What does India still need to learn from its history?

We are more often than not referred to as a ‘fractured and frantic species moving down the path of destruction.’ It’s surprising how easily people say that, and what is more surprising is the number of people who would readily agree to such a preposterous proposition. It is like the society is not left with any more flesh at all. It’s is as if the bones that are meant to hold us up are the only things we are left with. And when no hope is left, we turn around and ask a question. A question that bears an almost equal stupidity in terms of what is and what isn’t tangible. “Did we learn something from our past?”.

Aristotle once said, “a man can never cross a river twice, because the river will never be the same, nor will be the man” and though lesser quoted in various places, this is probably one of the most important quotes of the century second only to of course, “we haven’t intertied this planet from our ancestors, we have borrowed it from our children”. The problem that we as a population face change day by day. Our forefathers had the luxury of having a fairly constant scene of quite some years. That made learning easy. You had what was essentially a textbook field. Which is why textbooks were successful in the first place. As time went by and we entered the post modernistic era, we stand in a dynamic world where problems change by the minute and what we read yesterday becomes redundant before the date can change and that is what makes learning form the past mistakes a task that is not only intellectually changeling but also taxing to the society at the same time. Taking lessons from the past would mean vulnerability to circumstances that don’t even exist today. I am not dwelling upon a proposition for completely discarding history but the trouble still remains that a lot of what we experienced yesterday is experience that today is almost useless. This can be substantiated from the fact that a lot of corporations today are complaining about the employability of students once they finish their education. Companies are of the opinion that the students today are only qualified on paper and that the real world problems are too much trouble for their tiny little brains.

These factors hurt us even more when we have a developing country to feed. Not only do we have more frequently changing problems, we are also short of the solutions that others have access to due to a relatively stable economy. This unstable economy is something that cannot be cured overnight and something whose solutions are not referred to in the history that we have lived. Coming back to our point, the introduction might have made it clear that I believe that the solutions to our problems today cannot be directly derived from the happenings in the past. Neither do we have books and epics that can grant an exit in the form of a poetic magnum opus. The learnings that we can derive though are different and I will sought some liberty in terms of defining problems and solutions as and when we progress along this essay. That shouldn’t be much of a pain for conventional wisdom has anyways abandoned us and a different purview is all that we probably need.

Let us first define what ‘country’ we are talking about. This involves not only the Republic of India and all the terrain and exclusive economic zones covered hence but also the countries that we are in relations with. (That’s pretty much the entire world but still a certain set can definitely be defined.) This change in definition becomes essential because several favors rendered by countries to each other today are in some way or the other a form of barter when either now or at a point of time in future we shall be expected to pay them back even if it costs us our integrity. This being said, their problem and shortcoming become our headache as well to quite some extent. Let’s move on to the secondary domain of the problem that we have. This is the domain of the stakeholders. Now the stakeholders in the country are not only the people who reside in it and hold nationality but are also the ones who indulge in any kind of trade relations or other interactions that positively or negatively affects the nation. So we have an almost clear picture about where to look for the problem and centering whom we should deal with. It is most irrelevant in abstract sense as the domain is too large. But let’s look at it from a very objective point of view in the following section.

The world as a whole had changed over time and what has changed it more than anything else is communication. The way that we converse and the speed at which news from all around the world travels to places has changed. This causes a special problem for the target group we have in study here. We have always been relatively backwards in terms of technological or social growth when we look at the last two centuries. Backwards relative to the living standards of the west and the advancements in their social structures. Now this isn’t really a problem until the comparison starts. We have a state where the communication about advancements is so fast the people start expecting great things from everywhere all at once and it is a fact hard accepted in the realm of sociology that not all news is supposed to be taken seriously by a society. We as a nation have started expecting way too much out of our social fabric while the amount of maturity required in the foundation of our social structure has yet not reached a point where it can cope with that change. This leads us to where we are today. The potential as an economic and technological giant that we see in ourselves isn’t exactly flawed but it is to some extent wrongly approached.

