(WARNING: Contains Spoilers!!)

Hi all!!!

I don’t know where you people live and what you do but if you are into hollywood movies, romantics, that is, or have ever been bored, or have a love relationship brewing… you must have seen A WALK TO REMEMBER.

I am not much into romantics, not for a long time now, but i was pestered and battered into viewing this movie by all my friends in college, and frankly, i was tired of being mocked at every social gathering as i had not seen THE movie. So, i now know how badly peer-pressure can effect lives of innocent children, almost ruining them.

I was a bit apprehensive, like a virgin girl is on her first night, and feigns to be on rest of her first nights. I started low, saw the review on imdb.com . It’s a good site by the way, as far as information about movies is concerned, but i am learning to go by my gut feeling rather than views of emotional wrecks that love this movie. The review i read started with the guy telling that he cried as he came out of the movie. AND I WENT BY HIS INSTINCTS…..no amount of repentance can absolve my sins now.

But, i digress. So, i downloaded it from a torrent( and shattered a thousand copyright infringement laws along the way, i suppose) and after waiting for about 6 hours( damn my isp, actually i was sleeping so no offence taken). As i started the movie, i thought i would love it. The guy was actually handsome(keep feigning surprise over my sexual orientation), and was someone with attitude. He was one in a group of friends who are considered elites…you all know about it, don’t you. And a noob(newbie) was trying to get in. So he had a dare to fulfill, jump from a high platform into a reservoir below. I had my fingers between my teeth due to sheer excitement. To tell the truth i was expecting meter long cast iron spikes just below the water surface, maybe there were. But the guy just hit some damn pipe and was knocked unconscious, a miracle actually considering the height, but if people choose to ignore it, well, i am no Moses.

This was the most interesting part, from here the movie tends to spiral downhill. All his friends escape but our mr. good has to jump in water to save the kid. I mean, comme on. He had police at his heels. Even if he didn’t jump, they would have saved him faster than he could, along with applying resuscitation techniques, which he comfortably ignored while he ran to save his…..behind( Don’t want my blog to be restricted from viewers who need it most).

Scene change, he is given jobs of community service like part-time janitor and acting. It broke my heart!!! Another talent wasted. And what sorted of twisted community is this? And what sort of a demented person was this principal, to extend such a physically taxing duty to a guy on crutches…And he has to teach a guy who is interested in sports, though hardly seems to be good there as well looking at his fitness level.

He is also supposed to go to church where he sees the daughter of minister, who has the most beautiful voice you will ever hear, and so innocent…sry, had to blow my nose…got emo.

FFWD, she is also seen 2 b in the same tutoring school as him, as well as the acting school, and sits on a seat beside him uninvited and starts disturbing him when he is listening to a song, hmmmm…. too many coincidences??? A female stalker??? A femme fatale??? Definitely weird. Keep thinking….

So, our hero is no good with the guy he is supposed to teach, nor with the play in which he is supposed to lead…umm, a point, why did the mam ask him to lead when he was a novice?  Did she want the play to be a flop? Did she have hots for our hero, as his black friend said while they were rehearsing lines( Don’t remember? BAD BAD DOGGY!! Go watch the movie again).  A conspiracy conveniently forgotten. But it was not a subject to be dealth by the picture anyway.

As our guy’s acting class is over and he is left stranded in the middle of nowhere, with his friend who was supposed to pick him up nowhere to be seen ( most probably a flat tire, but they show it as if he did it on purpose, and to show us how the friends he had made were all false, and…blah,blah,blah!!!!), so he asks our cute heroine to hitch him along, which she does happily…i begin to seriously suspect her.

Our hero is having a trouble with his lines, so he asks our heroine to help him with them, which she agrees to, with an attitude of-course. I would have shoved the papers up her…. then and there, but the hero is being paid not to do so, and so the story continues. He comes to know about her little itsy bitsy teeny weeny cuchy puchy girlie wishes as they start working together, which range from being in two places at once to getting a tatoo… I was having a head-ache listening to them, and putting up with her fake innocent smile. Felt like bashing her teeth everytime she parted her lips.

