Experiences

One word of advice about Julie and Julia: don’t! Meryl Streep of course is fantastic. Doesn’t she look much taller than she looked in Mamma Mia? How does she manage it? She is delightful to watch. But Amy Adams is disappointing as the single-minded young woman who cooks 524 recipes in 365 days. Roger Ebert wonders when the couple had time to eat. I wonder how come they did not die of atherosclerosis. My God, so much butter! I also wonder why the movie got made. I mean, wow, Julie made all those dishes over a year and even wrote about it. But what was the compelling reason to make a movie, which might as well have been a documentary on Julia Child and her obsessive fan? The movie left me cold. No, to be honest, it left me peck-ish. After seeing dish after dish, I most certainly wanted to eat something, although I had supped earlier in the evening. We tried to assuage it in Costa at Juhu. As coffee shops go, I like only two of them. There is this place in Hiranandani called Aromas. It is...

Over the Gandhi Jayanti weekend, I visited my sister in Bangalore. My nephew, our baby, wanted to “hang out” with me and tell me everything that has been happening in his life. As I listened to him talk about college, cinema, art, summer internship that he found for himself, screenplay workshop conducted by Kamal Hassan that he attended, and a certain sense of alienation that he felt among his peers, it hit me forcibly that he has grown up tremendously in just a year. From an indulged, cosseted boy, he has transformed into this enterprising young man capable of taking care of himself. There was a minor celebration between my sister, my mother and I over the very creditable driving skills he demonstrated when he drove us to Nandi Hills and back. I was almost choked up when the boy sat through Naseer’s Ismat Aapa ke Naam patiently and without complaining, although he didn’t understand a word of it. It is truly a privilege to witness the coming of age of someone near and dear to o...