Dussehra time!!

Happy Dussehra!! I can shamelessly admit, I am a sucker for festivals. I love them! Festivals of any religion...any geography and absolutely any motivation get me smiling. There is a spark in the air, strangers smile warmly when crossing each other...everyone is dressed up in their fineries...there is a certain magic around these occasions that you and I can't really explain.

And the mother of all festivals in India has to be the Dussehra-Diwali month! I was crossing a Ramlila ground last night and they were getting all ready for the famous Ravana burning act. And it got me thinking....the story of Ravana as told in India makes us see things in black and white. There is no scope for grey. He was evil. Ram was good. Good kills evil. End of story. But I see contemporary India moving away from this school of thought. I see us questioning things. What motivated Ravana to act like he did? Was he justified in doing so? Was he really all that evil?

JK Rowling got Dumbledore to say a very thought provoking statement in one of the books. Dumbledore told Harry - "There is no good or evil. All of us have a little evil in us. It is our choice which voice we choose to act on."

This is the grey that we recognise today. All of us have skeletons in the closet....some words said, some acts done that we wish in retrospect that we had not. But that doesn't make us evil. We can choose to bury them and select a different path...and the beauty of this moment in time is that there is a chance we will not be crucified for our thoughts and we won't be burned in full glory to signify the victory of good over evil....

What NEXT??

Cinema theater visits are becoming more and more addictive by the day. One after another, well made movies are coming in and sweeping us off our feet...ofcourse that does not pertain to every movie in the market. A Laga chunri mein daag or similar are best avoided...but movies like NEXT are a must watch!

Starring Nicholas Cage and Julianne Moore, the theme of the movie is that Cage can see 2 minutes into the future - the catch being that he can only see into his own future. A fast paced, no nonsense movie, it keeps taking the audience into a spin of events and their consequences.

Besides impeccable acting that can be expected from these actors, the movie wins because it refuses to play on drama or unimportant action. The action itself is of a sort that we have not seen before owing to the unique concept of the movie. 'Next' manages to make us gasp in surprise and shake our heads in bewilderment...

A must watch.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5