Review: Mangal Pandey The Rising

Just finished watching 'The Rising' starring Amir Khan. Had a lot of expectations because of huge publicity of the movie and being Amir's movie after a long while.

What I can say that I am very disappointed by the movie. This movie had a subject which really has the ability to touch people of India but alas! everything was ruined by the moviemakers making the movie just another Hindi Masala movie and losing all the essence. Only delight in movie was performance by Amir and the British officer who acts as his friend in the movie. Nobody can ever understand what was the need to include Amisha and Rani Mukherjee in the movie, which certainly diverted the movie from its basic story. The charachter of Mangal Pandey could have been elaborated in much better way. The movie does not deal at all with the aftermath of Mangal Pandey's hanging. I think the movie makers were very much insecure that seem to be the reason they included all that unnecessary stuff.

What made me more disappointed is the fact that this had been movie by Amir in last four years. It can't even be compared with 'Lagaan' which made its way all through to Oscars. Even 'Swades' although not very successful was a much better movie, at least it dealt with the story of the movie sophistically.

So my rating to the movie id ***.

Making of an IAS

Being in a professional institute actually in an Engineering College it is great to see different people and watching them doing different things. Everyone is looking for a different direction and preparing for that. Some of the students are preparing for GRE so that they can further their studies and really do something with what we study in the college. Some for CAT to become young dynamic managers. And another group of students are preparing for premier exam of India, yeah! Civil Services to be able to serve this country in true sense.

I always thought this exam to very tough. It has a really big syllabus and you need to be really very very good. Students in my college who aspire to clear this, they keep on studying all the time and why not, it has got a huge syllabus. They don't go watching movies screened by our instutute, they don't flirt with girls (they don't have time even for that, so bad). They don't watch great English movies. They know being an IAS* officer is a very very big thing so they sacrifice their days of fun for that. Isn't that so bad? Agreed! Being an IAS officer is a very big thing but if you are going to have fun at 21 years of age when are you going to have...after marriage or after being an IAS officer, Not possible. Then you grow up as an adult, you are no longer a young who can go crazy and do whatever silly things that can catch their mind. I know most of the people will not agree with me. May be it is just some kind of homogenization of people becoming IAS. They all will have similar thinking whatever background they might have.

I feel even bad for the people who devote their live for this purpose and could not clear it. Belonging to a state, where people are almost crazy about this IAS thing, I know a lot of such people. One year ago, my Father took me to meet a girl who had not cleared JEE and was upset about that. She was thinking of taking admission to some another college and during the course of chatting she said that she want to finish her Engineering studies and then she will prepare for IAS Examination. I said "Why?". She just said that she wanted to be an IAS officer. Like, there is nothing else in this world she can do? I, myself, had been said many times to prepare for it. They all say, this way you can make us very proud. Like being an Engineer does not make them proud at all. I am not going to spend my whole life, preparing for one after another competitive exams.

*For those who don't know about IAS, it is an abreviation of "Indian Administrative Services". CAT is an all India test used for admission into India's top Management Institutions.

P.S. This article does not have even slighest of intention of discouraging anyone from preparing for Civil Services Exams.