Monday Morning Questions: What Do You Want to Ask Me on Rajkummar Rao’s Birthday?

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Happy Monday! Bumpy morning here, we have a friend coming up for the day (social distancing, only sitting on the porch, wearing masks, etc.) and my Dad went to senior hours at the grocery store to get supplies, only to discover the power was out at the store! Also, the president is coming tomorrow (not to our house, just the county), which is of course depressing. And on Wednesday I have to go back into the city for a foot appointment, Thursday I stay in the city through the work day and miss another friend who is coming up, and then Sunday we have my two young friends coming for the day who we will hopefully sucker into helping us take the boats out for the winter. PHEW! Big week!

Here is where you get to ask me anything you want, from “did you have instant or store bought coffee this morning?” to “what’s the name of that one movie? you know the one? with the thing?” All week as you think of questions, just keep swinging back here!

Now, question for you! It’s Onam! The big Malayalam festival thing with the elephants! So, two questions: What is your favorite Malayalam movie?

I think it’s always going to be City of God. Ohm Shaanti Oshaana is fun, Bangalore Days and Koode are beautiful, but City of God just gets at me.

Second question, have you ever ridden/touched/had an experience with an elephant?

When I was a little kid, my maternal grandparents lived outside St. Louis and the St. Louis zoo had the first elephant born conceived and born in a zoo. The whole city went a little mad, and we did too. We visited him at least once on every visit, sometimes pulling over on the way home (since we drove by the zoo) for one last look. There was a nice lady we got talking to once sitting on a bench who explained that she came every single day and just watched him. Baby elephants are ADORABLE. It’s like the Dumbo cartoon, but way way more so. And they take forever to grow up, you know how puppies are cute but only for like 6 months? Baby elephants are cute little mini-elephants for years and years and years! And elephant families are so cute too! Baby Raja had his Mom and like 4 aunts all fussing over him and giving him whacks when he was bad and just generally being aunt-like. No make role models of course, because no one wants a male elephant in their zoo. Anyway, Baby Raja, sold me on baby elephants for the rest of my life.

And now he is 27 and has a wife and 5 kids! I feel so old. Oh, looks like one of his daughters died when she was 7. Oh, that’s sad. But he just had his first son this year!

28 thoughts on “Monday Morning Questions: What Do You Want to Ask Me on Rajkummar Rao’s Birthday?”

  2. With Malayalam movies, it’s a tie between Bangalore Days (the first one I saw) and Ohm Shanthi Oshaana (which is just so wonderful)

    I’ve never ridden an elephant, I think. But I remember going on a family trip to North Thailand where there was an elephant farm/natural holding place. My family all went on this course for a couple of days, learning how to ride and control an elephant. I was/am very much afraid of heights so it was a ‘no’ from me, but I did grow close to a small baby elephant who was in a wooden pen with its mother during that time. The mother didn’t do anything, but the little one was kinda a friend during the short time we were there. Basically a Disney Princess, but with an elephant feeling is what I remember from it and it was HEARTBREAKING to leave it behind as we returned back home. There is even a framed photograph of me with the little one.

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  3. I once rode an elephant in school(government school,officials bringing in all sorts of creatures for no discernible reason)for a couple of minutes,and it was a terrible experience.Is there anything like animal mount sickness?The “mahaut” or whatever we call him in English was fairly unfazed by how uneven the motion of an elephant can be.

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    • There must be something like motion sickness on elephants. It’s the same kind of repetitive steady motion that makes people sick on boats and in cars and airplanes.

      On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 9:57 AM dontcallitbollywood wrote:

      >

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  4. “Every time I’m in this city, there are elephants in the church yard.” That’s what an American friend of ours said after his first visit with us, when we’d taken him to the next biggest town for the day. They were plucking the leaves from the trees, slowly moving across the cobblestones. It was surreal. We do not usually get elephants in the church yard, but just on that day, there was a circus in town.

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  5. I have an experience kind of like Eva’s, from probably 15 years ago now. I was in Manhattan on a Saturday morning to go to an aikido class. The school was near Penn Station, one of the ugliest parts of Manhattan, my usual mode was to get off the subway and speed through the short walk head down. On this day, I looked uptown as I was crossing the street and…there was a line of elephants walking across Seventh Avenue right in front of Madison Square Garden. The sky was blue and the morning sun was coming down and I was stopped in the middle of this big street watching elephants file along like they belonged there too.

    Apparently the circus was in town, Barnum and Bailey, before they retired the elephants.

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  6. I wanted to share an academic research paper in my field that you would find interesting. The researchers investigated whether spoilers in movie reviews help or hurt the movie’s box office revenue. And surprisingly, they found that spoilers actually help the box office. They show that spoiler reviews can help the audience reduce their uncertainty about the quality of movies, consequently encouraging theater visits. This is particularly important for movies with a limited release and smaller advertising spending.

    Link to research paper –
    https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022242920937703

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