Over the weekend...

I quite enjoy going to Geoffrey’s (Marine Plaza) for catching up with friends for a drink and shaking a little leg to the music there. We always manage to hog the inside room where they have enough space for 4-5 people to dance. I especially love this quote outside G’s – ‘Jack Daniel was no saint but he did start something of a religion’. G’s it was, on Friday and I ended up sleeping at 5 on Saturday morning, but was the happiest because there still were two holidays coming up. The food at G’s is quite horrible except for the sauteed mushrooms but they mix some mean drinks. I had this new drink coz I had a bad cold – hot toddy with mint and it was quite weird though it opened all the flu-assailed pores in my head.

Movies

Movies over the weekend : ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ (TDWP) and ‘Pyar Ke Side Effects’ (PKSE).

For TDWP, reviewers had been raving on and on about how the movie was much better than the book for the first time ever. I found the movie just about average – just another chick-flick.

There were two young ladies sitting next to me who found the whole thing extremely hilarious – so much so that we had to shift a few chairs away from them to get the dialogues over the delirious laughter. I didn’t find any sequence funny enough to laugh out loud in the flick. That said, Meryl Streep fit her role of a hard-as-nails boss to the last ‘t’, but was not evil enough as in the book. Anne Hathway was just lovely (looking). Special mention – her lips…very grrrrworthy!! Move over, Ms Jolie!

The story was very very average. It was, though, kind of interesting to see how Andrea (Anne) developes a kind of Stockholm Syndrome for her demanding boss – I guess we all do it at a level to justify whatever we’re doing. And Northwestern University seems to be doing its bit of media planning through movies and TV channels! I saw a couple of TV serials too, with protagonists (prominently) from NWU. An inane movie that seems to be overhyped.

PKSE – I had been warned off it on an internet board but with nothing to do at 4pm on a Sunday and Regal at jogging distance away, I found myself watching PKSE alone (friends busy watching Bas Ek Pal which I was’nt too keen on).

Newspapers had been raving about an improbable pairing of the lead actors (Rahul Bose and Mallika Sherawat) but I find nothing improbable about it. They were actually pretty good together and Mallika does play the pissed off, confused role pretty well. Ok, she was NOT overly attractive and with all her clothes on she looked like any 5th woman from Haryana. Pliss to be catching Ms Sherawat say No, No, No, No two times in the movie. The No’s were very unEnglish and remind me of my German boss who has a heavily accented English – but that’s beyond the point.

The first half rocked – it was good fun and I think most of the males there could really identify with Rahul Bose going through guy-issues. The Mad-o-Wot hairdresser Sapna Bhavnani also had a small cameo in the movie and heck she looks prettier than in the hideous pics I’ve seen of her in the Mumbai Mirror column she writes for. Of course she can’t act and hence spent most of the time hiding her face from the camera. Her tattoos look pretty good and again not as bad as they look in the still pics. The second half of the movie was a bit contrived as if the Director had run out of steam, though it did have its bright moments at points in time. The item girl (Sophie Choudhary) in the movie is NOT hot at all (unless you find horsy faces hot)and the item numbers were stupid and a time-waste. All in all, a decent pic.

I just finished watching this show on CNBC – The Job Show, hosted by Naukri.com. So a company (Mindshare, in this case – a media planning company) has a vacancy and they interview 3 potential candidates on Tv, putting them through 3 rounds of questions and situations. Great idea, you’d think. Yeah, great idea for sure! But they had to spoil it by getting 3 idiots as contestants! Sample the following questions and answers:

Mindshare: Approximately how many satellite and cable enabled homes are there in India?

Contestant 1 – ehhh…ummm…in India? (at this point you expect an answer closest to the third decimal) eehhhh…ummmm..184 (wha…??? The answer is more like closer to 30 million!).

Mindhshare: Do you think the cola-pesticide issue has become political now?
Contestant 2: ummm…aaa…ya..ya…the MNC should not be under pressure for feeding pesticides..aa…even municipal corporation..umm..you know..should be closed because they also serve the dirty water to drink (good point, actually but lost in the tangled web of English she wove skilfully around us)

Mindshare: If your company employs a person as your colleague based on how she looks and not on the basis of skills, what would you do?

Contestant 3: Good, no?? (Camera pans to a speechless HR head of Mindshare).
Anchor of the show: So that means you like having eye-candy in office around you
Contestant 3: yaya (Flashes huge smile, salivating at the prospect)

Mindshare: If you are having a family problem because of which you cant come to work and you’re subsequently fired, what would you do?

Contestant 1: I come from a Sindhi family (whoa, I sit up, expecting to hear about either how Sindhi families do NOT have family problems or about how professional Sindhis are) and I had a tough time convincing my family that I could work even though I was a girl so I will definitely be able to convince them that I can attend office (bleahh: what if the family problem means that your dad has had an accident? And how about answering the question asked?)

Mindshare had sent 2 high powered interviewers to the show and I could feel them squirming in their seats (ok, if they were’nt, I seriously doubt them as a good company to work for) because now they were supposed to pick an employee on the basis of these questions and answers. I did’nt envy them at all!

Yaawn. It’s a Monday tomorrow but am looking forward to it. It was a good,restful weekend. I've been resisting temptation and not trying to look at the Confiserie Sprüngli chocolates I got from Switz and HAVE to remember to courier them to nephew-niece tomorrow - cant hold on for much longer!

Ps: Mindshare picked the eye-candy fella (but cautioned him against having an unnecessary sense of humour all the time lest he get into trouble). I’d have dropped all three.