The Booklover's Guide to the Movies

In my limited experience of books being made into movies, there is only one movie which can be said to be as good as (or doing justice to) the original book. And that movie is the Godfather. It is my theory that it is impossible to make a movie which is better than the book from which it is adapted. Even so, I found, surprisingly, that people who have not read the original books sometimes enjoy the movies better. A good example is the LotR and HP movies. I for one don't really enjoy the HP movies much but a few friends of mine who haven't read the books love it. The reason for me pondering this is that I experienced the same feeling today. The movie in question as anyone who has read the title of this post can tell, is the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I really liked it very much. It captures with perfection, the zany sometimes crazy feel of the books. The dialogues and screenplay are great and keep you (well me atleast) riveted. However, I must caution you that to enjoy this movie you must have some idea of the books. If you haven't even heard of the HGttG, you are going to have a hard time making sense of what's going on the screen (as I felt my companion had). Ideally you should be like me. I have read only the first two books of the trilogy. So I had just enough background for the movie to make sense and just enough ignorance for it to be new and interesting to me. In any case, my advice is go and take a look. It's a very well made, well paced and well edited piece of celluloid.

Hit a century and score it too

Recently in wake of the test defeat at Bangalore, I got to hear again the standard gripes about Sachin not performing in crunch situations. There were so many of them and I wanted to tell all of the people the same thing. So I am going to do this on the blog. My answer to these people is that they can go @#$%& themselves.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. If Sachin is supposed to be the one who should rescue India from crunch situations then what's the rest of the team doing? There are supposed to be 11 players on a team, not 1 player cloned 10 times. Some say that Sachin does not contribute to the team in proportion to his hype. Well, the answer is that Sachin is not the one creating the hype around himself. He is the same committed, hard-working cricketer that he was 15 years ago. He has matured with experience but his core talent and commitment are the same. The hype exists because of his achievements.

If any one has any doubts about why Sachin has a place on the team should take the following pop quiz:
Imagine that you are in the stands watching a match. India needs 80 runs to win in 8 overs.
1. Rahul Dravid is at the crease. Do the stands start emptying or do the spectators stay on?
2. Sachin is at the crease. Do the stands start emptying or do the spectators stay on?