PREDICTIONS FOR MARCH 2017

BYNANCYJADE ALTHEA

LIBRA Sept 23 - Oct 22

This month you will be lookingat yourfinances, andhow to invest and where. There will be many decisions to take and you will be doinga lot of thinkingand panning this month. Family will offer advice and help. Seems to be a lot of activity this month and as you pan your property matters and personal affairs. The cards are indicatinga time when you will also be looking at a trip and time away to relax.

SCORPIO Oct 23 - Nov 21

This month you may not be feeling your usual energet c self. There will be some niggling health issues that are bothering you and making you feel very tired and low. Business matters and finances will need your attention too and you will be looking at how to grow your existing business. The cards are indicatinga time when you may be lookingat purchasinganother property. You will be planning a surprise party forsomeone. Buck up and get going!

SAGITTARIUS Nov 22 - Dec 21

There will be a lot happening around you this month. Work will be busy and hectic, but you will also be planning on lookingfor other opportunities and perhaps working in anotherstate. There will be matters relating to your partner's work that will be stressful and they may need yoursupport and advce. There may beanother add tion due to the family which willbea sourceofjoy. The cards are indicatinga happy month, overall. En oy.

CAPRICORN Dec 22 - Jan 19

The focus this month is finances and makingsure you are saving enough for those rainy days. There will be an emphasis on career this month and there is an indication ofimprovement and abundance. You may dec de to connect w th an old flame or a past love.Thecards are indicating a time when you may also be looking at a new venture or decide to work with someone else. Take time out to take in morefresh air.

AQUARIUS Jan 20 - Feb 18

This month you willbe busy. You will need to find afine balance as you do not have enough time for yourself. Home life will be happy and cordial. You are planning to meet a relative you have not seen for a while and this will be quite nerve racking for you. There may be some matters relating to property that you will be helping your parents with. A siblingisalsogoingto be needingyourhelp.

PISCES Feb 19 - March 20

This month will be an interestingand powerful month when you will be puttingtogether plans and ideas to focus on yourself and your future. You have been wanting to make changes for a while and you are now feeling ready to forge ahead. The cards are indicating a time when you will be feeling positive and brght. Financially you will becareful with your spending. Emot onally you mightfeel like you need to take a break.

Rangoon

STARRING: Shahid Kapoor, Kangana Ranaut, SaifAli Khan

DIRECTOR:Vishal Bhardwaj

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In art, as in life,consistency is not a quality that is easily obtainable. In the life that is created in VishalBhardwaj's art, the characters are so flawed and fractured, andso driven down to destruction by theirown demoniacal desires, that you fear they will collapse under the weight of theirown ambitions and longings.

This is true as much of the characters as the director himself. Bhardwaj's latest arguably his most ambitious film to date could have ended up being the Bombay Velvet/Mohenjo Daro of 2017. It is rescued, no, redeemed by an excruciatingly exquisite perception of the wounds and lashes that love pelts down on those who are its victims.

Rangoon is asimple tale, unnecessarily complicated by its characters' prevarications. It is a story pinned down to a bobbing blueprint of passion and betrayaI by a fey feisty whimsical woman, a popular action actress of the 1940s, who is not, repeat not, Fearless Nadia she is Fearless Julia not afraid to wear her heart I on hersleeves.And when you have

I Kangana Ranaut to play 'Fearless Julia' t is easy to show the woman complete stripped of vanity in her lunge towards love.

Set in the 1940s for a large part of its narrative, Rangoon reads like an overintellectualised literary excursion replete with educated, well-informed arrogant and pompous references to the role of Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army in bringing down the British Raj.

The references to the politics of India's Freedom Movement are drawn out of the commodious plot with a groaning wheezing gravity, as though Bhardwaj, of all the learned elements in Indian cinema, knows that theIndian 1 audience needs to be educated. He has visited the library, you see.

I Tragically, the characters from both the British army and the INA come across as caricatures cloaked in a gravitas that the screenplay is unable to pull out of the circle of intrigue and deceit that the screenwriters create to cheat on destiny. The British Major General Harding (Richard McCabe) sprouts Urdu poetry with an endearing lisp (Ghalib never soundedso glib) but soon begins to behave like the Gora villains in ManojKumar's Kranti and Manmohan Desai's Mard.

McCabe is Tom Altered.

The erudition that Bhardwaj and his writing team slap on to the long-winded screenplay go a long way in slackening the story's pace almost to a near-inert place from where it is hard to pull ourselves out even whenShahid Kapoor and Kangana Ranaut's compelling chemistry is an inviting incentive.

By the time the plot reaches its third and final act, Bhardwajgets totally carried away by his librarian's lyricism. He injects massivesuffocating doses of academia into his narrative with scholarly arrogance, sacrificing narrative evenness for interludes where time comes to astandstill as we see characters enacting scenes from the Freedom Movement on stage.

Theskits-o-phrenia is distracting. Many of the characters appearto be wasted in the long-legged libretto on nationalism that Bhardwajinsists on playing out while we are meant to watch his paean to patriotic pride in submissivesilence. Bhardwaj plays and sings variations of the national anthem so many times during the film that the audience in the theatre (all25 of them) was confused as to whetherthey should just continue standing in reverent attention.

After all this is not just the Jana Gana

Mana.It is Bhardwaj playing the Jana Gana Mana.

A pity, he sacrifices theopportunity to tella beautifuland tenderlove story about three wounded fractured broken characters for thesake of a baggy ode to desh bhakti replete with a climax on top of a precariously compromised. wooden bridgethat David Lean would have usedas adress rehearsal for The Bridge On The RiverKwai.

Aerial shots of WW2 war planes swooping down on the natives areso clumsily done they are proof of how far FX-drivenIndian cinema lags behind its Hollywood counterparts, and why.

Peel away the layers of self-referential nationalism, and we are left with a luminous lovestory, adishydesiversion of David Lean's Ryan's Daughterand Vijay Anand's Guide about a capricious seductress in acommitted relationship who strays into a passionate liaison with a near-stranger who is way out of her social league. Indeed, the most masterly portions of the narrative are those where Kangana andShahid areshown slogging through stretches of slush and marsh land accompanied by aJapanesePOW.

Kangana and Shahid are extraordinarily at-home in expressing the eruption of unpremeditated passion. Their scenes together are magically shot by cinematographer Pankaj Kumar and are elevated furtherto a level of liberating lyricism by Vishal Bhardwaj's serene background score.

A pity Shahid and Kangana's time togetheris rationed. It ends with the Japanesesoldier (played with gratifying earnestness by Soturo Kawaguchi) begging to be freed to go home to his mother.

Exactly our feelings.

Subhash KJha