This is where learnings from the past come into play. Let’s start by talking about the trend of development in the world vis-à-vis the national growth. The world got automobiles somewhere back in the 19^th century. India on the other hand had the first locomotive place somewhere in the late 19^th century. The world saw its first flight in 1903 by the Wright Brothers. India on the other hand still extensively used bullock carts till the first quarter of the 20^th century. Automobiles did make an advent and with a lot of panache but they were what 100 acre mansions today are for a common man. It’s not really the question of how fast the world moved than it is about how fast we coped up. As we move to the post-independence era, we saw the slow growth of most industries under strict governmental control while the rest of the world had already hit full scale industrial revolution, and that too privatized in the early 20^th century. This was also one of the reasons why the first and the second world wars were able to move to such a large scales.

Now move to the very recent history where in less than a year of the launch of the curiosity rover, we have launched the world most cost efficient mars mission. We still haven’t been able to land on the planet but nevertheless the leap was large and gained appreciation from all over the world. We are catching up, but we are doing so in a very polarized manner. Our advancements in all the fields are fast and promising but they aren’t exactly ours. It is like taking pills for power because the body can’t generate anymore of itself.

What we need to learn from the past is to slow down a little and rethink where we are going. Where we as a country need to be and what we want ourselves to be in the next 50 years. Being caught up in the global turmoil is not going to cause us any good. It will instead make a scapegoat out of the country for its resources and push us further into the past. That is a very caustic statement to make but it will most probably be the violent result of the actions that we decide upon today. When we look at brain drain as a socio-economic problem for the slowdown of the nation’s growth, we must also realize that the motivating factors for emigration are not only individual selfishness based but have a greater social grounding. The dent in drapes of delusional reality hit upon us when we take a closer look at the emigration trends over the last few decades. But let us not delve into those numbers as they will not provide much insight into where we want our learnings to come from. Rather, let’s have a look at the way we have changed the way we look at things. Consumer goods today have a very polarized trend in our country. They are mainly marketed on the basis of two properties. First is the fact that they have been developed in or R&D in insert-developed-country-name-here or second, that they have been made from insert-name-of-indigenous-never-heard-about-jungle-here. Nowhere else do we find the distinction based upon made in your country vs. not made in your country. And the surprising thing is that both of them equally sell well. Figures of the same are out of the scope of this essay but are readily available in the public domain. And the selling trends for both have seen a divide in the class of people who buy them and this has a direct relation with the availability of the products. When FMCG goods of non-indigenous making were not readily available, their commercials featured scenes that would appeal to the elite while today the exact opposite has happened and a trend of the more ‘so called knowledgeable’ people is to go for goods made with as little machine intervention as possible. Funny as it may sound, the Mughal and British rule has superimposed a sense of ‘elite in rarity’ than in ‘quality’ amongst us. We need to rewind to times that we have forgotten already and peek to where we had a perception that was truly rational. Times when we were intelligent enough to make paths from dense forests than to follow on the paths already laid by narcissists and nitwits of a totally different level. We need to look at what wrong this form of government has done to us and to our thinking in the name of democracy. We need to put the right people in the right places and put or money where our heart is. This is not only a talk about idealistic restructuring. It is more about reorienting what we as a nation want. Incentives have been our sole drivers as we have been oppressed for several centuries altogether now. We need to remove that tarnish and find the true spirit that lies beneath.

And how do we do it? Glorify the government. Make defenses more desirable as a profession, put governmental autonomy into the right hands and have the judiciary run on interpretive-constitution and not on bull-heading into notions. What we need more than anything today, in times of a crisis where we as a nation might lose our identity, is to make sure that we know who we are and what we can do if we look at the right places within and around us. As I said before, being in a world where things change by the minute, it is simply not possible to adopt a game plan right from the past and throw it over the present. But what we can derive out of the times past is the motivation that brought us here and that which can lead us forward.

