Gandhi Nagar Jack Sparrow

Gandhi Nagar is this bustling place in Bangalore North (I guess so, was never strong in geography anycase) where when you keep your feet on the road, you would be lucky if it is someone else's feet that runs on top of yours. If your karma decides to catch up with you all of a sudden, you could be run over by a BMTC bus or a stray auto or even drown in the human melee. This part of bangalore, apart from serving as a thrill ride for unsuspecting pedestrians, also happens to be the the seat of pirating just about anything. ACDs, VCDs, MP3s, Video Games, DVDs, you name it, they smuggle it. It also happens to be the place which has been causing the biggest hole in my already-torn purse these days.

DVDs. Aaah. What a concept. Re-mastering old movies with a digital audio track, write it onto a (slighly bigger) pocket size gadget and give it you for a decent price. Aaah. What more, you get even upto four movies in a single DVD (although with a discernible, but pardonable difference in the audio and video department) which rocks.

Extreme Caution: Now, if you are too greedy you even have DVDs with six movies, but you would have to settle with half of the movie if you are really lucky.

The best thing about a DVD, apart from the audio and video qualities is that it lets you follow all the dialogues in the movie, so that you can look cool when everyone else is having problems understanding Jacob's Ladder and Mullholland Drive (In the local lingo, it helps you to "jalli adichify").

Couldn't keep my hands off when i saw all the leone/eastwood spaghetti westerns clubbed with unforgiven in DVD. And then i picked up lost in translation, monster, big fish and cold mountain, all in one DVD. For all those who aren't exactly thrilled, we are talking Anthony Minghella, Tim Burton, Patty Jenkins and Sofia Coppola, all in one DVD. Its like having Thayir Sadham, Vaazhakka Poriyal, Pudina Chutney, Vaththa Kozhambu and Maavadu/Elumichai Oorga on a sunday afternoon. If this wasn't appealing enough too, you are probably not a thamizh iyengar or most likely you should take a long hard look at your values and start living before its too late (No curd rice ?? Sheesh!!). Add to this list the usual suspects (matrix, lotr etc) and you have weekends flying past as if they never existed.

The only hitch with gandhinagar is that you dont get so many good movies. shawshank, memento, bladerunner, space odyssey .. nothing .. not even a hint. Fear not, Perusu is going to china soon it seems, and if he gets my movie shopping list served in shanghai, he wouldn't need a patch above his eye to show he is a pirate.

So here goes a huge thanks for all those __engineers__ who found the dvd technology, dvd player and dvd discs and another bigger bunch of thanks to all the managers who told them, after careful analysis and prophetic forethought, that the idea of a disc containing a movie would never, ever work (grrrrrr).