Pact on Catches

I am more than surprised to see Ponting still trying to sell his pact on catches after all the incidents during the last series between India and Australia. As a team in that series, Australia played bad sport by claiming everything as a catch. While batting, their batsman stood their ground even after the catch was taken cleanly at waist level. In the recent past, Australian team is the one that benefited most when it came to umpiring decisions and match referee verdicts. For opposing captains, it's essentially choosing between umpiring errors vs. Australian fielder's word when comes to close catching. No wonder they choose NOT to sign the pact to minimize damage to their team.

Bell the Cat.. Somebody..

The tamil movie screenings in different parts of USA is mostly managed by a group of individuals or by some locally formed club. But in recent times, especially after the huge marketing success of Sivaji - The Boss, some of the big names are entering the movie screening business in USA. While this may be good in terms of bringing professionalism, it has led to lack of personal touch and customer service. Some of these big names (Reliance, Sulekha etc) are going to run this like business which means they will try to maximize profit at any cost. What this means for regular filmgoer is higher ticket prices, fewer and even no shows in some of the areas. The recent incidents include cancellation of preview shows in some of the states for the movie Kuselan, very low collections for ATM, Kuselan and even Dasavatharam due to very high ticket price - $21 per ticket (it used to be $12 before "Sivaji - The Boss" days). The movie SAROJA is getting released this week here, which is very very late for a movie release. Since this movie has no big hero names, the corporates probably waited enough to make sure the movie is a hit before releasing the movie. Bad idea and this type of attitude will never fly with the audience here.

This is exactly what happened with satellite channels and cricket in USA. The satellite networks started showing cricket on TV and slowly the prices started going up and at one point they were charging as much as $300 for a 5 match one day series against Pakistan. What it led to is total boycott and viewers found other alternatives like internet.

As such it is easy to get DVD version of the movie relatively quickly here and given the current economy, we will have fewer families going to cinema hall if this trend continues.

Reality Shows

Reality shows are often fun to watch, not so much for the actual performance, but for the unusual situations and unintentional comedy that comes out at some weird random moment. Here are 2 examples from popular Vijay TV shows.

Super Singer 2008 - One of participant rendered a female duet and she had so much shrill in her voice it was hard to enjoy the whole song. She should have kept quiet with the judges. Right after she completed, she explained how she can sing high-pitch notes well and how she curbed her voice to accomodate and adjust to the other person's voice in the duet. The other person (who in fact sang the high notes really well) promptly got selected. The judges could have (IMO, should have) rejected this singer, instead they were so nice with all their advise and waitlisted her.

உங்களில் யார் அடுத்த Prabhudeva - This is more of a laughter show than a talent show. The person to watch is one of the judge "Sridhar Master". If Super singer judges are extremely humble, this guy is opposite. He is serious, rude and never say a sorry. This is how he gave his verdict to one of the participant. The participant was wearing a jacket with the hood on and also had sunglasses on and performed for a good 3 minutes. His dance was mediocre, but this was only an initial screening. Right after that performance, Sridhar asked him if he ever considered himself a dancer and the guy replied passionately "Yes". Sridhar followed it up with "Ok, எதுக்கு hood போட்டுருக்கீங்க, அத எடுங்க, எதுக்கு கருப்பு கண்ணாடி போட்டுருக்கீங்க, அத எடுங்க. The participant does everything in anticipation of good verdict. Then comes the clincher from Sridhar "இப்ப எல்லாருக்கும் ஒங்க மூஞ்சி தெரியும், you are rejected". Seriously, this Sridhar guy should never be in front of the camera.