Tag: jatin sharma

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Overdose

Ode to a pothole

So here you are again, in all your glory, just like you promised. Jatin Sharma’s been eagerly waiting for you.

Jatin SharmaMy dear Khadda,
I have been waiting for you to show up. I know that you have always been around, and there is no particular season when you choose to emerge. But this is the most favourable time for you to make an appearance, when my city and its administrators welcome you with open arms.

I am amazed at the sense of variety you have. Sometimes you are big, sometimes you are small and deep, sometimes round and sometimes your shape reminds me of the rotis that I try to cook at home.

I know that you are not so adamant about coming to this city every year, but it is only that you are lured by corruption and malpractices attached to the road construction business. I even know that you have been asked to (or made to?) reappear the moment a road is completed. You are as precious and reverential as the craters that dot the moon, only you dot my city’s roads. I also understand that the construction contractors have failed to understand you from the past 25 years. They (and we) don’t know what it is that makes you so attractive that even after spending crores of rupees on you, they still can’t get enough of you.

There is something about you. I feel that you are a woman because it’s so hard to fathom you. At other times, you’re the pesky neighbour potholethat deserves all the dirty looks you can get. You are so sexy that all monsoon, as the rain pelts the city and while everything is thrown out of gear, I think only of you. And my city loves you so much that no matter what, we will not raise a voice against you. We will look at your vile effects – the way you damage our vehicles, the backaches you provide, the cesspools you create in the rain, but we will still ignore all of these because we know you are here to stay.

Even though I pay taxes, it gives me immense joy to know that a large part of my money goes to nothing and I get to experience you always. Because tum nahin toh monsoon nahin. Some people have always blamed you for their troubles: don’t listen to them, it is just because they look at better cities that are as world class as they claim, and these people want their own city to be like that. To these people, year after year, you say: Ha ha!

But the rest of us are not rude like them. We love you and that’s why year after year, you have occupied not just a permanent place in our hearts, but a permanent spot on our roads. And you getting bigger, wider, deeper. From just being a few in the city, I can now see that you have mushroomed everywhere. You Khaddas have this amazing stage presence, too. With the rains thrashing the city in the last two days, I have heard a lot of people talk about your different shapes. It must feel bad to be spoken of like this (especially if you’re a woman), but kya karein, you are something that we can’t get our eyes off once we leave our homes for work.

potholesI am sure, even this monsoon we would have made all the right moves for you to arrive in style. For you to be present all over the city. We are a world class shitty, I mean city, and we will continue to be so with you in it.

Welcome to my city this lovely monsoon.

Love,
Jatin Sharma

 

Jatin Sharma is a media professional who doesn’t want to grow up, because if he grows up, he will be like everybody else.

(Pictures courtesy www.dnaindia.com, www.afternoondc.in, www.mid-day.com)

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Cinema@100

The secret world of Shahrukh Khan

One of Hindi cinema’s megastars has unfulfilled dreams – impossible as it sounds – and they involve guitars and women.
by Jatin Sharma

While producing a show for UTV Stars, Live My Life, I was meeting people close to Bollywood superstar Shahrukh Khan to get some insights into his life. We were looking to get a glimpse of this Khan’s life away from the arc lights. Does he do normal things like the rest of us? What does he do to unwind? What makes him laugh?

shahrukh khanMost importantly, what does one of Hindi film industry’s most powerful men dream of? We were trying to get all this and more.

After the work wrapped up, in my head, I started calling SRK ‘Dream Khan’. There is something about this star that is different and enchanting.

Those who know him say that his habits and preferences are like that of a child. But he deals with situations like a master. He is disarmingly honest, and he has a wicked sense of humour that catches you off-guard. Proud of his Delhi origins, he is equally at home in Mumbai. And on the subject of home, what we learnt during the shoot was that one could catch this Khan at his honest best in his home surroundings.

We shot a volley of questions at him, he retorted with several smart answers.

Phone disturbing you? Keep it in the bathroom! 
The first thing we understood about him was that he is a family man in the real sense of the term. He would shoot till late at night, sometimes pull an all-nighter, but he would still be up early to drop the kids off at school if they had an examination. He loves spending time with his family so much, that to avoid distractions, he is known to keep his mobile phone in the bathroom! It’s weird to some people, but it helps him Shahrukh khan with his family at his home Mannat 1_thumbnot check on his phone all the time.

Sleep-walking with fairies
Another thing we learnt about him was that he won’t get into his night clothes till they are perfectly ironed. Yes, he sleeps in crisply-ironed clothes. Apart from this, he liberally douses himself with perfume before going to bed. Reason? He feels that if the fairies come to him while he sleeps, he should smell nice.