As a note of conclusion, all that I would like to say is, we don’t need to follow developments that happen around us but we need to rise above them and particularly avoid disrupting elements. Kill anything that comes in way and use the corpse to cross the mud. Extremism is not quite advisable for a democracy, but sometimes, we have to do what is necessary. As Dante rightly said in his works, “the darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of a moral crisis”. We are at the cross roads of that crisis. What we do from here onwards will matter not only to us but to all the generations yet to come. So let’s look back, correct and move on.

Parth Trivedi

The Ultimate Defense Mechanism

It’s been quite long since I talked about the human nature. One of my most favorite topics simply because it is just so inexplicable. There are few other parts of philosophy that even come close to this form. Now if you are a biology teacher who has taught me, I have already bugged you with this question. If you are a saint, I have already told you a million times over that you are wrong and that if I were to agree with you we would both be wrong so let’s just skip to the end where I pose the problem statement over again for those of you who have just joined the debate.

Take the human body for instance. We are composed of the brain and of the organs in the rest of the body. We have voluntary and involuntary think centers that make sure we poop alright. That being said, we comprise of the basic understanding and comprehension of our surroundings and of the phenomena that cause it to be so.(the understanding might not be correct but it at least has us convinced that it is). If we break down this supercomputer like functioning down we could see that we are essentially made out of the organs and in turn tissues. There tissues in turn by cells and cells that are controlled by the center called the nucleus which gets the code of what to do via a sequence of enzymes and amino acids called the deoxyribose-nucleic –acid (DNA for short). Now into this code is more than functioning. The essence of existence and the mere tendency to live on remains within this code and more than that multiple copies of it tend to work in tandem in order to generate the results that we see today as a massive civilization. A simple chain of a handful elements (no literally handful, mainly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen) has been capable of inducing the tendency to keep living within the organisms and I think that it is more than conscious that drives us to be that. Now let’s just say that we as a species were driven to behave in a living tendency as such and taking that as a null point, we are to discover what keeps us that way. Let me take you a little deeper into this. Humans have always been developing defenses for themselves. We have always, as a species been on our toes when it came to protecting our assets and interest groups knowing that one day, inevitably, we shall perish. What makes this more interesting is the methods we device for the same. Now in a recent video by V-Sauce on YouTube, I saw him mention how, what sets humans apart is something which is very fundamental. Our ability to ask questions. Now scientists have been able to train chimps to count, to express, and even to an extent to feel emotion and convey it in the precise manner. But the one thing that they haven’t been able to do even to the species that is second most intelligent to humans, is to induce the ability to ask questions. I have always had this theory that our will to know everything around us is more than just a human factor and a few days ago while driving, it struck me! It is the ultimate defense mechanism. What made humans evolve, what made them stronger and more agile and adaptable than other species to a certain environment is their ability to ask questions. Now I am not stating this biologically or as a theory in general to be universalized but it is worth giving a thought.

Early on in the process of going around doing our own business, we as humans catered to the fact that we needed a defense mechanism simply so that we can strive and be alive for as long as we want. And what we figured more than any other organism was that we needed information. We needed a constant flow of knowledge of things around us and things around those things and then things around them in turn. We ended up hardwiring knowledge gathering into our predecessors and today we see ourselves are explorers and expedition makers and the wanderers of tomorrow. We have seen, through history that more we know about things, the safer we are, everything else kept constant. And it perpetuates into our lifestyle.

Now the root of me writing this article was actually to figure out why we happen to have a tendency to survive, and I somehow ended up thinking about all of this and then wrote that down. And that very same thought process stands as testimony to our ultimate defense mechanism. Our ability to ask questions. And more so, our incessant and frustrating morbidity to answer them.

Bhaag Milkha Bhaag: Changing the Course of Indian Cinema

So here we are. I don’t review Bollywood movies a lot. Actually this might be the first one that I am sincerely doing and so you can say that they have made it big this time. Yes, we are talking about the much babbled about, much tweeted about and much updated about, “Bhaag Milkha Bhaag” the biopic of a legendary runner who was crowned the ‘Flying Sikh’. Now I won’t get into the particulars of the real life story on this one. We will keep it a ‘movie’ review, stick to the purpose. As of where the motivation to watch it comes from, it was an early morning call and I hadn't even taken a shower when someone just randomly asked me to go for it and then here we are.

