I realized yesterday at Bali’s place that I have been living quite a hollow life since the past few months. Bali and I – we are from the same IIT. The same department even. And now we work in the same company. He is an year senior though. Bali and I – we played NFS for hours in his flat over the weekend. FYI, the dude has a SONY play-station that he has connected to some super big wide angle TV. Super big. But definitely not bigger than Hanuman’s.  Hanuman has this huge huge huge mountain of an LCD TV – so gigantic that I refuse to call it a TV at the first place.  So yeah, Bali and I – we played video-games for two days and went to a multiplex to watch a movie and also attended Chhota Hanuman’s budday in between. Chhota Hanuman – Hanuman’s son – a third grader. Or may be fourth. I don’t remember things. I have a very sharp memory. Bali and I – we hunted for a gift for the third grader and guess what – I ended up picking a toy for myself as well – an infra-red remote controlled mini helicopter. For the kid we picked up a gun. A huge gun if you ask me. A mountain of a gun. LOL.

My childhood. I was crazy for guns. Those Leo ones. The  blue coloured mousers that ejected yellow discs. The bigger black coloured barreled ones that ejected those cute and small reddish cylindrical plastic bullets.

You never really had to aim at anything. All you had to do was to sway the machine in the air and let lose your fingers on the trigger. Bang bang. The discs, the bullets – they would fly faster than the speed of light and hit something. Anything. And then you ran and collected the discs. The bullets. And slowly you started losing them. One by one. Sometimes two at a time. And when, one fine day, the ammunition was all over, you still fired sometimes. In the memory of the lost discs. The lost bullets. Life was fun. You had a gun. Lol. Mai aur mera bachpan.

I have been flying my chopper since yesterday and it’s great fun. Maneuvering it is a tough task but then I am improving. I had seen a similar flying helicopter at Bullu uncle’s place in Mumbai last year. Back then, the thing hadn’t flown. I guess, we had run out of batteries or something. Whatever.

I had always wanted some cool toy that actually flew in the air you know – like a butterfly, a bird,  even a mosquito . I had never really liked those plastic aeroplanes that just rolled on the floor. I mean what the fuck yaar – even as a kid, I wasn’t retarded enough to be satisfied by an aeroplane that never took off! Thankfully no one gifted that to me. But even then, whenever I met any kid who felt proud to possess a non-flying aeroplane, I took the kid to be retarded. I still do. You can keep a non-flying chopper though. That’s okay. That’s cool with me. I wouldn’t mind that. Why? Well, coz I had one. LOL – don’t kill me now. You know I am a bad-ass.  All work and no play makes Jack a bad-ass. LOL – again.

Hey hello, one second. Hollow life I was talking about. Hmm. So you see, eating in costly restaurants. Shopping. Multiplexes. TV. Big TVs. Play-stations. I mean, what the hell is happening around me? I am so glad I bought a real toy for a change. And I would really like to keep things real for some time. So I, Vatsap?, with one hand busy clutching my testicles, take an oath this very moment that I am not going to go to a theater or a luxury restaurant till 30th April except when I need to entertain someone and it becomes a pain in the ass to figure out anything else to do. Alright, and now the testicles are hurting, so cyao later. And please do feel jealous of my flying helicopter. RRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…

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Welcome me back to single-hood once again. And now that I have cleared this off my throat (no – I am not going to get into the details of the break-up), let’s talk about life. My life obviously.

I saw ISHQIA with Ali in an empty theatre in the dead of a night in a lonely locality of Gandhinagar. We loved the movie. Arshad warsi rocked. Even more than Naseeruddin Shah if you ask me. Sahi hai khaalu, aapka ishq – ishq, aur mera ishq – saxe? By the way, I also discovered recently that Ali could write lyrics for me. So that means, I have the chance of completing some of my songs that I have been composing for years now. Nice I say.

Day before yesterday, my laptop shut off. Just like that. I was working on it – files were open and things had been going smooth. And then it just shut off. No error messages. No warnings. No beep. And then, it never started again. It didn’t matter if you tried starting it with changed adaptors or changed batteries. I hope that – In Sha Allah – one day it will. Untill then, I am pretty much laptop-less. LOL – sounded funny that one.

Ok. Before I end – currently reading the ‘Difficulty of Being Good’ lent by Hanuman’s boss (who if you think about it, is obviouly my boss as well). What is everyone else reading these days, haan?

