My pre 17 look

See below for how I look like now.

My post 26 look

Now you might ask why in the world you need to see a ‘before’ and ‘after’ pic of me read a movie review about kites, and I’d give you two reasons.

1. It serves as a frame of reference to gauge how long a time has elapsed since my last view of a Hindi movie.

2. Do you really need a reason to look at my picture? No, you don’t

Now that we’ve established the background to me watching the movie, I’ll get on with the review.

Kites

Excerpt from IMDB

In the harsh terrain of the Mexican desert, a mortally wounded man is left for dead in the heat of the desert sun. This is J. Once a street smart, carefree young guy. Now, a wanted man. As death looms, the only thing that keeps him alive is the quest to find the love of his life, Natasha. A woman betrothed to another man, but surely destined for J. A woman who comes into his life like a bolt of lightning and changes it forever.

As you can see, nothing shocking or earth shattering there. And I’m told that as far as Hindi movies go, this was a below par movie for all the people involved. If you go into IMDB boards you’ll see a lot of people trashing the movie. But all that is irrelevant because I liked the movie. I don’t know what exactly made me like the movie, maybe it was the fact that it was bashed so much I went in just expecting to sit through 180 minutes of suckiness, maybe not. Anyway, the following elements can be found in Kites.

Primary Characters

He doesn't even look Indian!

Hrithik Roshan as Jesus

Don’t tell me you don’t see the resemblance. The first time I actually got to see his face (it was obscured by hay initially), I was like WTF?!

The character’s actual name was J, short for my suggestion maybe?

His acting wasn’t bad either, I was actually quite surprised by it. And he seemed to be a (believably) good dancer, which is required according to the plot line.

Spanish heat

Barbara Mori as the Fiery Spanish Spitfire

To explain the impact of this character on me, I changed the my definition of a perfect woman from “PHP coding, beer drinking, LAN gaming female assassin” to “PHP coding, beer drinking, LAN gaming female assassin with Spanish fire”. Obviously humor, wit, smarts and the rest are a given. But fire in her belly (and I don’t mean the type of fire in your belly when you’re hungry either) is prerequisite now because this character was awesome!

She plays the role of Linda in the movie.

A Bob

Kabir Bedi as Bob

Ok ok, so he’s not a primary character at all. He’s got all of 15 mins in the movie, being the father of the girl that J dupes and the father of the guy that Linda dupes. He’s an Indian named Bob. I kid you not. He’s included here purely because most of the imaginary conversations are carried out by Bob-like people.

Recurring Themes in the Movie

Hrithik’s Abs VS Barbara’s Cleavage

Obviously, neither of these pictures are from the movie, but you should get the idea. Thankfully, Hrithik is decently clothed during the latter part of the movie. Also thankfully, Barbara managed to be all cleavag’y during the whole of the movie.

EDIT : I managed to find a picture from the movie with both of them touting their stuff (Click through for full image).

Hrithik and Barbara touting their stuff

Indians

Seeing as how this is a Bollywood movie, I know I shouldn’t be surprised. But seeing as it was shot in America and Mexico (I think) I would have expected less Indians. But you’ll come across Indians in the form of Bob the owner of the biggest casino in Las Vegas, two unidentified con artists who cheat the casino, a delivery truck driver who’s truck is stolen by the dynamic duo, and the multitude of Indians serving the leading family and so on and so forth. Kites is actually the nightmare for every red necked xenophobic American out there who imagine all the Indians pouring into their country to take their jobs. Thankfully the biker gang did not have even one Indian. That would have been too much to stomach.

Another big shock to me was that they had full on lip on lip kisses. The last time I watched a movie they would never actually lip lock, it was more of a “I’m going to kiss you now, but you should quickly turn your head to the side to show that you are a chaste woman even though we are dancing in the rain and your sari may as well have been made of glass for all the hiding it does – never mind all the belly tickling”. Speaking of dancing, when did the leading ladies of Indian cinema stop wearing those ridiculous knee length biking shorts for the dance scenes? Those would have been totally out of place in the dance scenes for this movie.

And in Conclusion

I enjoyed the movie. I went in expecting a three hour rendition of the same old story of boy meets girl-girl is coy-girl warms to boy-parents are coy-parents warm to boy-boy marries girl, but instead I got to see a romancy movie that was just about 2.5 hours long and had cars blowing up. And it didn’t have too many songs either, and the soundtrack itself was pretty good.

