As bashfully as a budding Romeo, he pulled out a stack of papers from his office-drawer. “I write love poems,” he said confidentially. “But that’s off the record.

Listen, I’m sure that actors from what is termed as “the South” in journalese, are distinctly audience-friendly. It’s just that they elect to debut, on the Bollywood front, in projects which give them short shrift. Self-publicity — a necessary evil — is also conspicuous by its absence.

Smile awhile. An entire scene — silent but for piano music — is made up of stolen glances and cloaked feelings. That’s romance, the kind that’s been long-forgotten in this era of hyper-aggression.

Yaaargh. Eyes hidden behind goggles, she makes the brain boggle. Hey lady, take it easy. Phooey, why the tsunami of take-offs on the widely adored songs-’n’-dances of Madhuri, Sridevi and Juhi?

o two or three ways about it. You must have been meditating in the Himalayas, luxuriating in a Mumbai ocean resort, or hiding under the Hyderabad boulders, if you didn’t know that yesteryear’s Chandni has made a comeback.

It’s a lost generation perhaps. Fired by the ideal to exterminate the British colonialists, a group of boys and girls, barely out of their teens, gave up their homes, families and eventually their lives during the freedom struggle.

Okay, so we’re going animatronics now. Super-special effects interspersed with “live” action — that is flesh-and-blood actors — are the USP of the high-concept Makkhi — the Telugu original Eega dubbed into Hindi.

Achtongue, baby. Or is it Achtung? Oho, here’s one of those rain-in-Spain-stays-mainly-in-the-plain dilemmas. Unlike the pronunciation-stressed Eliza Dolittle of My Fair Lady, the grammar-challenged motley group of the TV series Mind Your Language, and the harrowed hairdresser of Educating Rita, the distressed damsel is a bright-eyed, late 40ish woman who’s chronically low on self-esteem. And not as much on lingo.

He freezes. A fly’s buzzing on a factory watchman’s face, he traps it in his palm, and crushes it. Cruel? But then that’s life on an isolated expanse, outskirting Delhi, where fast food chains vend pizzas and burgers, for those who can afford Rs 500-a-pop meals. As for those standing sentinels to the multi-crore properties, who cares?

Blame it on me, entirely. I shouldn’t have opened my big mouth. In the company of an Actor Friend and Mrs Actor Friend, I seemed to be talking with friends, as in real friends. Forget it.