Well his swallowing his pride led to nothing as she got upset over a trifle matter and refused to help him. So he had to do everything by himself. Maybe he liked her attitude, maybe he wanted to get even with her, or maybe for the few million the producer was offering, he fell in love with her.

Well the play is a success, he kisses her in the end, i had bet Rs. 50 that it would be a french, but it was not. I had bet with myself anyway so no real harm done there. He meets his father who we come to know is a cardiologist, has a successful wife, is as smart as our hero despite his age, and his job clearly explains presence of a car inn the hero’s house-hold, as i had begun suspecting foul play. Who wouldn’t in a family where the guy is studying and mother is doing no job, none during the daytime atleast.

Our hero gifts her a sweater, since her father won’t, probably thought it a bad investment as she was going to die soon anyway. Busts his friend’s nose over a fake photoshop job done. I had my blood boiling at that scene. I mean, were they f**kin bastards? What sort of a person does something like that? Honestly, with a photoshop job taat bad, i won’t even keep it on my hdd, least of all printout its flyers. And i am a novice in photoshop >( .

Nest, our hero asks her out, takes permission from her senile old father by quoting bible, which he had mocked not long ago, and takes on as his personal achievement to fulfill the girl’s dreams, in very interesting ways. (The girl could have at least demanded a tatoo somewhere more interesting, just for the sake of our hero, no personal motives involved, but she should have…). And they kiss on there first night out, which makes me bang my head for not being born in america.

Then comes the twist. Our hero is taking the heroine in a deserted alley (don’t ask me what’s there to mention about it, think on your own), when she tells him that she has leukemia, and runs away, while our hero is left seething, torn, broken-hearted, ripping and tearing his hair…boohoo

He goes to his father to ask help, and seeths when he is told that he is a cardiologist, and can’t do much about cancer. So kids, that tells you to focus more on your study than chick’s legs.

Rest is pretty stereo-typed. He forgives her, not that it mattered much, and proceeds to fulfill rest of her dreams, and marries her(Smart move,boy!!). The movie ends with our hero getting into medical school and visiting his father-in-law. Landon says he wished Jamie could see her miracle. Her father tells that he was her miracle. Movie ends. Everyone leaves teary-eyed. And I leave with so much to spill in my mind.

Friends, i have a question. It is not something i want answer for, it is not a question that needs an answer. In fact, this question has it’s power unless you do not answer it, but it has power if you mull over it, roll it between the chop-sticks of your brain unless you know what the answer should be. Itn is a life-tansforming question, but you have to live in the question, keep it with you always. Don’t try to ignore it, if you can answer it you are going in right direction, but if you have to cook something up to answer it, you may need to re-focus and re-consider the path you are taking.

Do you know that this is the only life you are going to get? Even if you believe in the law of re-incarnation, the only life that you are going to be aware of? If you believe in god, this life is the best gift he had to offer to you, and if you do not, this life is the most precious thing you possess, the means to achieve everything you want. It is the only thing that you have that truly belongs to you in real sense. It is something that only you are accountable for, you want it or not. I am sure that till now i have not raised any question that might leave you stumped, or made any point that anyone else cannot arrive after five minutes of serious thinking.

Now i want to ask you, if you are aware of value of life, if you know that what moments of life you have spent are not going to come back to you no matter wat you do, and if you are aware of the fact that only you are ultimately going to be the person who gains or suffers from whatever happens in his life, why is it that you waste your life worrying over things? Did not understand me…. Answer the following then… What logic do you follow when you allow yourself to be disturbed by what someone said to you at work? What makes you deprive yourself of a good night’s sleep over a fight you had with someone? What makes you go into fits of depression, loneliness, worthlessness, etc. whenever you face an unwanted, yet unavoidable circumstance in your life? Have you realised that the hour you spent going berserk at what your husband said could have been well utilised in something productive? All i want to tell you is that you have a choice for every moment you live, every breath that you take, every thought that comes to you(yes they do not keep cropping up on their own, as many people would have you believe, you will get to know how to avoid them as well, keep reading my articles), it is upto you that whether you are ready to realise this fact or not.