Dreams unlimited
When I asked him what his real dreams were, dreams that kept ticking away in his waking thoughts, he confessed to a few things. “I want a jeep like the one in the song ‘Mere sapnon ki rani’ from the film Aradhana.” And then he said, “My dream is to learn to play the guitar.” This Khan has strummed the guitar and charmed several of his leading ladies in his films, but in real life, he doesn’t know the first thing about playing the instrument. He added that his dream for several years was to learn to play the guitar, and then find women and children (not men) and play for them. “I would just need fuel for my jeep and I would go all over the place playing my guitar for them.”

Shah-Rukh-Khan-playing-a-guitarAnother dream, he said, was to have a lot of public toilets for women. “I think sanitation for women is grossly overlooked in our country. I want to correct this. And if I can combine two dreams – I would play the guitar outside women’s toilets!”

Endorsing Videocon
“As a child, I wanted to watch the football World Cup (he used to be an avid footballer himself). My mother bought the first TV in our house; it was a Videocon TV set. I would watch the World Cup while pressing her feet. So the brand is very special for me.”

His other home in Bandra
Not many people know that he owns a penthouse on Carter Road in Bandra, with stunning all-round views of the sea. He told me a story about this house. “It’s a lovely house, and you can see the sea from all its windows. It’s a stunning place. When my mother-in-law first visited us, she looked at the views and said, ‘What’s this?’

Very humbly I replied, ‘Yeh mera ghar hai (This is my house).’

‘Yeh ghar hai? Yeh toh jahaaz hai! (You call this a house? It’s a ship!)’ she said. I resolved to move Gauri to a house that would remove all misgivings from her mother’s mind.” And he later bought Mannat.

(Pictures courtesy bestfwallpapers.blogspot.com, donshahrukhkhan.blogspot.com, www.koimoi.com, www.upperstall.com)

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Overdose

Mooch nahin toh kooch nahin

Where did all the facial fuzz go? And what for? Are we man enough to bring our body hair back?
Jatin Sharmaby Jatin Sharma

Waiting for a friend at Bandra station, I overheard a conversation.

A deep voice next to me said, “No Mark, I can’t come for the movie because I have an appointment at the parlour.”

‘Parlour?!’ I wondered, turning around to look at this person, who I thought must be a girl with bad vocal chords. But this ‘parlour’-going person was a young man. He told his friend that he had to get his eyebrows done, which made my eyebrows first shoot up, then come together.

I continue to be surprised, but I shouldn’t be. I’ve seen (and heard of) umpteen men regularly undergoing facials, eyebrows trims, manicures, and – horror of horrors – waxing. But apart from wanting to get fairer skin that glows, most men are waging an all-out war on body hair. The moustache, the chest hair and the rugged look are all going out of the window. Even the famous quote, ‘Mard ko dard nahin hota,’ is being replaced by ‘Do taangon ke beech maaro agar, dard nahin toh mard nahin.’

A moustache has been considered a mark of a man for time immemorial. Earlier generations of Indian men had lovely moustaches that were their pride and joy. It what made them the men they were, it was their ultimate masculine symbol. Even today, a gloriously-moustachioed man is the cynosure of all eyes. But a lot of previously-moustachioed men are now mooch-less – me included. We could say it’s a healthy trend, what with facial hair breeding God knows how much bacteria and with one’s food getting stuck in all that fuzz.

MARD campaignBut despite all our claims (or pretensions?) to metrosexuality, despite our clean-shaven faces and waxed chests and arms, the perception of a manliness still stubbornly holds on to facial hair as the ultimate male symbol. Recently, even Farhan Akhtar used the moustache motif to promote his MARD campaign – everybody supporting the campaign wore a mooch.

It’s probably none of my business, but the whole anti-hair thing freaks me out, waxing in particular. I continue to be secretly amazed at the men who walk into saloons asking for not just a haircut, but bleaching, waxing, eyebrow trims and pedicures. I asked a few of these men about to get waxed about wanting to get waxed in the first place, and all of them shrugged, “I just don’t like hair on my body.”

I am also quite baffled by macho fairness creams. “Mard hokar ladkiyonwali fairness cream kyun?” says a popular ad, but dude, if you want a fairness cream, be man enough to use a woman’s fairness cream if that’s the best you can do.

And don’t even get me started on pink shirts and green pants for men.

