Wes Anderson’s characters

Wes Anderson’s movies are about people who are almost total nutcases.

His world is full of people who want to be loved but don’t care about others, who have lost someone even before he or she is dead, who are not sure if the person they love loves them back, who try suicide but not enough so that they’ll die….nutcases, in a way.

The characters all are a bit cartoon-like. They wear the same cloths and same hairstyle when they are 12 and when they are 30 – the jumpsuits worn by Ben Stiller and his sons’ characters in The Tenenbaums is a prime example. I think he uses it primarily to show that these people have not grown up – but then isn’t it a too literal representation? The humour in his movies is quite subtle (and the dialogues work on multitude of levels), but because of the humour, the audience may not be really emphatic about the plight of the characters. So it is not a full blown comedy, and it is not a drama, it is something in between – it is becomes quite lukewarm in the process.

Probably there is sarcasm that I can’t read and a lot irony as well. There is the portrayal of a slice of personalities that if you met otherwise if real life, you will certainly be wary of, for they will stand out in a crowd and their presence around you will make you quite uncomfortable. His movies are not about regular folks, they are about folks who want to be regular, want a regular, normal (in their own definition) life.


The last movie I watched was Rushmore. It is a good movie – acting is fine, the story isn’t too bad (a little dragging at times); the same thing could be said about The Darjeeling Limited, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life aquatic….but I fail to really care for the characters – they are all hurt in some way, their family is broken (most of the times), they fall for women whom they can’t have etc….but still, by the end of the movie, I really don’t care which way the fate swings for them.

The movie that stands out is Bottle Rocket. First few minutes into the movie and I was totally engrossed into the lives of the two lead characters, played by the Wilson brothers (Owen Wilson’s debut role). This is the most moving film Anderson has ever made. The movie revolves around two friends who are small time thieves with big dreams; one of them just out of a rehab for breakdown, played by Luke Wilson. He is the more sensitive one, and you wonder why did he have to go the rehab in the first place.

You do wonder Dignan, played by Owen Wilson, needs some help! He is spot on as the bumbling, hyper active type who has big dreams…no matter if they involve robbing book stores and cold storage units! He plays a similar character in The Royal Tenenbaums, who ultimately needs some psychiatric help to get over his troubles. His character reminds me of some kids in my school. These were the boys that got into trouble with teachers all the time. They were friends with some kids who were way older and weirder. These were the kids who bunked school mid-day to go play or did it just for the heck of it. When you talked with them, they were a little less coherent in their thoughts but not dumb. They were the unpredictables.

Owen Wilson plays it to perfection. He is almost adorable in that role.

The more subdued part of the group is Luke Wilson’s character –his character symbolizes the directionlessness in life, and the effort to find that missing direction; he falls in love with a room service girl at a motel, and that is when he realizes he has found something to hold on to.

Unlike the other Anderson movies, I cared for what happens to these guys in the end, partly because unlike his other movies, the cast is smaller. There isn’t an ensemble of characters like in the Tenenbaums or Life Aquatic. Which also means the story is more focused compared to other movie, and you are not made to watch through a microscope the slide show of clashing personalities in great numbers.

The quest for spirituality in The Darjeeling Ltd was too lame. Being an Indian, I really don’t get that impressed when someone from outside tries to make it a theme in his movie. But it worked well in the US. It did move people (I guess). I failed to understand why someone would come to India, when they need to look within. There is a lot of symbolism in this movie, although not everyone is going to get it. I did not. I was left with this half empty, half full feeling after watched the move. While I enjoyed the train journey with the three brothers across my country, it failed to move me.

His movies are interesting, and he has his own unique style (with all those slow-motions – almost Bollywoodisque!). They put me in a kind of confused mode – I liked The Royal Tenenbaums, but I’m not sure if I give a damn about any of them? Why so?

When a movie does make you think – ‘why are you not thinking about the fate of the characters?’ ,does it mean that the movie is working??

There is no Sun here!

