Mayakkam Enna

A group of friends are always fun to be with - drinking, gossip, dinners, lying around the house drunk, late nights at the beach. Your friends are your best judge and sometimes your worst enemy. Nevertheless, its only your friends who can forgive and forget because they have seen you every moment. They understand what you are going through; your toughest moments are easy when they are around. You can do what you want when you are with them and not bother about consequences.

Love happens. You don't know when it hits you. It could be your friend's girlfriend too but she doesn't care. 'She was never serious the first time' she says. You try to resist the feeling but this time, it hits you like a hurricane. And this is when life gets complicated. You are torn between the most cherished parts of your life - your true friends and your new love. The weirdness begins. You want to be lonely. Its not the loneliness but the fear that makes you run away from believing the truth. You don't want to accept. You tend to think that running away would solve all the problems, rather that creates the most uncomfortable situations.

Amidst all the chaos, life begins in a modest way. Being a part of the middle-class you have your own share of difficulties in life. There is pain, struggle, betrayal, frustration, alcohol, bruises, blood, tears and definitely lack of power. With so many negatives in your life, there is nothing much to look forward to except for that simple reason called hope which emanates from the love that you originally had, to begin that life. 

Selvaraghavan lets us walk into the life of an aspiring photographer Dhanush who neither has the education (atleast we don't know this part) or professional support to be successful. The meek and submissive character that he is, although he bosses around with his friends, he is mentally affected by failures. Success comes his way in a big way, but life has taken the toughest turns until then.

Mayakkam Enna is a true director's movie with the least "masala" elements available in the typical tamil movie package. The movie has Selvaraghavan written all over it without any doubt. The hilarious first half makes you wonder what's going to happen in the second and that's when he decides to give you a high voltage shock.

Overall: Fantastic movie. Would be a great script for a malayalam movie sans   the songs. Tamil cinema lovers may hate this.

Santosh and Me

Being in the market, you get to witness many interesting events. I finally decided to blog about one.

So, the astrologer tells the girls dad(we got to hear about it later) - this horoscope is an excellent match. everyone in the family is well known to me. you can blindly give your daughter's hand to their son.

wait - i thought, love was blind. nowadays even astrologer-confirmed-arranged-marriages have become blind!!! anyway, sometimes i feel that love is not just blind, but its deaf and dumb too.

Few phone calls happened between the concerned parties - talks about family, ancestors, cities they have lived in and people they know etc etc. This is the background check. Then an email id was given.

Not being able to handle the daily rants, I finally decided to take the next step. So you know, the usual process begins. Introduction. And this is also like your "Expression of Interest" letter when you apply for your mba job application. Even though your skill sets are not going to change, you have to customize certain aspects so that it doesn't look like a cut and paste job. That was done.

No reply for about a week. Usually if I don't get any communication within a day or two, I give up. In this case, I was like - No way, even if I get a reply anytime later. I was thinking - after hours of random conversations on the phone between the families and trying to connect too many grey haired men and women that they could possibly know, what could be wrong? Or is it really taking this person a week to respond? Sometimes people write in installments you see.

Anyway, I gave my judgment on this case and closed the file from my side. Defense's (mom) objections were overruled.

Two days back, we got a call from the dad on the other side. It seems that he had told his daughter not to email until he told her to or something in those lines.

Instantly, the movie Santosh Subramaniam came to my mind. Its an arranged marriage situation and the girl says - "Appa sonnaarunga, neenga romba nallavaru, ongala kalyanam pannikitta en life romba santhoshama irukkumnu"(my dad told me that you are nice guy and if i get married to you, my life will be good)

I replayed that for my situation.

"Appa sonnaarunga, naan sollara varaikkum email pannaathae" (my dad told me that he will come and tell me whether to email or not)

"Appa sonnaarunga, neenga romba nalla payyan nu."(my dad told me that you are a very good person)

It was absolutely HILARIOUS. I was happy that I had already decided against this. Coming to think of it, its actually scary. If parents make the decision for the girl (its not just this one, but i have come across a few more) - oh my god!