Jigarthanda - The first Karthik Subbaraj!

With Pizza and now Jigarthanda (#jigarthanda) you cannot now deny the fact that there is a new story teller now in tamil cinema industry after Bharathiraja and Manirathanam. These both are legendary directors who respected and believed that if you are passionate then you cannot fail. To them success was never a goal, it was only 'keep going.'

As in a scene in this movie, there is a dialogue, 'success is not what others talk about you, it is what your inner self acknowledges', a very true man he is to this - Karthik Subbaraj.

The movie starts off with Siddarth being rejected in a TV Reality Show in the semi-finals. The comment he get is 'Kuppai Padam'. But the past rift between the two judges of that reality show, a producer and a national award winning director, the producer chooses to produce Siddarth's movie. But he insists that Siddarth does a cold blooded gangster story. This starts the journey for Siddarth to look and learn the life of Sethu (played by Simha) a psychic gangster in Madurai. Once this starts, you are all set for an experience.

Something that is very wonderful in this movie is the Interval. It is a very MASS scene. And when you expect a very racy movie for the second half, that is when Karthik get's you into his world again. You will actually forget that you expected a very racy second half! Personally during the 2nd half I was having a feeling that 'Who are these guys? How come they are able to entertain us like Pros! There is no veteran actors / actress and yet you have a feeling of watching a good movie. The climax is also MASS.

The music director - Santhosh Narayanan is one of the hero for this movie. The background score is really exceptional. Though songs are not great when you hear them as audio, when watched with the movie, it all seems to be very collected.

There were several places the audience clapped for dialogues and laughed their mind out too. No doubt that the narration will grab you into the movie.

Simha with this movie, has now reserved his special place in Tamil cinema. Not sure if Karthik had Simha in mind when he wrote this character or Simha moulded himself after hearing about this character, but he has certainly set a bench-mark for the role. He deserves a very huge applause.

Siddarth deserves a huge applause. Knowing the entire script he has choose to do this film. He is a true chennai boy. Especially in scene when he tells Lakshmi menon that 'Let's be just friends' he is very much Chennai!

Overall, your expectation is 100% met in this movie. All you expect when you walk-in is a different movie from Karthik Subbaraj and you are not let down. It is indeed a very different and yet enjoyable movie. I was actually amused to the hall full at 8:50 AM in the morning.

All the best Karthik and team. Keep entertaining us such!

Happy New Year

Happy New Year. May 2013 bring all the great things that we wish & desire and may God & Nature give us the strength and health to work towards that. Let's make sure that we earn and grab all of the stars the let them stay with us!

Neethanae En Ponvasantham

My verdict : It is light. It is nice. I was able to remember a poem that I read during my school days from John Keats. 

There is an expectation set when you hear the names like Gautham Vasudev Menon, Illiyaraja, Jiva, Samantha, Santhanam. All have done their job with an intention to give a very good movie. It has really come out well. I initially read and also heard from my friends that this was a very huge disappointment for them from Gautham Vasudev Menon. I even saw few similar FB posts. But to me it was a very nice movie.

Story: It is a love story. A love story very raw and very natural. Normally I term only Subramanipuram kind of movies as raw, but this too was a raw love story.

Screenplay: Poetic! The narration is actually excellent. The director along with the cameraman and editor has done an excellent job. Flashback's are an very essential element for story telling. Even for us a story is something that happened in the past. Gautham is an amazing story teller, no doubt. He has handled this subject too very well. Heard that in VTV the story itself was from Gautham and in NEP he wrote the screenplay and was the director. But his improvisation to the script has been really cool. Coming back from this movie was very light. Like Ok, get back to work. But after an hour, you have Varun Krishnan and Nithya Vasudevan haunting you. The story line says "This could be your love story". But there are certainly a lot of elements that each one of us could relate to ourselves. 

