SG OwnBlog

I saw the trailer of this movie once and really really liked it. What was really interesting was the Thomas Kretschmann acted in a movie with the same name exactly 20 years back. Stalingrad was released in 1993 and the young Kretschmann played the role of a dutiful but conscientious German leutnant of the ill fated 6th Armee. Here also he comes back, slightly older and rugged. The spectacular visuals, the background sound and the lack of background music makes it a realistic watch. That is all positive that I have to say about this trash. Yes, that's what I will this. Naturally, while watching this I brought in similar scenes of Stalingrad (1993) among other war movies. And in comparison this movies cuts so sorry a figure that I dared not watch the entire movie even! The story starts of slow enough and just completely refused to pick up pace. The entire movie seemed to be directed by an amateur school student, bolstered by some insanely talented special effects team. This made t...

Spoiler Alert : If you read this, watching the film may bore you. Yer warned. There are only very few war movies that I did not like. Empire of the Sun is one of them. The war movie directed by none other than Steven Spielberg is set in Shanghai, China during the World War II. It basically documents the life of an young English boy under Japanese occupation. The movie is so bizarre right from the beginning that I often wonder what got into the head of the director. An overly irritating English boy is shown as living the life of extreme luxury while China is being devoured by Japan. So far so good, as that was pretty much what happened in real life as well. But after the Japanese take over the city things become more and more ridiculous. Starting from American adventurers in occupied China to the boy turning into a surrender freak! You would often wonder if the boy is just plain childish or retarded, or God forbid, both! An innocent boy's chronicle of life under foreign oc...

Recently in India all nutjobs from across the political spectrum are busy painting terrorists with religious brushes. The ultimate motivation for this action is unknown to me. But let's briefly discuss how evil the Hindus have become. In the last few years some of the vilest crimes committed are by Hindus. These are Samjhauta Express Bombing Malegaon blasts version 2008 - apparently terrorists have a certain fixation with this place Mecca Masjid bombing - This mosque is in India and not in Mecca I could not find any major involvement other than these. For an evil militant Hindu civilization, such poor record is disturbing. But anyway - let's examine them one by one. Check out the captions - you are looking at one of Indian media's judgements passed against an individual to increase sales. Note terms - Hindu terror and 'The Believer'. The movie is about a neo Nazi fanatic who likes to attack Jews. Check out the poster here. I did not find any similar...

Ajmal Kasab on his tour in Mumbai - Mumbai Terror Attack Islamic terrorism is a reality and anyone denying it is living in denial. It is also a known fact that the terror activities are largely inspired by faith. Of course, when I asked a mufti he said it was entirely due to politics and there may have been some religious justification but that the casus belli was politics. So this quesiton has been posed many times by academics, scholars, intellectuals, right wing lunatics, conservatives, bleeding heart liberals and so on. Everyone has their own point of view. Of course there are plenty of verses that can be used to justify the acts of terrorism. I can say that there is plenty of justification present in other Abrahamic religions. But hey, Jews are not blowing up a bus of school children in Iran. Christian extremists are considered extreme even when they only shout against abortion. But Islamists have been engaging in acts of terror long before 9/11. This post is not a...

There are times when you feel nothing is really moving forward. The monotony of the day to day conundrums of life takes its toll and you end up with a feeling of nothingness - having done nothing, feeling nothing - kinda numb. I hate this feeling. Of late, I have been feeling lost. There are a number of plans in the horizon but I feel that I lack the enthusiasm to carry them out or even pursue them. My work at office has become pretty boring. The studies and all - I have pretty much lost interest. Painting, drawing, playing games - everything seems mundane and ordinary. I can feel that I need to wind up and retreat. Take time off to do basically nothing. That might just help. Over the last couple of weeks a number of things happened though. I drew a girl. Another very sweet friend came over from Mumbai to Bangalore with a permanent transfer. One of my best friends is on a nervous breakdown-a-marathon. My dad sold his old and my favorite motor cycle like a ninja, sold his old Maruti ...

I have never been a TV guy. Okay, when I was a kid, I loved the Cartoon Network. When I grew a little older, I used to tune into the Movie channels. But since I got a good internet connection, I never really cared for the idiot box. All that changed quite recently. The American Sitcoms/TV series had scored terrific ratings in IMDB. Those ratings did not escape me. But the very term TV series turned me off. I was however attracted to this series called Hannibal. I had watched all the movies on that topic.The extremely addictive show quickly got me hooked and I watched the entire first season in less than a month. Next I tried the very popular - "The Walking Dead". The realism, the decay, the utter helplessness, lack of Hollywood heroism made a fan out of me and so far there is not a single episode I have not seen till date. However entertaining these two shows were, I found 'Two and Half Men' and the 'Big Bang Theory' the best. After a hard day's...

Starting from the New Year - I have got a strange succession of events. Mostly negative, but thankfully nothing extraordinarily disturbing. First thing that happened was a really bad hangover in the morning of 1st. It was cool but woke up at 11AM! So yeah - I almost missed the morning technically. That very night a friend of mine fell and broke the washbasin in our restroom. What's more - I did not know about it till morning. I went ahead and walked in and whoa - a piece got into a toe finger and colored the slippers and the bathroom floor red. Next thing you know I was busy holding my leg up trying to let the blood clot. Got late for office naturally. The next funny stuff happened at my friend's place. He was running a pre-historic version of Ubuntu. I smartly typed in the sudo apt-get update. That was all great, except the fact that the version was absolutely not supported. So a selected few packages that remained the same were updated and the rest of the sources got broke...