Go watch Being Cyrus!

Happy Sunday!

If you haven't seen Being Cyrus yet, then what have you been doing? You had the weekend, and you should have watched it!

Smit, Sundar, Siddharth and I went to see it yesterday, and personally I think it's a terrific first film from Homi Adajania.

The pros:

Great direction and camera work. Great editing - by Jon Harris, the same guy who edited Snatch. Each character is well played out and is more of a caricature of himself or herself. It's not exactly what you expect it to be. I love surprises! Oh, and excellent score. What else? Lots of humour, well-written dialogue... It's thoroughly enjoyable.

The cons:

Not for those who like predictable plots. Quite a few loopholes in this unpredictable plot though. Gets a bit slow in the middle -- though out of necessity. A few too many Parsi dialogues, but that's it.

There's no reason why shouldn't watch it. And there's also no reason why you should agree with me.

So go watch the movie (it isn't very long -- just an hour and a half) and post your views here.

See you soon.

Rohit out.

PS - You can visit the official website at - http://beingcyrus.indiatimes.com/

Promotional Spot for the NID Film Club

What began with this...

(Click for larger view)

...has resulted in this -

Make sure you have the Flash Player plugin to view it. You can install it from -

http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash

This spot was made by me and a friend of mine in Film & Video - Siddharth Gautam Singh (You can call him Sid, though).

Let me know what you think!

Define... "Rohit"

I was going through Wikipedia, and I had an idea.

EVERYONE Googles their own name (at least once), so I thought, "Let's see what good 'ol Wikipedia has to say about my name."

So here it is -

Rohit is a proper noun derived from Sanskrit, it means the First Rays of the Sun. For example - "With dawn, Rohit cleared the darkness that was spread around".

Rohit also means a person who leads to growth and development of his family (a commonly held belief in Hindu families).

Rohit is a popular name for Hindu males, and is widely used in the Indian Film Industry.

Rohit is also a name derived from the Hindu god Vishnu, when he first arrived on Earth as a beautiful red fish.

For those of you who would like the direct link, here it is - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohit

While you're there, why not look up your own name? You might find something interesting. If you do, please post it here.

Now, about clearing that darkness...

My Blog in the News

Check this out; it appeared in today's Indian Express (Click for larger version) -


This came as a total surprise to me. Yesterday the writer, Elsa Mathews called me up saying Arun Gupta (one of my teachers) had recommended me for a story she was writing on blogs. So she chatted with me for about fifteen minutes... And then this happens!

I guess this gives me incentive to post regularly now. ;-)

By the way, Elsa is also a blogger. You can check out her blog at http://www.jhansikirani.blogspot.com

Arati in Raipur - II

More photos.

Arati in Raipur

One of my Graphic Design batchmates told me there was a locker with the name Arati Iyer in the Graphics Studio and she asked me if it was my cousin's.

Being the curious being that I am, I had a look and - Lo and behold! It was Arati's old locker from her days at NID.

I broke it open only to find a treasure trove of notebooks, photos, posters, and work inside.

I also found a contact sheet from an old black-and-white roll of film that Arati shot when she was in Raipur.

Boy! That brought back memories. I'm posting those photos here. Have a look.

The Fox And The Goat

For the illustration course that we had last semester, the final assignment was to illustrate a children's story. We had the option of selecting any one story from four given. Each of the stories were on of Aesop's Fables.

I chose to do it on The Fox And The Goat. After a lot of thought, I ended up doing it with poster colors on off-white cartridge paper. Initially, I had this idea of making it very, VERY different - I wanted to make both the characters more adult-like characters and "The Well" was going to be a night club where both of them end up and the same story is told in a much different way.

But, due to time constraints and other things, I decided to go the traditional way, while at the same time attempting to give my own style to the story.

The format is vertical to play with the concept of a well and the characters are feature-less because I wanted to be able to use gestures more to communicate the story.

The images are below. I hope you like them. Do let me know what you think.

(Click the images below to view the full size versions)