The task at hand.

A year ago for my birthday my friend Carolyn took me to this neighborhood in Chicago-- not even a neighborhood, more like three blocks on a particular street-- which is filled with grocers, restaurants, sari shops, all sorts of businesses owned and operated by citizens of Indian and Pakistani descent. Carolyn had a fine time browsing the grocery stores and this one bakery featuring both gulab jamun and a boy of about nine running the cash register. The main draw for me however was of course the video stores. There had to be at least seven or eight of these places up and down this three block radius, not to mention all the other shops selling tons of CD's of Bolly soundtracks. I dropped about $200 that day. Nine DVD's and four CD's. (I looked it up; thanks MySpace blog.)

This past April, despite the fact I'd been jobless for six months I decided to treat myself with part of my tax return and take advantage of a sale Yash Raj Films was running for just such an occasion. Seven more DVD's.

As of today, out of the sixteen Bollywood DVD's I've purchased in the past twelve months I've watched four. You can see why this page hasn't gotten the attention and effort I originally saw myself putting into it.

There's a few reasons I could point to for not having been on the ball in all that time. One was that for most it I was out of work, out of money and depressed as hell. Doing anything at all felt like a chore. The other, and this is probably the one that really matters, is that more often than not I simply don't have the attention span to sit and watch a three hour movie. I fast forward through porn for god's sake. Not even just the talking scenes, I mean the important bits too. I mean, I love Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, but it's four hours long. That's not a movie. That's an evening. And then to sit down and write about my thoughts on what I just watched and try to make sense of this other culture through my own eyes, suffice to say I think my editorial output around here is proof of how often I can muster that kind of willpower.

Point is, I want to try and get back on track. I've got a new job (which I despise, but guess what? You can learn all about that here). My mood's elevated a bit from having money and food in the house again. So to celebrate I want to buy some new movies, but I've made a solemn vow not to do so until I've watched everything I own now. This past weekend I finally watched one of the films I bought in Chicago so long ago. It's called Devdas, it's excellent (imagine Romeo and Juliet meets Leaving Las Vegas), and I hope to write more about it in the near future. In the meantime, this is what I still need to get through:

Baazigar (1993)
Black (2005) - Rented this once, the disc was wrecked and I got half an hour in when it crapped out. Lame. I was digging the movie too.
Bunty Aur Babli (2005) - This one I fell asleep halfway through. Do-over needed.
Dil To Pagal Hai (1997)
Duplicate (1998)
Fanaa (2006)
The Great Gambler (1979)
The Inner/Outer World of Shahrukh Khan (2005) - Screw you, IMDB.
Karan Arjun (1995) - I graduated from high school that year. But I'm not old.
Mujhse Dosti Karoge! (2002)
Umrao Jaan (2006)

It's funny, I'm re-reading the plots on some of these and I can honestly say if the same story were done in Hollywood I probably wouldn't even give it a second glance. I'm still at the point where I'm buying based almost solely on name recognition. Every one of those films has either Shahrukh Khan, Rani Mukherjee (which I do believe is Hindi for absolutely freaking adorable), Amitabh Bachchan, or some combination thereof, except for Umrao Jaan, which has Amitabh's son Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwayra Rai, whose name I knew even before I started watching Bollywood films. Though to be fair, I knew her more commonly as "that insanely hot chick from India."

So yeah, I've got some sitting on the couch to do. Heavy is my burden, amirite? Here's to catching up on something I love and maybe, just maybe, the blog I keep about it too.



PS: On a completely unrelated note, I've had "Gigantic" by Pixies on a loop for the past thirty minutes or so. Song came out twenty years ago and it still crushes 99% of anything you put it up against. Also, I would have a lot of sex with Kim Deal. Just saying.