veni vidi cui bono? {in which Vidhu Vinod Chopra shoots his mouth off}

VVC and Anu Malik deserve each other. Although the latter clocks a higher sin count for his shameless plagiarism, both love shining spotlights on themselves and dis'ing the rest of the world. In a recent interview with Rediff (titled, peremptorily, Judge me by the highest standards) to coincide with the release of Parineeta. Although rediff's bowdlerisation isn't perfect (must we make our own educated[sic] guesses about what the stars stand for in statements like I have the ****s to create this music??), we get a fine example of a man whose obsession I just cannot understand. This is the man who made fine films like Sazaye Maut and Khamosh (has anyone seen Satyakatha, a film revolving around "a law that states that the police are not to be concerned with people who may be injured and alive, that their duty is only to shift the dead bodies" [source] ??). He then began his gradual descent into the murk of commercial cinema with Parinda (where RDB provided some wonderful yet unnecessary tunes, the mainstream screamed about Jackie Shroff's acting prowess, and a lot of us accepted it despite its flaws for meritorious flourishes like Renu Saluja's editing and an above-average screenplay). 1942: ALS was proof that VVC had gone the way of the lemming instead of stepping back from the edge of the cliff. Turning producer after a couple of movies (and having reportedly come to the point of assaulting Khalid Mohamed for his negative take on Kareeb), VVC gave us the disgusting tripe-laden unsatisfying (except for Arshad Warsi) Munna Bhai MBBS (dude, just because your film becomes a hit and Hollywood decides to make an adaptation doesn't mean it was a film of substance -- it got lucky at pandering to the baser instincts of a multitude). The film's success gave us an ego larger than Godzilla (Why would Amitabh Bachchan send me an SMS? ... dude! Because he can!). All we can do is mourn the loss to cinema. Add Kundan Shah to the list of defaulters, btw.