The Self Love Project

I came to be an immigrant to US in 2001. Initial years were busy doing my Masters in Health Administration.
As you can imagine, hubby being a resident physician and me being a graduate student, we were sparse on money.
Things I did in India , like ‘missing no stardust or filmfare magazines’ were hard to maintain.
Later the IUIs and IVF took its toll and we had to be vary careful on money spending.

In India i would never miss a hindi movie trailer.I loved watching latest songs and loved watching music channels but all that came to halt when we chose to not take hindi channels on cable, to save money.
We did maintain watching movies at this point.Every friday we would catch an english or hindi movie in theater/video.

When our parents visited we would take those extra channels on TV but somehow i could never recreate that intense interest i used to have for Star World or Zee or any such channels.

Mind you this is not typical at all.
Many of my friends can tell you more about Bollywood than some people living in India.
One of my friends thinks ,its safer for kids to watch this stuff than American television.
I do not agree at all.
Over time, i have developed disinterest towards this.I firmly believe that her 11 year old son can easily watch Disney or Nick instead of Bollywood songs and those serials that come on Indian TV.

Even though i was out of touch with Indian TV , until 2 or 3 years back, i daily, yes daily, went to rediff.com bollywood section and read all the latest gossip in the tinsel town.
I have no idea what brought on the change but one day i noticed that it was not the case anymore.
I just stopped.
Completely.
Imagine my shock when during one of my parent’s visits, mom said, Kareena is Saif’s girlfriend.
I was like….what?….what happpened to Sajid….i thought they were made for each other.
It was that day, it sunk in, i was out of loup…
ME?
Who never missed a movie or a magazine issue not so long ago.
Or was it long ago?

Only other time i went to Indian movie sites was to check out what they were saying about ‘Slum Dog’ and ‘Shiny Ahuja scandal’.

My disinterest has emerged not only for Indian media but towards American stuff too.
I no longer am aware of newer series that come on ABC, CBS, Fox , NBC, or the likes.
I might be among very few demented folks who do not know much about hits like ‘Greys Anatomy’ or ‘Desperate Housewives’ and such.
I am not sure if they are still a hit or not.
I still try to watch ‘Big Bang Theory’.Like once a month!

My interest is fairly limited to HLN( sister site of CNN) , HBO( i like to watch ‘curb your enthusiasm’ and i have watched 3 episodes of new series ‘ Bored to Death’)

First about ‘curb your enthusiasm’
This is its final season.
Casting coup with ‘the reunion of Seinfeld ‘ is stunning.
Also its going crazier and crazier with every episode.
The pee splatter on Jesus photo thing was fairly shocking and i had no idea whether to laugh or just feel offended.
The media backlash on it was present but not adequate.
I thought wow, Larry gets away with lots of crazy stuff.
Until i saw the last weeks’ episode.
It was stunningly crazy.
Larry is going to be suspected as ‘Pedophile’ and Michael Richards comes really close to repeat his racist mistake…it was shocking is all i can say.
I can’t wait to see how media reacts to it.
One thing i absolutely love about the show is that even the team talks about how dumb was the Seinfeld Finale.I completely agree.It totally sucked.I love the reference here.

Also from the few episodes of ‘bored to death’ that i have seen.It has amazing potential and is very interesting.I always liked Ted Danson and its good to see him back.
I loved the ‘carl jung’ , ‘projection ‘ and other such references in one of the episodes.

So coming back to my Bollywood talk.
Well, things have come to such a state that i watch only major movies now.
We get almost every Bollywood ( even Tollywood etc) movies screened in our city, but i haven’t been to one for the longest time.Catching them on DVD is a great achievement!!
Sometimes i look up lists of biggest block busters of 2008 or most critically acclaimed movies of 2008 and choose movies accordingly.

My daughters have seen only 3 hindi movies
Jodha Akbar
Tare Zameen Pe
and recently Ta Ra Rum Pum

Ta Ra Rum Pum has greatly influenced them.
It was about race cars and they talk a lot about it.
They talk about how driving car too fast is not good and tell their dad to slow down on the interstate.:)
In order to explain that their dad is a Psychiatrist.I always call him a ‘head doctor’ now they think he is a neuro surgeon and could treat RV (Saif). …uh ..oh..
One of the many problems with that movie was use of words ’stupid’ and ‘crazy’ very loosely and like a common talk in the movie.Unfortunately after lots of talk and time outs, girls have become recently very aware that these are bad words.I feel showing the movie confused them as in the movie, they were using these words like its really cool thing to do.

So that brings me back to the reason that triggered this blog.My sweet hubby baught me a stardust from Indian store.
I was like, why?
Hubby said… why not, you liked it, now you can restart reading them again.
It turned about to be very entertaining copy.
It has Aamir Khan interview!
Aamir Khan on stardust!!! I thought he HATED those people!
Wow! times have really changed.
It turned out to be his most explosive interview after two years of silence.
It was thrilling, awsome.
I knew everything he was talking about.
It was like coming back home.

I might not go to rediff anytime soon but might take my copies of stardust and filmfare again from our Indian store from now on!
Life has surely come full circle!!