The ending itself was quite a surprise and it actually got to me because I was in a bit of a blue funk afterward. It reminded me of the ending from the book Amber Spyglass (Book 3 of His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman), although in their case they did what they had to do because it was necessary.  In the case of the lovers in Kites, their decisions were forced upon by others.

All in all, feel free to trash the movie after you’ve watched it, because it could have been a lot worse.

Some of the images have been acquired from this site : http://satyamshot.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/an-image-from-kites/

A lousy day for this guy

Those clothes must really chafe

In the interests of completely aping movies/books that start at a random place and produce some back story later on, I will now give the back story.

Early on Saturday morning I left for the sandy shores of Unawatuna for a weekend full of sand, whales and other sea creatures – edible or not. It’s not because I was suddenly bit by the travel bug – those who know me know that I only travel from one computer to another – it’s because some people were going and I was kindly invited as well. Since I’m totally awkward among people I don’t know (while at the same time being awesome in other ways) I took along a few of my friends as well. They aren’t linked here because none of them have blogs and we all know that if you don’t have a blog, you don’t really exist online.

Anyway, after a drive with many rest breaks and one sightseeing stop, we arrived at Unawatuna Beach Resort. Owing to having worked my ass off for the past couple of weeks, we splurged and go some really nice rooms. They even had a Jacuzzi in there. I beat my roomy and marked my territory by leaving my ass hair all over the Jacuzzi.

The Jacuzzi, prior to me marking my territory with my ass hair

After chilling at the hotel for a bit, we head out to meet up with the rest of the crowd. I had no idea who our travelling companions were, just vague estimations as to their numbers. Being the nice guests that we are, we headed off towards Galle to get some beer and ice. After that we headed off towards Matara because I was under the impression that the place we were meeting up was past our hotel. Suffice to say, it was not. After heading back toward Galle again we managed to find the lane down which the place was located. After what seemed like an hour long drive (which is truth was only five minutes) we were still lost. This was actually not my fault and was simply a breakdown in communication channels. Due to being in the middle of nowhere, signal strength was varying. And some people do not realize that a ringing phone is a clear indication of someone trying to get in touch with you. Add to the fact that one of the guys actually gave us the name of the owner of the hotel (Bishu’s) and not the name of the hotel itself (Unawatuna Bay Hotel). All in all it ended well due to the road actually turning into a dead end near the hotel.

After saying our hellos to what I thought was a crowd of people (Actually it was only 6), we headed off to the beach to have dinner on the beach. Here we met a million other people (again, actually 20) whose names I’ve forgotten, but their faces stay on. Thanks to the good people of Submarine Diving School and whoever made the decision to go there, we had an incredible dinner right on the beach. I drank, then I ate, then I ate some more. In short, it was bliss. Since we had to wake up in the middle of the night the next day, we decided to make an early exit.

And then we come to the start of this post. After reaching Mirissa and signing what I assume were legal waivers in case we were suffered a watery doom at sea we finally got to eyeball our seaworthy vessel.

The white one with the upper deck (on the other side) is our boat

I won’t give you the details about the voyage because you just have to be there to enjoy it.  Once you get out of the dirty harbor, the water is just beautiful. It changes color from a translucent turquoise nearer shore to a deep blue a few dozen miles out. Some people may claim that I was asleep during most of the trip, but I was just resting my eyes. Shown below is one such instance (picture by PP)

Me "resting" my eyes between whale surfacings

The only thing missing was some chilled beer to keep the heat off.

This was before the run really started doin it's thing.

The mid afternoon sun. It actually gives an "old game sprite" look

The crowd was a varied bunch. You had the casual traveler who buys all sorts of medicines to keep the motion sickness away, only to leave the whole lot and the breakfast in the car (That would be primarily be me). You had the hobbyist/adventure traveler lot who were out for the experience (some people just like getting up at four in the bloody morning and be disgustingly awake during the whole time). And finally you have the seasoned pros that are out to get some mind blowing pictures of the environs. Everyone was very chilled and did their thing. My thing was sitting somewhere shady and snoozing between whale sightings. Sleep comes easy enough when you’re boat is gently rocking you from side to side

And the cameras. I’m sure anyone with a camera fetish would have been sporting a hard on if they were on our boat. There were zoom lenses longer than my forearm. You could have added all the zoom lenses together to make a seven foot robot complete with a heat ray. There was some impressive kit in there, probably worth more than the whole boat.