After you take a right turn in front of the Bishop’s Co Ed in Kalyani nagar, you enter a very narrow lane. This is the beginning of the ‘mega’ road that leads you to the so called ‘Sun City’ by the Bramha Builders in Pune.

There are about 3 blind turns (90 degrees sharp) along the way…oh and it gets better…this is also the PMT route. So when the bus, which is wider than the paved tar road, enters this stretch, it sends a cold shiver down the spine of every biker and car-wala (more so in the later case)…say goodbye to atleast 45 minutes if you are at the far opposite end of road, either on left or right!

So you somehow manage to reach the place (by the way there is another way in, from Nagar road, but it is only convenient if you are NOT coming from Kalyani nagar or KP; and to use it, you have to get to Nagar road first, a travesty in itself), you come inside and go park and go to the entrance lobby.

Wait wait wait…let me go back to the entrance again…supposedly Asia’s largest gate…so you enter after feeling like your life’s goal has been achieved, you will be greeted by some well landscaped greenery, which is quite well done.

You get to the desired building and to the lobby. You see two KONE lifts, but only one is active. You wonder why:

If you stay on the 7th or 8th floor, then do not dare leave for office between 9 and 9:30 in the morning. Why, the only available lift is being used by the garbage collectors! Yes, and they will keep it busy for atleast 30-45 minutes, everyday.

That’s not all that’s phony about this place. There is one security guard in two buildings. So your security is really compromised. The area is open to one side due to ongoing construction from which anyone can enter.
There are heavy vehicles which use the same internal roads used buy all the residents and children as well. It’s a pain to be awakened by noisy trucks on Sunday mornings.

There is no space between two buildings. You can’t tell where one building starts and where it merges into the next one (this is the layout of choice for an increasing number of housing projects in Pune. A modern chawl system…it is disgusting I tell you!).
All the buildings are atleast 8-9 stories high. So when you are standing on the tarmac below, it’s am imposing concreter jungle.

Since the buildings are built like Siamese twins, there is no privacy left – sounds, smells, light – everything is free flowing. Unless you have a corner flat, your apartment is only open on one side, that too only enough open in one balcony - so very meager sun light and wind in you room.

This was one of the most hyped projects when it was launched in Pune, with Katrina Kaif as brand ambassador. It fails to deliver on a lot of points. Having stayed in Magarpatta City before moving here, I felt even more strongly against the short comings. Magarpatta is so well managed in all the regards. It is the only township in Pune which should be allowed to add ‘City’ in the name. Here, the garbage collectors just dump all the litter from the buildings right in the parking lot! So it’s a feast for the stray dogs. (I dare not call them stray, for they live here more than I do, if you count the hours!) . In Magarpatta, the garbage was directly put in a tractor that arrived at the same time as the garbage collectors, so all the garbage was out of the building within half an hour.

The lifts are ill maintained, apart from only one being active, as I’ve already mentioned:


Instead of using bolts and screws, we see insulation tape - What an idea!

And it does…oops!

No one should buy or rent out (like I am) a place here. Even if one overlooks all these things, the major drawback is the approach road, there is none that’s big enough – a road from Adlabs was to be ready last year which would have directly come till the entrance – there are no signs of that happening anytime soon…So find a better place to enjoy the Sun!

Some Kossu, anyone?

Finns are funny people...

Finnish flat tyre
Antero is driving down the road when 'boom' he gets a flat tyre. "Saatana" he says, and after discovering he doesn't have a jack, he decides to walk down the road and try to borrow one from someone.
As he's walking, he's thinking "Damn, they probably won't have one." He walks a little further, and the growing suspicion increases... "I BET they don't have one". He walks further... "DAMN IT, I'm sure they won't have one, and if they did they wouldn't lend it to me anyway."
Finally he reaches a cottage, picks up a rock and hurls it through the window, shouting "KEEP YOUR BLOODY JACK!!"

