Desi Galaxy

Well you guys have already read Aamir Khan’s official blog. Honestly I am a bit jealous of Aamir. While we guys work so hard on our blogs to make them popular, these movie stars can beat us by just calling names to their colleagues. A friend of mine says that if you want more comments and link backs to your blog all you need to do is to provoke a controversy, start some controversial debate, make your voice stronger and be passionate about your ideas. I never paid attention to my friend’s advise but now he is telling me that Aamir followed his advise and now look at Aamir Khan’s blog. Thousands of comments on a single post! Here is how Aamir did it.

Aamir Khan wrote a post titled “Settlers Of Panchgani” where he mentioned that he bought a house that came with a dog which is named after Shahrukh Khan. He writes:

Shahrukh is licking my feet and I am feeding him biscuits every now and then. What more can I ask for?

Now, before you jump to any conclusions let me add that Shahrukh is the name of our dog. And before you jump to any further conclusions let me add that I had nothing to do with naming him.

The post was mentioned on almost every news channel in India. Almost every newspaper wrote about this post. Even the king of Bollywood Shahrukh Khan talked about this blog post. I can’t even imagine the traffic this single post would have generated for Aamir Khan’s blog. There are 9697 comments on this post, and I am sure that the technical team at Aamir Khan’s office must have deleted thousands of comments.

Aamir Khan is a popular super star of Hindi film industry. The fame he got is not the fame of his blogging capabilities. He is still famous as a movie actor/ director/ producer not as a blogger. However, I think he has a good sense of humor. His writing skills are not bad either. But his blog lacks interactivity, I think he should understand that blogs are not about comments and posts. He needs to upload videos, photos, and he should link back to websites he found interesting. He is already immensely popular all over the world and he is famous for working hard to achieve the perfection in his work. So he must improve on his blogging skills and since he is the pioneer celebrity blogger, he should try to set an example for other celebrities that are thinking about following his steps.

I have just added this new plugin that allows visitors to take advantage of Google’s language tools and translate a Desi Galaxy page into their own language. I am very excited about adding this new feature to my blog. I always wanted to know the people who are visiting this site from Europe and other countries. I wanted to make blog accessible and readable for them, and now it is.

Salaam-e-Ishq is a crappy Indian copy of “Love Actually”. Nikhil Advani is a talented director, but embedding six stories into one love marathon is a difficult job. He tried and he failed. What this movie lacks is a witty plot with surprises and twists. Some thing that surprises the audience and keeps them captivated during a three and a half hour long movie.

The abstract style of story telling that Nikhil introduced in ‘Kal ho na ho’ didn’t work out for Salam e ishq. The six stories needed to be joined together and Nikhils no surprises and typical hindi film approach to the climax fails him to successfully attach the stories together. Taran Adarsh discussed the plot of movie in his review on IndiaFM.

Music was not at all bad. Shankar Ehsan Loy did a good job, specially the experimentation they did with songs like ‘Babu ji Dheeray chalna‘ and ‘Qawwali Saiyaan Re’. They also attempted to mix indian musical instruments with caribbean in the songs ‘Dil Kya Kare‘ and ‘Tenu Leke’. These elements make the music quite pleasant and surprisingly good. But unfortunately Nikhil failed to picturise the songs with something equally new and beautiful.

You can watch the movie trailor here:
http://www.salaam-e-ishq.com/

Some pictures, images, posters and movie stills:
http://123india.santabanta.com/wallgallery.asp?catname=Salaam-e-Ishq

Cast:
Priyanka Chopra
John Abraham
Salman Khan
Anil Kapoor
Akshay Khanna
Ayesha Takia
Govinda
Vidya Balan

Story: Nikhil Advani
Screenplay: Suresh Nair
Script: Saurabh Shukla

Costumes: Vikram Phadnis

Guru is not an exceptionally great movie. It is a great movie, quite intelligent and fantastic for typical well-educated-Indian-middle-class audience. Based on the life of Indian business tycoon Dhirubhai Ambani, this movie has a brilliant plot, it is a story of ambition, optimism, hope, dreams and love of course. Eventhough the movie is based on the lives of real life people but the director doesn’t claim that this movie is based on the biographical events from the life of any person.

