The Agneepath Coincidence !!!

A remake of Agneepath is on the cards, to be released later this year ... got me reflecting that I'd not seen the orginal as yet ...

The late 80s / early 90s were not the best of times for the big B ... he had a string of flops ... Toofan, Krodh, Ajooba etc ... none of which I've ever seen either.

Movies from this period which fared better were Shahenshah ( Rishte me hum tumhare baap lagete hain ... ) and Hum ( Jumma chumma de de ... ) both of which I'd seen and of course Agneepath ( Vijay Dinanath Chauhan ... poora naam ... ) which had somehow eluded me over the years ... cant fathom why though !!!

Anyway decided to rent the DVD over the weekend and realized that Agneepath is such a treasure trove of Big-B dialogue gems !!! Had it realeased in the Bachchan heydays of mid 70s it could have potentially dethroned Deewar ( Mere paas XYZ hai ... tumhare paas kya hai ... ) for sheer dialogue recall if not Sholay !!!

( paused the movie to click this !!! )

While watching the movie I was casually checking for facebook updates and found an old friend (

Shashi don - who loves his single malts these days ) of mine half way across the world was also watching Agneepath at the same time ... some coincidence !!!

Thought I'd post our facebook chat text on my blog for posterity ... also whats a blog on Mumbai without a smattering of Bollywood !!!

Chess World Championship 2008 : Anand poised to beat Kramnik

 

Anand has crushed Kramnik in 3 of the 7 games of the ongoing World Chess Championship 2008 ... in the 3rd, 5th and 6th games with the other games ending in a draw. Looks like an unassailable 3 point lead with 5 games remaining. Kramnik will need a miracle to win from here.  Featured here is the 5th game which Anand won with the black pieces.

During my schooldays I was an avid reader of Sportstar primarily for their cricket coverage. The first time I heard of Anand was in one of the issues in '87 which carried a cover story about a guy who had just won the Junior World Chess Championship held in Philippines. 

Soon after that in quick succession within the same year he became the first Indian Chess Grandmaster ( youngest in the world ) and also the youngest ever Indian to win the Padma Shri. 

Vishy ( Vishwanathan Anand ) quickly became a phenomenon and a role model ... many of us even skipped cricket after school to play chess and cram opening moves and middle game tactics ... which later helped me win some inter-hostel chess tournaments at IT-BHU :-)

Over the years of course Vishy has been going from strength to strength ... being one of the few to have a near par win-lose ratio with the mighty Kasparov. In rapid chess he's of course unparalleled having beaten the best : Kasparov, Karpov, Ivanchuk, Kramnik, Shirov, Topalov et al multiple times to win most of the tournaments. In 2007, after the unification of FIDE and Kasparov's breakway PCA, Anand became the "undisputed" world chess champion ...

Anand will surely win the championship yet again this year ... which will re-establish his status as the undisputed Chess champion of the world !!!