Biopics have always been an important part of the cinema. Every cinema. Be it any language, biopics help us look into the past from the perspective of the movie maker and the facts about the life of the person in scope. They not only serve the purpose of cultural preservation, they also provide us with the opportunity to make an alternative take upon what had happened. Alternative journalism is picking up a lot these days and is certainly remotely linked to alternate perspective biography making. So let’s get down to it. The movie that a lot of people have been waiting for.

The Intro

You can expect this one. A race. (Meh!) As the title tells us, it is a movie about a runner and so it makes perfect sense to start it with a race and more so with a race that our protagonist does not win. The beginning has the required impact. The force of the scenes is impounding to the senses and you do get indulged into the process. In fashion of a recent trending dialogue, “You had my curiosity but now you have my attention.” Talking of what happens next would be a spoiler and so it would be enough to end this one on that it is fairly intriguing. There are following sequences of the runner entering into the army and making a living of pride. From the first half an hour of this monstrously huge movie, you realize that it is constantly going to shuffle between the very far past, the far past, the past and the present. Yes, there are literally flashbacks in flashbacks. It’s like a whole different level of “flashbackception”. Jokes apart, that innovative style keeps you hugging your seat for long enough.

Experimentation, straight to the point and interpretive cinema, the movie easily snatches an 8 on 10 for this section.

The Plot

Well now. There is nothing new in this plot. You know that it is going to be about a guy who is going to run the f**k out of every track on planet. But yes, that doesn't really stop the whole bandwagon from keeping you entertained. There are beautiful pieces of humor and emotion along with tragedy and thought assimilation that bring a lot of new perspectives to the table. That is what I was talking about in the previous review as well. To have a very simple and predictable plot allows the screenplay writer to experiment and mingle with the rest of the intricacies of the movie. You have a lot going on in terms of the aspirations of the runner, they are more defined by the story than by the character of the protagonist. The order and system of scenes and therefore the overall plot has a lot to do with the pleasant experience (as opposed to its simplicity). It will give you a lot of emotional twists and turns but not many that you just weren't expecting. The depictions of the times he spent on the rehab camps and his earlier days growing up in the village and falling in love put a stereotypical Bollywood tag to the whole process. Not saying that it never really happened, but then you just happen to roll your eyes on the seat and think, there had to be one right?

For this brave endeavor and the zeal in the plot to carry on with the ability to get you to think about it. The plot is not that bad a job at all. Fetches a 7 on 10.

The Characters

A lot of people are going to jump on me for this one, but then that’s how I feel about it. Farhan Akhtar has not played such a great role here. The expressions are stone like. Whenever he smiles it feels as if someone has given him a tonic. The reason that even after a fallacious role play he gets so much of applause is, as I told you above, the story. The process of him rising above everyone is what makes you love the character. The sheer charm of the victory takes your heart away, the adrenalin that the race pumps is all that has you going. As for the rest of the characters, the general commanding the small group of soldiers in the beginning does a great job in entertaining the audience along with the coach and almost everyone else who has been roped into the process. There is richness in character because there is diversity in place. Any less diversity would have made it downright boring. For the simple yet splendid interplay of people and the taught story line with so much going on, I give it a whopping 8 on 10 for this section only because more than depth in character they have dwelled into the expanse and thought laterally, something that helped in a movie like ‘The Green Mile’ as well which was more about an amazing story than about an amazing Tom Hanks.

For everything new, for facing the odds of thinking so much and so making everyone work together and in the tandem of the flow and tone of the movie, I give it a 7.5 on 10 for the characters.

