dhobi ghat

is an extremely boring film! :) That's completely not true but that's what we are gonna hear most.

The movie demands lot of attention, and a lot of filling in the holes from the audience. Doubt how many people would care to spend quality time with the movie. and even if they do, the movie does not draw you in as much as it could. I don't understand what makes you feel attached to the characters but perhaps that element was missing from this movie. the underlying feeling of isolation, melancholic undercurrent fails to take over - maybe it needs a re-watch.

anyhow, 7 khoon maaf is next in line. and dil to baccha hai ji too. the year is full of interesting movies.

edit: watched dhobi ghat again. haha. its such an amazing movie, so full of nuances. but why does it fail to move? whyyy? perhaps the connections, characters were not laid out very deeply. perhaps they were not made so likeable. all performances (except aamir khan's) were so subtle, well-done. munna and yasmin, so powerful performances. and still, yet, somebody tell me what went wrong! again, either what they felt wasn't explained or wasn't even thought out deep enough to resonate with us. that's the best i can come up with. this movie could have been so powerful.

and the music of 7 khoon maaf is out. the whole album is a adventure in non-linear compositions. VB gone crazy! right now, i'm simply disappointed with that suresh wadkar song - such an amazing poetry lost in such a plain tune. awful! :)

creativity and humility

had to tepo this from AB's blog.

Rewards are such a funny business. Not just here in Mumbai and its film industry, but I am certain in every institution that builds up to award individuals. The desire and the yearning of being ‘officially’ recognized as being better than the others is such a universal human behavior. Once fallen prey to it, it can actually destroy your mind in believing that that is in fact the truth. There could be no greater falsehood than that. I believe each creative input has its own immense merit and dignity, one that can never be replaced by another. An individual, an institution an organization may think otherwise and long may they live to do so. But the merits that come to each individual personally when he indulges in the craft of creation, cannot be understood or surpassed or compared with another. Creative comparisons or gradings are odious. Each act of creativity is a masterpiece in the eyes of the creator, and that is what needs to be respected. Winning an award does not and never will, make me a superior actor. No jury or judge shall ever have the capability or the capacity to pass judgement on and give merits to an artist in comparison to the others in the creative field. We and only we will know what our true worth and merit is. The blood sweat and tears that we shall shed in our drive for creative satisfaction shall be the reckoners, not any other. How can they ? Unless they are willing to shed their own !

He often writes quite to-the-point stuff. Sometimes idealistic, but often with incisive clarity.

nav varsh

faqat nigaah se hota hai, faisalaa dil ka.
na ho nigaah mein shokhi to, dilbari kya hai.

Found this captivating sher after a long time - I'd almost forgot abt my sherdom!. Off Abida Parveen in one of the Coke studio's songs. It says something I've wanted to say for a really long time :) and says it so tersely too!

I don't think I did even 12 posts last year! That's pathetic. :) I mean how much does it take to just write down random stuff once in a while. I should try to improve this year.

Meanwhile, I caught up on plenty of 2010 movies by the end of the year. and surprisingly, many of them turned out to be quite interesting.

alright, the good ones - phas gaya re obama, daayen ya baayen, band baja baraat.
and the rest - knock out (irfan!), dus tola (climax gone wrong?) and payback (!!)

Phas gaya is a masterpiece. Awesome script and so well done. Rajat Kapoor should be given a lifetime for his contribution to indian cinema, period. and the guy who's winning a few supporting actor medals this year is Sanjay Mishra, whose versatility as a character artist is unrivaled. remember pha-phaa in one-two-three?

Also watched mansarovar, 2004. surprising discovery. made very 80's style, and somewhat hamming english - perhaps its only drawbacks. I couldn't help replaying atul kulkarni's soliloquy in front of the malini? elephant. surprising how little (!) it takes to touch you. Anup Kurian, the director is coming back with his second movie - should be interesting.

Playing Patiala House. SEL. Pretty melodious but of course SEL can do much better. kyun main jagoon is perhaps the central number, but aadat hai woh somehow pleases me more - Vishal Dadlani's new lower octave rebirth :) If music directors form a nexus, god knows where the new singers will go. tumba tumba is pretty funny.

