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It’s kind of a ritual for critics in the West to pick their favourite 10 films of the year gone by and even here in Bollywood newspapers and news channels are pouncing on the habit. But sadly, most of the papers and channels pick the Top 10 based on box office collections. While that to me is a great barometer to judge the quality of the film, it is not necessarily the best one. The paper I write for, they too, are going by the box office profits as a basis for zeroing on the best films of the year 2007. Which gives me complete liberty to pick my favourite 10 Bollywood films of this year. Here they are in no particular order with 5 keywords for each on why I have put them on the list. There’s a disclaimer in the end - the films I haven’t watched.

1. …

2008 was a very low key year as far as music & movies goes in my life. Esp after last 2 years of marathon movie watching & discovering music. But I would still go ahead & write a diary similar to last years Discoveries of 2007.

Books -
I read a lot of books this year. I tried to read of lot from the Random’s 100 list.

1) Animal Farm - George Orwell
This was probably the most satisfying book I read last year. What happens to Boxer brought tears to my eyes. Thats very rare in my life. I can’t believe I had not read this book till now.

2) The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
A year when Hollywood got curious about Fitzgerald, I finally read his classic. Loved it.

3) Bend in the River - V S Naipaul
Naipaul at his detached cynical best.

4) …

It is that time of the year again when we look back at the year and analyze the year’s movies we loved. I don’t watch many movies in a year(or let’s put it, not being able to), so this is the list of movies I loved amongst the lot I watched. Since I couldn’t watch some of the most talked about movies of the year like Aamir, Mumbai Meri Jaan, Welcome to Sajjanpur, Dostana. So, they don’t make it to the list for obvious reasons.

They rocked it. And how! (Rock On!!)- After a spate of failures, Excel entertainment finally delivered with Kapoor’s Rock on. The poignant story of 4 individuals discovering themselves when they have ‘moved on’ in life and ‘compromised’ with life. Beautifully understated and surprisingly subtle, Kapoor’s story telling ability showed huge improvements since his forgettable Aryan. Farhan Akhtar looked very assured in his first stint in front …

Disclaimer:  This  is my personal view point of  Bollywood in 2008,  of the movies  i have seen.  As far as Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi is concerned, my take is  not  great, not bad,  just plain average, but considering that  lot has been said, nothing really of value from my side.   And  lastly  i  feel  absolutely stupid putting up this disclaimer, but  considering some  comments i have been getting off late, i am putting it up just in case.

Well its that time of the year when every one starts to take stock of what has happened, and comes up with the Best, Worst list. Some years are quite crazy, they just leave you dumb founded and dumb struck. 2008 was such a year.

Wall Street went bust, thanks to some dodgy business theories, floated by overpaid B-School Grads, who took Michael Douglas words on “Greed is Good” too seriously, and tried …

It has been a crazy year at the movies. While Bollywood has mostly found it tough to spring any surprise, in the real sense, and there are hardly any films which impressed me out of the league (when compared to the last year – examples are aplenty, it had films either so good which made one shout from the rooftop or films that made you cringe and rethink about spending your money on a multiplex ticket), Hollywood was not much different.
The only few films that I thought did create a dent somewhere were Tashan, Sarkar Raj, Aamir, Jodha Akbar, Rock On, Dasvidaniya, Jaane tu ya jaane na, Mithya and probably, Welcome to Sajjanpur. I won’t bring in my guilty pleasure/antisocial-exercise films to ruin the post (in other words I won’t be talking about Contract & Phoonk). And then there were the disappointments – commercial and parallel. Commercial disasters …