I can't believe it has been five whole years since I made this post, announcing the launch of Karthik82.com!  But believe it or not, it has been that long that this site has existed, and there have been roughly 100,000 hits since then.  So yes, thanks to everyone who keeps visiting the site, keep coming, I'll also keep adding stuff to it whenever I can.

Work has been going on as usual over the last couple of weeks and has been occupying most of my time.  Fortunately though, I got a break from it all this weekend, as I went to Chennai to attend Nisha's wedding reception on Saturday.  Got to meet relatives and friends, and it was a short but good visit.  A few other things of interest —

• I bought the Telugu remake of Kaakha Kaakha, titled Gharshana on DVD.  The movie was actually quite a disappointment.  Whatever happened during production I really don't know, but from the finished film it looks like the remake was shot quickly and on a lower budget, possibly with interference from producers (think about it, if you were writer-director Gautham Menon remaking your own movie, you'd try and improve on scenes you were dissatisfied with the first time around, and certainly wouldn't tamper with scenes that worked perfectly well the first time).  It's nowhere near as good as the original, and the acting from Venkatesh as the lead character, doesn't help either.  If you haven't seen either movie, I would suggest you don't spoil the experience by watching the remake, and if you've seen Kaakha Kaakha, the only reason you'd want to see this would be to compare the two, and see how ill-informed additions and changes (however small) can ruin perfectly good scenes.  I will try to write a more detailed comparison of the two movies (I've taken some screenshots to illustrate my points), I just wish I had a little more time to do this.  Taken by itself, I guess Gharshana isn't a completely bad movie, I was simply disappointed comparing this with the far superior Kaakha Kaakha (the terms local and global maximum come to mind!).
• I watched the black comedy Ek Chalis Ki Last Local on VCD last week, and it was a pretty enjoyable movie.  The movie is about a man (Abhay Deol) who misses the 1:40 AM train to Vikhroli, and is forced to walk along with a woman he meets (Neha Dhupia) near the station, who has also missed her train.  The two soon stop at a bar where they meet a lot of shady characters, and things only become weirder after that.  First-time writer-director Sanjay Khanduri should be commended for this effort, as he makes you feel like you're watching a Tarantino, Coen Brothers and Guy Ritchie movie all rolled into one, while still retaining originality.
• I re-watched a couple of classic John Carpenter movies recently — The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China, great stuff.

Pablo Dictter wrote a detailed review for Reanimated, the Doom II WAD which my brother Varun and myself collaborated on.  This one was posted on his private journal, hence I copy-pasted the review here.  Go to the Reanimated page and have a look.  Thanks man!