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Hi, I am the maker of the Phir Mile Sur Video once again – here to continue writing my story at Vatsap.com. Those of you who missed the first part, can check out the post here. And now the rest…

Zakir bhai replied to my sms – ‘hey dude! long time! me in US. call me coz i have some really friggin story to tell ya’.

I called Zakir bhai and asked him what the ‘friggin story’ was. Three of his disciples had apparently quit him just when I had smsed. Zakir bhai explained – ‘they said they were fed up of my bobbing head and hair. Can you beat that? Theze American bastards! They didn’t even take away their tablas with them man! So I am like surrounded by four extra pair of tablas, feeling quite depressed and all that. Anyway, so what are you upto’?

I sympathized with Zakir bhai and assured him that back here in India, we were still as crazy for his bobbing head and curly hair as we had been since eternity. I told him we still remembered him every time we saw Saif advertising for the Taj tea. And then I informed Zakir bhai about my ongoing video-shoots. And then I asked him something.

I asked Zakir bhai if he could shoot himself playing all those extra tablas that his ex-disciples had left just then – all at the same time? And then send the clip to me?

‘Eight tablas at the same time? Have you gone nuts or something? Just because ‘My Name is (Zakir) Hussain’, does not mean I have the right to perform ridiculous stunts’.

I told him how I had already shot Rehman rubbing a red plate and if that could be bought by junta why not him beating eight tablas. He finally relented and agreed to my proposal. Of course, I reminded him not to forget to frantically sway his hair  – not that it would have mattered whether or not I reminded him. When does one need to ‘remind’ a dog to keep it’s tail straight, haan? Silly me.

I soon received the video and when I saw it, I was left so totally speechless man! Zakir bhai had gone so totally overboard that he had ended up projecting a zoomed up live streaming video of himself behind him! To his bad luck (and mine), he could not say no to the two guys who had brought the projector and the video-cam respectively when they asked Zakir bhai if they could feature in the video as well. Now, that’s called value-ad! And value-ads sometimes do leave you speechless. I was left so speechless that I suddenly remembered few famous lines of an old poem:

And when my work shall be done in this world, O King of kings, alone and speechless shall I stand before thee face to face.

If only I had been face to face with Zakir bhai! Anyway. So I wondered whose lines were these and after some time, when I could not – I Googled – and oh my God – the lines had come out from none other than the great Rabindra Nath Tagore! At that very instant, I wanted to shoot Tagore in Kolkata. Since Tagore was dead, I started a search-hunt for someone Bengali who could at least look like him. My search ended with Prasenjit. I still wish he had listened to me and let my make-up men paint his beard and mustache white. Sigh! I consoled myself by thinking that even Tagore must have had black beard kabhi na kabhi. Chalta hai.

I was in Kolkata itself,when Shaan called me up to let me know that he had gotten a chance to see Shreya’s clip. For some crazy reason, he wanted to do exactly what Sherya had done – sit atop a running bus and sing his lines. I made it clear to him that since I didn’t find him as cute as Shreya Ghosal, he needed to something special for me, for me to agree to his request. Shaan thought for a while and then offered me a deal that I could not refuse. He promised to me that if I let him do the Shreya act, he could arrange for Rituparna – the queen of Kolkata – to wear the cliched Bengali costume (with the cliched red sari and bindi and all that) and stand in front of the cliched Howrah bridge to sing for my video. I have always had this weakness for cliche’s and therefore when Shaan offered this, there was no way I could turn it down. Both Shaan and I lived up to our respective promises.

After having wrapped up with Bengal, I was sitting at the Kolkata airport, waiting for my flight to Jaipur when I got a call from Mr. Hazarika. He asked me if I was planning to come down to Guwahati as well. I told him about my hectic shooting schedules. When the central government didn’t have the time to bother about the happenings of the NE, how was I supposed to find enough time, haan? I did tell him that if he could manage to record something and send over, I could use that in my video. When he didn’t sound too happy at this, I also offered to add some Guwahatish crimson sky in the background. I think he still felt bad but that was the best I could do man! It was only when I finally saw the clip that he sent later that I realized how deeply aggrieved he had been – the man was almost crying in the video man – crying! I shred few tears myself when I saw him cry.