A few men I know take longer to get ready for a night out than their wives. It’s almost as if men in the country have suddenly realised that they can primp and buy fashionable clothes and the best skin products as much as women can, and are trying to make up for lost time by doing everything they can to not be like their fathers and uncles.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t much like this behaviour, it really creeps me out. I guess I still bear the legacy of a lost generation of Indian men, whose attempts at beautifying themselves started and ended with them getting a haircut. Most of them would blankly wonder what blackheads were supposed to be, and be quite aghast at the idea of getting a facial done. Several fathers still look askance at their sons’ clean faces, studded ears and long hair, and at some level, I know exactly what the older guy with the sad eyes is thinking – Mooch nahin toh kooch nahin.

Jatin Sharma is a media professional who doesn’t want to grow up, because if he grows up he will be like everybody else.

Some celebrity moustaches:

(Pictures courtesy www.salford.ac.uk, www.bollyworm.com, fashion.ozg.tv, www.mensxp.com, articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, in.lifestyle.yahoo.com, www.indiamike.com, rediff.com)

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Cinema@100

The boy who couldn’t dance

Everybody on the sets, including Hrithik Roshan, thought he couldn’t dance at all. Guess who turned that idea upside down?
by Jatin Sharma

Hrithik Roshan

We all have our insecurities. Hrithik Roshan, the man now synonymous with breathtaking dance moves, had his own insecurities, too – he couldn’t dance!

From the age of 9 or 10, Hrithik Roshan believed that all the fathers in the world are actors. “I thought every person grows up and becomes an actor,” he says. “My father was one, everyone around me was one. I thought this was something you did, that you didn’t have a choice.”

But as he grew up, his dreams of becoming an actor were also supplemented with the long hours he put in helping his father, Rakesh Roshan, as an assistant on his shoots. He assisted during Karan Arjun and other films. Then, quite literally, a shower changed his life.

“My father’s best ideas have come to him while he was having a bath,” Hrithik laughs. “He was once having a shower. He was suddenly very excited and started talking about the central idea of Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai. I was hooked, but I said, ‘Shahrukh, Salman and others have done these things before. Why would they do it again?”

“And he said, ‘They won’t. But you will.’ And he gave me exactly two months to get ready for the role.”

Training days

Though he prepared meticulously for the role, he says he felt the pressure so much that he couldn’t sleep the night before the first shoot. “I got up and listened to music on my walkman till I calmed down,” he remembers.

He was soon to become known as a dancing sensation second only to the legendary Michael Jackson, but his first dance shoot made it clear to everyone – including Hrithik – that he had two left feet. “The first song we shot for Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai was ‘Pyaar ki kashti mein’ and Farah Khan was furious with me for not getting it kaho naa pyaar hairight. Everybody thought dancing and Hrithik were two separate things,” he chuckles.

Horribly embarassed, Hrithik took Rishi, the assistant on the shoot, aside and practiced one dance step for about an hour. Then he came back and gave the shot. Suddenly, there was silence on the sets. “Then they all started laughing because they thought I was playing a prank on them earlier. Somebody even said, ‘Humko ulloo bana rahe the, ki aap naach nahin sakte!'”

Hrithik just nodded and the shoot continued. “I figured at that moment that dance did not come naturally to me, but it was something I could do if I worked very hard on it,” he reasons. Even today, he is known to rehearse a single step for about an hour or two and does not let the camera roll till he feels he is ready.

He still grins at the memory of how he was compared to Michael Jackson for his dancing after Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai became a blockbuster. “When I first read the news in a newspaper, I remember, Suzanne (his wife) and I were laughing!”

Jatin Sharma works in radio. 

(Pictures courtesy mvmsit.blogspot.com, www.myindia.raafatrola.com, www.suvarnaa.net)

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Overdose

I love Monday

Why do we hate Mondays? Is it just the thought of going to work or is it something even deeper?
by Jatin Sharma

For the first time ever, I think I can claim exclusive rights to the title of this column.

Because this is an exclusive thought.

Come Monday, and there’s a deluge of email forwards talking about how people hate Mondays. There are scores of posts on social networking sites describing how Monday should be ticked off the list and how much they hate it. It’s like Monday is this monster that devours entire populations of people.

If Monday was a person, he/she would have felt really bad, almost to the point of being suicidal. For no reason at all, Monday bears the brunt of collective hatred as the work week begins.

Why do we hate Mondays, though? It can’t only be because we hate having to push ourselves out of a mini-break mood over the weekend to go to work. Or is it because we don’t like our work much? If it’s the latter, it doesn’t make much sense: do we realise that the work we do on Monday, and on the days after that, is what gives us enough money to spend on the weekends in the first place?

I think we all hate Monday not because it’s the day that starts off another work week, but because we like to waste our time (the way we do on  weekends) and continue wasting time till such time that we are not actually forced back into work. I’ve seen several successful individuals working hard and with equal passion, whatever day of the week it is. I can’t imagine Sachin Tendulkar waking up in a grump because he has a match to play on Monday. At his age, even Amitabh Bachchan seems upbeat every day, working whether it’s Monday or not.

