English...errrrr...German......

We generally come across thousands of forward mails a year. This is a mail that I really liked and thought to share with it with my readers as well as save here permanently. Here it goes:-

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as 'Euro-English' .

In the first year, 's' will replace the soft 'c'. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard 'c' will be dropped in favour of 'k'. This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome 'ph' will be replaced with 'f'. This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent 'e' in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as
replasing 'th' with 'z' and 'w' with 'v'.

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary 'o' kan be dropd from vords kontaining 'ou' and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

If zis mad you smil, pleas pas on to oza pepl

Here comes back my old friend!

The summer seems to have started again and so has my sleeplessness! Last night when I required to have a tight sleep more than anything following my week long activities of various kind, I actually kept wondering the entire night - 'why I cant sleep when I'm so tired'? This is a mystery to me!

As I met Him...

...I started hopping and jumping not even caring that the salty water was wetting my kalamkari salwar and the off-white edges of my dupatta! I was ecstatic…like others… But I guess I was happier than others as it was the first occasion I was touching the sea…the endless sea….the limitless sea….. I had read and written so much about its magical beauty! But nothing I could think of then except for listening to the heavy gurgling of the waves and watching them coming one after another…relentlessly…..

And then I met Him....the sea...the virile sea

Jodhaa Akbar - my take

Yesterday I saw Jodhaa Akbar, finally. I had got so many negative feedbacks before going to watch this. Still I knew that I would definitely be watching it and would definitely like it. And yes, I did like it.

I always loved to study the history of Rajputs and Mughals. My two years of experience as travel writer gave me more exposure to that when I wrote extensively on Delhi and Rajasthan. So, the fact of Akbar’s getting married to Jodhaa Bai of Amer, Akbar’s immense faith on Moinuddin Chisti of Ajmer (Akbar actually walked in bare feet from Agra to Ajmer Sharif), Akbar’s rebellious brother-in-law whom he couldn’t kill in order to keep his promise made to his sister, his roaming around in the streets in disguise to know his own people, etc. are not unknown to me. The history also says that Jodhabai was the mother of Jahangir and there’s a mahal in Fatehpur Sikri in her name, which was not shown in the movie though.

But I really liked the way Ashutosh Gowarikar did his thorough research. The forts, palaces are still there but they are now surrounded by more than one examples of modern era. It must have been a headache for the director to take the shot at proper angle in order to avoid the lamp posts, electric wires, hoardings and thousand other examples of modernization. And he never gave up.

The fight sequences are too good. The language was Hindi, but I felt like watching a Hollywood movie. No wonder, people who are listening to their moron friends and not going to watch the movie, are not even aware what they are missing.

But I must admit, I missed something in this movie too, the same way that I missed in Swades. It’s Amir Khan. I didn’t miss him on the screen, but I missed his intellect that bridges the gap between a class mind and a mass mind; just like it did it in Lagaan, Rang De Basanti and Tare Zameen Par. No wonder, Ashutosh Gowarikar is a wonderful director but somehow he misses to induce the ‘punch’ in his story telling that he finally misses out to catch the pulse of audience. Since the same story repeated with both of his post-Lagaan movies, probably we can guess whose head worked stronger behind the success of Lagaan.