The Angry Vijay!

Update - All the videos have been removed due to 'terms of use violation'.  Not sure who violated what, but Vijay, we have all seen this video atleast once and have a local copy in our hard drives ;)

If you have searched for 'Vijay Angry' in Google, then you are not alone.  This seems to be the most searched keyword atleast for the Kollywood followers for the past two days.

So, what really happend?  

1.  Vijay attends a press meet and the following happens -

 2.  When asked for an explanation, he had the following to say - 

3.  'Mr.Vijay, we have never seen you let it out like this.  This is so not you.  What happened?'  And Vijay pointed out this person in the following video was testing his limits with his questions.  We hear you Vijay...We hear you!

4. Silence!...

Mahatma Gandhi Going Once..Twice..And SOLD!!!

 

 ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the next item on display is Mahatma Gandhi’s Pocket watch, accompanied by his Sandals, bowl, plate and glasses’ announced the auctioneer in the Antiquorum in New York.  There were tons of bidders present at the event, with the highlight being on the distillery tycoon Vijay Mallya.  He was under a tremendous pressure to place the winning bid and bring the most treasured Gandhi’s belongings back to where it belonged, India. 

 

‘The official starting bid of these items start at $20,000, please place your bids now’ yelled the announcer. 

’Forty thousand dollars’ yelled one bidder

‘Ninety thousand’ came the response from another

‘One Million dollars’ shouted an antique collector from Los Angeles

‘1.2 Million’ said another bidder

‘1.2 Million Is the current highest bid, going once, going twice…….’ Stress was mounting on Mallya and it was high time for him to place his bid which would save India’s dignity (?)

 

‘1.8 Million Dollars’ screamed Mr. Mallya.  That’s it!  There were no more takers.  All the belongings of Gandhi, now officially belonged to Mallya, which means it now belonged to the people of India!

  

All went well, and Mr. Mallya was ready to finish the final paperwork to close the deal officially.  When he was about to make an exit from the Antiquorum, someone came rushing towards him screaming,

‘Mr. Mallya…Mr. Mallya…..you almost forgot this.  This comes along with the items that you just won’

 

Mallya looked at that and was visibly panicking. 

‘I never bid for this…and I never will.  Who would need this and what could one possibly do with this’ screamed Mallya

 

‘But sir, we have clearly mentioned this in our fine print.  When you look at the terms and conditions of this auction, it reads that the winning bidder of Gandhi’s belongings assumes full responsibility of this item along with the items that he/she won’

Mallya had nobody to blame but himself, for not reading the fine print and he considered himself being tricked into this by the auctioneers. 

 

As this was a high profile auction, he was aware this news will instantly reach millions of people in India, and he knows that when everyone comes to know about ‘this’ they are not going to be very happy.  Mallya knows that no one in his home country cares about this additional ‘item’, as the Indian public has long disowned it.

 

He was panicking.  He had to get some support from the Government of India to deal with this situation.  The best thing he can do is to call up the leaders of the ruling party and the opposition party to handle this situation.  He got the two leaders on the line and started explaining about how he missed the terms and conditions and how he ended up with ‘the additional item’ along with the items that be bid for.  He was trying to persuade the leaders of both the parties to accept ‘this’, and was even ready to pay a hefty amount for whichever party that is ready to accept.

 

The response was unanimous from both the party leaders.

 

‘Mallya, who do you think we are?  We are politicians and this is strictly against our policy to deal with anything like ‘this’.  It is true that we wanted to win the other items like his Spectacles, Sandals and the Bowl that belonged to Gandhi….but this?  Sorry Mallya…this is election season and we don’t want the public to think that we had anything to do with ‘this’. ‘

 

Mallya replied ‘It was you both who forced me to do this auction in the first place.  You cannot back out just because of ‘this’.  If you politicians don’t want ‘this’ and the people of India don’t want ‘this’, who do you think I should take ‘this’ to?  I don’t care even if I am losing money, I am going to set up another auction for ‘this’ and hopefully some one would buy it’.

 

The next morning, a new item had surfaced in the list of ‘items’ for auction. 

The title read--

‘On Sale Now. The Principles of Mahatma Gandhi.  The official starting bid for ‘this’ item is ONE DOLLAR’!

 

Thanks Appa for the original idea

Read more about 'this' on wikiHow

 

Food in India

Click to enlarge.  Thanks to This blogger for the image.

