Month: October 2015

Categories
Film

Review: Titli

A superb directorial debut and excellent performances are just two reasons to watch this remarkable film about a dysfunctional Delhi family.
by Ravi Shet

Rating: 4/5

This is a film that takes you to the narrow bylanes of Delhi, with its small, packed houses. One of these houses belongs to Titli (Shashank Arora) and his family of car-jackers. Titli is desperate to escape from his criminal family and plans to invest money in a shopping mall parking lot.

Vikram (Ranvir Shorey) is Titli’s oldest brother; he is abusive and short tempered, and his wife and daughter leave him because of this. Pradeep aka Bawla (Amit Sial) is the second brother who is often the mediator between Vikram and Titli, while their father (Lalit Behl) is the silent type, maintaining his peace with a cup of tea even in the midst of huge fights between brothers – stepping in only to give wicked suggestions.

Titli is a part of their newest car-jacking plan; he asks for a lift from a car that slows down but does not stop. Vikram and Bawla ride past on a scooter, intercept the car and break the windshield before Bawla and Titli flee with it. However, the car soon meets with an accident near a police check post, but the duo is released after they bribe the cops. Titli soon discovers that Rs 3 lakh is missing from his bag; this is the first time his brothers hear of the money and they realise that Titli is saving up to escape them.

 

Instead, they persuade him to get married – they reason that a woman can be useful to their work in conning people. Titli soon marries Neelu (Shivani Raghuvanshi) who is in love with a married man, Prince (Prashant Singh). Titli tells Neelu that he will help her unite with Prince – but first, she must hand over her fixed deposit money. She agrees.

First time director Kanu Behl impresses with his tight grip on the subject and shines a spotlight on the realities of families that are driven by the lust of money and harmful to their own. Debutants Shashank Arora and Shivani Raghuvanshi are confident, while the best performances come from Ranvir Shorey and Amit Sial. Without a doubt, this is one of the best films released this year – it will stay with you long after you leave the cinema hall.

(Picture courtesy www.india.com)

Categories
Deal with it

Resolution for Diwali: Stop preparing for imaginary guests

We have so many items stashed away for ‘when guests will come’ that we have forgotten to enjoy our own possessions.
Pooja Birwatkarby Dr Pooja Birwatkar

The pre Diwali mood has already set in all over the city. Everyone is busy sprucing up their homes, cleaning out their wardrobes, throwing out broken items and washing their curtains.

Cleaning is therapeutic for many of us. It is an amusing activity that makes us see how much stuff we have hoarded all year, how many items we had misplaced and overlooked. Diwali cleaning is especially disturbing to those who are compulsive hoarders. Most of us cannot resist sales and bargains, where we buy things in bulk and never even use them.

We also have a strange habit of buying things and then packing them away for ‘future use’. Be it beautiful crockery, bed sheets, towels, carpets, glassware, perfumes, silverware…we don’t use them, but preserve them. Rooted deep in our psyche is the philosophy that all expensive items must be used only for special occasions, when guests arrive. This means that we wait our entire lives for ‘important guests’ to arrive and give us the chance to use our cherished possessions. In the meantime, we sleep on ragged linen, eat in old plates, drink juice in steel containers and use threadbare towels…despite all the excellent stuff we have hidden away, unused.

Then Diwali comes and we realise that our expensive leather bags have wrinkled away, we are too large to fit into that costly dress, mould has gotten into the bedsheets we bought. Life has passed us by while we waited for people to show up.

Our desire to show off to our guests stops us from living for ourselves. We spend all our lives working hard – what stops us from enjoying the fruit of our labour? We base our entire lives on how people will perceive us, and so our material possessions define our reality. If you think about it, our houses in Mumbai are not even large enough to accommodate guests. The guests themselves are too busy to notice that they are wiping their faces on expensive towels or sleeping on silk sheets.

This Diwali, let’s pledge to use all the things we have stacked away. Give away the things that you have not used for over six months. The next time your child wants juice, unpack that beautiful glass tumbler. If you want, unwrap those new sheets when you make your bed today.

Let’s celebrate Diwali for ourselves first.

