Compared to last year’s New Year Eve in Kathmandu, this year’s celebration in Chennai was more comfortable and enjoyable. First off, we got the official go ahead to bunk half a day’s office – my colleagues at work along with their families descended on Sathyam for the matinee show of Avatar-3D. The chaos called “corporate booking” with Sathyam was a different matter altogether. However, thanks to a complete team effort we did manage it pull it off.
The movie itself was quite spectacular: the visual imagery, as written in every quarter, is breathtaking in the first half and the second half is more action and some loosely scripted plot and dialogues (remember “300” – all that bravado backed by some inept acting and very poor speeches). The toddlers in the audience were awestruck and weren’t scared, and hence made it easier for their dads to watch the movie in whole. Even though, as is my custom, I missed the first few minutes, I picked up the futuristic plot (whatever there was) which talks about a distant planet – Pandora – habituated by Na’vi people. The US armed forces led by Col.Miles (Stephen Lang) is commissioned to extract a mineral – Unobtainium, from that planet. He enlists a paraplegic ex-marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) to aid Dr.Augustine (Cameron favorite – Sigourney Weaver) and her team, with the intention of persuading the Na’vis eventually to settle for a negotiation with humans with regards to the giving up their sacred place which houses the mineral.
So Jake and Augustine’s minds take on the incarnation (aka Matrix) of Na’vis to befriend and gain their trust in an effort to avoid the potential mayhem. The love angle is provided in the form of Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), who is entrusted with the job of training Jake in hopping trees and taming wild aerial dragon-like creatures in Pandora. As love blossoms between Jake and Neytiri, Col.Miles runs out of patience and calls for bombarding Pandora and usurping Unobtainium. But Jake and Augustine by now are totally against the military showdown and try their level best to persuade the Colonel against it, but to no avail. The second half is all about flying battleships, dragons, warriors on horses, big elephant like creatures stampeding and some very badly written call-for-war dialogues. As one would expect, its triumph of good over evil, albeit the loss of precious human and Na’vi lives. Cameron is the big bad splurge master, equivalent of our own Kollywood Shankar, when it comes to spending a fortune in film-making. But at the end of it all, Avatar-3D is an enjoyable fantasy laden action adventure, set in a Utopian planet. 
Post the movie, a splinter group (8 out of 38) made its way to ID in Sathyam. I had my share of pre-dinner appetizers, while majority had their full-dinner. I had few other friends to catch up for dinner and after some serious thought in deciding the dining place, we settled for Kokum (Another oriental group specialty restaurant). The restaurant is located in MRC Nagar and is pretty cut-off from the city’s hum-drum. The restaurant specializes in predominantly Kerala cuisine, but had fair share of Goan and Mangalorean delicacies as well. Buffet, priced at a princely sum of 545INR, is a very rare feature of this place and they had one, owing to the New Year ’s Eve. I checked out their ala carte menu and figured that the buffet had a representation of the main dishes from that menu. So the eventual price of the buffet works out to be cheaper if one were to try out those dishes from the menu. The place is a well decorated (just like any other oriental group restaurant ), the food is authentic and really good, and has luxury apartment complexes in its vicinity. Apparently Hotel Leela, being constructed there, is set to be inaugurated by Dec 2010. We also met few third party acquaintances who happened to work for Nila ventures (holding company of Hotel Leela) and were currently residing in the apartment opposite to that of Dhoni’s (he bought that flat for Rs 2.crore).
Post dinner, it was drive back home at around 10 PM, by when the roads were already being battered by few crazy drivers in bikes and cars in spite of the heavy patrolling (in numbers alone, not by their ability to chase down the offenders). Back home, I popped in the “Eagle has landed” DVD……
Happy New Year to everyone !!
