Talk of the Town

Gone are the days when you had to wait anxiously for phone lines to open to participate in the ``Kaun Banega Crorepati'' show. ``Watch, enter and win'' is the new buzzword now on Star Plus.

Starting September 10, all you have to do is answer correctly the one question that Amitabh Bachchan will ask viewers during the course of each episode and then register yourself through the phone lines or through a dialnet dial-in card between 10 p.m and 12 noon the next day.

The names of the winners will be announced in the next episode of KBC. Each of the 10 lucky winners is then required to call an exclusive Mumbai telephone number (022-9372444) between 10 p.m and midnight to confirm his or her entry. Failure to do so will automatically bring the next eligible winner up the KBC entry list.

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To coincide with the ongoing Cinemaya Festival of Asian Cinema, film actress and jury member, Sharmila Tagore, opened an exhibition of Asian film posters and photographs at India Habitat Centre in New Delhi earlier this week.

``The posters go far beyond merely enticing people to come to the theatres. They also reveal that there is a vast commonality between India and the various countries of Asia when it comes to cinema,'' said the versatile heroine of yesteryears who won special acclaim at the Festival of Three Continents at Nantes in 1999.

The 300 odd-posters belong to the countries participating in the week-long festival. These have been collected by Ms. Aruna Vasudev, Chairperson of Cinemaya, and Mr. Naresh Kapuria, Curator of Art Junction, over a period of time. ``These posters bring alive the magic of cinema,'' Ms. Tagore exclaimed after taking a round the exhibition, which is open till September 3.

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It is lonely up there! You sure have heard that often, but picture this. From an affluent textile-trading family in Coimbatore to the high-risk motor sports -- currently doing the Formula Nippon series -- travelling the world over, living day after day out the suitcase, and to endure all this at the age of 24.

And now, Narain Karthikeyan is caught in the dream of making it to Formula One races where the world's top 22 racers compete for the coveted title. The dream has taken him now all the way to Japan.

Announcing the J.K. Tyre go-karting championships at Le Meridien here this past week, this is what India's first Formula One hope had to say about his current assignment in Japan, ``Living in Japan is difficult. I don't understand either the food or the people and, even worse, neither do they understand me.

``It is lonely out there. Japan is so unlike England which is like my second home. There is no one who understands English and God forbid if your car breaks down it takes forever to make them understand what is wrong.''

He goes on: ``If you have to get things done quickly, well it is simply an impossible task. But the worst is that there is no one to talk to, as no one understands what you say. And they sure are in no mood to learn English. As for me, I cannot start learning Japanese; for one, it is a difficult language and two, I cannot concentrate on things that are not performance related.''

As for his career prospects, the future of the sports in India, he said: ``Funds are not easy to come by for anything besides cricket or tennis, but things are looking up and really I am not complaining.''

(By K. Kannan and Bindu Jacob).

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