BREAKING NEWS

(This is not their baby. No baby pic as yet)

A dear couple friend of mine has just been blessed with a baby boy. He was supposed to make his grand entrance sometime towards the last week of April but after constant disturbances (the smart ones among you can figure it out) he decided to pop out early. He arrived on 31 March 2007 at a hospital in Kathmandu.

The naming ceremony has not been done as yet and till then they have decided to call him Gogol.

Naa Just joking.

I am not exactly sure but they are vacillating between a couple of names.

Govinda Shumshere (the grandmother’s favourite),

Hrithik Shumshere (the aunt Sanjok’s choice), and Hash Shumshere (the uncle Peggy’s fave). The mother Shraddha wants him to represent the times and name him Prajatantra Shumshere (an oxymoron if ever there was one. Prajatantra means People’s Democracy and Shumshere is a synonym for Feudal Dictatorship). The father wants to call him Siirpech Shumshere (Siirpech being the royal Nepalese crown which my dear friend has his eye on).

My personal suggestion is quite simple. Stick to Nepali tradition and since he was born on a Saturday name him Shani-kumar Shumshere.

Anyway Dear Shraddha,

From all of your friends and well wishers and numerous others who only know you through the blog, a hearty CONGRATULATIONS.

You must be feeling joy, elation and god damm relief. We heard that it was a C-Sec so I guess you were spared the agony of dilating your V-Sec to push the little guy out.

Hope you gave the father some taste of what the experience was like.

I am sure you will make a great mother but wait a couple of years before you imbibe in him the teachings of Chairman Mao.

Congrats once again.

Dear HRH Prabir,

Congrats. You are a Padrē now.

Just make sure you always weigh more than the baby does.

My regards to the whole family too.
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On a completely different note I was watching the Zee Cine Awards yesterday evening. It began at 6pm local time and dragged on and on till it finally came to an end at a quarter to 12 midnight. The worst thing about it was that it was so bad, sooooo bad that you could not switch off the TV and put an end to it. I know that is confusing but try and think of it as a bad bad train crash happening in slow motion over 6 excruciating hours. You cant do anything to stop it but at the same time you cannot take your eyes off it either.

(talk of unintentional comedy)

To start off, Katrina Kaif (as pretty as she is, God bless her) did a stick dance. Actually it was a proper dance but she was so stiff that the audience was fooled. It was only when Salman joined her and did his jig (dance would be too strong a word for it) that things looked a little up. And I do mean little.
Then there was a 10-year-10-song-10-star ‘tribute’. The songs were ok (after all you cant mess up recordings) but the 10 stars were anything but stars. Riya Sen (of the MMS fame) was the biggest of the 10 stars so you can imagine who the others were.

I could go on and describe the rest but I will spare you the academic version of the train crash.

If the ‘performances’ were a joke the ‘awards’ made a mockery of the whole event.

If you don’t get what I mean check out this list.

Shah Rukh Khan
Sanjay Dutt
Hrithik Roshan
Kajol
Ayesha Takia
Gul Panag
Saif Ali Khan
Abhishek Bachchan
Arshad Warsi
Kangana Ranaut
Upen Patel
Konkana Sen Sharma


And NO it isn’t a list of the nominees. It is a list of the winners. Everybody and I do mean EVERYBODY and their fathers, were given awards.

Rekha was given the Forever Diva of Divas award. And as silly as that is, it was probably the only deserving one of the evening. Looking gorgeous and immaculately dressed she was equal parts seductive, coy and playful. Truly, they don’t make stars like her anymore.

Then it went all downhill from there. Subash Ghai got an award for opening a film school (don’t ask) and from a laundry list of really B & C grade star presenters one F grade one named Sharad Kapur (don’t try to jog your memory, only film historians remember him anyway) even decided to use the platform to thank some people. I will just tell you what he said.

“I would like to take the opportunity to thank Mahesh Bhatt, Mukesh Bhatt, Vikram Bhatt etc etc for helping me 10 years ago when I joined the industry.”

Poor guy, apart from the fact that the thanks came just a little bit late, it didn’t help him that people were reminded about how long he has been out of work.

There also were many emcees.

Urmila trying to speak English with an god-knows-what accent. Frankly girl, master the language before you try on accents. Is that so difficult to do? I mean just look at Salman, he probably speaks more ‘British’ than his girlfriend Katrina who was born and raised there.

Shilpa who along with her mother, has decided that she is going to milk the 15 minutes of the Big Brother fame for atleast 15 more years. Though to be fair she was looking HOT. Then she began to make faces and opened her mouth and all the magic left the building.

Saif Ali Khan. Looking bored and just waiting for his check probably.

And finally K Jo, who is becoming a bigger drama queen as every day goes by. At one stage he even had on a Tiara (again dont ask)

And finally to hammer home the last nail in the coffin on this 'dead'-ful day, Hrithik was named best actor.

In a year which saw performances like Aamir (RDB), Ajay (Omkara), Siddarth (RDB), Saif (Omkara), Sanjay (Munnabhai), Anupam (Khosla ka..) etc........... Hrithik (who is otherwise a good actor) gets it for Kkrish.

Only when Oscars get handed out to Ben Affleck for Daredevil or Tobey Maguire for Spiderman , can we probably say that Bollywood has finally ‘conquered’ Hollywood.

Till then….