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Finnish drinking game
There are two versions of this game for Finns; regular and advanced.
Regular: Three Finnish guys go into the sauna, each with half a litre of Kossu (Finland's famous Koskenkorva vodka). They each drink the vodka, and then one guy goes outside. The other two have to guess who went outside....
Advanced: TWO Finnish guys go into the sauna, each with a litre of Kossu. They each drink the vodka, and then one guy goes outside. The other guy has to guess who went outside....

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Taking the Bull to the Butcher

Extract from 'Under the North Star' - Väinö Linna
"Well then, this old man once went to take a bull to the butcher, and he took some turpentine with him. And that bull got tired, so the old man put some turpentine on his balls. Then the bull started running so fast that the old man put turpentine on his own balls. But the bull's balls stopped stinging before the old man's and when the old man got to the butcher's he handed him the rope and said hold on to this I've still got a ways to go..."

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At the airport...
A guy sitting at an airport bar in Atlanta noticed a beautiful woman sitting next to him.
He thought to himself, "Wow, she's gorgeous! And I think she's a flight attendant...but which airline does she work for?"
Hoping to pick her up, he leaned towards her and uttered the Delta slogan, "Love to fly and it shows?"
She gave him a blank, confused stare and he immediately thought to himself, "Hmm, no, she doesn't work for Delta."
A moment later, another slogan popped into his head. He leaned towards her again; "Something special in the air?"
She gave him the same confused look. He mentally kicked himself, and scratched American Airlines off the list. Next he tried the United slogan, "I would really love to fly your friendly skies!"
This time the woman looked at him, irritated, and screamed "What the $%#! do you want?!"
The man slumped back in his chair, and said: "Ahh, Finnair..."

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Finnish soldier
A young female reporter from a British newspaper was sent to Finland to write an article about Finnish soldiers returning from the Winter War. Interviewing one infantry-man, Jussi, she asked
"When you came home, when the war was over, what was the first thing you did?"
"I screwed my wife," Jussi replied bluntly.
The journalist went red, and tried to change the subject.
"After that, I mean. What did you do after that?"
"I screwed her again," he answered.
The journalist turned an even darker shade of red.
"Other than that! Uh - what did you do when you were finished with all that?"
"I took off my skis and had a beer."

The only river...

The man stood there, in the arid land of the Deccan, with thorn bushes scattered in the entire flat valley. His eyes shone as bright as the perpendicular Sun above. His thick grey beard made him look very aged, contrary to what the eyes told.

The hot air made his cloth flutter around him violently.

He started walking towards the settlement that lay beyond the dry riverbed.


A Safari pulled up somewhere in the large dustbowl. Its white now all khaki, the dark windows still rolled up. Two people climbed out.

“Darn hot it is; this is an oven man”

“We start say, about there, near those rocks. That seems like the smack middle of the river”

The two are carrying some instruments. They seem scientific, both the men and their equipments.

“You know, as I think of this, it seems like a big waste of my adult life. This, here, is a place which is baking in the sun as we walk. It is May for God’s sake. Do you see anything around us? This is like Mars, only worse cause we are not astronauts, and that makes it so uncool!

The older of the two hasn’t spoken a word yet. He is analyzing the riverbed.

The river, when it was blessed to be aqueous a long time ago, flowed in all its grandeur, two hundred meters wide here. The valley now was the river then.
The smoothened rocks were a testament to the furious waters that once noised around the river bend. On this May afternoon, everything was quiet, apart from an occasional Kite as it searched for an odd snake or two.

It seemed as if history suffered from the Alzimer’s disease, forgetting about this magnificent river as each year passed. The river started losing its scale, and no one knew why. The rains were there each year, so there was no dearth of water. Still the waters reduced from the bank, year after year. Folks moved away from her, blaming the decay on the powers Above; the fertile riverbank became many sandlots. She was left alone to her fate, and one day, she just vanished.

“Set up that thing over here and start taking readings”. The older one finally broke his silence.

“I want to be exact this time. We’ll need to tread along at least a hundred meters, from here”, he pointed out a spot to the younger one.

“Did you say hundred?”

