Working Holiday

Well, every working guy has to work a weekend here and a weekend there, sometime or the other. I have had no more than my fair share of working weekends / holidays. In fact, except the initial few months, I haven't really had to work on a weekend or holiday. Yesterday was Anzac Day, a public holiday in Australia, and as it turned out to be, a holiday when I had to work (in a long time), more due to my inefficiency and laziness, than due to over-burden.

Its amazing how a working holiday gives you a totally different feel. Though I never like working on a holiday, its amazing how one can manage to get so much work done on a day off. Somehow my efficiency increases on such a day. Yesterday, I was left wondering why... possible reasons:

1. Freedom to define your hours of work - You can wake up at 11:00 am, have breakfast, surf the net, watch a sitcom, and start work at 1:00 pm
2. No disturbances - Total solitude, whether in office or at home... no phone calls through the day, no meetings, no conference calls, no cluttering keypads (except your own), no voices chattering away on their respective desks
3. Music - The whole work 'experience' gets a boost if you can get some moozik playing in the background
4. Breaks - While on office days, the max. you can do is accompany colleagues for sutta-breaks apart from the lunch break, here you can even take a half-hour break and play stick-cricket, or take an hour-long break and go for a walk
5. Peace of mind - A day when no-one else, or rather not many others are working, you feel a strange peace of mind... you can walk into office in shorts, t-shirts and floaters... and you feel strangely free...
   

Now I know how artists, painters, writers, etc can get their creativity flowing so well... because they are not bound by office hours and office norms.. But having said that, personally, I would rather work in an office environ on a day to day basis...
Now back to work :(

Go Gunners!

Waking up early has never been an easy task for me. Have always been a late-to-bed and struggling-to-rise person. There are a very few things which could motivate me to wake up at a pre-dawn hour. One example of such a rare occurance was the 1992 Cricket World Cup, where I consistently woke up at 5 am for all India matches. And another example would be the last couple of days when I woke up at 4:30 am. The reason : Champions League Semi-Finals

At a pre-quarter final stage, most people would have predicted the 4 teams to make it to the semis as Barcelona, AC Milan, Inter Milan and Juventus. Well, they got it half right! The surprise packages being Villareal and Arsenal (ye ye!) . Today morning, Arsenal took the first baby step by securing a 1-0 victory in the first leg at home against the Spaniards. While it is not a brilliant result, it is still a step in the right direction and now they just need to hold their nerves in the away leg next week. In any case, as Thierry Henry put it, 1-0 is always better than 2-1

In what can be described as one of the worst domestic seasons for Arsenal, where they are still struggling to get a top-4 finish to qualify for next year's Champs League, they have been surprisingly different on a European stage. Flashes of their 2002-03 brilliance have been re-emerging at a CL stage, with them having gone 9 games without conceding a goal and gobbling up giants Real Madrid and Juventus on their road to the semis.

The gunners lifting the trophy has been a dream, but now it does seem strangely realistic. They need just 2 good games and bang.. the trophy is theirs. Not may expect Arsenal to pull off this surprise, but then, not many expected them to reach this stage. Here is hoping that they come off victorious in the away leg, and then beat the shit out of AC Milan (hopefully) or Barca in Paris

Spike Lee Joint ...Chhaiya Chhaiya

Inside Man was just my second Spike Lee experience after Malcolm X, and was definitely worth a dekko. There were 2 reasons why I wanted to see this movie, apart from the fact that it was supposed to be on a bank robbery and starred Clive Owen and Denzel Washington.

Firstly, the fact that this guy titles his works of cinema as 'A Spike Lee Joint' instead of say, a regular 'Spike Lee Production' makes it quite intriguing. There is something about this 'joint' thing which makes you smile at this guy's attitude and arouses immediate interest in his work. The second reason was the fact that this movie had Rahman's song Chhaiya Chhaiya (from Dil Se) in its sound track, and supposedly it was also featured in the movie.

So, I go in expecting a very short, cropped version of Chhaiya Chhaiya to be played as a backdrop possibly when the robbers would be stuffing their bags with bundles of currency from the bank lockers. But I was shocked when the song was what the movie started with! Yes... it is played as a sound-track for the movie's titles, and what's more... it is played in full!!

The movie starts with Clive Owen staring in your face in all seriousness, giving his introduction and claiming that he had pulled off the most perfect bank robbery. And then, the movie breaks into Chhaiya Chhaiya as the titles are displayed. AND... this is the only song used in the entire movie! What else could you have asked for... well, apart from a couple of hot females dancing to Rahman's tunes on top of the van used by the robbers (a-la-Malaika)

Would really love to know how the Western audiences reacted to this song... whether they liked it, whether they thought it was out of place, whether they knew the origin, whether they wanted to find out the language, etc etc. Honestly, I felt rather wierd listening to this song as a backdrop to a Hollywood movie, sitting in a packed cinema hall filled with people who wouldn't know Hindi. But thats probably because I have heard and seen this song so many times, but in a different setting, and this element of surprise was too overwhelming at that point of time.

Anyways, net-net, its a good movie... Clive Owen was quite impressive, and the entire plot would make you think about the movie even long after you have left the cinema hall. If the last 2 English movies that you have watched in a theatre are Munich and Syriana, you would not have expected the next one to hold up to the standards... But surprisingly, this Spike Lee Joint did.