And wonder of wonders, we actually did see whales and dolphins and flying fish and tourists and container ships. After harassing a whale for about an hour and being all paparazzi like(I kid. We actually never got closer than a hundred meters. I’m happy to see that there are guidelines as to approach their space), we hit upon a pod of dolphins frolicking in the sea.  Although I was mostly asleep during the voyage, I didn’t miss much as I was incessantly woken up by the cameras on the upper deck going ape shit whenever a denizen of the sea made an appearance.

After about 6 hours out at sea, we finally headed back to shore and went our separate ways.

All in all it was an excellent trip. I had a great time even though there was every chance of a badly navigated Somali pirate ship capturing us out at sea. Even though I have complete confidence that I would be ransomed, it would be unfortunate since we would miss the five pee em checkout at the hotel.

I’d like to give a hearty thank you to everyone involved in organizing it and making it happen without any postponements or changes in plans. Excellent work!

Me in my fedora. You are forgiven for imagining you saw Indiana Jones

EDIT – To all you bitches who keep complaining about the distinct lack of whale pictures, here you go. This is from one of the photographers who was there – http://www.flickr.com/photos/photosofsrilanka/sets/72157623669928110/. Pictures by Dhammika Heenpella / Images of Sri Lanka

With the advent of the Internet, a good portion of humanity leads two separate lives. One, in the offline world where you are like the mild mannered reporter who is cut off from everyone else and doesn’t have access to the collective knowledge  of humanity. And one in the real world where you wear colorful underwear on the outside, are connected to everyone everywhere and have access to the collective knowledge of humanity while at the same time being about as smart as your average pumpkin.

Everyone knows what happens to you when you die in the offline world. But what happens to your identity on the Internet? What if you had no siblings who could inform your four thousand two hundred and twenty one friends on Facebook that you had died? What if you were and only child and you only had parents who used the Web only as a transport layer to access their emails? Would Facebook still be sending you emails to your old email address telling you what your friends got up to? Shouldn’t someone update your current status to “Dead”?

Facebook - You're Dead

And let’s not even talk about the forums and blogs we hang out on.

Bloke 1 : Dude, what happened to jomanlk? I haven’t seen any of his well written, thoughtful and altogether praiseworthy posts in awhile.

Bloke 2: I don’t know, I haven’t seen him around either. If this was the offline world I’d have thought he died. But we all know that people don’t die on the internet.

Bloke 1: Word. Here, take a look at my cat – http://i.imgur.com/7yOSV.jpg

(This conversation contains only blokes because we all know that there are no girls on the Internet. Only 40 year old men pretending to be girls)

Maybe it’s for the best that your online presence lives on while you die. Usernames and profiles could be valuable family heirlooms. I mean think of it, a Facebook url like http://www.facebook.com/john.n.pereira is worth way more and less stupid than something like http://www.facebook.com/john.da.dawg.2023. The same goes for Email IDs, usernames and domain names. Not to mention reputation earning profiles like Ebay, Amazon, RentACoder profiles. A high value profile on one of those services could be worth a lot of money.

Dying father: And to my eldest son, I bequeath www.pereira.com and all its sub domains and email addresses.

Eldest son: Booyah!

Others: coughsonofabitch!cough

Dying father: And to my programmer daughter, I bequeath my grandfathers RentACoder account with 99.8% acceptance rating and 2143 completed jobs.

Anyway, you get the drift.

All these Web 2.0 people need to come up with ideas on how to address this issue. It’s an important issue. It’s not as if it’s even a rare or borderline issue, people die all the time. And their dying only partially! Their souls might not even be going to the rest they deserve because Google is still indexing all the tweets an app made on behalf of you, therefore trapping your online identity in their capacious servers.

Yes, it’s a chilling thought. Everlasting half-aliveness in some database server or webserver. And for company you’ll have all those Internet memes (we all know they don’t die, they just go away for awhile, waiting to trap some innocent internet newb) of yesteryear playing on a loop, rick rolling the crap out of you. It’s enough to make me shudder.

