Last couple of weeks, two multimillion dollar news/ reviews caught my attention – Multimillion dollar stories of a dog, a shoe and the many games people play.

One was of course of “The Bush Shoe” and the other was the latest movie going the rounds- Slum Dog Millionaire

US President George Bush was attacked with a shoe by a Cairo based Iraqi TV reporter Muntadar Al-Zeidi. The shoe has gained tremendous popularity – in the middle eastern world and the western world. Although shoe throwing is considered as an insult in many parts of the Middle East, this particular incident was an exception of sort. There was allround praise for Mr.Zeidi. In fact I even heard the news of a Saudi man willing to give $ 10 Mln to get his hands to those “Godly” shoes

In his last days as President, Mr. Bush has certainly earned the respect from his followers so much so that it took a shoe for all the talking. Apparently the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al- Maliki had clearly heard the thrower’s accompanying cry of “This is a goodbye kiss, you dog”

Check out the many shoe games that has come to the market post this incident. There are many, here are the top five

1. Sock And Awe

2. Bush Bash

3. Flying Babush

4. Bush’s Boot Camp

5. Can You Throw a Shoe at Bush ?

What a mess indeed, huh ?

Talking of dog and of course the million dollars, it seems Slumdog Millionaire has caught its viewers by surprise.

Slumdog Millionaire is a story of a Mumbai Boy who won the Hindi version of famous reality show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”. The film is directed by Danny Boyle and written by Simon Beaufoy and is based on the book Q and A by Vikas Swarup.

The story sound simple – Jamal Malik  goes into the Hindi version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire and wins it. How can the illiterate boy from the slum with zero knowledge win such a prestigious show ? Things get complicated when the producers of the show do not believe that the boy indeed won it fairly.

Will that deter the boy from reaching his ultimate goal ? What is his ultimate goal ?

He loves a girl from his childhood days and has lost touch with her. Now he wants to get reunited with her. He knows for a fact knows that she watches every episode. Inorder to find her he goes to the show and wins it.  What mattered to him was the girl and not the million dollars that were waiting to be taken.

The Director Danny Boyle revealed on MTV Movies Blog that it is a true story. The movie stars Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Anil Kapoor, Irrfan Khan. Music is by A R Rahman.

I browsed around to get see what others are talking about the movie. And here are few of those ketch ups

1. Although set in India, Film’s appeal are universal

2. It is a Crowd Pleaser

3. One of the most dynamic and exuberant underdog stories

If you are keen to take a sneek peak, watch the theatrical trailer here.

Image Credit: Wikimedia

Popularity: 15%

I wonder if there would be a day where our commercial & entertainment capital Mumbai would be renamed to Bollywood on the lines of Hollywood.

Nevertheless the world cinema today knows only two top names, Hollywood and Bollywood. The language Hindi is considered to be 3^rd largest spoken in the world after Mandarin and English. Statistics say that we produce double the number of movies than Hollywood in a year. So having been 3^rd on the list, what Bollywood  additionally requires to edge past Hollywood? Does it qualify to have its own Oscar counterpart in Bollywood that actors across the globe aspire to be nominated and win the prestigious award? It would be a dream come true for all Indians to proudly associate themselves with our country regardless of their location.

So why are we not able to make headway in this?

• Routine stories
• Same old melodrama mixed with lot of sentiment
• Not much creativity – More of romantic movies less of creativity
• Making movies only with set of audience in mind – no bigger picture

Most of the producers in Bollywood have a mindset of making movies for masses and for youth. I understand that about India’s total population is comprised of 41% youth. But the times have changed, and audience looking for more and more variety. We have seen enough of romantic movies now. It’s high time for our producers to take Bollywood cinemas across borders. Its quite encouraging to see these days international production companies like Sony Entertainment Pictures, Walt Disney Pictures and recently Columbia Pictures investing on Bollywood cinemas.

One of the reasons for Hollywood being on the top is due to variety / creativity of movies it makes. Although there are more non-English speaking nations in the globe, all these movies are dubbed into their own language. I was watching Terminator movie in Spanish whilst I was in Barcelona this summer. That’s the reason why we have so many audience worldwide for Hollywood compared to Bollywood.

What is required for Bollywood to win the race?

• Variety
• Creativity – so that foreign countries can dub them into their own language to watch it. Are you listening all those copycat writers?
• Please do away with unnecessary songs –Hard to dub songs in other native languages. Release the songs as separate pack not in the movie. Cannot tolerate any more people around the world mocking Bollywood is just about dozen people dancing. Lets prove its more to it.

I would like to see world cinema looking up to Bollywood as a prestigious place to work and achieve.

Producers are you listening?

Image Credit: media-studies.ca

Popularity: 8%

You might have heard of musicians becoming bloggers, bloggers writing about music etc. Have you heard of bloggers getting together and forming a band, creating albums and distributing over the web ?

If you’ve not heard, I will not be surprised. So was I until I explored BlogSwara a couple of days back.

As per the website,

“Blogswara is an internet music community which acts as a common platform for musicians (a majority of whom are amateurs) to showcase their talent before the world by producing original music and share it over the internet. It is also a free-music movement where visitors/listeners can listen and download the mp3 files free of cost. The songs are released over the Internet and as multi-lingual albums”

Blogswara recently released their 5^th album. It is called “Blogswara  V5″. Most of the songs are Hindi, Kannada, Tamil or Malayalam and some are instrumental. All the songs are available under Creative Commons licence which means you can publish it as long as you give them the credit.

The USP of Blogswara is its artistes. All of them are amateur singers or musicians and each of them is a blogger. Besides being a blogger, they are either an engineer, a student, a doctor, a housewife, a Podcaster etc

Hear this out on one of the songs called Khushiyan

“Khushiyan is a very special song and the first one by Dhwani. This is a cappella where all the instrumental sounds were also done with the mouth. However, these were later processed to make it sound like the way it does now. Also, all the voices were recorded by the artists at their home and were done in parts and then mixed together in a studio. Last but not the least, none of the artists met each other during the complete production.”

Want to know more of them ? Check them out at BlogSwara.in

Popularity: 11%

Worldwide, computers communicate in native languages, at least figuratively. The Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Europeans and the Russians have long had their own local language applications running on supported or native operating systems for many years now.

Albeit a late entrant, looks like we are catching up. C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) launched the latest version of our desi (GNU) linux edition BOSS version 3.0 codename Tejas. This version features GNOME 2.20 ,KDE 3.5 with Kernel 2.6.22-3-486. Developed by the NRCFOSS (National Resource Centre for Free/Open Source Software) team, BOSS stands for Bharat Operating Systems Solutions.

The 3D desktop screen look neat and retains the ease and convenience of a GUI. This edition features a full Graphical mode installer and simplified menus. Office productivity will be provided by BharatheeyaaOO, which is a desi version of OpenOffice.org 2.0.1. There is a bulk document converter for added convenience. PDF reader, instant messaging , Firefox 3.0, firewall, samba, ftp et all are standard.

Multimedia support is good with support for video playback, removable media, TV tuner and plug and play devices. Connectivity includes wired and wireless networks and Bluetooth.

Currently BOSS GNU/Linux Desktop is available in almost all the Indian Languages such as Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Bodo, Urdu, Kashmiri, Maithili, Konkani and Manipuri.

So finally it does look like Information Technology will reach even the majority of our non-English countrymen. Share your experience with this edition! You can download the linux distro from http://bosslinux.in/downloads .

Popularity: 24%