I cannot get to sleep tonight
I toss and turn and flop
I try to count some fluffy sheep
while o’er a fence they hop
I try to think of pleasant dreams
of places really cool
I don’t know why I cannot sleep
I slept just fine at school
…..a quote from Kathy Kenney-Marshall
My earliest memory of the beautiful actress Madhubala was the song accha ji main haari with Dev Anand , which aired on Doordarshan on a balmy Sunday morning. The legendary Mughal A Azam was seen much later.
Also remember her iconic B&W poster on the walls of the computer center where I used to go for classes as a teenager. That image, for me, was always the enduring image of that ethereal beauty…
Until this ‘rare colour photo’ started doing the rounds on twitter. Beautiful!
P.S: the photo was taken by James Burke for Life Magazine, in 1951. [Source]
Wishing you all a Very Happy & Prosperous New Year! May 2012 not end as soon as the Mayans predicted… 
P.S: If you didn’t read my ‘Old’ New Year Poem yet, suggest you head over here and check it out.
Having had shunned movies for a while, I was waiting for a good one to break the self-imposed exile – and The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn was definitely a good choice to do that. Director Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Georges Remi a.k.a Herge’s characters – the intrepid boy reporter Tintin, his dog Snowy and the foul-mouthed but likeable Captain Haddock – comes to life in an animated rollercoaster of an adventure.
I’m not a huge fan of Tintin and his adventures (well, there was the time when I used to diligently cut out the series’ pages from The Week and staple them to make a poor-man’s version of the comic book since the original ones were priced a bit high for my pocket money) but have read most of the works and also used to see the series on TV, even though the Hindi versions didn’t do justice to the characters or their utterances! The movie instalment, however, is an immensely enjoyable spectacle which brings out the comic world onto the screen in amazing vividity and vibrancy.
The movie follows Tintin and Snowy’s adventures as a wooden model of a long lost ship – The Unicorn – and the secret that it hides leads them onto a fascinating journey across the world. They come across Captain Haddock, whose ancestor the ship once belonged to and holds the key to unlocking the mystery behind it all. There are the bumbling cops Thompson and Thomson, the villain Sakharine, the mutinous former ship-mates of Captain Haddock, the singing lady Bianca Castafiore and a whole lot of fun, frolic and edge-of-the-seat thrills and spills.
The story is engaging and fast-paced and though it combines elements from three different Tintin books, the cohesiveness is there. Having the movie animated enables several scenes to be grandiose and large-scaled, something which would probably have been difficult to shoot the normal way, even with CGI. The animation also copies the look and feel of the original comic books and makes one feel that the books itself have come to life.
It feels just like yesterday that Mozilla released the major-est version of their Firefox browser – Firefox 4, with various enhancements. Both within & without, especially in the GUI/look-and-feel department. I’ve never liked the tabs-on-top feature and the disappearing status bar either so I’d tweaked it to look as similar to 3.6 as possible. Well, except the orange menu button – looks nice.
And now hot on the heels, Firefox 5 is upon us. Mozilla had earlier announced that they were ditching the old numbering system and instead focusing on rapid releases and hence we don’t see many 4.x versions. After having been in beta for a couple of weeks, Firefox 5 is available for public download via your browser’s built-in update or from getfirefox.com
And I thought Chrome’s versions were too quick for my liking*!
P.S: * coz I’m a tester and compatibility testing with so many versions is a PITA 
The Telugu New Year will be upon us shortly and here’s wishing you all a very Happy Ugadi. It’s been a week or so late this year…we’re into April already!
I’m not sure but this new year is called the Khara Nama Savatsaram. Not the Hindi type of Khara I suppose 
Forza Ferrari!!!
