Blogpost at OIAB

Time elapses at a different rate in the land of Narnia. You could spend half a lifetime in Narnia and come back to find that you'd been gone only a few days, or minutes, or perhaps no time at all.*

Things are somewhat similar on the blogosphere. Time passes much slower at http://cachacamonopoly.blogspot.com compared to, say, http://www.desipundit.com. So, even if one posts weekly, the gentle reader might receive an update about once a fortnight, or once a month, or perhaps once a quarter. 'Tis tragic, of course. But 'tis relativity.

In any case, that is not the point of this post. No.

For it has been brought to one's attention that a Bollywood film entitled Shootout At Lokhandwala has been released in recent times. One finds this most interest-piqueing. Shootout At Lokhandwala. As opposed, presumably, to Mild Fracas At Flora Fountain.

We had discussed the fact that cellphone companies have major issues when it comes to naming their products. But their woes pale, yes, Pale to the Point of Transparency in comparison to the woes of our filmi folks. 'Tis an arithmetic matter, you see, for we have way more phillums than cellphone models. And producer-types need their phillums to stand out from the celluloid crowd, as opposed to mobile chaps who can simply change a couple of letters here or there.

Let us at this point delve into the history of our Industry, because said filmi folks have, over the years, hit upon several solutions to the nomenclature problem. After the Golden Age exhausted most of the zippy Urdu terms for love, faith, destiny and so forth, they began to string together multiple words, sometimes managing to form a sentence.

They then realised that the names of the more popular phillumsongs tended to roll off the collective tongue with something of a flourish, an epiphany that led, in the heady summer of '93, to the A. Khan starrer Hum Hain Raahi Pyaar Ke, named after the D. Anand song. Its success was presumably what led to a flurry of song-named flicks over the next decade or so - Pyaar Kiya To Darna Kya (1998), Bas Itna Sa Khwab Hai (2001), Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (2006), amongst many others. Much fodder was provided for Bollywood-related quizzes and for Wikipedia's disambiguation pages.

And so the reader gains an appreciation of the background story, the milieu in which our Lokhandwala team was operating. Most potential film names had been taken, twice over. Most song names had been used for films, and for the title songs of said films, and for saas-bahu serials, and for the title songs of said saas-bahu serials, and for songdance-type reality shows, and for the theme jingles of said reality shows.

So they took the direct approach. They were going to show a Shootout, right? At Lokhandwala, right? Well, there you had it. Shootout At Lokhandwala. No frills. You knew exactly what you were going to get. A hearty Shootout, at no less a place than Lokhandwala. Paisa vasool.

Others have tried to be different, and come up with a) Tarzan: The Wonder Car and b) Fool N Final. Clearly, being straightforward has its advantages.

So one shall now take your leave, gentle reader, and proceed to work on one's groundbreaking script for next summer's blockbuster, Anti-War Protest Opposite Mother Dairy.

* To the trained mind, it is evident that the Narnian universe moves around at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. Relatively speaking.