I will give you an example. Visualize that you are in a very bad mood, feel the anger, hatred, revulsion seeping through you body. Easy, isn’t it? Now, smile!! Don’t ask me why, don’t look at me for reasons, and please don’t exhale in exasperation. Smile without any reason. You will feel yourself losing track of your negative thoughts. Now try to think of smething good. It does not need to be related to your current problem. It could be a treasured childhood memory, or something you would like to do that you think would make you happy (No need to tell me, keep it personal). Now keep thinking of these thoughts for five minutes. I can guarantee you that after this you will be in a considerably better mental state and you will be able to tackle the problem more effectively. You may even get to take a whole new approach which you may have neglected hitherto.

What i want to tell you is that it is your choice that makes your life. You can choose to make whatever you want of the moment you are in, and life is nothing but a succession of moments at your disposal. I would like to end the discussion with a beautiful thought i happened to come across a few days back… “What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”

Friends, how many times has it happened that you went to bed in the night feeling sick of your life, broken, tired, and woke up the next day feeling the same, or worse, worse than before. If this has never happened to you, you are among the lucky few and can use this information to help others, if you have felt it happening in your life, well you can use it to see the magic of life.

Sleep, is a beautiful creation, period. I am not going to go into details of who created it- lord almighty or some smart gene during the period of evolution through which living organisms have been passing for millions of years now- because it can lead us astray into a totally different direction than we intend to. What i want to tell here is that how you can utilize it to obtain results that have been eluding you, and improve your life, and be happy.

Just to clarify a point, there is no happier or happiest in the type of happiness i am talking about. It is not comparative like the difference of winning a 1000$  or winning a 1000000$.  It should not involve moving forward because we hate where we are and what we have currently, and it certainly should not be seen as equivalent to being lulled into a state where you slip into a self-induced coma and become ignorant of your surroundings. The happiness i am talking about involves you, reaching your goals without furrowing your brows over your circumstances. For if the goal is really desirable, the journey should be too.

So, coming back to our discussion. How exactly can we use our sleep? And to what purpose? After all it is just meant to be a transition period from one day to another, right? Wrong!! Sleep is the time when a person’s body tries to heal all the breakage it has undergone during the period of the day. I know you knew that. But the wealth lies in knowing, how does it do it? Who tells it what to do and how? Who tells it what steps to take so that the body is ready to face another day of work…. It’s your inner brain, your sub-conscious mind. What is this subconscious mind? It is the same part of your brain that helps you in eating without thinking about how food will move through your intestines, breathing without having worry to circulate oxygen to your various body parts, and sweating when you see a beautiful girl. It is this mind that we will try to explore.

What we really need is to control the thoughts that enter this mind. During sleep your primary brain, from which you think, is at rest, so your sub-conscious, is directly approachable. You need to use this time in your benefit. Make sure that just before going to sleep, you chalk out what you want to do the next day. Start with simple things, it always helps. Next, you must monitor what you are thinking, the thoughts you have just before going to sleep are going to be there all night, cause no new thinking is to be done in the meanwhile. So if you are angry, frustrated, sad, depressed, dejected, broken-hearted or in any other negative mood, just stop thinking about it and think of one thing that makes you happy. It could be anything, your girlfriend, your friends, a trip you recently took with your friends, your parents, but it should lift your mood. Now focus on this memory and this is what you should be thinking when you sleep. You will feel the difference the very next day. You would have enjoyed your sleep after a long time, you will be invigorated, and most of all, you will be ready to meet out challenges of the day with a warm smile.

