plucked out from the web the script of one of my favourites, Forrest Gump. Here are some memorable passages...

My momma always said, "Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get."

Momma always says there's an awful lot you could tell about a person by their shoes. Where they're going. Where they've been.

Run, Forrest! Run!

They even put me on a thing called the All-America Team where you get to meet the President of the United States....Now, the real good thing about meeting the President of the United States is the food.

Nobody gives a bunk of shit who you are, fuzzball! You're not even a low-life scumsucking maggot! Get your faggoty ass on the bus. You're in the Army now!

This one day, we was out walking, like always, and then, just like that, somebody turned off the rain and the sun come out.

Neil Armstrong : That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. The, uh, the surface is fine and powdery. I can, I can pick it up loosely.

I thought I was going back to Vietnam, but instead, they decided the best way for me to fight communists was to play ping-pong.

... and we were the only boat left standing "Bubba-Gump" shrimp's what they got. We got a whole bunch of boats. Twelve Jenny's, a big ol' warehouse, we even have hats that says "Bubba-Gump" on 'em. "Bubba-Gump Shrimp." It's a household name.

Now, because I had been a football star, and a war hero, and a national celebrity, and a shrimpin' boat captain, and a college graduate, the city of fathers of Greenbow, Alabama, decided to get together and offered me a fine job.

Though he did take care of my Bubba-Gump money. He got me invested in some kind of fruit company. And so then I got a call from him saying we don't have to worry about money no more... And I said, "That's good. One less thing."

And 'cause I was godzillionaire and I liked doing it so much. I cut that grass for free... But at nighttime, when there was nothing to do and the house was all empty, I'd always think of Jenny.

Sometimes I guess there just aren't enough rocks.

I don't know if Momma was right or if, if it's Lieutenant Dan. I don't know if we each have a destiny, or if we're all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze, but I, I think maybe it's both. Maybe both is happening at the same time.