Abhishek Bachchan performed brilliantly as Guru. This guy surprises me with each new movie. He has some genuine skills to offer and it shows with every new release. Aishwarya Rai didn’t has a role as strong as Abhishek, she was there in the movie to say some dialogues. Her character revolves around the character of Guru. But since there is so much hype about Aishwarya-Abhishek wedding in the press, the couple looked well coordinated in the movie. I would say that Mani Ratnam made the perfect decission to cast them together.

Mallika Sherawat has a sexy item number in the movie. If you size up Mallika’s performance from her vulgor dances and shameless display of her boobs. Then the Turkish and arabic belly dance with typical hindi masala was quite ok not very delicious though.

Lyrics were just as beautiful as the melodies of A. R. Rehman. All the songs and the background score is excellent. First song in the movie “Barso re” is a lively rain song by Shreya Ghosal and Uday Majumdar. Then there is ‘Tere Bina’ a song that A. R. Rehman has dedicated to the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. “Jaage hain” is a magical delight. Sung by Chitra and Rahman with Madras Chorale Group providing the orchestra.

But the greatest aspect of the movie is the cinematography. Rajiv Menon has proved himself to be the best cinematographer in Bollywood.

For Mani Ratnam I would like to quote from Aprajita Anil’s review:

But one head that weaves together all the vividness and intensity and spells out an incredible performance is the director. Kudos to Mani Ratnam! It is only a director of his stature and ability who can bind together emotion, drama, intensity and make it so rooted in reality.

Official Website: Guru - The film Unfortunately you can not download songs of Guru from the official website but you can watch the trailer and preview the music.

I can now tell you that there is not a single film maker in India capable of making an Urdu Film. Seriously, it is such a shame to watch Dutta’s Umrao Jaan when you have seen the Muzaffar Ali’s Umraoo Jaan. Even though Dutta’s Umrao Jaan had a lavish budget, Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan but he surely does not have the capability to make a Poetic Urdu movie.

The most disgusting aspect of the movie was poetry and the Urdu accent of Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan. It was artificial and through out the movie not a single character was able to deliver the language, culture and emotions correctly. The overacting of Aishwarya Rai made me cry at her foolish attempts to appear legendary. She is good looking there is no doubt about it but she was totally misfit in the role. I can not believe that a professional film maker would hire Annu Malik to create music for such a movie. I was surprised that JP Dutta didn’t hire any consultants to understand the literary background of the movie. I think he should have hired some writers with background in Urdu screenplay for the movie. Javed Akhter failed miserably too.

Yash Chopra made the similar mistake with Veer Zaara, totally forgetting that Urdu has a different sub culture. If you are going to make some parts of the movie representing Muslim Urdu speaking culture then you must realize that it is not even slightly similar to India’s current Muslim culture. Urdu’s poetic powers demand well balanced screenplay with just the right poetry and dialogs. You don’t need lavish sets and expansive costumes to create the environment. Just look at Muzaffar’s Umraoo Jaan, Her gharara’s had only Gota Kinari on borders while Aishwarya is wearing overly embodied outfits.

The only thing good in the movie was Shabana Azmi who did justice with her role as Khanum.

I would say that if you haven’t seen the original Umrao Jaan, then go ahead watch JP Dutta’s version. But if you have seen the original one then you are definitely going to curse JP Dutta for this humorous attempt to disgrace a classic.

Read Also:

Aishwarya Rai in and as Umrao Jaan

Review Umrao Jaan on Desicritics

I am working with a few friends to make a little blog network. I have just moved my blog from blogspot to Sabza.org, the single roof providing shelter to all our blogs. Now that I am using Wordpress and has a lot more control on my site, I think I will be blogging better.

Transition from Blogger to Wordpress was easy but I am still unable to redirect visitors from my old blog to exact posts on my new blog. I tried to use Tom Sherman’s technique but it is only redirecting to the Main Page of my new blog. I will be spending a little more time to fix the problem and then I will become the Queen of Bollywood overnight.

This is a blog about Pakistani celebraties. Here I will publish news and gossip about Pakistani pop artists, musicians, bands, television and movie actors and actoresses. The idea came to my mind when I was looking for some information about Rema, the top class Pakistani film actoress. What I found during my search was not relevant to my queries. I realized that there is not much content on the web about Pakistani stars and just to prove it I searched google for Meera, Resham, Saood, Shahid Afridi, Atif Aslam and others. So I thought that may be I should start my own magzine to fill the void.

I will add links to the news items, picture galleries, downloads and other goodies. I will try to make it a fun experience for my readers if you the readers promise to encourage me.