The Screenplay

Fabulous. Sweeps all grounds. Haven’t seen an Indian flick with a better one. Go just to see how shifting from one time frame to the other can be made so enticing and elegant. They have left no space of jarring scene transitions and the whole scope of the writers’ pen fits very aptly into the brains of the audience. Especially when the people of our viewership have the attention span of a nail and a hammer. Things cannot get better for a director when he has such a powerful screenplay in hand with such a diverse character pool. But then in the process of doing everything nice, they face those typical movie sins. Oh god there are so many! They show the partition time (1947-not that you don’t know, just mentioned it for the math) where Milkha seems to be somewhere around 13-14 years old at the max. And then the first Olympic that they show he won is said to take place somewhere in 1953-54 if I am not wrong. This gives us a 6 year span between the two instances where young Milkha goes from becoming a skinny Punjabi kid to a fully grown bearded/braided man in the army who is already winning medals and respect. I is just a little jarring. But even when I get over that analogy, the place where he goes to drop Sonakshi every day after fetching water is apparently an 8-10 line broad gauge railway track. Hold on a moment. Wasn't it supposed to 1950? Where the hell did they get so many lines from and that too in a remote locality? Never mind. Let’s get over that as well. But then the movie is full of such stuff. You can see Farhan driving a 2012 model of Bullet back in 1956. That too in Pakistan where he does not have a valid drivers’ license and not to mention the fact that he found someone to give him that bike in the first place.

Long story short, the sequence of events a beautifully arranged but sometimes those glitches take away the charm. 8 on 10 (one less than what I wanted to) simply because if they had so much of thinking, a little more wouldn’t have hurt.

The Feels

It feels great. Watching it that way. Seeing him overcome his obsessions and controversies, moving on, pushing forward and keeping the spirit high, really makes you feel great. And then the realization dawns on you that it is indeed a true story. Some of it might be recreation-oriented for cinematic purposes but then essentially at the core of it, all that really happened. The movie is densely gratifying and motivating. It has put a new front to the Indian cinema and more such shall follow from talents hidden from the camera as of now.

Farhan has done a great job in setting up a stage as well as setting up a standard. I give him 9 on 10 for this path breaking endeavor. Averaging all the sections, we get to an overall ~~ 8 on 10. A must watch, take as many people along because this one is super fun in company.

some old stuff while i was clearing my hard drive

and now do i find time to write once again
in the midst of my examination does this wild thought of going through the odd bearings of my mind does summon my fingers on this not so friendly keyboard of mine
and well
to be honest
i wont be talking anorexic crap today
i have somehow been trying to grow out of it into an intelligence that can use words with four or more syllables with sense
and that in fact, trust me, is not an easy task
had it been i would have applied to write the script for the next season of "the big bang theory"
yet, here is am, suffocated by a string theory of my own
yes, my personal and as you might me expecting a complete jeopardy of the original, "the string theory"
yes, it sounds nerdy, yes i realize you no longer feel like reading this
but come on, give it a shot,after all, that's the case with more than half of the blogs you subscribe to
at least in the want of interest you might just read the whole thing
so yes, the theory that proposes the whole world can be divided into strings and that yes, all of us are connected
most certainly, a very self obsessed phenomena
...

Despicable Me 2: You Barely Expected Something Like This

There is always an incentive to not growing up. And of course there are its own drawbacks of being despised by the society for being inconvenient to them by differing from their ways. Overall, there is always a need for ways in which one can escape the mundane. The brains today have gone so stale to routine instructions, that to strike a chord, satire is one of the very few resorts left. 

This then explains why animated movies play such a huge role in the movie industry. Not only is it pleasing to the eye and a much creative arena, animated movies provide the audience with a portal to escape. I know that this is a very common thing to state but then let us appreciate the fact that a huge audience of these movies is people in their 20s’. Not going much into demographics and mass psychology. Let’s get down to the adorable deal.

The Intro

This is something you usually expect to be awesome. It is necessary after all to build a gripping premise for a movie to come. But boy can an intro get any better. They knew people are there for the minions and they threw those little yellow devils of cuteness on the screen right in the first frame where the logo of “Illumination Entertainment” (the production house) comes in. My friend and I were there together and from that very frame, we lost it and the next time I took a breath was when I got up for popcorn. This is just to say that intros to a movie do not get any better these days. As expected from the continuation of the last movie, our protagonist Gru has been shown to have given up all the evil work and has settled with the three girls (Agnes, Lucy and Margo) living a peaceful life using his previous resources to engage in an enterprise of bakery. Blah blah blah.
Bottom line: Adorable setup for a yet to come amazing story.