Oh, and in these forgetful times, I forgot to mention kahoon na piya tose from srk bola khoobsoorat hai tu. The movie itself is not bad and the soundtrack even better. and this particular song is a plain jackpot. the singer is same as the MD, Vasuda Sharma, her first movie. plenty to be said about the song - the fusion of bass, sitar, tabla and drums. the arrangements never subduing her vocals. so expressive notes and vocals. strikes the right balance between subdued nasalness and throw. and of course, the romanticism of the lyrics.

I've got addicted to posting song links on FB. wonder if I should merge these two.

guzarish

sanjay leela bhansali (SLB) turns music director with this one. with a characteristic non-linear song tera zikr hai (shail hada should have been discovered in saanwariya itself). i wonder how much SLB influenced those non-linear tracks of saanwariya by monty sharma. can't find a better phrase than non-linear :)

 I've been meaning to watch guzarish. Right from the first promos, it has looked like another SLB epic - he probably outdoes himself everytime. The catch, however, is the characteristic mechanization (of thoughts, emotions, expression) that he employs - much similar to how the bengali school of directors 'ham'. I fear watching another grandiose dream which lacks a heart.

But, this isn't what inspired! me to write this post. It's this - dhobi ghat, the movie. kiran rao directs it, aamir khan is on with full-fledged publicity. its amazing how the doode never fails to lay finger on gold. and he has been doing it over and over again. its another low budget movie - with as much attention to detail and creativity as one would aspect, backed by the doode. its business acumen put to the service of bollywood, hopefully for taking it where it hasn't been ever in spite of amazing talent.

the promo was out sometime this week. the website oozes with meticulous marketing. and the background score in the promo is simply too powerful - gustao santaolalla, an argentine composer- mandolin (?) used so cleverly, with percussion providing the rest of the emotional drama. the guy has had multiple big movies - brokeback, babel, motorcycle diaries, 21 grams, amores perros, and i'm simply ready to be enthralled by this movie's track.

and yes, I watched udaan. Its set in jamshedpur and its amazingly powerful (except perhaps the conclusion). I wish the movie had dhobi ghat kind of backing. To reiterate a cliche: we need to tell our own stories! not just tell, but scream out loud! :)

intuition

A wonderful post about formalizing the intuition. Multiple quotes:

“Often you write something down to clarify your thoughts. In particular when you’ve reached a real impasse, when there’s a real problem that you want to overcome, then the routine kind of (mathematical) thinking is of no use to you. Leading up to that kind of new idea there has to be a long period of tremendous focus on the problem without any distraction. You have to think about nothing but that problem – just concentrate on it. Then you stop. Afterwards there seems to be a kind of period of relaxation during which the subconscious appears to take over, and it’s during that time that some new insight comes.” -- Andrew Wiles

 “One thing is to prove it by equations; the other is to check it by calculations. I have mathematically proven to myself so many things that aren’t true. I’m lousy at proving things — I always make a mistake. … So I always have to check with calculations; and I’m very poor at calculations — I always get the wrong answer. So it’s a lot of work in these things. … If [we] can do a real physical problem with real physical things in them, then I’m sure we have the right method.” - Feynman

“Our brains are complicated devices, with many specialized modules working behind the scenes to give us an integrated understanding of the world. Mathematical concepts are abstract, so it ends up that there are many different ways that they can sit in our brains. ”
“A given mathematical concept might be primarily a symbolic equation, a picture, a rhythmic pattern, a short movie—or best of all, an integrated combination of several different representations. These non-symbolic mental models for mathematical concepts are extremely important, but unfortunately, many of them are hard to share.”
“Mathematics sings when we feel it in our whole brain. People are generally inhibited about even trying to share their personal mental models. People like music, but they are afraid to sing. You only learn to sing by singing.”  -- Bill Thurston
 
I particular love the last one - perhaps because it relates to singing :)
 
 Finally, “Intuition is natural ideas, concretely instantiated, that sing in our minds.” -- John Sidles

A nice lecture here.

jhootha hi sahi

ARR is back again with this wonderful album. Prolly its Abbas tyrewala's directorial debut and he manages to get Rahman work for him hard. Beautiful fusions jazz and classical. I'll be waiting is probably the most intriguing song - how seamlessly it flows from jazz to pure classical with the awesomest vivid lyrics. Rashid Ali recreates his kabhi kabhi aditi magic twice over again in Call me Dil and Cry Cry. Maiya yashoda is a crazy interpretation - wonder how that fits in.The whole album is a blast! Movie shouldn't disappoint either. I'm glad Sonu nigam sings for ARR again tho the song Do Nishaniyaan disappoints a bit.

what are the odds?

of attending a south indian instrumental classical concert in iowa city, when
- you went to the city for completely unrelated and in comparison, uninteresting reasons.
- it was your first visit and you didn't know a single soul in the city.
- you never knew there was such a concert.
- you were wondering how to kill the evening in the boring city.
- you meet a known writer from bangladesh during the morning breakfast.
- the writer (apart from telling his stories) also tells you that there is an evening concert in the town.
- the writer also kindly shows you a flyer with the pictures of the musicians.
- your old acquaintance from grad school was playing the ghatam.