To Me,

I am you from the future. In the future, people like to write letters to their younger selves. No, I am not joking, people are lame like that now. You have to get tagged to write a letter, but since no one tagged me (probably because I only started blogging 5 minutes ago) I decided to buck the trend and write it anyway. Yes, you become hardcore like that.

Most people decided to write lame letters pleading that their past selves be more cooler, chilled out, smarter, thinner or more sophisticated. Since you’re as good as it gets already (ladies, hint hint) and since none of the other stuff really matter, I decided what you needed was a bit more pocket money. So here we go.

Monarchos is the winner of the 2001 Kentucky derby. And Australia wins the 2003 and 2007 editions of the world cup. I’ve also included a list of winners of significant sporting events at the bottom of the document. Bet all the money you have on the winners. Yes, that includes the money you got for passing your O/Ls. And yes you pass all your exams, stop worrying about it. Also, bet anyone who’d care to listen that the war will be over by 2009 and that a black guy will be the president of the United States. You should get good odds. Now you should have some seed money to throw around. Now we start the real stuff.

Start buying all the gold you can get your hands on. The price of gold is going to go through the roof in ten years. Helped by the fact that some countries decide to keep their reserves in gold.  Don’t worry about the selling, I’ll be doing that. Just raise some money by using it as collateral.

In 2004, you’re going to hear about a company called Google going public. Your main aim will be to collect all the money you can and buy as many shares as you can from the IPO. And sell out by October 2007, that should earn you about five hundred dollars per share.

Next up is real estate. An apartment complex boom is going to hit Colombo soon and it will tank around 2008. Buy as much land as you can around Colombo 4, 5 and 6. So while all the other 16 year olds will be exploring their changing bodies (pubes for guys and boobs for the ladies), you will be buying up key real estate inside city limits. Start selling the properties around early 2008.

By 2008 you’ll notice that you are in fact, me – since unlike most people we are only 9 years apart. What with you taking care of all the real estate and the stocks, and me taking care of the gold, we’ll be sitting on top of a nice pile of money while everyone else will be copulating like rabbits on acid because their present selves don’t get enough action.  Now that we’ve got a substantial amount of money we can,

1. Buy a Gulf Stream
2. Get sexy

Now all we have to do is put all that money into low risk bonds and wait till my 35 year old self sends me a letter with the other details.

Dear John Pereira of 16.

You are awesome.

Love, John Pereira 25

P.S. – Don’t worry about losing weight. By 2009, fat people will be ruling the world and Sri Lanka. Most of them are in the Cabinet.

The more astute of you browsers might have noted the half done look of the site. That’s because it is half done. I haven’t blogged in over 4 months and I thought I might as well get some design work in before I start again.

Ergo, the site is under construction and is immune from criticism. The more foolhardy of you may feel brave enough to browse but do not send me whingey comments about something or other not working or not being readable. Don’t blame me if something falls on you or mice eat your eyes. Shit happens.

If your life is a meaningless husk without my words, go here : http://twitter.com/jomanlk

Danke.

WELL DONE!!

to the fire fighters. They just walked in there as cool as hell.

Some vids I got from the place. A bit shaky and low quality.

And I thought about it. I’m just not trendy enough. I mean look at the people in the ad! There are bunches and bunches of young people singing and dancing and gyrating and whatnot. Not a non-trendy person in sight. The only overweight person in the ad was Ashanthi and even she was wearing trendy clothes. These people looked like they had been born wearing denims and friendship bracelets. These are the type of people who would be able to pull of a look that you wouldn’t be caught dead in. And come on, how many of you have ACTUALLY danced on top of a fountain while drinking any brand of soft drink? Soft drinks don’t make you dance on top of fountains, a few stiff shots of whiskey do. Trendy drinks for trendy people.

Click to see image in full

The above image clearly shows what I’m talking about. This image was shot unbeknownst to the vendor with my special Canon VB-291 voice bubble capturing camera.

Note – I now have less hair. Also, I do not know why I’m holding the vendors hand. Also, most people call me ‘aiya’ regardless of how old they are. All 3 wheel drivers and shopkeepers call me ‘aiya’.

Ever since that day, and incidentally the day I watched Batman the second time, I decided that I would not go without soft drinks because of my un-trendiness or non-trendiness. I now make my own soft drinks from sachets.

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