(Picture courtesy blog.at-home.co.in. Image is used for representational purpose only)

Categories
Hum log

Meet Mumbai’s water warrior

Aabid Surti cannot pass by a leaking tap without fixing it. Till date, he’s saved 3 million litres of water.
by Ravi Shet

With the rise in global population, there has not been a corresponding increase in precious resources such as water. It is rightly said that the next wars in the world will be fought over water, but how seriously does the average person take the threat of water scarcity?

Aabid Surti with his creation ‘Bahadur’

Countries around the world are implementing various methods to save water, but the actual vision for this initiative to succeed must come from the common man. That’s where Mumbai’s amazing Water Warrior comes in. Meet Aabid Surti (80) – writer, painter, cartoonist and creator of the cult comic figure, ‘Bahadur’ – who has been running a one-man NGO ‘Drop Dead Foundation’ for the past eight years. He has been instrumental in saving tonnes of water by fixing leaking taps free of cost in Mira Road.

Aabid’s childhood was spent on a pavement in Dongri and he was exposed to the daily struggle for water with his mother joining the ranks of women lining up at the common tap each morning for their bucket of water. “But my movement to save water started I went to a friend’s house and saw one of the taps leaking. This hurt me a lot. When I asked him why he did not get the tap fixed, he said that getting a plumber for such a minuscule task was difficult. So the next weekend, I took a plumber to his house and not only fixed the leaking tap there but also several more in the locality,” he smiles.

Aabid’s war against leaking taps got a boost when he received an unexpected cash prize of Rs 1 lakh from the Hindi Sahitya Sansthan, Uttar Pradesh, towards his contribution to Hindi literature. He says, “Each time I ran out of funds and thought of stopping, I got donations through my close friends and people who understood my work. They would help in the form of money or awards. God has been my fundraiser from the inception of Drop Dead Foundation and somehow He manages the funds for my mission, which is a miracle in itself.”

Every Monday, Aabid identifies buildings or slums and even chawls. Next, a volunteer from his Foundation visits the secretary of the concerned housing society and if the secretary agrees, then they put up posters on the notice board announcing their arrival. On the following Saturday, they distribute pamphlets describing the Foundation’s work and why they are coming on Sunday to their area. On Sunday, Aabid, a volunteer and a plumber go to the concerned home and locality to fix the leaky taps.

“We put up a sticker that reads ‘Save Every Drop or Drop Dead’ next to the tap repaired by us. From the inception of the Foundation till 2014, we have saved 3 million liters of water,” he claims. “My basic idea is to motivate individuals, especially senior citizens, and they should believe that if I can, they can. I invest a couple of hours a week to do this and it does not require a large office or staff, it just needs a plumber to fix the leaky taps.”

Apart from his mission, Aabid is busy with his writing and painting and travels around the country addressing students, NGOs and other institutions advocating the need to conserve water. He wants to help individuals who want to start this mission anywhere in the world by providing online help for designs of pamphlets, posters, stickers and other relevant documents. Aabid says, “I tell individuals to replace my address and contact details (on these design materials) with theirs before printing it out. I hope people start this project in their own locality so that we can stop massive wastage of water.”

To volunteer at Drop Dead Foundation or to start this mission in your locality, contact Aabid Surti at C -16/003, Anuroop, Shantinagar, Sector 11, Mira Road (East), Mumbai. Call him on +91-9820184964.

Categories
Film

Restored ‘Pyaasa’ will be screened at Jio MAMI this year

Mumbai-based company Ultra has restored the yesteryear classic and will present the new print in Mumbai film festival next month.
by The Editors | editor@themetrognome.in

Pyaasa, a 1957 cult classic, will be screened in the restored section at the 17th Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival in Mumbai on November 1 and 3. The film will be screened at PVR ECX, Andheri and PVR, Phoenix Lower Parel respectively.

The ‘Restored classics section’ in Jio MAMI this year will screen six more films. This particular section has evoked a lot of interest amongst the festival goers and common public in general.

Produced and directed by Guru Dutt, this classic features an ensemble star cast comprising Guru Dutt, Waheeda Rehman, Mala Sinha, Johnny Walker, Rehman, Mehmood, Tun Tun etc. The movie boasts of one of the best musical scores put together by SD Burman, Sahir Ludhianvi, Mohammed Rafi, Geeta Dutt and Hemant Kumar, featuring such evergreen songs as ‘Jaane Woh Kaise Log’, ‘Yeh Duniya Agar Mil’ and ‘Jaane Kya Tune Kahi’.

