Alphin C. Tom

'Let me flow along' the Mani Ratnam's latest, Raavan.... which can't boast of an unexampled storyline (well, that's just for those who havn't heard of Ramayan.), yet worth every penny. Mani Ratnam is a great poet but he doesn't use a pen to write his poems, instead a camera. That's how beautiful the cinematography and  direction was. A stunning Aish in the backdrop of the virgin green forests of the God' own country isn't something I would ever want to miss. The nonstop rains may not have been liked by the actors, but on screen, it was just amazing.  After a monotonous first half, the film takes-off well with the uncovering of the creation of a villain. The movie then proves how far have we come from roasting villains to feting anti-heroes. (A graphic novel 'Raavanayan' is enroute.) Commendable performances by Abhishek and Aish, not-so-great entry into Bollywood by the Tamil superstar Vikram, gimmicks by Govinda and last but not the le...

This new version of the Mahbharata is set in fantastic, mythic time, at the end of the Dwapara Yuga (Copper Age) and the beginning of the fallen, corrupt Kali Yuga, the Age of Iron. Although historically, the epic is generally thought to refer to events occurring as recently as 9 BC and as long ago as 15 BC (depending on which account you favour), I’d like to place the action much further back into a more fantastical Indian past so that we can take full advantage of the possibilities for action and spectacle on a scale rarely scene. This is like a psychedelic The Lord of the Rings with Star Wars technology. BHARAT ...

In 1985, the world was a different place. There was no Google yet. Or Yahoo. In 1985, the year of your birth, the top selling movie was Back to the Future. (I had never noticed that yet. However, it has always been one of my most favourite movies. ) People buying the popcorn in the cinema lobby had glazing eyes when looking at the poster. Remember, that was before there were DVDs (before Blurays too) . People were indeed watching movies in the cinema, and not downloading them online (That’s really hard for me to imagine. Not that I don’t enjoy going to the cinema. Downloading and collecting movies has become inevitable part of my life . ) Imagine the packed seats, the laughter, the excitement, the novelty. And mostly all of that without 3D computer effects. (Hmmm... Who would have thought James Cameroon would come up with something as resplendent as ‘AVATAR’!!!) Do you know who won the Oscars that year? The academy award for the best movie went to Out of Africa. The Oscar...

So if you're fed up with Google, and you've got a litany of reasons. You don't even have to explain—I'm just here to help you crawl out from under the shadow of the big G, step by step. You don't have to be ready to commit to a full overhaul of your online lifestyle to understand why someone might want to yank their data from Google's servers, and hand it off to someone else: You've got Google's CEO deafly rehashing fallacious arguments about privacy—"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"—and hesitating on a drawback; you've got contextual advertising that seems just a little too closely tuned to that sexxxy love letter your girlfriend sent you while you were on that business trip; you've got that violently insane ex husband who now knows where you are because of Google's clumsy Buzz rollout. Most of all, you've got reasons, and you'r...

"It was a mistake. I know it was a mistake. But there are certain things in life where you know it's a mistake but you don't really know it's a mistake because the only way to really know it's a mistake is to make the mistake, and look back, and say, "Yep. That was a mistake." So, really, the bigger mistake would have been to not make the mistake, because then you go your whole life not really knowing if something was a mistake or not."