Last night I went out and saw "The Namesake". And as it has been reported before, for once the movie trumps the book on which it is based. Few other things I liked about this Mira Nair's movie include the way time in the movie movies both backwards and forwards across two continents, the cinemaphotography which captures the slovenly loveliness of two cities Irrfan Khan & Tabu's restrained and brilliant performances as Ashoke and Ashima, and the delicious background score by one of my favorite musicians, Nitin Sawhney, which includes one of his most brilliant songs "Falling". Finally, as the end credits - a brilliant touch that; Bengali written out in calligraphy - overlaid with Susheela Rahman's "The Same Song" roll, I think one walks out of this movie - especially if one is an exile, voluntary or not - with this knowledge that it is love (Ashoke and Ashima's no-hand holding-in-public love, Gogol's love for himself etc), and the shade that it casts are somewhat sufficient refuges to face off this certain loneliness that comes with geographical displacements.

A while back I had posted a few download links to Shankar Nag's wonderful TV series bases on The Great Narayan's Malgudi stories. And this evening, I found that you can watch many of these episodes as streaming video here (including all the episodes based on the novel "Swami & Friends"). Also does anyone remember reading Narayan's story "Hero" in one of those NCERT textbooks for English?

IITians (I include myself in this group) are known to be geeks with social issues. While that may be true to a different degree from specimen to specimen, the following spoof of Omkara's "Beedi" song proves that for sly humor there is no other place like an "frusth" IITian's brain: