"Areare Kunirama" and other disasters

Most people know there's very little to do by way of regular entertainment in Bangalore, especially if you are not the drinking-dancing OR trying to dance after getting drunk OR the drunk-senseless kind. On the odd occasion, theres a half decent play at Rangashankara which nowadays seems to be less and less frequent.

It'd been a very long time since I visited RS, so wandered out there with family today. There was a new Kannada play, "Arrere Kunirama". The introduction stated that the play was adapted from some famous French play, from someone called Mouliere, or whatever. I specifically choose Kannda plays they usually have decent scripts and good performances, given that the production is always going to be local and authentic, and mostly, subtleties and sensibilities are preserved as intended. What else can one watch a play for anyway?

The play began and what followed was an exercise in patience. Sorry, but this to be one of the worst plays ever made. The actors were terrible and loud, the jokes were abysmally poor and mostly slapstick, the dialogue could have been written by a dull 10 year old and in summary, the sum of the parts was in indeed worse than the mathematical aggregate.

I recalled sitting in one of those Bollywood flicks that I was tricked into going by some friends .... it was "Dhoom1", and waiting for the inanity to end. I have no idea how standards for popular movies and everything else continue to be so low. We're supposed to be one of the oldest cultures on this planet, right? Five thousand years or something.... in 5k years, our shining product was Dhoom 1 a few years ago. What is even more disappointing/shocking is the audience reaction in the theatre while watching Dhoom1. Gosh, I cannot imagine how people laughed at the jokes cracked by that Bachan's son and the other son-of-a-producer .... I mean, the guy with bad hair and big muscles who plays the sidekick of the cop in the movie. I neither remember his name nor care to register it. I have to say that no matter which way you slice it, the jokes were just not funny. No self-respecting primate living in the deepest corners of Ngorongoro or in the darkest corners of an Amazonian rain forest could laugh at those jokes.


That said, there are pockets of brilliance. To this day, the first play I ever watched in RS has to the best I've seen. It was called "The Barrister" and was adapted from a Marathi script. Absolutely brilliant play. Like all good, things, these pockets are hard to find. I just wished the Bollywood watching public would grow some taste and give up on the idiots running their family business.


On that note, the only Bollywood actor I have some respect for, Aamir Khan was on the telly in some interview, suffering the standard set of provocations. He was quizzed about his rather derogatory comments on the movie "Black", specifically about the time when he (very rightly, I might add) said the movie would have been better titled "taming the shrew" which is exactly what it was for the first part anyway. I recall some scenes where a crouched Bachan Snr circles the poor deaf-mute child in a dark room like he was fighting a rabid hyena. Thankfully, when asked to clarify his discomfort with the film, Aamir Khan simply stuck to his guns and simply said the film was a poor one. Like I said ... pockets of brilliance.