The Independence Day Woes & Killing Time

As Americans geared up to celebrate their Independence day, I feared an alien attack or an UFO sighting here on 4th July. I mean that's what they have always showed in their films. Come Independence day and the world's biggest super power faces annihilation at the hands of some extra terrestrial powers. Only this time I wished that our super hero Krrish would come to their rescue in his half burnt mask, climbing mountains, skimming over seas and oceans..in the proverbial Saat samandar paar se fashion. It would have been more than befitting for an Indian to save America from destruction considering the fact that US has increased the H1B limits to almost double for the next year. It might just have been our way of reciprocating.

But someone up there had other plans. There was an attack, not of aliens but blood sucking bed-bugs and the attack was in the apartment that I was putting up for the weekend with my friends. No, Krrish didn't turn up either. It was left to the three of us, sleepy and tired people to put up a fight against them. We were up at 3 in the night googling to find ways to fight this menace after killing a dozen of them didn't help. The results weren't encouraging. The bed-bugs had been a problem in NY some 60 years ago and they are resurfacing again. Someone's plotting for a biological warfare maybe. President Bush beware!

We also went for the fireworks at the Battery park. It was good but nothing spectacular about it. In fact I grew bored after 5 min of fireworks. It wasn't as grand as I had thought it would be! C'mon now, coming from a nation where you celebrate Diwali, the firework affair sure wasn't going to be a novelty in any case.

There was too much time to kill so caught up with a few old movies as well. The Shining and A Walk to Remember. When you watch a Stanley Kubrick film, you have to keep searching for the underlying meaning and keep asking - Why? The killing of the head Chef of the hotel and then the closing scene had more to them than what they apparently depicted. I now have to watch his last directorial work Eyes Wide Shut, which he claimed to be his best work to date. I tried watching it once but couldn't get a clue of what it was all about.

A Walk to Remember is a romantic film that you watch with your girlfriend and not with three guys. It was predictable and it ended with three of us forcibly making the fourth one accept that he was moved by the tragedy of Jamie Sullivan and Landon Carter.

A: "Abe tu ro raha hai"

B: "Paagal hai kya?"

A: "Tu dekh le, iski aankhein nahi bhar aayi?"

C: "Haan mujhe bhi lag raha hai"

D: "Dekh ro nahi. Ye to kahani hai. Kahe to Mandy Moore se milwa doon."

B(accepting defeat): "Chal thik hai mere baap ro raha tha..ab samajh gaya..nahi rounga. Jaan chhod meri ab"

Peace prevailed thereafter.

Read this line somewhere in one of the scraps of a friend on Orkut. Liked it for its originality:

"Har wo jageh jahan cheezein real estate prices se influenced hokar bikti hain, us jageh ko shopping mall kehte hain" - My salute to the subtle humor of Anubhav!