“Yes I did. That’s just the beginning. The earth here is soft. This is the best spot to catch her. We’ll concentrate all our efforts here, say a stretch of two kilometers along the river.”

They got busy with their task as the Sun began the journey to the other end of the sky.

“She was looking for some solace I guess. At least it seems like that to a mere mortal like me”

They look up to see the man standing there.

“How long were you observing us?”

The man smiles, “Since your were a child”

“That’s a good one.”

“Aren’t you a little lost here? The other pilgrims usually take the bridge to cross the bank, don’t they?”

The man smiles again.
“So any success with your endeavor?”

“How do you even know what are we up to here?”

“Oh I know, so very well. You are trying to see if this is where she is resting. You are trying to hear her playful sounds through the earth. That’s what I know”

“So you know she is here? How old are you?” asked the older scientist, wiping off the sweat on his forehead, a little bewildered.

“Age is what one goes investigating about a man whose words seem too right for his attire”

“That would make a pretty neat status message” the younger one was enjoying this visit now

“Tell us more”

“This is all; around you, what you see, this is the present. She is down there. Let her be in peace”

“If she is indeed flowing below our feet, then she would solve a lot of issues. Do you see a single flowering plant for miles around you? This land needs water in abundance. This was once a farmland…it could well be the same again”

“She went under because she was tired, long tired of carrying all the filth that the World offered, that’s all it had to offer. She went away; now she is in a different world, a world of her own. “

“She will be the only pure thing left when this world erodes away; she will water the parched earth when the harsh seasons have wiped away all the greenery and hope from this planet. Save her for that…she is the future hope of this very predictable and dark present”.

The man started walking away, leaving his words hung in the dry air like dark balloons.

The two kept looking at him till he was gone. They looked at each other and got back to their task.

“The heat must have got him” The younger one opined.

The older one looked again in the direction in which the man had gone.

“I guess it did. It made him see the future”.

looking back

I'm missing college, really a lot! Not because we had great teachers (we didn't) or that the campus was awesome (it wasn't) I'm missing my friends! At the end of two years, we were just getting bonded so well and that's when the departure came about.

And this is despite all the ups and downs in the friendships, all the misunderstandings and petty issues..all that was a part of it...and that was fine.

I'm also missing them because I'm the one who got left behind, like a soldier left behind in the war field...(kidding!) So it feels even more, when I pass through the street where I used to hang out, or when I pass in front of the college...and the other day I was looking at the scribbling day T-shirt, and that was quite nostalgic! People have really written some very interesting things about me there - lady charmer !? (why not? hehehe)...it cracks me up every time :)

I think it is natural that one will feel this way when the friends one had around suddenly went away one fine day! That's the way it happened...two years we literally ran into each other everywhere...now I have to make new (good) friends, which is not easy, since the set of people I meet regularly is quite small.

Anyway, so this is the deal. I'm coping with it. It's not a life critical situation. But I look at someone and it reminds of a friend from the batch, or I think about watching a movie, and I miss those with whom I really enjoyed watching movies and attending the film festival here...things will not be that way ever again...

near wild heaven...but not near enough!

I want to fall in love so well that the rationale clouds in my head won’t make a difference; the conviction out of it should be stronger than the gravity of a black hole…well, that’s what and how it should be…ideally. And as the legacy of love as such suggests, all the greatest lovers had that conviction, somehow.

It’s not that easy…I can’t override the rational mind and apply my emotions right away, cause at each moment, my rational mind is evaluating my emotions, checking them against a zillion things. WHY?

I hate to be so cautious, but I don’t know any other way.

It also happens because I feel I need to be ‘right’ about everything that I decide. The difference is, I should ‘feel’ the rightness rather than arrive at it or ‘calculate’ it. It is what we call intuition or going by the heart….hmmmm…see, I know how I need to be. Very well indeed, but I am not there yet.

Or is it that love happens despite all these things being there, and somehow your state of mind is a combination of rational and irrational (emotional) outlooks towards that one person…?