The film was restored by Ultra which will also re-release the film theatrically worldwide after MAMI.

How Pyaasa was restored

The most challenging part in restoring Pyaasa was sourcing the authentic materials to complete the preservation. After much effort, Ultra found the original camera negatives of the film at an archive in India; however a lot of the parts of the negatives were either damaged or lost.

They decided to use as many parts as possible from the original camera negatives and a few parts were used from 35 mm prints. A new digital transfer was created in 2K resolution on the ARRISCAN film scanner. This in-house technology helped in applying a multidisciplinary, data-centric approach to the entire film’s restoration process.

Once the complete film was digitally transferred, came the most challenging part of restoration. Thousands of instances of dirt, lines, scratches, splices, warps, jitters and green patches were manually removed frame by frame under careful supervision by experienced artists.

The in-house talented professionals used a specialised film content mending and defect removal mechanism in their repair process. They carefully selected the best way to restore this priceless classic to its original quality.

The original monaural soundtrack was remastered at 24-bit from the 35mm optical soundtrack. Clicks, thumps, hisses and hums were manually removed frame by frame.

Says Anupama Chopra, Festival Director, Jio MAMI, “We at MAMI are indeed delighted to screen Pyaasa. There are some masterpieces of the bygone era that a lot of people have not seen, either due to their poor condition or inaccessibility. These films when restored the right way can give it a completely new life and also can help not only to be screened but also as a strong reference material.”

Categories
Uncategorized

Builders go for broke to sell empty flats

Interest free finance, free electrical appliances on booking the flat, free building amenities…builders are trying every trick to entice buyers.
by The Editors | editor@themetrognome.in

For most Mumbaikars, buying a home is a once-in-a-lifetime task but due to a lack of budget and high prices of properties, it becomes impossible to buy a house without taking a bank loan. This brings in the dreaded EMI nightmare.

Elsewhere, too, the situation is no different. India’s other metros are also seeing a high increase in realty prices, pushing buyers to borrow from the bank to finance their home dreams. At the same time, there are many unsold housing units lying vacant all across the country. Thus, developers are coming up with innovative ways to attract buyers into investing in under-construction and ready possession flats. The biggest indicator of a slump in real estate is the scores of advertisements that developers put out in popular media – as is happening in the metros at the moment.

A builder in Delhi recently announced a ‘no pre-EMI’ clause till possession of the property. Customers are asked to pay 10 per cent as the booking amount, followed by 80 per cent of the amount within 45 days from bank funding. The remaining 10 per cent can be paid on possession. In effect, all the EMIs on the housing loan taken by the buyer are paid for by the builder and the buyer starts paying EMIs only after possession.

Earlier this year, for its upcoming commercial project, another leading builder from Chennai provided an option where consumers paid 40 per cent in three months and took possession of the house, while the balance was to be paid in 15 months. This move pushed sales of commercial premises substantially.

In Mumbai, the developers helming a housing project in Goregaon East decided to offload a series of their unsold flats in Goregaon with a ‘Ready Possession’ clause. The buyers do not take a home loan for the property, and can immediately move in after paying a small percentage of the total cost. The balance can be paid in EMIs to the builder directly, without an additional interest being charged on the same.

Says Dilawar Nensey, Joint Managing Director at the firm, “Since the realty market is down we thought of working out a way for people to be able to buy their permanent dream home as also offload our inventory. We prefer to pass on price benefits to our customers rather than pay heavy interest burden on term loans.”

Another builder in Thane has just announced a housing complex that charges customers as per construction costs, minus the profit margins. “This brings down the cost per house, so more people can buy houses,” the developer explains. Yet another developer in Thane is promising free household appliances like refrigerators and TVs on booking the flats.

But are buyers really buying?

“I am always sceptical of these ‘Ready possession’ claims,” says Shyam Borkar, an architect. “Maybe it is because of my perception that builders are not to be trusted blindly, but I always feel there must be a catch somewhere.” Shyam is about to close a deal on a flat he has booked in Navi Mumbai. “I purchased a re-sale flat because one can never know when the builder will stop construction on a project,” he explains.

Raja Mathur would agree. The garment exporter invested in an under-construction property in Goregaon three years ago, but the work was stalled mid-way owing to permission issues with the BMC. He says, “There is no clarity on when the work will start again and the builder has stopped responding to our calls and messages. I have paid almost 40% of the cost but I don’t know when the project will be completed. I wish I had waited and gathered enough money to invest in a re-sale flat.”

