Leonardo DiCaprio

Inspiring hollywood

A short paragraph is the best possible way of reporting this. Ron Howard wants to direct a Hollywood version of a Malayalam film, starring the white-as-snow Leonardo DiCaprio and 300 Indian dwarves. The original, called Albhudhadweep, was directed by Vinayan and starred Prithviraj as a navy officer marooned after a helicopter crash on a remote island where all the men are tiny but the women are, well, statuesque. The male islanders’ shortcomings aren’t the result of some karimeen-inspired genetic defect; a terrible curse of a local god is responsible. Ron Howard saw the film while on a brief holiday in Kerala and was so enthused that he decided that only Hollywood could do justice to a grand-scale epic like this. Expect it in theatres ? shortly.

Indian Oompa Loompas

More about short Indian movie stars. In a technology-intensive manner far more becoming of Hollywood, the eagerly anticipated Johnny Depp starrer Charlie and the Chocolate Factory also uses a little Indian, Deep Roy, in multiple roles. Roy plays all the Oompa Loompas in the latest adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic. You might remember Roy as Mr Soggybottom, Danny DeVito’s Indian circus dwarf sidekick in another Tim Burton film, Big Fish. For the uninitiated, the Oompa Loompas are Chocolate Factory workers who dance and sing witty, moralising songs about naughty children who visit the factory. They were originaly written as black pygmies from darkest Africa, and turned into blonde white dwarves after Americans complained about racism. In the 1971 musical adaptation Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, they turned into orange-skinned, green-haired little people not unlike the munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. Clearly Indian Oompa Loompas were the only option left.

From pygmies to revelations about musical giants. It was recently revealed that the Beatles album cover for Help! was shot not in glamorous Austria as was popularly believed, but in a grimy Middlesex car park.

A saucy affair

The heat not enough for you? A new chilli sauce that’s so hot it can actually kill people has spiced up Western markets. Called 16 Million Reserve, the sauce is 30 times hotter than the spiciest pepper. Medical experts warn that it could kill asthmatics and hospitalise users who touch sensitive parts of their bodies after consumption.

Calling time travellers

Time’s up

Amit Dorai, a masters student at MIT, recently made the news, or will have made the news in future, by organising the world’s first time traveller convention in Boston. The point of this convention was to test the hypothesis that time travel is non-existent because the world isn’t full of tourists from the future. The guest list? Anyone from the future. Dorai admitted that the possibility of actual time travellers appearing was low, but it would be a huge event if one actually turned up. While a lot of the guests at the convention claimed to be time travellers, no conclusive result was reached. It’s all in the past now, anyway.

AWARD OF THE WEEK

To a team of students from Gurgaon, Haryana, who built a website (www.effortsunited.com) that won the US state department’s prestigious international Doors to Diplomacy award. A small step for the team, a great leap for outsourcing.