ENTHIRAN - Latest Images

Here are some pretty cool images from the shooting spot.

I am going to add 'Enthiran' to the list of movies filmed in Machu Picchu Wiki.

Rajni, Aish and the villan Danny.  

International Robotic Conference in India - Why do I see two Rajnis in this pic?

Again, I am confused about the two images on the mirror !?

Dasavatharam, Sivaji and the Reality Check

Exactly after a year later Sivaji - The Boss, we now have Dasavatharam. Kamal and his producer Aaskar Ravi (Oh yeah..He is not Oscar anymore!) made sure that they did everything possible to promote the movie and tried really hard to hit the headlines atleast for the past one month, before the release. They even went to the extent of inviting Jackie Chan and Amitab Bachan (I have no idea why they did) for the Audio release function in Nehru Stadium. The controversies also added more interest among the movie buffs. Kamal also screened the movie to Karunanithi (Who has been involved in almost all the audio release and movie premiers recently - and yea, he does have a job of being the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu) who supposedly was really impressed and congratulated his effort (I don't understand this - you screen a movie exclusively for a celebrity and what else will you expect out of them at the end of the show? It is like my friend and his wife inviting me for dinner and me saying the food was awesome, even though it sucked big time ;) )

Ok, enough said about how much was done to promote Dasavatharam. The question now is, have all the marketing thingy paid off for Dasavatharam? Has it created enough interest among people? Google Trends can help you with that. Trends has been here for about a year and half now. For those who want to learn how this works - go here to learn.

Basically, Google trends will plot the popularity of a subject based on Search Volume Index. In other words, you can easily say how many people were searching for a subject or how many times that subject was listed in google news for the past 4 years.

Let's compare how Dasavatharam and Sivaji faired among the internet users. The results displayed are world-wide statistics.

dasavatharam

1.00

sivaji

7.00

Clearly, on the day of its release in June 2007, Sivaji (The Red Graph) hits a peak among internet users. Also, the small graph below shows the number of news reference for that particular week. You may claim that lot of hits may have come from Sivaji - the name, rather than Sivaji - the movie. Wrong. The search increased just on the movie release date and it took almost a month the settle down. Also, as some of you might have heard already, Google also lists Top 100 searches every day. Now, these results are only from the US and not global. On June 14 2007 (the release date for sivaji), the search phrase 'sivaji review' comes in at number 69. It is just the people in the US searching for it. Even though it was a slow news day, it had to stand up against the US open, the tooth paste recall, the flag day etc., during that day, last year. I have not seen any other Indian movie doing that before. The cool thing about hot trends is that, it lets you go back up to 2 years and search for the top 100 hot trends for every day in those past years. Trends also lists the related news articles alongside the results. All the A, B, C s that you see on the red graph above corresponds to Sivaji - the movie news article that touched periodic peaks. A complete set of country wide, state wide, city wide results can be found here. Bottom line, Dasavatharam clearly did not create enough interest before or on its day of release. I am almost positive that a movie's verdict will be directly proportional to these results.

Another movie that came to my mind when I thought of crazy marketing is Om Shanti Om. SRK is undoubtedly the marketing guru, when it comes to his movies. He was literally on all the TV channels all the time before the movie hit the screens.

Lets take a look at how it compared with Sivaji.

sivaji

1.00

om shanti om

1.20

As it came out during November 2007, the curiosity among internet users gradually increased and peaked during its release date.

The one thing that we should notice in the above graphs is their pattern. It is really interesting to see how the two graphs have a pre-release short peak and touches the high point on the day of its release. Later, the hype (or the graph) gradually settles down in a month.

Going with these statistics, Dasavatharam will fail to make the cash registers ringing. Kamal might have to go back to the drawing board and work on getting this graph right for his next.

Bollywood for Barack!

Check this cool video out. Watch out for PrabuDeva around 1:25!

Super Star Sam Anderson

People - The Wait is over!! We have got a genuine all-rounder for Indian Film Industry. 'Thala' Sam Anderson is here!!

