Bicky Pleej

Horror comedy is perhaps the most difficult genre to succeed in.
Bollywood has had a handful of decent films that can claim to be horror comedies. But in those, horror and comedies were separate scenes, such as in Bhool Bhulaiya, Golmaal Again, etc.
But the reason Stree is perhaps the first authentic horror comedy in Bollywood (correct me if I'm wrong), is that there are few scenes where you will laugh and be shit scared at the same time!

The trailer looked promising and when I saw Rajkummar Rao and Pankaj Tripathi sharing screen in many scenes in the trailer, I knew I had to watch this film (especially after their amazing performance together in Newton). Moreover, the trailer showed that women are safe but men are scared to venture out at night, which is essentially reversing the way our society works, which further intrigued me. And lastly, a promise of good horror comedy pulled me to the theater, and my wife and I saw this movie on Friday (1st day) itself, just after we returned from our offices!

Greatest reason for success of anything is consistency. This movie promises horror and comedy and it consistently delivers horror and comedy. Moreover, it keeps raising stakes in the plot until the final face-off with Stree, which is well-shot and well-done!
Moreover, and this is the most amazing part of the movie, humor doesn't dampen the scares. Horror needs certain time to buildup the scare and humor can easily break that fear. But when humor becomes part of the horror and you get to enjoy both, that's when you realize that a masterpiece has been created.
Stree did leave me with few questions but the final scene of the movie overwhelmed me so much that I decided to ignore those tiny little holes in an otherwise beautifully woven experience!
Go for it. Watch it on the big screen for an amazing experience.

My favorite dialogue: "Bicky Please!"
My favorite scene: Too many to count, but definitely the last scene.
Best part about the film: No cheap humor. And blend of horror and humor.

The Sound of Sanskrit

This Saturday morning, randomly browsing I found this link on YouTube and heard the song.

I was deeply impressed!

My sudden liking of Sanskrit sounds began when I heard the Baahubali movie songs, which have some Sanskrit Shloks, especially the song in which Baahubali lifts the Shivling and walks to the waterfall. Listening to that in the movie Baahubali made me realize how beautiful Sanskrit sounds! And listening to this song, Shiv Tandava Stotram, has verified that opinion. This is a great track to listen to. Don’t miss the visuals in the video.

I’ve been a fan of heavy metal bands like Iron Maiden, Metallica, Nightwish, Within Temptation etc. but listening to this track I realize that even though their songs are great, we do have a great advantage over such bands. They sing songs in English and English language is not inherently musical. It takes effort to find the right words to make it sing-song. I know this because I’ve written poems and lyrics in English during my college days (http://perpetualthoughts.wordpress.com/).

However in Sanskrit language, you can pick any Shlok and sing it the way you like and it will sound awesome!

In India, just because we give English importance and Hindi is our (most of us) mother tongue (and both taught since our first day in school), most of us neglected Sanskrit studies in our school days (which starts quite late in 5th or 6th standard). But over the years I’ve realized the glaring limitations of English as a language and began to appreciate Hindi and Sanskrit. For instance, English language has the concept of Capital and small letters, clearly indicating the tendency to divide people in upper/lower class or white/black race and so on. Whereas Hindi and Sanskrit has no such distinction and all are contained under the same horizontal line, denoting every Varna as equal! More on that later.

An afterthought. These heavy metal bands have excellent music. My desire is that if we take music of, say Iron Maiden, and write lyrics in Sanskrit, we could have the best of both worlds! That would be a great union of West and East and prove Mark Twain wrong.

And for those of you who accept the good aspects of our culture only after its validated by the West, here’s Bob Marley singing Om Namah Shivaay :)