Blah Blah...!

I saw ‘Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith’ two days ago. It was hyped as the best Star Wars movie ever, and I of course was dying to see it. Mom wanted to see ‘Naina’ instead, but I vetoed the idea and we went off to the distant suburb of Andheri to watch ‘Star Wars’ in Fun Republic, one of the many multiplexes populating Bombay suburbs.
The movie was really good! Hayden Christensen could have been much, much better unfortunately he was not. I thought the fall of Anakin Skywalker would be far more dramatic. His descent in to Darth Vader was quite impressive though!
But the actor who STOOD OUT was Ewen McGregor. Not only does he look good and has a cute accent, but also acts very well!! :D
All in all, the movie was worth traveling all the way to Andheri in a crowded local train compartment!

GO 92.5 FM, a radio station in Bombay is holding a contest called ‘Bollywood Badshah’. I’d taken part in this contest last year, and had actually qualified to be in the round that comes before the semi-finals (what do you call that??!). It was a really nice experience, going to their studio and actually being quizzed on air! I was so nervous! The RJ saw that and started singing “Urvashi Urvashi”, that famous Prabhu Deva song. Well, that did not help matters, as that song was the bane of my existence when I was in the sixth grade, as most people in my school would burst out into this song to irritate me!!
Anyway, I didn’t do very well, getting only five out of ten correct. I actually even forgot who the director of “1 2 ka 4” was!! And I’m a huge Shah Rukh Khan fan!! (In case anyone’s wondering, the director’s Shashilal Nair).
But it was quite a nice experience anyway.

I’m going to Kerala this week. Yay! I’ve always wanted to go to Kerala. The backwaters look so wonderful in all those “Kerala Tourism” ads! And I will be going at last!! As you can see, I’m very, very excited!

And here I’ll just end my ramblings. Nothing very exciting or interesting to report. Hopefully, I’ll be full of adventurous, funny, scary, or other ‘adjective’y stories to fill my blog and bore everyone to death!! Ha ha ha! Hmmm… but seriously, I don’t think I write about boring stuff, well except this once!

Sushi, Cheese and the Greatest Movie of All!

At last my exams are over!! YAHOOOO!!
They did get over quite a few days ago, a week to be exact, but the reality is just sinking in. This always seems to be the case; I feel free from the burden of studying only after about a week has passed since my last paper.
Anyway, lets move on to happier topics!
A few weeks before my exams my brother, D, celebrated his 25th birthday. Mom and Dad were also here, for their annual summer holiday. So it was decided that we would go to a nice hotel to celebrate his birthday. So we went to a hotel that had recently opened.
My entire family, especially Mom and I, are very fond of buffets, so we went to the coffee shop, which served a fabulous buffet (incidentally, is it pronounced ‘boo-fey’ or ‘buh-fey’?).
As soon as we were seated at the table, Mom, as is her wont, went off to inspect the food that was laid out. Dad, D, and I were sitting at the table, taking in our surroundings, when suddenly Dad asked, “What’s the name of this place?” D turned around towards me and went, “The name of this hotel is…” I, for my part, just gave each a blank look, and remarked, “Well! How nice! We are in a hotel, and we don’t even know the name!” and burst out laughing!
Mom arrived and we all turned to her and chorused, “Ma! What’s the name of this hotel?” I just knew it that Mom would know the answer (as she usually does!), and I was right! But for the life of me, I just cannot recall the name; it was something to do with Central. But that’s all I can remember!
Anyway, one of the things that were available was sushi. When I’d first heard about sushi and what it was made of, I almost barfed! But later as I heard about what a delicacy it was, I often wondered how a roll of boiled rice and raw fish would taste. So I didn’t hesitate in placing one of the sushi rolls on to my plate, and poured quite a lot of the sauce that accompanied it on top of it.
The only other person in my family, who had the guts to try it out, was of course, Mom! She was the first to pop it into her mouth and declared that it was “different, but quite nice!” So, I very gingerly placed the entire roll in to my mouth. At first, all I could sense was the bland taste of boiled rice, and then a bouquet of flavours burst in my mouth, and I almost gagged! There was a fishy flavour, a bitter flavour and some others I could not place! But I thought I’d be brave and swallow the damn thing, thinking that the taste (or tastes, as the case was!) would grow on me, and that I just had to get used to it. But as it turns out, sushi is not something that you fall in love with at “first bite”, so to speak! So I did the next best thing: I ran to the restroom and spit out the offending morsel on some paper napkins. A woman happened to walk in just then, and seeing what I was up to, turned around and walked right out!
Now, I don’t know if sushi usually does taste so bad, or it was just this one. I’ve even learned that there are different types of sushi. So maybe I just got a bad one! And I’m still game to try out any other variety of this popular Japanese delicacy, after all, millions of Japanese’s (as well as other nationalities’) taste buds cannot be dysfunctional; and sushi is of course supposed to be an acquired taste, just as caviar is. Though I don’t think I’ll be trying out caviar any time soon! That’s fish eggs for God’s sake!
This entire episode got me thinking of people and their different tastes. The saying, ‘One man’s poison is another man’s meat’ is so true, even in it’s literal sense! The vegetable I hate the most is cauliflower; I just cannot even stand the smell of cooking cauliflower. This one time, I was sitting around with my friends and I referred to cauliflower as “yucky!” and some other choice words, only to be chastised by my friend, F, who said that just because I hate cauliflower does not give me the right to refer to it in such a manner, as it still is food, and all food should be respected alike. Wise words indeed!
Most of us do have a predilection for weird food combinations! I love eating pineapple with chocolate sauce, but just hearing these two words uttered in the same sentence makes Mom want to throw up! When I was a kid, maybe five or six years old, I would grate cheese and then add spoonfuls of sugar to it, mix it up and eat this “treat” with much relish! An aunt of mine reminded me of this a few years ago, and said that she had asked me then, “But who likes to eat this?!” And I had very proudly replied, “I do!”
I haven’t tried the above combination in ages, but I can still remember the taste: cheese and sugar, who can not like it?! :D

On an aside, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge has completed 500 weeks!! That is 10 years! It is one of my most favourite movies, and I’m going to watch it in a theatre again! Quite a few theatres in Bombay are showing DDLJ to celebrate 500 years of the movie running to full houses every single day!
I remember Mom and I had gone to watch Sarfarosh in this theatre in Bombay called Maratha Mandir. We were waiting in the lobby for the morning show of DDLJ to get over, and Mom was wondering why they were still running this movie after so many years. “Who would still want to watch this movie?!” she had remarked. And I had said defensively that there are a lot of DDLJ fans, who would love to watch the movie again and again and again… I was right, and how! As the movie got over and the doors opened, droves of people walked out of the theatre! Even I was dumbstruck that so many people would still want to go to the theatre to watch DDLJ. I begged my mother to take me to the next screening of DDLJ, but she flatly refused.
But now, I insisted that this movie needed to be celebrated in its 500th week! I need to celebrate this movie that has made me smile, laugh and cry for ten whole years!