Always examine what the builder is promising, cautions Deepak Vaidya, an investment banker. “Many flats are lying unsold in the city and builders are getting desperate. Some of them will go to any extent to offload the flats. But one must be careful about believing their claims of interest-free payments, paying after possession, etc. They spend crores of rupees on their projects, why will they let the customer use the houses without recovering the cost?”

(Picture courtesy www.topnews.in. Image is used for representational purpose only)

Categories
grey space

Why senior citizens must keep mentally active

Writing, trading on shares online…there is nothing that a senior citizen cannot learn to keep alert and in prime wellness.
by Nagesh Kini

The rapidly changing dynamics of the population profile have resulted in an increasing addition of elders, those in the 60+ age bracket.

This has brought about the urgent need to seek the active participation of these presently mentally and physically stable senior men and women into the main stream of the society. Not doing this can make them prey to debilitating ailments like Alzheimer’s, dementia, Parkinson’s, vertigo, spondylitis, diabetes, cardiac conditions, strokes, hypertension, and vision and hearing losses, among many others. Their consequences can be minimised by preventing the feelings of isolation and marginalisation by making them independent and fruitful members of society, by changing social attitudes to keep themselves mentally alert to keep potential serious neurological disorders at bay.

It is essential for those after 60 to keep both mentally and physically agile rather than succumb to lifestyle diseases. According to a recent study published by the reputed British Medical Journal, The Lancet, physical inactivity or peoples’ failure to spend at least 150 minutes a week doing moderate exercise such as brisk walking for 30 minutes five days a week is responsible for 5.3m of the 57m deaths globally. This causes about 6 to 10% of major non-communicable diseases including coronary heart diseases and type 2 Diabetes.

Another team from Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School estimated the global impact of physical inactivity by calculating population attributable factors – or how much of the diseases could theoretically be prevented if people were sufficiently active both mentally and physically if inactivity decreased by 10-25% translates to 533,000 and 1.3m deaths potentially averted worldwide. Life expectancy could rise by 0.68 years if physically eliminated.

Post-retirement activities – both mental and physical – can go a long way in retirees maintaining their own mental equilibrium by contributing to wellbeing of the society at large. They can contribute their valuable hands-on experiences in profession and industry and provide vital intellectual inputs.

These days one of the most intellectually stimulating mental activities is writing by contributing to columns in publications of repute. This requires the writer to undertake deep study of the subject both on and off-line and keeps the brain busy by keeping constantly updated on the subject before putting the matter in print.

Writing is an extremely low cost, challenging and stimulating exercise. It can take place in the confines of one’s home. It just involves accessing facts and figures on-line and putting flesh on to the skeleton to bring out a well authored output that can initiate mind-boggling debates from readers far and wide. Writing can be financially rewarding, too – publications these days do remunerate columnists handsomely.

Writing need not necessarily be on professional issues; one can even write, among others on matters of common interests like hobbies, spirituality, food, nature and health, like benefits of walking!

Being basic computer literate can go a long way for the elders in helping their writing forays. It no longer requires putting down the matter in long hand and then having to transcribe it on a typewriter to manually post the hardcopy. All that one does is to punch a few keys to put it down in the Word format – edit, add, delete and amend the matter at will and mail it across. And hey presto you’ve conveyed your thoughts miles across! More and more senior citizens have become computer savy and learnt to keep in touch on Skype not only with their offspring, grandchildren and siblings, friends and even distant relations staying in the other end of the world at any hour of the day. I have a 75-year-old aunt at Bengaluru who picked up computer skills from her granddaughter and now merrily trades online – making a lot of money in the bargain!  This helps get her over loneliness by keeping in touch just punching the keys sitting at home all the time!

A happy retirement with activities like writing can make for a lot of difference to prevent isolation and loneliness!

Nagesh Kini is a Mumbai based chartered accountant-turned-activist. ‘Grey Space’ is a weekly column on senior citizen issues. If you have an anecdote or legal information, or anything you feel is useful to senior citizens, caregives and the society at large, feel free to get it published in this space. Write to editor@themetrognome.in or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/Themetrognome.in and we will publish your account.

(Picture courtesy www.samopportunities.in. Image is used for representational purpose only)

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