I give it a 9 on 10 for showing something really great, though clichéd yet synthetically appeasing to the eye.

The Plot

If you’d ask me how the plot is, I won’t have much to say. The usual part where the villain is going haywire and secret services called for an ex con-man to settle the deal and the con refuses cause he now has a happy family but the services just won’t let go cause they are the typical arses we know them to be. And then there is the attractive and yet quirky female secret agent/partner who will end up falling in love with the protagonist. Really. It’s all as predictable as the hand of the government in a scam these days. Don’t go to watch a great plot line. If Nolan has been your deal across the days and if the mundane cuteness does not attract you. Stay away!

For the awh! So predictable scenes and the overused stereotype in movies I give it a 6 on 10 for the plot.

The Characters

A total stellar in this section. The movie has everything it takes to make a character rich. Everything that you want to form a sketch for a cartoon. The ethical inclinations of each person in the movie can well be extrapolated by the viewer into any circumstance that they can think of which really pays off for keeping the cinematic part of the movie uplifted especially after the predictable plot upset. And while we are talking about the characters, the minions steal the show every time they show even half of their body on screen. The makes have done a great job with them. Each and every move, expression and unique perspective is put into play. All that you can possible do is laugh off the edge of your seat as bubbles of sugar and love burst in your tummy with rainbows above your head. There is always this doubt as to why would a super villain invent such adorable and cute looking helpers. But trust me. When they aren’t on screen, you’ll literally miss them.
To add to their richness and diversity, Agnes’s character has been portrayed beautifully. The girl is an absolute angle, again as the stereotype of the youngest of the lot goes and yet, her dialogues set her apart from any other toddler seen on screen.
Gru still maintains the panache of a villain within a changed man. His class sustains, although they have shown his frustration to be a bit too not like him at one point, you can grant them that much.
As for the rest of them people, their work is only made easy.

For this amazing development, this one takes a 9 on 10 for characters.

The Screenplay

Again, a weak plotline does not leave much room for a screenplay to evolve within a predictable sequence. But then again, as there are upsets, there are bigger surprises. The best thing that this movie does is filling in the gaps. While you do not have to bother about thinking where the story is going, your mind has a lot of room left for analyzing the current scenes and that is where all the magic is happening. And quite so, that is why this movie is the one that just cannot have spoilers. Everything good about it is between the story lines. It is only when you go to the movie and let it engulf you, will you enjoy the comforts of comedy. So on this most rare of occasions, we have a movie that has fared badly on a plotline but amazing in screenplay comparatively.

I give it a 7.5 on 10 for all that it pushed for.

The Special Effects

Technology, Art and not to forget the expertise of the Artists who make these movies has grown way too much for us to say anything about the special effects. The CGI looks spectacularly well blend. The theme is maintained constant across various designs of shots in the movie and we do see reasonable amount of detail though not as much as one would expect from a great animation. But then the point is to keep you focused on the main deal and not let you squander off anywhere.

For the very integrity of design, story and the fabric of the animation I give it a 8.5 on 10 for this.

The Feels

This is where we sum it all up. I have never seen a movie so rich in content of humor. It lets you loose ends and forget worries while you laugh your rear end off in a plethora of humor. My 130 bucks worth of tickets could not have been more worthwhile for an animated movie. Everything just seemed to fall in place. They have taken the daily life and successfully transformed it into a visual stellar. Seldom do you find movies like these. 

For making me happy after a long time, for keeping the head held high for animated movies and for helping people realize how important it is to never grow up, I rate the movie an overall (averaging scores in each section) 8 on 10.

That makes it move into our category of must watch before dying type of movies.

