Deepika, the new queen of Bollywood

“My general philosophy these days is not to expect too much, but I can’t deny that [the attention] feels nice. People now tend to look at me beyond the glamour and the looks,” she says, shrugging her shoulders.”The morning after a film releases, your phone is flooded with messages. It’s a beautiful high. But you can’t let it get to you. You have to get right back to work.”

Less than 15 minutes before I’m meant to arrive at her home, Deepika Padukone sends me a text message asking if we could delay our appointment.

“Can we meet half an hour later? Flying out to Macau for IIFA tonight. Have errands to run,” she tells me.

Some 40 minutes later, I’m in the elevator heading upstairs to meet Bollywood’s new queen.

It’s been a turnaround year for the 27-year-old actor, who’s had four back-to-back box office hits in 12 months (Cocktail, Race 2, Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, Chennai Express).

More at Vogue.com, from Rajeev Masand’s interview with Deepika Padukone

 

“2 Guns”…

Touted as an action comedy, 2 Guns for most part, delivers it.

Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg play the roles of two cons who’s background come to play spoil sport in what otherwise should have been one last mission as a team. Soon each is pitted against each other and once they know their real backgrounds, they unite on a common goal.

The movie takes the route of old Telugu multi-starrers when heroes are friends at first, then hate each other and then come together for one last bang in the third act 🙂

Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg bring the amount of star power and chemistry and required for the roles and pull it off pretty easily.

Even though a fan of Denzel Washington, I watched all his movies on TV. This is the first I watched on big screen. And there lies some disappointment 🙂

How telcos lost the media plot

Where are the telecommunications companies? About five years ago, the bets were that telecom companies would become media majors – that they would acquire big media firms or destroy them through the sheer force of disintermediation. This is because selling entertainment and news on the mobile phone was till last year a Rs 25,000-crore business. Telcos that are bigger and more profitable than media companies controlled the billing, the consumer and, more importantly, over 80 per cent of revenues, earned by selling ringtones and so on. Unlike newspaper or television companies, telcos were not dependent on advertising revenues. Mobile phones reach almost 900 million Indians, and are, therefore, the single largest device in consumer hands after the radio. So it shouldn’t have taken Bharti Airtel or Vodafone long to overtake the Times Group or Zee in the Rs 83,000-crore market for media and entertainment in India.

It hasn’t happened.

Click here for the complete article at Business-standard.com

ET, IT…and the rest