Jiva & Samantha :  Jiva is so handsome in this movie. In a few scenes I was not able to take my eyes off Jiva and have a look at Samantha. I should say he is a very professional guy. If most of us say that Surya may be the next Kamal, here is one guy who is silently surpassing that. Watching Jiva is something that you would love in this movie. Earlier I said that this was a *raw* story, it is because of Jiva. The way the climax was narrated and how Jiva did that was like *real*. 

Samantha, she is beautiful. She knows acting too and has did well. She is picture perfect! The scenes to quote her acting are the scenes in that Tsunami village and the climax. She has done it very well. 

Music : Breezy. Don't expect anything less here. It is all very real instruments being played by very real human beings! A lot of LIFE gets added into the movie when real people play it.

Could have been better: 

1. Camera - I personally felt that few shots very shot in long which made us get out of the scene. One shot to quote was the fight that they would have on a terrace when Jiva says he is going to join IIM Calicut.
2. Few Santhanam scenes could have been avoided in the 2nd half. Especially that VTV mimic scenes. 
3. The night walk and talk in the climax could have been cut short. Because it was not that time that Jiva and Samantha spent triggered the climax, it was Jiva's father who says "Be a man". 

Watch it! Varun and Nithya are sure to pass through you. 

My rating: 4 STAR

The Brand called goGrab

Like most of you, I too always wanted to be an entrepreneur. One industry that I always kept doing homework was service aggregation. I used to even tell my friend back home in Tirunelveli who runs an IT hardware shop that we do start a business where we just take AMC contracts for desktops and laptops basically in the Home PC segment. Every other home in the middle class to upper middle class owns a computer. And if you start catering to that market alone, we would have both (1) business and (2) work!

But that was not the intention when I started a very serious thought process about goGrab.in. Actually all I wanted to build was a great product and a platform which can open itself for much more service aggregation with very less effort. I have met Naru 4 times for validating my idea and also get his feedback and comments on goGrab. He always used to ask me one question when we start - "Ganesh, actually what are you trying to do?". 

We are creating a brand called goGrab, in the process of building goGrab.in. Yes, that is what we as a team intend to. Business is money, but brand is trust. The trust that you build with your customer, consumer. And to create trust with someone who is totally a stranger and eventually becomes your patron is an experience. 

At goGrab, we called ordering food as an experience and not a process. We keep working to make sure that the experience is always the priority. I think that is what made big brands like Sangeetha Veg, Kaaraikudi Chettinad, The Dhaba, Wangs Kitchen to partner with goGrab.in in the first place.

When you actually want to order food from home? When you actually want to place your order as you start from work and just pick it up on your way? Just try goGrab, once and let me know if we did redefine your food experience. If it we suck, just call us a shout at us. We will work on it and get back to you. 

goGrab, your brand to redefine your food experience!

Cheers,

Why goGrab.in?

When it comes to Thursday's of the week, plans start at home on where to go this weekend and whom to meet? To makes sure that kids are doing Okay and all. But most of the time, 99% we end up spending time at Besant Nagar beach and at our cousin's place for dinner and some chat.

Okay, coming to the rational of all these is: For a Housewife:  being a housewife, with 2 kids, all day at home, husband busy with work all the time and not spending time with you, all you have is only this reason to just pull him out of HIS chores and spend some time driving, walking and talking with him. For Husbands: More than an outing, it is just like a MUST DO to make sure that the rest of week and next week is taken care, just a balancing act!

Incident 1:
So, back to the story, it was on a weekend when performing this balancing act, at around 8:00 PM when we were about to start from Besant Nagar beach, I asked my wife, 'Can we have dinner outside?'. She thought for a moment and said 'No, we will go home and have dosas, but I want to have juice from Fruit Shop on Greams Road outlet.' That was a great idea and I too love juices from Fruit Shop on Greams Road. So, we drove and parked the car and ordered 3 juices for take-away and waited in the car.