Shilpa came to receive me at the Jaipur airport. She was wearing a pink sari. How hot! As we were driving down to the location, I wondered if there was a way out to depict on camera how hot she really was (without asking her to strip of course). And then a great idea struck me – how about showing rural Rajasthanis trying to capture all the heat flowing from the hot Shilpa, by surrounding her with huge thermal storage plates? Fuck man – I fell in love with the idea instantaneously! I felt so proud of myself man. And when I shared this concept with my queen of Rajasthan Royals, she readily agreed. That’s how I shot my most innovative (s)hot so far.

I very well knew what an innovative idea it was to have Shilpa circled with those thermal plates. But, in spite of that, I  kept wondering if I should have asked Shilpa – at least once – whether she minded stripping in the first place. And then I thought of the only person who would never have minded that.

I found Salman Khan in a school, where an entire batch that had gone to watch a special preview of Veer had turned deaf & dumb by the time the movie had ended. We shot Salman in his banyan there as he made fun of the children by mocking them. He even tried eating one of them but then decided against that when some of the children told him – in sign language – that he was already looking slightly motu types.

After the shoot, Salman told us that he had a door ka rishtedaar in UP – Rashid Khan and it would be geat if we could go there and shoot him as well because Rashid apparently lived all alone in a huge huge white coloured Haweli that could accommodate at least 5,000 people and no one ever went to see him. So we went to Rashid and shot him. We shot him – in every corner of his haweli, and kept shooting for one full day. Later in the evening, he took us for a boat-ride in a river. While on the ride, one of my crew-members noticed a drum-set floating in the middle of the river. We wondered where that thing had come from. We were to discover that soon.

We liked the country side so much that we decided to stay for one more day. The next day, my crew and I went for trekking in a jungle. And guess who we found there? Apna taklu Shivamani! And guess what he was doing out there in the jungle – he was beating water with his drum-sticks! Seeing him do that, all of us started laughing like shit man. The poor guy had lost his drums and had been beating the water since the last 24 hours! That was so friggin hilarious. We shot him doing that and even today every time I think about that incident,  I go nuts laughing.

The weird thing is, after few days, while I was in Bangalore, I got a call from Kavitha Krishnamurthy. She told me she had heard from someone that I was going around shooting musicians in the middle of jungles and all that and that it was quite an appreciated gesture. Appreciating gesture? WTF? Even before I could explain to her what had really happened in case of Shiva, she told me that she had seen Avatar 17 times with her family and could totally relate to my sentiments! Ah – so then I figured out where she was coming from.

She asked me if my team could shoot her family singing and playing violins in the middle of a jungle. This sounded too funny to be ignored and the very next morning, the shoot was concluded. The family left after the shoot while I and the rest of my team decided to hang around for some more time. There was a river in this jungle too and guess what we found floating this time – a pair of pajamas! Someone pointed at them and cracked a joke – ‘lol – hope it’s not Shiva’s again this time’. We all chuckled. Then someone took the darn wet thing out and commented – ‘it’s too tight for Shiva if you ask me’. One look at the cloth and you could tell that actually was true. We looked around to locate the owner if we could and then, when we did spot the owner – we all went like – fuucck! There she was – Deepika Padukone standing bottom-less in the middle of the river! How could we have left this gem of a scene from my video! We didn’t. Later, after the shoot, when we tried returning her pajama to her, she abused us for being hypocrites and walked off. Bottom-less. Funny girl.

More later guys. There is so much more to tell. God bless you all. Keep watching the video. In loops.

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Hi. I am the maker of the new Phir Mile Sur video album that was launched yesterday – the 26th of January – the red lettered day of India. Before I write more, let me thank Vatsap?  for providing me with such a shitty platform to speak out to the nasty world that reads his posts. I am here to tell you guys how I made the video. It’s already there on Youtube and if you exist on Facebook you might already have stumbled upon a link shared by some sincere friends of yours.

I don’t know how many of you remember it, but the opening shot of the original video had a yellowish morning sun followed by sea-waves (here is a link to the original just in case you wanna refresh your memories). The morning sun had probably symbolized the dawn of a new era. Or something like that. May be the makers of the original were trying to give hints at the upcoming liberalized era. I don’t know. May be. But when I set about shooting my video, I wondered if I should do the same – that is – begin my video with a yellowish morning sun?