Why am i writing this? Two reasons, i have been pretty depressed for a large part of my life and now when i turn back and look, i see soooo many opprtunities that i missed due to it, so much more i could have done. Retrospection is a useful turn if we do not want history to repeat itself.

Everyone loved rock on!!! There was everything in it that a successful film wants to be, well, successful. I went to see the movie in the local mall,(which i rarely do….piracy rocks!!) with all the stars in its ratings dazzling infront of my eyes and all the hype of the movie submerging every other sound that this world has been able to produce. Well, to make a long story short, this is what I witnessed:-

Farhan akhtar, a guy with three friends who dreams of making a successful rock band, though the lead singer can shoot a flock of birds with his voice and other guys seem pretty dejected wondering how the hell they came to be sitting beside such strange looking instruments. With a beautiful song the scene ends. I was still pretty enthusiastic.

Next we see the lives of various band members who have “by odd games of fate” been separeted from each-other. The lead singer Farhan akhtar goes on carrying his daily life in a pretty bored manner, and I was left wondering why…..that was…until the film introduces us to his wife. Prachi is someone (yupp, all we know about her is that she is farhan’s wife, “and pretty bored and boring”, till the end of film). She carries an expression that would make anyone seeing her get an instant emotional turmoil, guaranteed!! After this I started losing track of things……

Somehow someday she ends up meeting an old friend of farhaan who due to some reason believes that everybody with his 10 year old friends name is his 10 year old friend whom he hasn’t met for 10 years. After meeting her Prachi has a  sudden desire to go through cleaning and re-arranging of her house, which she has probably postponed since her marriage as she comes upon a hitherto unnoticed box that farhaan packed 10 years ago and forgot to unpack.I started feeling drowsy…

We saw a few flashbacks into past of the bosom friends that together formed Magik, this was the name of their band. They were best friends and so close that they always ended up bathing together in ponds while their girlfriends watched….. :O or would go and get photographs taken in weird places like empty swimming pools….for reasons not discussed in the movie..

Arjum Rampal , the hot-headed, alpha male, king of…whatever, has now grown a beautiful lock of hair that would make more than a few girls jealous…..and lives happily playing his guitar while his wife does all the work…an inspiration for people like me….His wife manages a fishery, refuses adamantly to pay her employees and looks pretty senti about the fact that all she has to weat are fishes……hmmm..something smells fishy

Meanwhile, Prachi(farhaan’s bored wife) decides to throw a party and invite all of Farhaan’s friends…Farhaan is visibly disappointed, he hoped for something more “exciting” probably..

We see that the band was broken due to some petty reason like Farhaan taking up all the footage in their music video and agreeing to not letting Arjun’s girlfriend do styling in it and Arjun Rampal getting angry and beating the director(producer ?) to a pulp over it….and all the people around me definitely felt that it was Arjun’s fault….haah!!

Then by some cruel joke of fate the band decides to reunite and re-create the magic of MAGIK (which , for all practical purposes, never existed in the first place).

Suddenly when everything seemed to be coming to an end (I was sooooo happy) Luke Kenny suddenly becomes terminally ill, in a matter of hours and gives a serious jolt to reuniting of band. On the other hand, Arjun Rampal’s wife is in tears trying to put some sense into him that he has a family to look after and so he should do the work on a cruise. Frankly, I would learn guitar if I had a chance to go on a cruise but Arjun has heart of gold. He decides to leave his wife an the middle of a traffic jam to join his friends in the performance they are delivering. And somehow manages to reach there on foot well in time..

Well they play the song, Luke dies( dont laugh!!!), and everyone else seems to be living pretty happily, though i still wonder how the radical change in their life-styles was, in anyway, affected by reuniting of the band, unless of course Farhaan started looking after Arjun’s family as well..

I could have cried when I left the movie……..

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