The concert simply brought me home that evening in the unknown city. The coincidences followed. Another musician guy playing the mridanga has his home less than a mile away from mine. The dinner with them had more in store - one or more CS phd turned musicians and tv producers, one of more stories of lost and regained romanticism. The night was brought to a hasty end by the heavy rains.

All morning flights canceled due to fog. Unsurprisingly, we meet and dine again at the airport.

I don't find anything wrong in believing in randomness/serendipity. Its all well-planned. :)

Just put the new ARR jhootha hi sahi on the player. Getting drawn irresistibly.

P vs NP: Mass hysteria

This is fun. Rocking fun. If I'm going mad just being an observer, I wonder how the author or even the close readers would be surviving. Call it an India-Pak cricket match for lack of an analogy.

Vinay Deolalikar  circulated a proof of P != NP to a private group on Friday, which found its way to the online media, slashdot, et al. He has updated the proof document 3 times since then, starts with citing Gita and matri-pitru rin, and connects first-order logic with fixpoints with freezing phenomena in statistical physics to get the proof done. Its an epic size drama in the world of mathematics and computer science: a lone guy against a world of hardcore detractors and a not-so-few bunch of sympathetic well-wishers. The odds are 101% against him, and yet he's fighting it out.

What is particularly new and awesome to this event is the amount of crowd sourcing that it has attracted.
An up-to-date wiki with all changes/discussions/objections to the proof methods, media coverage, ..:
http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=Deolalikar%27s_P!%3DNP_paper

Richard Lipton's blog with hoards of discussion inside comments:
http://rjlipton.wordpress.com

I'm still not sure why I'm fascinated by all this. Perhaps being able to appreciate some aspects of the proof is driving me crazy. Perhaps because the proof is so accessible and elementary. Perhaps, the sight of a crowd of knowledgeable geniuses scattering their knowledge for free is incredible. Perhaps, because talking about such apparently deep stuff in a strikingly dinner-table fashion smells of a new world. I don't know, but I'm completely taken in.

A collaboration of such magnitude, where no one guy is able to understand the whole deal (and moreso, wants to spend min time to find an counterexample) - Vinay D (~ Dev D:) ) is partly to blame cos he did handwave at multiple places. On another note, feels like a bunch of advisers helping this doode out for his journal submission - I bet he would be most "simultaneously advised" guy in the whole world right now. Wonder how many he is seriously listening to. Perhaps, they should update the wiki with the necessary and sufficient list of papers to read  to prove/disprove the result - that will surely accelerate crowd-sourcing even more.

What I find distressing in this whole saga is that a large proportion of detractors (even highly knowledgeable ones) are not making crisp statements about the fallacies or the hand-waving. Instead, many of these comments (.e.g, on lipton's blog) appear to be merely their egoistic manifestations (as is common in usual intellectual conversations) of the learned commenters without allowing Vinay D the benefit of doubt, even though they haven't read the document properly. The really targeted crisp objections, on the other hand, are put quite gently, allowing the author plenty of room to adjust and argue. This (despicable) facet of intellectual conversation will probably never go away.

Don't know if the proof is going to survive for long. But the event is an historical one, and I'm glad to be a closeby observer. Also, some thoughts on obscurity vs clarity in math presentation:
http://www.jmilne.org/math/tips.html

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound strive for obscurity.

---Nietzsche.

khatta meetha

Being not well has its advantages. I could slip back into a more relaxed mode - finished watching once upon a time in mumbai and khatta meetha. Once.. is well-made with wonderful dialogues balancing both dialoguebaazi and poetic form. KM is a pure priyadarshan epic - an ensemble of grey characters, awfully cunning, rendered with unemotional, unforgiving brazenness. The gangster movies bring out lot of depth in the characters, priyadarshan never has time for that. He takes the ordinary, mixes it with as much dirt and filth he can imagine (or has seen?) and just blurts it out on the screen.