India is growing and all that and we keep talking about GDP and stuff but is anyone doing much about the inequitable nature of this growth – haan? Tell me. Bolo bolo. Kahir chhodo. I am kinda left-oriented you see. So how could I show a rising sun in an era of inequitable growth?

My opening shot shows just the clouds and the sea -  no sun. Of course I wondered that if there was no sun like in the original, then what the whole logic of starting my video with a shot of just the clouds and the sea was? And then I thought that if I had to worry about logic, I would never have bothered to shoot this video at the first place. Raising a toast to this logic-lessness, in the next shot I showed some white cranes flying here and there and fetching fishes from a lake. Actually, if you think about it, this very logic-lessish attitude connects most of us Indians. And oh my God, if it indeed is so, then there suddenly is so much logic behind all this logic-lessness that I adopted for my first two shots!

I soon realized that with all the clouds and the sea and the flying and attacking cranes, my video had started to head in an altogether different dimension. Mile Sur Mera Tumhara (with or without the Phir) had to be brought back to something that had to with ‘sur‘! I decided to meet Rehman.

Unfortunately, when my crew went to Rehman’s terrace to shoot him, he was absolutely in no mood to play or sing. We really went crazy man. We pleaded to him like cunts. He just wouldn’t listen to us. Such a stoic person! He was in his own bloody world. Pointing towards a red coloured longish rectangular plate, he told us that if he rubbed it “the right way”, a genie would come off it. The only problem was – he didn’t have a fucking clue, what “the right way” was. Neither did we. He kept trying anyway. We shot him doing that and then later added some music during the editing. I was sure that junta would buy Rehman creating music even if we showed him rubbing a red plate – Rehman can create magic out of anything after all! In fact, I wondered why he needed a genie at the first place given that the man was so much magical and all that himself. I wondered about it so much, that I moved straightaway to the genie himself – Mr. Bachchan (not caring much about how big a flop Alladin was).

It’s funny but just like Rehman, Mr. Bachchan was fooling around on a terrace too. Thankfully, after the awesome failure of Alladin he had nothing to do with genies. When we told him why we were there, he got all senti talking about the shooting of the original Mile Sur video that had taken place more than twenty years ago. He asked us if we were shooting Mr. Bhimsen Joshi again. We explained to him how when we had contacted Mr. Joshi, the cloying old man had abused the entire Mile Sur concept itself. We told Mr. Bachchan, how Pandit Joshi blamed the Mile Sur video of stereotyping him for life – in small small villages, every time a kid asked the mother who Pandit Bhimsen Joshi was, the mother replied – that oldie who comes in the Mile Sur Mera Tumhara video. We were about to tell Mr. Bachchan a lot more about our interactions with Panditji when the Big B interrupted. He asked me if in my video, he could sing.

We started ROTFLing on Bachchan’s suggestion! And then he threatened to kick our butts by writing against us in his blog. That’s when we had to give in. He started singing. He had sung just two lines when we fell to his knees and pleaded to him profusely to stop doing that. It was only when we promised to him that we would also include Abhishek in the video (we had already decided on Aishwarya), that he agreed upon to stop singing. He finished off the next two lines by speaking them in a very Silsilaish fashion. May be he still missed Rekha.

After this roof-top musical fiasco with Bachchan, we desperately needed a real singer. Someone tipped us that Shankar Mahadevan and those two vella friends of his – Ehsaan and Loy – were putting dope somewhere in Goa. When we finally reached them, they were standing in the middle of an absolutely desolated stretch of a white beach – totally out. While Shankar was screaming to an electric microphone, the other two were working on an electric guitar and an electric keyboard respectively. There was just one problem – there was no fucking electricity out there in that deserted place. They were too high to realize that. We had to shoot them like that only. Except that I somehow managed to steal Shankar’s mic and hid it under sand. Their shot would have looked too stupid otherwise. I couldn’t do much for the guitar or the keyboard though.

Shankar was twaddling during the shoot when we came to know about some lady in Chennai who played a brown coloured longish cock-resembling musical instrument really well. Shankar was too high to recollect what the instrument was actually called. Finally, after much wheedling and cajoling from our end, he did recall the name of the lady – Anushka Shankar. Our session with Anushka went well and her facial expressions throughout the shoot were so erotic that we kept going back to Shankar’s description of what she played – the Sitar.

