Leonarda dei chekku's works opened to the public

One of the most recognized figures in 2oth century, he is best known as Leonarda dei chekku..This artist wishes to display some of his work for public appreciation.These works are already auctioned at the Sotheby's.

The Diana portrait was drawn out of the artist's fetish for the princess..The artist has rejected a cool six million pound offer from Maharajah Charles..

The artist in his younger days thought shah rukh khan was cool.and sketched this one.

This artist admired netaji and drew it to express his admiration for the great fighter.

CHILDHOOD remembrances

Before I gained some level of logic in the haywire brain of mine...I believed in a few things, a few ideas....a few beliefs.....a few concepts which evoke laughter, shame and absurdity when I recall them now....


Whacky event 1:

I was always fascinated by what happened in the church. The pomp and splendor was a must watch when I was a kid... and was quite bewildered by the attention the mass paid at the “mass”......But the real curiosity lied in what the holy communion was all about. Used to nag mom about how the communion did “taste”...Funny part is that I was bemused about its taste rather than why people took it.....Got enough scolding from the elder’s in family for this sacrilegious curiosity...And then one day at St Mary’s church in Trivandrum while taking part in the mass, in the hustle and bustle, I got inadvertently placed in the queue and was standing stark in front of the priest who was giving the communion. Rather than get out of the queue I showed the audacity of fulfilling this ambition of childhood...The kid in me was pretty disappointed that it was no big deal taking the communion. “Honest” to the core this incident was explained to my parents and rest of the story aint pretty.......


Whacky idea 1:

My parents always wanted me to be a whiz-kid @school....And under influence of some magazines or lectures they believed the idiot box will affect my academic pyrotechnics...
Bro and I had this fetish for the telly and we used to be severely reprimanded for excessive watching. Each time parents used to go out we used to be glued to the box...The television used to be switched of nano seconds prior to the time they reached home... (The scooter my parents used to give sonic booms when they approached home).But my dad found an ingenious way of checking whether we were watching television by placing is hand on top of the set..... And the temperature sensors in his skin responded relatively (temperature proportional to the hours of viewing)...This played spoil sport in our scheme of things and we used to get caught red handed because of dad’s “Telesensor formula”.....But myself and bro were not to be defeated easily...Cognition proved that a mug of ice placed on the top of the box resulted in a drastic drop in temperature of the set. The art was perfect over a period of time and just seconds after the “sonic boom” of dad’s scooter echoes through... we conceal all the evidence (read ice mug, cloth to dry any moisture.) and we sit back with our books in the study room...And my parents are “satisfied” at how their kids have changed for good.....Since we were not familiar with six sigma rules and since we never expected any mishap in the operations, we were caught off guard when our T.V blowed out due to excessive amount of water creeping inside the set. After intense questioning from parents akin to CIA or RAW (I have slightly exaggerated here) my bro gave away first and then me and our brilliant plan was busted......



Whacky impressions (there are many):

Sidney Sheldon was “female” until quite recently....But am happy that there many others having the same delusion (DJ).....Nowadays am careful with names...
West Indies was always some part of India and couldn’t figure out whey they played as separate team even though they were part of the motherland......
Getting into IAS was easy...u just have to read the manorama year book.....
Once on a trip to blore along with parents, someone stole cash from dad while traveling in a bus. Looking at the grievous face of my parents I was perplexed and really wondered whether we would be in the streets since dad had lost all dough he had........I was under the impression that all dough one had would be in his/her pocket......And I cried a lot imagining the life ahead in the streets ....

These are incidents which gives me a lot of fond memories while recollecting. Guess each one of us have such small incidents, beliefs, ideas....Naive but worth giving a smile.....

SChinDLeR's LiSt

I always thought that I could watch through any movie without empathizing with the characters...without an iota of sympathy for the victims portrayed.....I always thought I wasn’t dumb enough to cry watching a movie......I always thought crying is for the weak hearted.......but these notions were shattered when I watched Schindler’s List......

Very few movies have perturbed my conscience...my existence....But this one really got into my head.....I got the DVD through a friend of mine. And started watching it alone at home........The movie is shot in black and white...Initally it dampened my spirits to watch the movie in B&W...But towards the end I realized why the directly shot it in B&W...The movie is too gory to be portrayed in color and the shades of B&W gave justice to the era in which the movie is shot.......Previous Steven Spielberg movies which I had watched were primarily big budget flicks with freakish themes....And I expected this one to be just another movie with lot of guns...bullets...canisters......

The sheer disregard for ethics and morals is depicted explicitly in this magnum opus. I couldn’t help wonder how people could become such sadist and savage as portrayed about the SS who ran the Nazi concentration camps....Ralph Fiennes depicts the role of Amon Göth quite realistically...Infact he was able to generate so much hatred in my mind against the Nazis that I inadvertently began to admire his histrionic skills.....The detailing of the camps are graphic and it doesn’t try to mince the images.

Jews in the camp were killed to fulfill a propaganda that they were a lesser race...They were made to work like dogs in the camps and the older ones were periodically exterminated...Amon Goth is depicted killing people like he was just practicing shooting...People are killed in Gas chambers due to shortage of bullets.........The ghettos are crowded with people with hardly a crumble of bread to it......I found it hard to digest the human race can deteriorate to any extent in pursuit of power and greed.....

Oskar Schindler (played spectacularly by Liam Neeson) helps few Jews from the Gestapo’s brutal homicides......He invests his fortunes in buying out Jews from the concentration camps to employ in his factory... The penultimate scene in which Schindler breaks down when he realises that he could have saved a few more Jews by selling his car is heart rendering...

I just could help myself cry watching this movie which made me feel guilty for something which I hadn’t done.....Is it because I felt sorry for the Jews in the concentration camp...Is it because of Schindler’s helplessness...Is it because I have never done good enough as a Human being....Is it because.....

I ve never found the answer........




Trivia on the movie from Wiki

Ralph Fiennes' performance earned him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. While he didn't win the Oscar, he did win the Best Supporting Actor BAFTA Award, which is the British equivalent to the Oscar.

Originally, Roman Polanski was asked to direct the film. However, he passed on it, having survived the Polish Ghettos himself. He felt it would be too personal, and would bring up too many hard memories that he was not prepared to deal with at the time. He went on to direct another Holocaust-themed movie, The Pianist in 2002. This earned him an Oscar.
Director Steven Spielberg refused payment for making this movie, saying that it would be like "taking blood money."

SHANTARAM

I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum-security prison. When I escaped from that prison, over the front wall, between two gun-towers, I became my country’s most wanted man.
Luck ran with me and flew with me across the world to India, where I set up and ran a free clinic in a crowded Bombay slum. I joined the Bombay mafia, and worked as a gunrunner, a smuggler, and a counterfeiter. I was chained on three continents, beaten, stabbed, and starved. I went to war. I ran into the enemy guns. And when those wilderness years of hunted exile came to an end, when I changed my life, when I stopped running onto the knives and started running into the light of love instead, I wrote the novel, Shantaram, that was based on my wild and wicked life."
–Gregory David Roberts, author of Shantaram


The book is a gem in every sense.It might not be a literary masterpiece.But it stands out for sheer portrayal of emotions and relations..Just like the reviews say its hard to come out of the book unscathed.The story itself is very unique and the detailing the author gives is so good that you happen to visualise everything through his eyes.Gregory David Roberts as "Linbaba" rocks!!!