Overall its done with such finesse, and fitted within the standard formula. But still, I remain dissatisfied. Its a core-dump, a mega brain-dump of the director/author. It has the formula, the message, plot, justification and everything else you could imagine bundled into one. Perhaps somewhere, it touches you too but it fails to move you - which is dissapointing given the movie contains so much depth and detail. Couldn't we avoid this fast-fwd rendition and focus on the core ? Perhaps what is missing is the elegance of portrayal - maybe the frugalness of presentation? I don't know.

I perhaps noticed this fast-fwd style of rendition in Mani Ratnam's Bombay first - Roja was also done in that hurried way, and later on Yuva too (Guru didn't seem so jarring, though). I earlier shrugged off the fast-fwd genre in priyadarshan movies by attributing the style to his penchant for slap-stick; now, it appears that perhaps he has been meaning more - perhaps he has been trying to put across his message stealthily. I admire his way of putting it across if that's the case - but then do it more beautifully, do it like munnabhai, not like a braindump.

Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya

The title means something like jump from heaven and come to me :) I came across this recent ARR album and the title song is clearly of the vellai pookkal genre. Mannipaaya is lovely too moving beautifully between Shreya and ARR.

Rajneeti is getting good reviews. Mora piya is classical khayaal fusion - I'm surprised how easy it is to intrigue the audience over and over again - Aadesh Sh. used the same stuff in tujh sang baandhi dor and baawri piya ki - in fact, I think mora piya is nowhere up there - perhaps ranbir and katrina jodi on screen makes the goosebumps persist. I'm yet to absorb the other two numbers - ishq barse and dhan dhan dharti.

I heard nice things about MM Kream in Vedam. I find only the last two tracks Vedam and E Chikati (the best one) worth listening. I seriously don't like heavy arrangements of the above kind whether it comes from ARR or anyone else.

and yes, I'll be at the ARR concert on June 12th.

love is an illusion?

I found this writeup on analysis of love - don't know why the guy chooses/needs to reason in/out of a doode called Schopenhauer. Still, interesting set of arguments. What I found more exposing was a comment to that post, which I inline here.

Romantic love is two people projecting onto each other, and mirroring that projection, for so long as it takes a child to be born and raised.
Think about it: the “honeymoon period” subsides when the bonding chemicals do, which is typically up to two years, long enough to get pregnant, maintain the pregnancy, and birth the child. (All periods when a woman’s mobility is reduced and she requires more food for functioning = therefore needs a protective, hunting, man.)
Unfortunately, the way we’ve set up nuclear families in our society, the expectation is that two people will live physically and emotionally closely for 50+ years; long after the bonding chemicals have subsided. To me, this is absurd – and pointless.
Romantic love is a high, anything after the “honeymoon period” ends is a mutually advantageous contract for raising children in *our* society (it’s preposterous that child-raising falls on the shoulders of one person in Western “civilisation”), an obligation, and more often than not a habit against loneliness that is rewarded by governments and peers.
There’s nothing wrong with that — but I wish people wouldn’t pretend that it’s otherwise.

I went ahead looking for more theories and definitions. Here is a contrasting claim from yahoo answers.

Love is not an illusion. It is the Greatest Gift that Nature has given this Universe. Love is the Inherent quality which is keeping this Universe afloat.

Love represents a range of human emotions and experiences related to the senses of affection and sexual attraction. The word love can refer to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from generic pleasure to intense interpersonal attraction. This diversity of meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, even compared to other emotional states.

As an abstract concept love usually refers to a strong, ineffable feeling towards another person. Even this limited conception of love, however, encompasses a wealth of different feelings, from the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love to the nonsexual. Love in its various forms acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships and, owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the most common themes in the creative arts.

"Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it...It really is worth fighting for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even more." 

shankar bona fusion

It can't get better than this.

Happy New Year!

with a long awaited format update. May the new year be as interesting as the last year and all previous years!

the music of ishqiya

The album is no doubt a masterpiece.  A perfect new year gift. Two songs on pain, one innocent, and the  last one wild-silly. Rekha bhardwaj excels at expression pain - raat ye bhi guzar jayegi (chachi 420), rone ko jiya kare (maqbool), and she is no less here.  

