PREDICTIONS FOR NOV 2016

BYNANCYJADE ALTHEA

LIBRA Sept 23 - Oct 22

This month will bean exciting and fulfilling month for you with your partner.You will be feeling very connected and in love, and wanting to experiment and spend time together. The cards indicate a time when you may be looking at changing your job and opportunities will be very tempting. You may be looking atstarting a new exercise and eating regime. You may also start meditating. It will be time to make those long overdue changes in lifestyle.

SCORPIO Oct 23 - Nov 21

This month you will be feeling a little upset as your love life seems a bit unhappy and tense. The cards suggest that you need to give yourself a break and decide what you want to do and how you want to go about it. Life will be very busy and you will be financially stable. There will be a lot of social gatherings that you will be invited to, and you will have a chance to meet old friends.

SAGITTARIUS Nov 22 - Dec 21

This month you will be planning some new adventures and holidays with your family. It seems like you have been very busy working and now need to take some time off. Your partner may be feeling a little unwell due to over stress in their job, so look after them. There will be some happy news from within the family about a new addition. Some projects you have been contemplating may come to fruition this month.

CAPRICORN Dec 22 - Jan 19

This month is going to be a very busy and productive month for you. You are on a mission to increase your finances and work hard. There will be some interesting developments with projects. You will be speaking to someone very interesting who may end up working with you - it will all be productive. Relationships will sizzle with enthusiasm and you will be happy and content.You may be planning to travel. Exciting times ahead.

AQUARIUS Jan 20 - Feb 18

This month will be a very busy month for you. It will see you doing a lot more of your personal work, and you will also be busy in your regular job. You might plan a holiday with the family and take time out for relaxing. Financially you will be planning another purchase of a property or other large purchase. You may be thinking of changing your furniture and redecorating your home. Life will be hectic but fun.

PISCES Feb 19 - March 20

This month you will be planning to meet some old friends you have not seen for some time. You may be feeling low on energy so you will need to take care of your diet. At work you may be asked to do extra hours as it will be very busy.You may be looking at purchasing a new car. Takesome time out to rest and relax as you have been working very hard lately with very few breaks

Shivaay

STARRING: Ajay Devgn, Erika Kaar, Abigail Eames and Sayyeshaa

DIRECTOR: Ajay Devgn

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"Tum mein Shivajaisa kya hai," the lady asks Devgan lustfully.

I held my breath wondering what he will show her. Relax. It's just the tattoos which make ourhero so loftily heroic. Just to drive home the hero's anointed status, we have the noisy background I score where star-stuck choruses chant in unison about Shiva, the Destroyer, I blah blah blah.

I Shivaay is so steeped in selfimportance,so awed by its own intendedgrandeur, it seems the makers forget there is a story to tell. The story is there to tell, but the plot is propelled forward in stuttering staccato waves of melodrama and action. It's like Shekhar Kapurdesperately tries to shake hands with Rohit Shetty. But they just can't seem to find a meeting-ground. Not in thisAjayDevgn-directed lopsided melange of mayhem and melodrama.

At one point in this tedious homage to mountain climbing and cross-cultural copulation, debutante Sayyeshaa (she could do better, I'm sure) tells us that she wanted to help Ajay because "superheroes comic books ke baahar nahin milte".

Precisely the problem inShivaay. It wants to make Ajay a larger-thanlife superhero, the kind that may look appealing in a comic book but appears amply askew in areal-life situation.

And I use "real life" with much reservation.

Shivaayis as real as 300or Baahubali, minus the comfort of escape into fantasy. Devgn plays a whole lot of superheroic roles all in the course of one film.

He is a mountain climber (ala Sylvester Stallone in the disastrous Cliffhanger), and an unabashed explorer of uncharted territory. That includes a Bulgarian woman Olga (Erika Kaar, listless and clueless). The two are soon shown getting intimate and passionate, while the censor board looks the other way. This is after all, Ajay's first stab at on screen passion, and we all must step back reverentially for the grand occasion.

The fruits of the passionate liaison is a little girl Gaura (Abigail Eames), who alas is vocally impaired. Gaura, I suspect, has been written as a mute character to accommodate the young foreigner actress' inability to converse in Hindi. I really can't be blamed for being paranoid about the scriptural contrivances. Shivaay is cluttered with them.

The plot moves from trying to be a Masoom inreverse(illicitliaisonand the complications thatensue when the child gets insistently precocious) to being a clamorous wannabe clutteredand confused adaptation ofPierre Morrel's Taken where Liam Neeson rescued his teenaged daughter from fesh traders. Some such catastrophic eventuality crops up in the narrative, like an uninvited viral fever, when oursuperhero Shivaay's half-Bulgarianspeechless daughter insists on meeting her mother who has by then, upped and left.

Recently, we saw the calamitous incidents that awaited the father and daughter when they took offto meet the girl's motherin the Koreanfilm Train To Busan. But in oilinghis triple tattoos, catering to his demanding daughter and saving the world, I doubt Shivaay has time to watch Korean films.

He does seem to have watched Taken closely. The actionscenes are shot with the uni-focusedsingularity of a screen hero who wants to give the audience enough thrills to forget the Hollywood super-hero films.

Alas,it's alosingbattle.Shivaay is a cumbersome over-blown actiondrama. While the stunts are quite engaging at times, the drama is unbearable and unintentionally funny. It is hard to even bear the characters, let alone devote nearlythree hours of time to them. The performances are partially to blame.

Ajay's strong-and-silent act had been done to death. Mercifully, he doesn't try comedy here as he did in ActionJackson. Sad to see talented actors like Vir Das and Saurabh Shukla wasted in sketchily written parts.

Aseem Bajaj's cinematography captures the bleak foreboding mood of the plotmuch betterthanany of the actors.Shivaayis not the light, fun, crackerjack Diwali film you'd like to sit through this festive season. It is laden with an overbearing darkness which eclipses all of the film's efforts to pull us into its embrace. The proceedings get so edgy that they finally topple over.

Subhash K. Jha