I think I need to take a breather and not wreck my brains out over all this…but I’m not thinking of all this out of context…there is a context… and there are constraints…constraints sounds so technical! There are considerations let’s say…, which I must look into. If they call it falling in love, then they should have known that some of us would fall with a parachute, because the impact would be too harsh if one falls anywhere else!

I need the sunrays of clear thought piercing the clouds in my head…

I’m staring in the mirror, and there is a stranger staring right back at me and I hope he tells me something about me that I have not yet known!

Good Advices

The phone rings. It seems to be ringing in the dream I am watching, but it keeps ringing and I’m finally taken away from imagery paradise...

“Hello?”

“Dude, sorry to wake you up at this hr”

If he had said ‘Were you sleeping?” I would have sent a bullet through the airwaves

I recognize the caller

“What’s the matter?”

“Well, I need some advice”

“At this hour? You need some sleep “

“Had it been any other hour, I would have asked for much more”

He says it so matter of fact that I’m taken aback for a second. Oh that’s so generous of you, I think in my mind.

"Shoot”

“Ok. Well..Umm..I have this friend who is new to Pune and he and some friends wanted to know if it was safe to go to Station at this hour... and they stay in Kalyaninagar, kinda inside, so and some of them are in town just for a couple of days you know”

“Have you fallen on your head? Did a bat suck the living wisdom out of you??” It’s ..it’s ( check my watch) 2:40 in the night man!!!” “You are asking the worst...this is not even an advice that you are asking!? I’m not a bloody nightwatchman to be bothered about the nocturnal safe places of visit in the city!

(I’m screaming in a low voice, and it bothers the dog; he gives me a look of tired hopelessness)

“What I wanted your opinion on, is something else”

“ I hope you don’t want to know which particular bakery or tea stall they should visit at 3 am, cause most of the tea stalls don’t have sign boards and I would recommend the Viceroy bakery...can I sleep now?”

“It’s about this girl...well she is with them, and I like her! I know it sounds a bit weird, and well right now I’m headed towards where they are staying, in Kalyaninagar, kinda inside I told you...anyway, so I have my bike and she might ride with me...and I just ...I need an opening”

“An opening?”

“I did break ice in the day when we were together”

(Where did two of you go to break ice, the Alps?) I didn’t say it out loud cause between a good joke and sleep, always go for sleep - you can laugh in your dreams...but this bugger friend of mine was not letting me of the hook just yet.

“that’s grand”

(silence on the other end”)

“Take her to..ummm...Khadakwasla. It’s almost full moon tonight...the lake and moonlight, she by your side etc etc...or go and sit at some secluded place like the Z bridge near Decaan “ (What the hell am I saying!?)

“Well, I was thinking more about your place”

“(upright in the bed)what about my place?”

“Like I can bring her there and we will sit in your balcony and talk till the daybreak”

“Are you crazy? Have you completely lost your already evaporating mind? I’ve a dog, dirty laundry and oh, A DAY TOMORROW!!! No way!”

“ Look, simple advice, don’t get your hopes high...go to Station...have some tea and pastries...take her on a ride...you know the city like no other punk, and just roam around...make conversation. Where is she from by the way?”

“Goa”

“Goa? Hmmm exotic...”

“Just go there and things will happen, that’s the best I can tell you...I’m no Don Juan you know it” (not feeling too proud saying that)

“Are you there?”

“Yes...ok.I’ll see..I’ll try not to mess it up...thanks for talking”

“Relax and just be cool man. Don’t think about the mess, cause you don’t have anything to mess. Be spontaneous”

“Spontaneous”

“Yes”

“Ok. I’ll see you in the morning”

“Hehe...No. I don’t think so. My day will be late by atleast a couple of hours, so ...until some solid double digit hours...goodbye. Take it easy”

“Yeah sure”

I’m back in my bed. This was random, quite so, I mean the conversation. It didn’t make any sense and in the end, I’m damn sure it didn’t help him. It did make me wonder about a certain profession, suddenly. I don’t know why about this particular profession that I found a similarity between it and the conversation I just had:

Is this what consultants do?