The First Day

The first day of the internship and I am typing away this blog post. Yes, pretty much an amazing office with good people. My officer and mentor are both nice people but as of now, at lunch time I felt like that new kid in school who nobody will sit next to :P haha

The rest of the employees around here seem to have no idea whatsoever of what is going around. Most of the time all I can hear is marathi chatter and nothing else. But expectations are high. The feeling you get when you enter the ground floor of the building is exceptional :D The full corridor has models of drill ships and rigs made by Transocean. Pretty amazing I would say. Another feel good factor about this place is the fact that Starbucks is only a walk away, just in case I am feeling too tired :D 

Anyways thats it for now. Not wanting to speculate or judge way too much on the first day, this is PT signing off.

Iron Man 3 The review that Just cant wait! ^_^

Movie Name: Iron Man 3

Release Date: 26th April 2013

Genre: Action/Sci-Fi/Thriller

Director: Shane Black

Writers: Drew Pearce and Shane Black (screenplay), Stan Lee, Don Heck, Larry Lieber, Jack Kirby (comic books)

Stars: Robert Downy Junior, Gwyneth Paltrow, Guy Pearce, Ben Kingslay

PS: Don’t worry, there aren't any spoilers :)

Yes! Finally! The exams have ended and there was no better way to celebrate it. They did not end on as high a note as I was expecting them to, but then, celebration isn't to be kept off like that. So yes! Shinjali booked the tickets for all the nine of us! So a huge shout out thanks to her for doing an excellent job! Because I actually made a "duh" face in front of a friend who was there in the line to get the tickets thinking that he could in the first place. So old school. Haha, Never mind. Lets get down to the good stuff! The Iron stuff that I was talking about. Excellent. The first words that I would say about the movie. Not because of the hype, no, not at all. But because of what I saw. So all the goodness of Iron man three crunched for you within a few words. Here we go! Enjoy the review!

The Intro

It starts on a note that you don’t really want an Iron man movie to start with. You see now, seriousness isn't exactly RDJs' style. But then, something's are pardoned when you are doing something that big. So well yes, it starts off with a narration but then goes into the same groovy Stark tone. The style of speech and the modulations are just perfect and I absolutely adore the man for that. But lets not get biased here, it could've been better. You might end up feeling a little superficial in the beginning and not really getting into the movie, but give it time. Let yourself sink in. It might take a little longer than you thought but then the whole point of coming to a movie is letting yourself get consumed in the aura. So let it do that. Let the intro pass. All the magic and good stuff is right around the corner.

I give the intro a 8/10 that extra point for trying something new.

The Plot

Not that fabulous. Not particularly that awesome. No. But then great nonetheless. Why am I so jumpy about my statements? Like I am dancing from one foot to the other? Because well, that’s what unbiased looks like! Haha getting over it, we were talking about the plot. Staged in something fairly sensible and relevant as well as appealing. Terrorism and a plot of the 'dark people' creating super soldiers is what you can expect when you get into the build up of the plot. It is very fluid. I have to say that the movie makers have done a wonderful job at making the movie watchable and feel-able. One thing that I don’t very much like about the Nolan movies, especially the Batman series is that there is distinct disconnect between parts of the story. Although that is a very well calculated and distinguished art that puts a lot of fabric to the story, but then, it might not allow you to enjoy it sometimes. Its just a different kind of cinema but then comparison was only because both of the cinemas have come down to super hero movies and more or less been equally successful, at least in the word of mouth and hype part. (TDK might have been a tad bit more on the hype side because of Nolan's popularity and given it had the content) So yes, the plot is lucid. It dawns upon you and it needs you to embrace it. This one of the plots that isn't so audacious about falling upon you. You just have to let it in. And you'll have fun. Trust me, this movie is all about having fun and all about the way RDJ puts the image of the 'Steel Soldier'. As you'd expect, there is a lot of 'SUIT' and a boat load of JARVIS (Just A Really Very Intelligent System) jokes.