My elder son, who is fond of cars, immediately jumped to the front seat and starting playing with the steering and gear knob. Actually the engine was ON as we were using the Air Condition as we were waiting for the juices. I had a tough time to convince him not do that and finally he started crying. So, to pacify him I asked my wife to get the biscuits that she usually brings. She said she did not bring it! Then I asked water and she said it was over!! So, I turned around and asked "Don't you know you need to bring all these when coming outside? Are you carrying it by yourself, you could just keep in the car, right? What stops you from doing that?'. That was all, to start a **good** argument within us and spoil my total balancing act! As my wife was yelling at me, I looked at my watch and it was almost 25 minutes and still the juices were not there. Just asked the guy again and finally he brought it after 10 more minutes. It was like 35 minutes for 3 juices!!!

As I started to drive back, I was thinking:- 'How would it be, if I had an app on my iPhone to order juices from Fruit Shop, Besant Nagar and just drive thru to pick up the juices, not needing to wait for 35 minutes. I would have very well spend that time at the beach itself!

Incident 2:
It was once such evening, we were back from a movie from Prathana and planned to pick-up food at Sangeetha Velachery. So, reached the place around 9:50 PM and saw it crowded. As we had no choice, I walked in and ordered just 4 dosas for take away. Finally the guy came around 10:40 PM with the dosas after repeated, heated queries with the billing counter. By the time, my kids has slept on the car and we were burning on hunger.

Once again, the same thought pop's-up! How would it be, if I has ordered this food as I started from Prathana and just stopped by to grab my dosas. In-fact if I has had that, I would ordered, Naan and Pulav instead of dosas!

So, finally I started brainstorming this idea with my bunch of pals and of-course, my experience with CSS Labs and PayPal helped me to give a product shape to it! And finally after doing some home work on the tech feasibility, we formalized that we are doing goGrab.in!

goGrab.in - makes it easy for you  place an order with your favourite restaurant and pick up food with NO Waiting Time!

Try it! Tell me if you also feel the same experience on using goGrab.in. Also please do send me your feedback on ganeshrajmohan@gmail.com.

Cheers!

My takeway from DisneyLand...

This is was in October 2011, but, was the moment that made a huge impact in my life.

It was with a lot of stuff happing in my life I decided to take my family to DisneyLand,CA for my son's quarterly leave. We spent a week in Fremont, looking around SFO and other places and drove the 2nd week to LA. 

DisneyLand was fabulous and we all thoroughly enjoyed it. The second day I waited till 8:00 PM to watch the parade. Once the parade was over, there was a show with fireworks and so many fantastic actions performed as if in a disney tale. And the show ended with the saying "This is the place where dreams come true!". That is when I started thinking about how much of effort, work, planning and co-ordination should the team have to create this wonderful experience for all its guests all these years. It was amazing to see that the principle and vision of DisneyLand, what Walt Disney had envisioned, was still alive even several years after his death! I can name a tonn of organization where the employees don't know their vision or it was forgotten by the entire exec team, but here, this place is great!

My take away from disneyland that day was... for life!

Getting back into the groov

Occasions are basically reasons for us consider and do something different that we either love or wanted to do that for a while. 

After 3 days, yesterday was when I started feeling of getting back into my regular mode. New year eve, New year day, etc, etc. And what did I do, was just left it open and took it in the way it came. Actually it was not bad at all. Somehow this year took me close to Swami Vivekananda. Yes, I visited both the RK Mutt and the school and polytechnic + hostel in Mylapore too. I had the chance to meet few very great scholars who have devoted their life towards bharamacharya and service. 

One thing that I learnt from that place was the power of being disciplined. It was an excellent, calm, very neat place and it was completed maintained by the students of the home! I am very sure that if you go the houses of few old students of the home, their home will also be neat and clean. There are few very basic things that needs to be inculcated into a child right from the beginning and the first one is discipline. Discipline make you align with Principles and people with principles are they ones who live even after death!

I personally feel that having principles for life and following that is very important. Just start with 2 and then keep adding. But you should know what suits you and what not as you are the best person who knows yourself! Principles are NOT to make you good or great, but they make you give 100% of you, which makes you live that moment.

When you sit in a roller coaster and start, first few secs you feel wary, but then you enjoy it, and I am... for 2012...

Come 2012... take me where you are destined to....