'Rekka': Idli chic with oregano flavour

'Rekka': new age gangsta chic in Tamil. Dimpled hero with a stubble and golden heart disproportionately bashes comical bad guys and celebrates small town family values. Bashfully bold lady love  is a cross twixt rustic daddy's girl and romantic urban belle. Mall meets Mela. Vijay Sethupathi and Lakshmi Menon make a fine pair with an engagingly vulnerable appeal. This is what software does to Jallikkattu country.

Jio Beta! Is RIL hiding a secret sauce?

Reliance Jio is creating a flutter in India's telecom market. Mukesh Ambani seems to be using a late mover advantage by going in for aggressive pricing because he has not spent much on buying spectrum, in contrast to big incumbents such as Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and idea. This gives his Reliance Industries Ltd more elbow room in terms of flexibility.
At the same time RIL is targeting 100 mln customers in a short span of time. He can hope to play the volume game. But where will the profit come from?
My guess would be that it would come from data science.
By being flexible on handsets, adding content and using smart software to figure out profit opportunities, a retail-savvy game can be played.
Here is how.
By combining Lyf-branded house phones, partnerships with low end brands like Intex and content providers, RIL can get high volume semi-rural consumers.
Reliance Retail can be the e-commerce play using supply chain management efficiently.
There is also room to create, procure and manage in-house content. Remember, Ambani controls Network 18 and Viacom 18 is famous for Nagin serials!

Iraivi - Mini review

Saw Iraivi by Kartik Subbaraju who earlier directed Jigar Thanda, a comically chilling exploration into the hitman next door. Powerful tale blending feminist views with theft of temple idols in a metaphorical embrace. Many plot twists and much violence makes it skid. But KS is Tamil cinema 's unique  blend stylistically mixing Sudhir Mishra, Anurag Kashyap and of course, Tarantino. He explicitly recognises the influence of writer Sujatha and director K Balachander. A deft mixture of art with crime, realism with everyday entertainment, misplaced machismo of weak men with emerging assertiveness of empowered women and visual motifs with hard-hitting dialogues makes the overcooked plot still worth it.

Flawed Machismo And Philandering Femmes: Tanu Weds Manu Returns

Two archetypes of Modern India.
Tanuja Trivedi a.k.a. Tanu - from UP. Romantic, aggressive, self-confident
Kusum Sangwan a.ka. Datto - from Haryana. Confident, dutiful, athletic.

Then you have Manu Sharma a.k.a.  Manu - A man torn between the two women
In the trignometry of modern India's changing gender equations, writer Himanshu Sharma and director Anand Rai explore patterns that go beyond the obvious.
Marriage meets betrayals. Lovesick Romeos flaunt flawed machismo. Girls lose their heads and find their feet as freedom comes with its warts. Tanu Weds Manu Returns is a subtle comedy of manners spiced with a depth that arrives elegantly when Kangana meets Kangana in a voluptuous meeting of dialects and dialectics. See it for her histrionics and the rugged charm of a plot that celebrates the vulnerabilities of hinterland India.

Selfie Verite - When stand-up comedy makes you sit down

'Time stands still in Calcutta. That is where ambition goes to die. It has a high return on investment on nostalgia'- says Papa CJ

It was delightful attending his PAPA CJ - NAKED (Gurgaon - Sun 31 May)show on Sunday. It is more than comedy. It has a deep literary flourish, with a visceral sense of pathos as he journeys into his own past to mix the ribald with the profound and the profound with the poignant. There is always a challenge in making stand-ups rise above the simple stringing of gags. CJ, reveals much more (body and soul) in what you could call Selfie Verite -- a click into his true persona. He does that in a fascinating way, combining impromptu interactivity with audience with a part-nostalgic, part-incisive recollections of his own past.

Pronounced bowels and digestible consonants: Piku

There is only so much you can guffaw when the bowel is a muse.
But beyond the ablutions lie the intuitions that provide a richer variety of humour.
Piku is brilliant. Beyond its toilet humour lies a sense of character and souls trapped in a rubble of conditioned habits and ways of the flesh. The richness of cultures ingrained and established is nothing when worlds collide between souls in search of harmonious understanding. Writer Juhi Chaturvedi excels in a matrix where characters are stripped naked of their habits and social mannerisms to a point where you see the constant permanent over the variables of everyday idiosyncrasies. Shoojit Sircar's ability to weave in little oddities and rich textures of culture within single-frame detail and short-lived gestures is amazing.
We are quite used to excellence from Amitabh Bachchan, but he can excel himself sometimes -- and the more weird the character, the more is his ability extract the juice of mannerisms, twitches and eccentricities. 

Irffan Khan, by now Bollywood's uncrowned king of understated elegance, can somehow combine the ruffianesque with the sensitive as only he can do, it seems.

But what is fascinating alongside is Deepika Padukone's ability to retain a sense of modern, independent, aesthetic style even as she sinks into a messy role that reflects a character steeped in the hallowed weight of traditions and responsibilities beyond what her tender shoulders might permit. Some things, when chewed well, can be very digestible and delicious.

Gangsta Chic Rum in Vintage Wine Glass: Bombay Velvet's Underwelming Underbelly

Smart Alec Parsees and uprooted Punjabis melt with tycoons and labour leaders in a cauldron that brews struggles for power, status and wealth amid rising skyscrapers and squalor. This is an excellent setting for a saga of wounded souls embracing and conspiring in romance and lust.

But overambition is a crime, be it an urban underbelly's anti-hero serenading a Portugese-scarred songstress or a Banaras boy trying to be a desi avant-garde Hollywood icon.
Anurag Kashyap, like Johnny Balraj played by a dedicated Ranbir Kapoor, shows spunk in a montage of taut plot, moving lyrics and nostalgia jazz. Yet Bombay Velvet underwhelms. It gets caught in a crossfire of style and crafting flaws. 
The characters jump too quickly in, with little etching. They all shake hands in curt Hollywood fashion in clumsy self-introductions. Close-ups make up for lack of aesthetic long shots or zooms. There is too much of Sphagetti Western influence that eats into the jazz mood. The characters are strong in some way but are way too middle-class in articulation. 
Karan Johar tries too hard as a manipulative wannabe, Ranbir shines with sincerity and Anushka Sharma fits the role despite her persona of not being a vulnerable screen figure. The music, inspite of the staccato violence that peppers the movie, stands out in poignant elegance. A lot of hardwork has evidently gone in: Sri Lankan locales, a pastiche of double-deckers, old-world brands and sepia knick-knacks.
But still...

Because India is not America, 1960s isn't 1930s, gangsta chic is not period authenticity, emotional trignometry is not social history.
And Kashyap is not Scorcese. 
Rum in a wine glass.