First entry of the year....

Chinese new year

It is more than a week after Chinese New Year and here in the Miri suburb of Senadin people are still playing firecrackers. On New Year’s Eve quarter to midnite, the firecracker supernova started and it lasted for at least 20 minutes, non-stop. Complete with fireworks, those BIG fireworks they usually have during big events like Independence Day. And those produce the cannon-explosion like sound, the loudest of all. Children, who couldn’t have possibly stayed asleep with all these things happening, went out to see the fireworks, parents tagging along. Senadin was like a war zone. I have never experienced anything like this….

The dinner

As per previous years, the office had the New Year dinner for the project team. We were in KL that time for the kickoff meeting and teambuilding…. So included in the agenda was the new year dinner. As usual it started with the tossing of the yee sang. I could see the sudden explosion of pure happiness and delight as people started to toss the vege-raw fish-crackers mixture as high as they could. Every year (and seemingly at another new company…) people are happy at a CNY dinner. What is with tossing food that make people so happy?

Easily amused

It is a given that as you age it gets harder to make yourself feel happy. I remember how happy the anticipation of getting on the plane made me when I was 10. Now I go to the movies and its getting harder to be entertained because I will be bothered by over acting, weird facial expressions, unrealistic plot, or stupid dialog. As Oprah would say, true happiness comes from within you, when you are at true peace with yourself, with God, etc etc and all those Dr Phil crap.

Slumdog Millionaire

Got a copy of this movie from Hafiz and probably had too high an expectation of it. This is like the ‘darling’ of critics now, dominating the oscar nomination, winning the golden globe best picture and basically capturing a lot of attention from moviegoers, perhaps helped by all the attention to Mumbai; where the film was set; when the terrorist attacks happened.

Five reasons why I think this movie is overrated:
1) Fairy tale. Guy from slum, got separated from pretty girl, wins Who Wants to be Millionaire, reunited with girl, girl likes guy… oh come on!
2) Poor justification. Guy can answer all those questions from his own life experiences. Very not believable.
3) Plain bad acting.
4) Sometimes Hindi, sometimes English, I got confused at times; whether the characters are actually speaking English or they were speaking English just to make it easier to the audience, when in fact they were communicating in Hindi. And then, they were actually speaking English, kids from slum speaking perfect English. How ridiculous is that?
5) There were many lines that bothered me, but this one I remember the most. This was when the older gangster brother talking to the hero, which goes something like this: “This is a city of 19 million people….”. I bet you that no one in any slum in Rio, Cape Town, Jakarta or any parts of the world would even care about that, let alone talk like that.