"God bless Mr.Sam Anderson. This vdo really changed my mood...the complex dance movements and the romantic smile n looks, cant forget this for decades......FIVE STARS" -- E! Online

"This is possibly India's Biggest Movie Ever Made---Has OSCARS written all over it!!" -- Chicago Sun Times

"The Dawn of a new era!!! From now there will be no Salman Khan, SRK or even AMIR Khan but our great SAM ANDERSON. This is just the beginning....watch out for more.." -- Hindustan Times


"Gumthalakadi Gummava Sam Anderson na summava???" -- Ananda Vikatan

Michael Madhana Kama Rajan

It has been a looong two semesters for Michael, Madhan, Kameshwaran and Raj here in the ‘University of Sucks ass’, which was ranked 195 in the top 100 universities in the south east America. They were all set for taking a break and fly back to Chennai, their home town. Everyone knew Kameshwaran would nail it and the other guys were just hoping to be seated next to him during the finals. Bindhu, their 28 year old neighbor, was one of the ‘Sumaar looking’ females in the Desi apartment complex that MMKR lived in. Raj, was the lover boy among the four and had the best chance of scoring and Kameshwaran the least.

As a standard they all decided to take two check-in bags for their trip to Chennai. They would have never realized that each one of them would have to give away one whole suitcase for the greedy Bindhu – who would eventually trick them all. Bindhu, like a lioness, picked the perfect timing in attacking each of the cows in isolation. She would walk into MMKR’s apartment (They shared a 4 bedroom) when Kamehswaran was alone and would sweet talk him into taking a load of shit to be given to her father, mother, uncle, neighbor, local sub-inspector, watch man and her dog. A Bit Background on Bindhu – She has been out of Chennai for years together now, as getting A’s and B’s was not her thing. She had now switched 8 departments from Information technology to Indian tribal studies, but nothing worked out. She is hanging on to her student visa, and she knows that the INS would not be too happy to let her in once she steps out of the US main land. Back to our story, no other girl had talked more than 5 minutes straight to Kameshwaran, and he was way too happy to dedicate one whole suitcase and fill them up with Bindhu’s goods. The same thing would happen to Michael, Madhan and Raj and no one would know about each others situation. They were all packed with 8 check-in baggage, out of which, 4 now belongs to Bidhu! They all had a sense of pride and threw a sarcastic smile at each other. ‘What a bunch of loosers! When are they going to realize that I have outscored them in scoring Bindhu’ – is what everyone thought about the rest of the three before they departed. Bindhu called everyone privately on their cell phone and went through a check list to make sure they had everything that she gave.

It would be 3 days and 12 stops before they could finally reach Chennai (They were running on a student budget and $750 was all they could afford for that trip!) Bindhu had set a dead line for each one of them for delivery of their packages. They all landed midnight on a Sunday. The next day, Kameshwaran woke up around 5 AM, took a shower, did his sandhiya vandhanam, said to his parents that he has to meet a friend in Nungambakkam, filled up gas on his TVS 50 and was accelerating at an incredible speed of 50 km/hour to reach Bindhu’s house. At her house, the dog would not let him in and he stood there at the gate for 15 minutes, before her Mom would open the door for him. Her Mom grabbed the suitcase, which she knew was for her (and for the whole street, basically) and started going through the foreign crap. Kameshwaran had to caugh twice to get her attention, and then she would offer him a coffee. Her dad walked in and started asking how US was and how ‘people’ live there and stuff. Kameshwaran went crazy and thought ‘Guys..Are you not going to ask about how your daughter is even for once?’ Raj would go one step ahead and would even skip his Brother’s reception to deliver the goods to Bindhu’s house. Michael and Madhan followed the next day at 9 AM and 1 PM respectively. Bindhu was good in logistics planning, and was smart enough to distribute the FedEx delivery time across 2 days, so there would be no clash.

3 weeks over and they are in the flight back to their school. A small fight broke up between the four, as to who gets the isle seat. The one who gets it would get the chance to be closer to the hot air hostess, who for some reason would not stop walking back and fourth throughout the flight. Raj got the place, and Madhan was pissed and spilled the secret. “Go ahead and sit it the isle dude…but you were not the 'chosen one' by Bindhu..I win..sucker!”. All the three turned their attention to Madhan and went ‘What? What the hell are you talking about’? Madhan, with a sense of pride explained about how Bindhu met him in Private and ‘trusted’ him in delivering ‘Important’ stuff to her family. They were just devastated to hear about each one of their story and they would laugh at each other about how they were tricked by the lady, the entire flight back.

They landed in the airport and some of their seniors were ready to pick MMKR up. On their way back to school, one of their seniors said ‘You guys were lucky that you got to take only your personal stuff. Bindhu made us took a suitcase full of shit last year!’ This made MMKR realize that they were not the First Generation Loosers!!