Books, Movies & Games

This is the forth book of the Wilt series by Tom Sharpe. As usual Henry Wilt faces absurd & outrageous problems which at the same time are of his making & beyond his control. Namely an aristocratic pervert, his lover, greedy wife of a shadow cabinet minister who is an ex-prostitute & the combine forces of British & American police. Author Tom Sharpe uses Wilt to expose the farcical realities in small town to hilarious effect.

This time around Wilt goes on a walking trip around his county while his wife & the kids go to meet the aunty in US. Wilt cleverly avoids making the trip with them pretending he has work to attend to & goes on his trip the moment his family leaves England. Although Wilt intends to enjoy the normal older England as usual he falls in to trouble. He gets drunk & finds himself at the hospital. Where he claims that he has no idea what has happened. With the police suspecting Wilt to be an accessory to the burning of a manor house things get complicated pretty fast. His family been suspected of carrying drugs to US does not help the matters either. Things get pretty confusing & amusing while involving Inspector Flint, Shadow Minister, His wife & the wife’s lover- The burned manor owner before they get untangled.

Although it has the familiar feel of the previous books, I couldn’t help feeling that there was something missing. It doesn’t felt like the previous Wilt books. Of course this book has the usual jokes & outrageous behavior of the quadruplets. It felt drawn out. Like Sharpe was trying hard to be funny. All in all I would say that it is a amusing read, but not to the standard you would expect from a master satirist like Tom Sharpe.

About Tom Sharpe

Tom Sharpe was born in 1928 and educated at Lancing College and Pembroke College, Cambridge. He did his National Service in the Marines before going to South Africa in 1951, where he did social work before teaching in Natal. He had a photographic studio in Pietermaritzburg from 1957 until 1961, when he was deported... From 1963 to 1972 he was a lecturer in History at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology. In 1986 he was awarded the XXXIIIeme Grand Prix de l'Humour Noir Xavier Forneret. He is married and lives in Cambridge

Wilt in Nowhere Links

Amazon.com

Random House

Guardian Unlimited Books

"I always thought there were two kinds of people in this world, the kind that go to their death screaming, and the kind that go to their death silently, and then, I met the third kind"

This wonderful film is about those people who fall in to the third category. People who go to their death smiling, because they know they accomplished what they wanted. Rang De Basanti means Color of Patriotism (at least as far as I understood. I’m a Sri Lankan. My Hindi is just above nil.) It is about a gang of contemporary Indian college students who are persuaded act in a documentary by young English women. She is lacking in funds & she recruits the young men with the help of her Sonia, an Indian girl who is part of the gang. She wants to make a film on Indian revolutionaries Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad and their contemporaries and their fight for freedom from the British Raj, with the help of her grandfather’s diary. Which describes his meeting & dealing with these revolutionaries. They go through some wild & funny moments as well as some intriguing & bitter moments. Sue's film makes DJ and his friends stop and stare at themselves for being the actual descendants of these great men and never recognizing and celebrating their courage and spirit.

In the second part of the film it takes a more serious attitude with the eternal struggle & misunderstandings of Hindus & Muslims in India highlighted. Then it reaches the climax with the crashing of an Indian fighter plane which is piloted by Ajay, the boyfriend of the Sonia. The gang is devastated by the incident. And the politicians try to blame Ajay who has heroically stayed with the aircraft to steer it away from a city. At this point the documentary has started to change their perception about life & the react like the legends they portray in the documentary. Although the film ends quite violently, it is not an unnecessary violence. You feel they are justified.

And the way the film is presented with both the documentary & the life of the gang been shown side by side enhances the film. It highlights the changes of the gang goes through with the flow of the documentary. Finally it is a very good movie. And a different one too. All the actor justify their roles brilliantly. The music & directing is the same. But what standout is the editing. Which greatly enhances the look & feel of the film. And which makes a movie that would have been just good to a great one.

Cast:

Aamir Khan	....	DJ/Chandrashekhar Azad
Siddharth	....	Karan/Bhagat Singh (as Siddharth Suryanarayan)
Kunal Kapoor	....	Aslam/Ashfaqullah Khan
Sharman Joshi	....	Sukhi/Rajguru
Atul Kulkarni	....	Laxman Pandey/Ramprasad Bismil
Soha Ali Khan	....	Sonia/Durga Vohra
Madhavan	....	Ajay Rathod (as R. Madhavan)
Waheeda Rehman	....	Ajay's Mother
Anupam Kher	....	Karan's Father
Om Puri	....	Amanullah Khan/Aslam's Father
Kiron Kher	....	Mitro/DJ's Mother
Lekh Tandon	....	DJ's Grandfather
Cyrus Sahukar	....	Rahul

Directed by
Rakesh Omprakash Mehra

Links:

Official Site

Rang De Basanti

imdb.com

I promised to write about books, movies & games in here. But then I realized that there are so many sites dedicated to movies & games. So I was bit reluctant to write about them. So I will not write about every game I played or every movie I watched. For the record in the last few weeks I watched Aeon Flux (Yuk!) , King Kong ( for the 3rd time), Pacifier, Formula 51, Serenity & Final Fantasy. And since I finished assembling the new PC, most of my spare time is spent by gaming. I have installed Star Wars- Jedi Outcast-II, Quake 4 & NFS Most Wanted. Outcast is some what an old game. But I wanted to play it for sometime & it is quite good. I just got the light saber in it. And Quake 4 is a very good FPS game, although not as good as Doom III which I had played in my cousin’s PC.
The best them is Need For Speed Most Wanted. It has incorporated features of Hot Pursuit & Underground to very good effect. The cops make the game much more interesting. And the movies are pretty cool too. Currently I’m 14th in the Black List.

Links:
Need for Speed: Most Wanted Tweak Guide

NFS Cheats & Forum

Quake 4

Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast

Jedi Outcast Walkthrough and Strategy Guide ...