Since we were in Chennai, we tried checking up on few Tam movie stars. Vikram was rehearsing for a Tam version of Men in Black at the Marina Beasant Nagar Beach while Vijay Surya had just given up on trying to move the famous huge boulder of Mahabalipuram. We shot them both. Pretty friendly guys, both of them.

We had just wrapped up our shoots in Chennai-Mahabs when Sherya Ghosal sent to me on my phone, a recording of her part of the song. The file that she sent didn’t only have the audio – it had video as well. I found her so cute looking in the video, that I decided to insert the whole damn clip in my album. Even before I had put down my phone, I got a call from Mr. Bachchan. He wanted to know when were we shooting Abhishek & Aishwarya – and if we had already done that could we pass on the video to him so that he could post that in his blog. He really freaked me out man. I promised him that we would get this whole Abhishek-Aish thing done the very next day and that’s exactly what we did then. Abhishek, for some reason, refused to get rid of his Pa getup during our shoot. We didn’t care much anyway. Aishwarya in a red sari was good enough for us and we wouldn’t have minded even if Abhishek had dressed like the Kala Bandar himself.

After the shooting was done, we asked the Bachchan couple how things had been going with them. They said that they were pretty happy together and wanted to grow old together and may be when they grew old, could go and spend some time with Mahesh Babu. This took us by surprise. Mahesh Babu? The gult hero? They said yes. They asked me to find Mahesh Babu in Hyderabad if I really wanted to know the connection. And when we finally found Mahesh babu, the connection got all clear. Pretty fascinating in fact.

Mahesh Babu had become a singing teacher at an old age home. He refused to be shot till we also shot some oldies repeating lines after him. It was a great sentimental occasion for us and soon I and the rest of my crew started feeling so old and hopeless that we felt like listening to some Santoor. So we went straightaway to Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma who was then in Delhi. His son boasted to us that when both the dad and the son played together, the vibrations could reach as far as Kashmir. Initially, we thought that the dude was kidding. But when he sounded really really serious, we called up our correspondent in Srinagar as soon as the father-son jodi started playing their respective Santoors. We asked the correspondent if she could feel any vibrations out there in Srinagar. She told us that one really needed to be gay to be able to do that. We then asked her if she could spot any gay around. Luckily, she could spot Rohit Behl buying vegetables from a boat-based vendor on the lake – and sure enough, Mr. Behl proved that Sharma Jr. had not been entirely bluffing.

We soon got very very fed up of Santoor. To do away with the after-effects, when we went to a pub in CP that evening, we bribed the DJ to play Bhangda numbers only – in full volume. It was only when I and my crew were couple of pitchers down that I shouted out loud – holy fuck – we haven’t been to Punjab yet! We still had a hang-over when were in Punjab the early morning next day. So instead of catching Mica for some hep version of the song (like – ay Ganpat, thoda Sur Mila), we ended up shooting the good old Gurdas paji. He bored us as usual and greatly helped us out of our hang-overs.

We were about to pack up when Juhi Chawla turned up and told us that she was ready to shoot for the new tedha-hai-per-mera-hai commercial. We tried explaining it to her that she had probably confused the mera-tumhara concept with tedha-mera concept. But then I thought – what the hell, let us just shoot her as well. And so we did. After the shooting, we ordered Kurkure and some garma garam chai. Someone from the crew, exhaled with the first sip of his tea – ‘wah Taj‘. That’s when it struck to me that I hadn’t heard of Zakir Hussain ever since he had let the brand-ambassadorship of the Taz tea slip off to Saif. Fortunately, I had his number. I sent him a text – ‘hey wazzup dude – where art thou’?

I guess I would have to sit down some other time to finish my story guys. Keep watching the video in loops till then.

Update: Part 2 posted

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Loly. She came and she took me to her home. And while at hers, I felt I was at mine. Because her mom loved me just like my mom would have had. And her dad chatted with me, just like my dad would have had. Ah, and now I want to fly to my parents and hop around all the rooms in the house. Holi kab hai. Kab hai holi?

PS: ek March ko Sardar

PS2: If you think about it, LoLy kinda rhymed with Holi. LOL! And if you think really hard about it, even Sholay kinda rhymes. Fuck – I am going crazy. Ha ha.

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