Overall there is this lack of pure story. Whether the movie stands without its animation and start-cast just as a story is a huge question that I am not very willing to answer. I would give the plot a 6/10

The Characters

Yes! They are what make a movie! Especially one like this! Tony Stark is a stellar. Ben Kingsley is stunning as expected. Flawless performance by the two of these. Pepper and the 'girl-who-pretends-to-be-a-friend-but-is-with-the-bad-guys' have also done a great job. But then there was a lack of commitment to the role. That's just what I felt. You may have a totally different opinion and we still might both be right. (that’s what I love about diplomacy) The world is ready for only one change at a time. (why am I quoting the Prestige here?) The characters so hold their earlier feel. Its like going back home for a series lover. The same amount of weight and groove to the set up as it was earlier. Wonderful consistency with the characters and the overall feel of the movie. There isn't really anything wrong with the characters if you'd ask me. So they get a cheesy 8/10 for that one! (you don’t score a 10 until you do a Prestige or an ESOSM)

The Screenplay

Yes! This is one part I want to talk about. The screenplay is not distinct. It’s the same old formula. Good guys, bad guys, good guy kills bad guy, he's still not dead, good guy gets hit bad, we all start whining, but wait its not over! There is a super sexy and super exciting, super confusing nevertheless, and super whiplash (read kickass) end of the story. Tried and test formula across ages and populations. Nothing new to add to it. Only the part where he narrates, that's new for Iron ma, but I cant take it as a significant improvement. As the plot grow, so does the screenplay, but only to a threshold. It wont take you very far from what you could image. Some very good thinking has gone into the making and sequencing but not as much as you want. Not the "super duper shit I did not see that coming" kind of good. I wont spill beans here because for this kind of straightforward work, talking about it is as good as telling it all. So I'll just contain all the spoilers.

For all the punches and screen-shifts along with the impounding suits and flying around shoot sequences and so amazing work and placement of Montage sequences, I give it a 7.75 for screenplay!

The Specials!

Okay. Now. Take a deep  breath, relax, don’t panic, don’t think too much, don’t move, and make sure you have your seat-belt on. Especially if you're watching it in I-Max 3D. There is some really, really amazing special effects work that has gone into it. The plot, the story and the overall scene marries with the effects really well. It all makes sense and all of the tweaking gadgets have a reason for being where they are. Everything placed and shot perfectly. As my friend Gayatri insisted (and I thank her or that) we waited back for the after credits scene and all of the rest of the theater had left (so dumb) which is where I noticed that they had a whole skydiving team! For a total geek material skydive that they have shown in the movie and they call it 'Barrel of Monkeys' Totally worth whatever tickets you have spent, this scene takes it all in. All that you can do is jump up and down and make sure you don’t die screaming! It is down right one of the coolest diving scenes you'd have seen till date!

Apart from that I'd like to dedicate a whole paragraph for the Suits! Damn, there are some really nice makes right there. Spell bounding special effects and absolutely amazing CGI. I bow down to whosoever thought it the way it is. The protest outside the Oscars is now totally justified and I am on their side. The people who make the imagination of the director look nothing but "REAL" deserve a standing ovation. I personally applaud all the efforts that have been put after this movie. Without the effects, it is nothing but a bunch of self obsessed people fighting for a bar of chocolate.

I give this a 9.5/10 (yes a 9.5! Not even Life of Pi got this!) simply because of the Integrity that the effects hold with the story which makes it so enjoyable.

The Feels

Now the Part where we sum it all up! Great experience! Beautiful movie, great dialogues, great entertainment. If you want to take your brains out, put them in your shelf out and then go watch it you are going to enjoy it! If you want to take your brains with you, you'll enjoy is even more! Haha! It is great for a good feel. Makes you scream for the flying suit and the way it jumps to his self obsessed (not to mentioned beautifully toned) hell of a body. Well planned, and nicely executed. The movie is great! No other words, just fabulous. If you have time, go watch it! There is nothing like it this weekend. Unless you're interested in what the Indian cinema has to offer with the sorry ass cleavage of some out of the scene heroines in a desperate movie (read Ek thi Daayan).

My overall rating? 8.5/10 or maybe 4.25/5 is more adaptable to your senses :) 4-1/2 stars are perfect for this flick!