India

Our ship was docked in Chennai (aka Madras ), the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu. Chennai was definitely not my favorite port, but I still did some pretty cool stuff there, such as eating a lot of really good (and cheap) Indian food. I also did a lot of souvenir shopping and rode in a lot of auto-rickshaws, which are basically a hybrid of a motorcycle and a carriage. We crammed 5 people into one multiple times, and they’re made for 3 people. It was pretty terrifying/awesome. Traffic there was really scary, by the way. Tons of people ride mopeds or motorbikes, but none of them wear helmets and they do insanely dangerous passes between buses and other equally crazy things. Plus, moms will hold their babies and sit sidesaddle while the dad drives. I don’t know HOW any of them are still alive. Driving is also REALLY loud because Indians let each other know when they’re passing each other or about to get hit by constantly blaring their horns. So getting from one place to another was an adventure in itself, as was bartering for cab fare, which I am very tired of doing, by the way.

Other than that, I went to Mamallapuram twice to see cool temples and monuments built over 1000 years ago, and I saw similar things in Kancheepuram. I made sure to take lots of pictures. They were really neat and interesting, but between those temples and the one in Cambodia , I think I’m very ancient templed-out at the moment. I'm still looking forward to seeing the shrines in Japan, though.

The other fun thing I did was see 3 Indian movies with no subtitles. One of them was hilarious/stupid, 1 of them I understood maybe 15% of but had good dance scenes, and the other I only saw part of, but it seemed funny. Anyway, to give you an idea of the insanity of the hilarious and stupid one we saw, I will detail the key plot points and some of the best scenes in it.

So this movie was called Enthiran the robot, and it’s about a guy who, surprise of surprises, makes a humanoid robot. The scientist guy happens to have a fiancée who is 40 years younger than him and also has an evil rival who is also trying to make a robot. Anyway, the evil rival man convinces the scientific community that the robot (Chiti) is just a machine and there isn’t anything special about him, so then the main character scientist guy decides to give Chiti feelings. That’s when all hell breaks loose, because Chiti then falls in love with Sana (the scientist guy’s fiancée) and does something to make the main scientist guy (I’ll just call him MSG from here on out) livid, so then MSG breaks Chiti and throws him away. The evil scientist man (from now on, ESM) finds Chiti in the garbage and downloads the programs in him to use on his own robots and gives Chiti some “evil” hardware that makes him turn crazy and destructive. Chiti then kills ESM and creates a robot army, crashes MSG and Sana ’s wedding, takes Sana hostage, and generally wreaks havoc. MSG then disguises himself as a robot, infiltrates Chiti’s evil robot base, and defeats Chiti by injecting (yes, injecting – don’t ask me) him with a virus. MSG then goes on trial because people assume he programmed Chiti to do all those terrible things, but Chiti saves him by playing data on his system that shows ESM implanting the evil hardware. MSG goes off scotch free, but the court decrees that Chiti has to dismantle himself. A few years later, however, Chiti is still functioning as an exhibit in a robotics museum. Roll credits.

From that description, one would assume the movie was fairly normal. Extremely cliché, but normal. But it wasn’t. First off, there were the dance numbers. Now, Indian movies usually have awesome dance numbers with really catchy music, but it was painfully obvious that none of the leads could actually dance, so the dancing left much to be desired. The dance numbers were just plain RANDOM, too. One of them was in the Andean highlands with Macchu Picchu in the background and with occasional appearances of llamas thrown in. There were also scenes where the robots danced, and that was just hilarious. My favorite number has Sana , Chiti, and a bunch of robots dancing to this random song that has a lot of English rapping in it. Speaking of English, a good portion of the movie was in English. I assume this is because the Indians who go to the movies are more affluent, and I assume more affluent people are expected to be more educated and speak English, but I’m not sure. Anyway, my favorite line was near the very beginning, when one of MSG’s stupid helpers (he has two) says this to Sana : “Hello Sana. Long see no time!”

Another highlight is when Chiti talks to a (poorly animated) mosquito. Right after Chiti falls in love with Sana , he detects a mosquito in her room and tries to catch it, but it gets away. Chiti talks Sana into agreeing to kiss him if he gets the mosquito to apologize, so he goes and finds it and talks to it amidst this SWARM of mosquitoes. That scene was gross just because there were so amny mosquitoes that you could almost feel them on you. Anyway, he convinces it to apologize, so it does and he gets a kiss. Makes a lot of sense, right?

Then there’s the fight scenes. At the end, the giant robot army uses magnetism to connect to each other to form a giant cobra that’s terrorizing the city. Later on they turn into a giant transformer-esque humanoid thing. There were also lots of cars that exploded and/or were tossed miles into the air. There was also a scene straight out of Terminator where Chiti is fixing his eye, which I found amusing only because of the blatant copyright infringement. There’s also a scene where Chiti is riding on a hoverboard swinging a Lightsaber that he pulls out of nowhere. For some reason this movie was very popular with an 8-year-old my friend Megan met during her Rotarian homestay, and I can’t imagine why.

All in all, Enthiran was very entertaining. Plus, it was filmed in Tamil Nadu (which has its own film industry separate from Bollywood), so it was cool to see buildings I’d seen in Chennai in the movie. I have a feeling it is not a good representation of the Indian film industry, but I still found it to be highly amusing, and I bought the soundtrack to commemorate the experience.

And that’s all for India . I doubt you were all expecting an informal film write-up, but considering I spent most of my time in Chennai shopping and watching movies, that's what you get.