VB's patterns are to essentially take it slow, stress and elongate words, fill them with different laykaari all the time, but never sound dissonant. The album in general is strong on vocals, of course no arrangements can stop  Rekha or Rahat's voice from piercing through. Still, feels like we are getting back to basics again. Quite a bit of the blast-from-the-past thrown in.

rekha bhardwaj - rustic, frugal, meditative.

ab mujhe koi  (Rekha) - very rustic ghazal. beginning sounds like tujhe ae zindagi hum door se. unable to fully place it in memory. mostly supported by piano and strumming, arrangements pick up in the para. watch out for the classical guitar interlude. Love the para 3rd-4th lines. 

ab mujhe koi intezar kahan,
wo jo behte the aabshaar kahaan. 

aankh ke ek gaaon mein, raat ko khaab aate the.
choone se behte the, bole to kehte the.
udte khaabon ka aetbaar kahan. 2

jin dinon aap the, aankh mein dhoop thi.
jin dinon aap rehte the, aankh mein dhoop rehti thi
ab to jaalen hi jaal hain, ye bhi jaane hi wale hain (?)
wo jo tha, dard ka karaar kahan. 2
(VB's unique style of stressing via hamming notes "jo tha", "kahan". The expression in wo jo tha dard ka karaar is terrific.)

badi dheere jali (Rekha) - more wild imagery, very ostentatious arrangement. very unique composition, perhaps only people like zakir hussain could compose such numbers. variety of percussion, tanpura, veena. beautiful how the initial classical mood blends into a ghazalish (?) mood. its set in a common raag, wish i could tell which one. 

badi dheere jali raina, dhuaan dhuaan naina. 2
raaton se haule haule, khori hai kinaari.
ankhiyon ne taaga taaga, bhor utaari.
khari ankhiyon se, dhuaan jaaye na.

badi dheere jali raina (love the groovy return-of-beat here)

The imagery is goose-pimplish. Gulzar did some taaga-dori pull of chaand in Satya too, and who knows where else also. The para starts with the percussion getting bold, but suddenly shusshed. 

palkon mein sapnon ki agni uthaaye, humne do ankhiyon ke aalne jalaaye. 2
dard ne kabhi, loriyaan sunaayi to, (boring here)
dard ne kabhi, neend se jagaaya re.
bairi ankhiyon se, na jaaye, dhuaan jaaye na.
(love the way base kicks in at dhuaan)
badi dheere jaldi raina...

dil to baccha (Rahat) - accordion+strumming introduction, waltz beat. colored laykaari with staccato flat ends. expression of rahat out of the world - switching between softness, innocence, breeziness, irritation,  staccato - all done seemlessly. The raaa ra..(rara rara rara) structure is present at multiple places. accordion can do things which violin can't - very good choice. Again, very complex arrangement - arabic interlude added for free. Periodic drift of innocent, playful accordion into suspense modes. The lyrics are a treat, though I'm too tired right now to put them here. 

remix done well except that rahat's softness is somewhat out of place with the rough arrangements - yet quite coherent/consistent in itself. made me somewhat uneasy after a while but i guess listening to the remix after the original was my mistake. the change of beat is very well done. 

ibn-e-batuta (Sukhwinder, Mika) - lovely shehnai backing, reminds me of dev-d. its sukhwinder let loose - unbelievably let loose to twist the song to his full potential. and of course no furrrrr can be enuf for the audience. remix is traditional and boring - could have been done much better. the song is full of gems like:

dono taraf se bajti hai ye, zindagi kya dholak hai, 
horn bajaake aa bagiyan mein
thora aage, gatirodhak hai.

dil to baccha hai ji

The promotion of Ishqiya is gaining momentum, the gaali-galauj and the censors adding to its publicity. It has three of most superb, outstanding actors and favs of mine. Outside "tumhara ishq ishq aur mera ishq sex", here is a refreshingly innocent song just out from the movie.

Its a VB-gulzar gem rendered with his characteristic innocence and mithaas by rahat fateh ali khan. (just see how he enunciates dil-too-baccha-hai-ji). The sound is that of an oldie-classic set to a waltz beat (think dil ki nazar se, nazron ke dil se), with the crispiness of a modern recording.

aisi uljhi nazar unse hat-ti nahi,
daant se reshmi dor kat-ti nahi,
umr kab ki baras ke safeyd ho gayi,
kaari badri jawaani ki chhat-ti nahi

vallah ye dhadkan, badhne lage hai,
chehre ki rangat, udnee lagi hai,
dar lagta hai tanha sone mein ji.

dil to baccha hai ji.
thora kaccha hai ji.