Is it because these two gentlemen really love what they do?

Lots of people are by now armed with the excuse that Sachin and Amitabh don’t have to brave public transport to get to work, and they have so much money already that they need never work in their lives ever again. You are right, but that situation exists now. At the start of his career, Sachin wouldn’t sit at a desk counting the money he made after every match. Amitabh Bachchan was rejected as an All India Radio announcer – a job his heart was set on. But that failure didn’t hold him back, and see where he is today.

We’ve forgotten what our parents kept telling us: Work is worship. That work is closest to Godliness. That work is what defines us and what we will be in life.

Hating Monday is surely not going to help anyone. I was resentful of Mondays, too. But I realised that I really loved my job. Sure, for a lot of people the thought of going to work is awful. Many people have a bad boss, a bad salary package, bad working conditions. But the trick is to still love your work, and love it wholeheartedly, at least while you’re doing it. If you keep telling yourself, “Things are not perfect but I still love my work,” your resentment towards Mondays will disappear. You won’t even feel so elated going home on Friday.

If you shift the hate and turn it into love (or even like), Mondays will be something that you start looking forward to. Mondays will be the reason you exist. I love my Mondays because I love the thrill of starting a new work week and taking new challenges head-on. Sure, I love being happy on the job but I also embrace the moments of sadness that sometimes come with it.

So on this lovely Monday, tell yourself this: “I love Mondays. I love my life. I love me. And I love my work.” Say it often. Say it and believe it.

Jatin Sharma is a media professional who doesn’t want to grow up, because if he grows up, he will be like everyone else. 

(Pictures courtesy blog.theshuttergypsy.com, iamtantra.com)

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Overdose

You are a terrorist

Terrorism doesn’t start with the picking up of a gun. It begins with mentally slotting people on various small fronts.
by Jatin Sharma

It might shock you to hear this, but it’s true. You are a terrorist. You have been contributing to terrorism in one or more ways knowingly or unknowingly.

It seems to me I am meeting a lot of terrorists these days.

What really is terrorism? It is an act of creating terror and feeding people’s mind with fear.

And you are contributing to it in many ways. The first step of supporting terrorism is when we, as individuals, try deciphering a person’s origin the moment we get to know his last name. It is the favourite pastime of an average Indian.

“Oh, your name is Mark Wesley. You are a Catholic?” you might say.

“No, I am a Protestant,” he may answer.

The moment we hear a person’s name, we get all excited. Like a person is a puzzle presented to us, and that must be solved. And as if we are not foolish enough to divide people in terms of Muslims, Sindhis, Sikhs and Parsis, we go a step further and say East Indian, Goan, Dalit and what not.

Let alone this sport of naming and categorising everyone in sight, we even throw out silly taunts when we celebrate festivals or watch matches. Have you ever gone up to a Muslim friend and asked him if he is supporting Pakistan when the cricket match is on?

Aren’t we helping terrorists – the bomb-weilding kind – become more powerful, for these kinds of statements make it easier to brainwash people later?

We are basically supporting terrorism as long as we keep dividing our people. We get amazed and make it a big story when a Muslim hosts a Ganesh at his place during the Ganpati festival. If you are a mediaperson who prints such stories to show that India is a land of ‘Unity in diversity’, you are a terrorist. Why does it shock you if someone wants to believe in a God without calling that God Allah or Ganpati?

The irony of the matter is that God has become a divisive name in today’s world. Even if you think you are the most reluctant fundamentalist, think again. If you have ever gone out to show the world that your celebration of a particular festival is better than any other religion’s celebration, then you have reiterated the divisive mindset.

If you still disagree, listen to this. The moment you go, “Patil is Marathi, Shah is Gujarati, Kapoor is Punjabi, Motwani is Sindhi, Batliwala is Parsi, Sheikh is Muslim, D’Souza is Catholic,” you are supporting terrorism, for you are segregating people in your mind. You are giving them an association that might not actually be true. Your mind is that of a terrorist, that automatically relates one person to be a part of a larger group, and you believe that group to be representative of a certain kind of behaviour.

More examples of daily terrorism? Sitting at a table and acccusing someone of being a miser as he is a Marwari, or calling a loud mouth at work a Bengali, or a show-off neighbour, a Punjabi.

When was the last time a person’s name was just a name to you? Or the last time you came across an unusual last name and didn’t waste your and his time asking which part of the country that person belonged to?

Jatin Sharma is a media professional who doesn’t want to grow up, because if he grows up, he will be like everybody else.

(Pictures courtesy o.canada.com, indiadeific.blogspot.com)

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