Advertisement
Published: November 20th 2007
Om Shanti Om!
The newest and most famous movie to come out of Bollywood yet!Arriving at 2AM at Mumbai International, the temperature outside?... 26 degrees Celcius. We jumped in a taxi for Colaba (a more touisrty part of town) which was one of the greatest rides of all time. Who cares about traffic lights, speed limits, designated lanes or even on-coming traffic in India?... apparently no one. Driving through the city I tasted about 100 different smells per minute, from the constant smell of raw sewage, to rotting fish, burning garbage, food, sweat, smog and a varying mixture of the above and many I couldn't determine.
India, being the second largest country in the world (after China) at over 1.2 billion is obviously over populated by the enormous amounts of people including entire families sleeping on the street, under carts or on top of cars. I couldn't walk more than 10 feet without another family spread out on the sidewalk. Mumbai is the largest city in India at around 20 million and is home to Bollywood, the famous Indi movies myself and Hawk so terribly enjoy! It's also incredibly polluted, with the constant smell of garbage and smog everywhere and the dry heat is almost unbearbale, while you can only see about 1km ahead.
Mumbai Waterfront
A shot of the Mumbai waterfront, love the water reflections! India also has the worst enfant poverty in the world... worse than Africa, Yikes! Other than all that, it is incredibly exciting. We just so happened to arrive during Diwali, (Hindu New Years) which lasts for a few weeks in November. Fireworks were set off in the streets every night and day and the streets were flooded with out of towners while many festivities took place around us.
On the first day we just toured the streets, had a few bites to eat and chilled out. Later we watched as fireworks were lit at intersections, under traffic, and behind unsuspecting children to scare them to death, although they didn't even flinch. After a few firework displays we headed off to watch a Bollywood flick. Not knowing any of the movies we decided to watch "Om Shanti Om" as it had a nice poster and it was opening night. The movie was just over 3 hours and even included an intermission. Hawkshaw did an excellent job of telling the story, so I'll just copy and paste his summary.
"Boy worships movie star girl in the '70s.
Dance sequence.
Boy saves girl.
Dance sequence.
Boy is hiding when he hears
Hanging Gardens
With the city in the background, one of only a few scenes where Mumbai can actually look clean. girl say she is pregnant to her evil producer boyfriend. We know this because she says, "I'm pregnant".
Evil producer attempts to kill girl. Is successful, but also kills boy.
Boy is reborn in 2000's as megastar.
Dance sequence complete with ripped abs, and water shots.
Boy comes across evil producer again and has flashbacks.
Dance sequence with every Bollywood star ever.
Boy hatches plan to drive evil producer mad with girl lookalike.
Producer finds out about lookalike.
Ghost of real girl kills producer.
Dance sequence."
Little did we know when we returned to our hotel room and turned on the TV, the movie we just experienced was now the most famous movie to come out of Bollywood. You couldn't flip to a channel that wasn't talking about it, showing the premier in London, talking to the actors, even MTV India was playing the music vidoes off the soundtrack, which I must admit was an awesome soundtrack. We would hear about this movie for the next 2 weeks as it continually broke records around the globe and the leading actor, Shah Rukh Khan, would appear on almost every commercial endorsing everything from TVs, cars, sunglasses, suits, gum, food, pepsi,
Nude Model Wanted
A "sex monkey" poses for a full nude frontal shot. etc...
Well the next day we took a short ferry ride to Elephanta Island to see some caves, sculptures, monkeys having sex... all the usual things you do while in Mumbai. Later we checked out Gandhi's old house which was now a musem. It told the story of his life and was quite interesting as I only knew about him through Civilization IV as he was India's leader. While in Mumbai we also toured Chowpatty beach which was a massive fair due to Diwali and the beautiful Hanging Gardens which seemed to be the only clean and green area of Mumbai.
Well reading over what I just posted, it seems the highlight of Mumbai was Om Shanti Om as it takes up a good 60% of this journal... and I have to say it was. Anyone interested in Bollywood flicks, check it out, its awesome. Of course its not in English and we watched it with no subtitles but you can easily follow along with the story line untli the random dance scenes come in from nowhere. But whenever they have something very important or emotional to say, they use English one-liners. Now I must go find the
Cricket
Kids play some cricket on the sports park in Mumbai. soundtrack... "All the hot girls put your hands up and say, 'Om Shanti Om!' All the cool boys come on make some noise, and say 'Om Shanti Om!'"
Advertisement
Tot: 0.119s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 17; qc: 76; dbt: 0.0663s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