Very passionate artists in the making of the song. Or maybe they resonate with me more than others do :) The para could have been composed better tho.

saari jawaani katraa ke kaati,
peeri mein takraa gaye hain,

dil dhadakta hai to, aise lagta hai wo,
aa raha hai yehin, dekhta hi na ho,

prem ki maare kataar re.

Plenty of usual gulzarisms - I bet he doesn't have to try hard, just bring in a new thought and let it flow with the usual metaphors. There's an interesting moment at 7:44, where VB cues raahat, which he conveniently (and with some guilt, a moment later) ignores and continues with his style. The song is a masterpiece. Awaiting the audio release (there is at least one sukhwinder song too).

Actually there is more. Here is this song in a promo, and another one ibnbatuta. Look at vidya balan man! mujhe is shareef-zaadi se ishq ho gaya hai. :)

rdb

a nice video remembering rahul dev burman. 

paa, again

Paa is a roller coaster ride. Extreme wit, full of irony and poignancy. Its perhaps one of the best native scripts after khosla ka ghosla, altho in a different genre. The bum jokes, the crazy giggle, the unfailing wit and sarcasm, boiling with irreverence, and of course the title song. The film does have its digressions - well the story teller needs his space. R Balki (I don't know what he was doing before) upps his cheeni kum humor interleaving between his childish and mature modes - the writer's source of craziness is a complete mystery for me. his sense of humor is unfailing - wonder how many more (deeply humane) slapsticks he's hiding under his belt. and seriously, i fell for vidya balan all over again.

and if this and this don't send you crazy, nothing else can. naseer and arshad put together, casting couldn't get better. add vidya balan with all her oomph and cold, you fall short of words. the latter RGBG is another crazy ensemble. The trailers give me butterflies :) I am hooked.

paa

Paa's music has been out for a while. The title song rendered by AB is only next to Maa by shankar mahadevan, though in an entirely different genre. Beautiful lyrics by swanand kirkire. Illayraaja has been recycling tunes from his non-Hindi movies for sometime. Paa too is one of them - here is the original sung by Illayraaja himself from a recent Tamil movie. Illayaraja doesn't sound as cool as SDBurman tho :) The older version has multiple string instruments in the interlude, while the newer version relies on a more complicated percussion. But the real credit for this song goes to AB for his mindblowing rendition.

and it couldn't get more difficult to distinguish between real and contrived than this speech by Om Puri.

tum mile

Just finished watching Tum Mile, review here. Far more mature version of love aaj kal in terms of depiction of the relationship. Has its flaws, but very well done. Vishesh films has quite successfully created its own genre, ever since they discovered Emraan Hashmi. I wish his face and voice expressed a bit more. Soha Ali Khan looks old in the movie, I was surprised she is 31. Its almost a crime to look so beautiful, more so if you are redoing it in the second generation.

Mohit Chauhan's new album Fitoor doesn't fail to recreate his sound. No praises enough for the nasheela voice immersed in the characteristic staccato style of singing. Already performed babbaji (the fact that i completely fail to understand that song makes me like it even more :), looking fwd to challeya. I wonder what language (peshtu?) that interlude blabber (in challeya) is in - never mind, the song can be done without it too. 

rediscovered songs

now that's not a good excuse to write a post but then..

so there was this shelved (?) movie called DUS (98), which was probably one of the first shankar-eh-loy's movies. two songs chaandni roop ki, and piya piya lived with me forever. chaandni roop ki is so amazingly meditative; its incredible how such compositions could be brought to life.

there's a relatively unknown ARR movie vishwavidhata (97). hariharan's zulfein ghataon si is so breathtakingly beautiful - both poetry and rendition.

I realised that the two songs above are similar in theme. Sandeep chowta's mitti (?) had this beautiful groovy song khoobsoorat hai tu - the song sung by sukhwinder (+mahalaxmi?) is very hypnotical in composition, and the fusion between classical vocals and the groovy base is exploited to its best. I was surprised to find its video here and after watching the video I'm pretty much at loss of words: I guess people have their own clever ways of visual hypnosis. :)

I liked YMI, don't know if I wrote earlier. what's ur rashee is supposedly boring - still haven't got hands on it.