Saturday, January 26, 2013

Race 2: Expecting the unexpected

Venturing out on a Eid-e- Milad day in Mumbai requires lots of courage especially towards the late evening. Being a movie buff, I had to take up the task and prove myself.

Race 2, sequel to an Abbas Mustan movie, released after a wait  of 5 long years. Expectations were high right from the word go. So, couldnt afford to miss a single sequence. Paying high gratitude to the Milad processions, it built up a perfect prequel to the movie. It was finally a "race" to the theatre. And you could expect yours truly to never miss the beginning of any movie. Today was no exception.

The movie starts with a bang in typical Abbas-Mustan style and carries on from there. The chase sequence is breathtaking. It gives us heavy relief from the absurd South Indian fight sequences. The locales are amazing. Music is foot tapping especially the Be Intehaan and Party on my mind numbers.
We start expecting the unexpected now. The plot now deepens. The entire cast is very much up to it. Saif, John Abraham and Anil Kapoor all play their parts with élan. Their female counterparts however, do not have meaty roles to boast of. The ending could have been better with some little more editing.

All in all, seems a good entertainer though. The director duo does not let you down once again.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Life after death: Myth or Reality


For years Dr. Eben Alexander III  had dismissed near-death revelations of God and heaven as explainable by the hard wiring of the human brain. He was, after all, a neurosurgeon with sophisticated medical training.

 
But then in 2008, Dr. Alexander contracted bacterial meningitis. The deadly infection soaked his brain and sent him into a deep coma.

During that week, as life slipped away, he now says, he was living intensely in his mind. He was reborn into a primitive mucky Jell-o-like substance and then guided by “a beautiful girl with high cheekbones and deep blue eyes” on the wings of a butterfly to an “immense void” that is both “pitch black” and “brimming with light” coming from an “orb” that interprets for an all-loving God.

Dr. Alexander, 58, was so changed by the experience that he felt compelled to write a book, “Proof of Heaven,” that recounts his experience. He knew full well that he was gambling his professional reputation by writing it, but his hope is that his expertise will be enough to persuade skeptics, particularly medical skeptics, as he used to be, to open their minds to an afterworld.