Escape from Alcatraz

Escape from Alcatraz is a 1979 movie starring Clint Eastwood depicting the true story of a dramatic escape from maximum security prison at Alcatraz. Clint Eastwood plays Frank Morris who arrives at the Alcatraz prison for what we are not told, but to whom the warden informs that no one has ever escaped from his prison. Frank plans an escape with three others after finding that the concrete around his grill in his cell is weak and could be chipped away. Then they work around the plan over several months making a papier mache doll of his like image to ensure that he can rendezvous around the prison to find out his escape plan. On the appointed day, one of the four panics but the other three carefully make their way around the prison through various obstacles. From the prison to the main land is a mile long water body and where the water is so cold that people can drown in minutes of numbness. But these guys make a life raft out of rain coats.

Clint Eastwood as usual displays his deep stoic expression as in all his movies. There are no female characters. 

14.86 kms Juhu Versova

Ran 14.86 kms today from Juhu (Granth) to Versova (fishing village) and back. Along the way passed Amitabh Bachhan bungalow, JVPD circle and then turned left into Versova. The road from the turn off into Versova just after JVPD circle is bad with rotten garbage strewn all over the place. But if you turn left to go into Versova fishing village side, the road becomes very nice with lots of trees surrounding, nice roads, good buildings, old bungalows (its called as 7 Bungalows). Coming back jutted into Juhu beach at Tulip Star entry, but it was a high tide today and the beach was dirty as hell and crowded too. So quickly made way back into the roads at the Ramada Inn turnabout. 

The Firm

The Firm is a 1993 movie featuring Tom Cruise and it is based on a John Grisham thriller of the same name. Grisham is known for his legal thrillers so this movie is also of the same genre. Tom is a young lawyer who gets an offer to join a small boutique law firm in Memphis, Tennessee, which he chooses over upshot law firms in New York etc. He is given royal treatment upon arrival with his wife. But slowly he learns of the firm's shady dealings with the Chicago mafia, the Moretto family. Meanwhile he also learns that none of the firm's associates ever resign on their own. They remain lifelong subjected to the firm's culture or are killed in mysterious ways. The FBI contacts him with more juicy details of the firm's illegal wrong doings and warns him to co-operate or end up as body bags like the other associates. His brother is in jail on man slaughter charges so Tom uses that as a leverage to have his brother released from jail while agreeing to co-operate with the Feds.

Directed by Sydney Pollack, this is a nice fast paced thriller, but Tom Cruise lets it down with his wooden acting. Others in the cast are Gene Hackman as his mentor, Jeanne Tripplehorn as his wife. and Ed Harris as the FBI agent.

The book is more fast paced than the movie is and there are more details in the book, which has not been adapted into the movie. 

JVLR woes!!

When the Jogeshwari Vikhroli Link Road (JVLR) was being constructed, MMRDA told us that after the JVLR is built, travel from Eastern Express Highway (EEH) to Western Express Highway (WEH) will be in 20 minutes, that's right 20 minutes flat with no stoppages whatsoever!! Bullshit!! Today it takes anything from 1 hour to 2 hours to just traverse this link road connecting the eastern suburbs of Mumbai to the western suburbs. Still the Powai section of this road is bearable. It is when you cross the SEEPZ flyover that you run into humongous traffic jam, all the way to the WEH. It just simply stops, crawls, stops, sputters, stops. There are so many traffic signals, so many criss crosses that one simply gets bored at this stretch. Nowadays it seem the Aarey road has been blocked ostensibly for a fallen bridge during the August 29 downpour, but who knows what is the real reason ? It doesn't take that much time for repair of a bridge. 

Secretarial standard on General meetings

Salient features of Revised Secretarial Standards for General Meetings – SS2

1)     Applies to a section 8 company also but all other provisions of the Act relating to the General meetings are still applicable to a section 8 company;

2)    In case of a nidhi company, general meeting notice need to be served individually only on members holding shares of face value of more than Rs.1000 or more than 1% of the paid up share capital of the company, whichever is less. For other members, notice is by way of a newspaper notice in a newspaper circulated in the place where registered office is situated and on the notice board of the company;

3)     In case of companies having a website, the notice shall simultaneously be hosted on the website till the conclusion of the meeting. In case of a private company, the notice shall be hosted on the website of the company, if any, unless otherwise provided in the articles. This is an additional compliance even for small private companies which have websites. Nowadays every small company has a website for its promotion etc. The word used here is “shall” instead of “may” so this mandates compliance by all companies having websites. This is an unnecessary burden on the private companies to comply with this requirement. The only alternative they have is to amend the articles to provide that the notice need not be hosted on the website of the company. 

4)    Route map of AGM is not necessary for a closely held private company, where only the Directors and their family members are the shareholders or a wholly owned subsidiary company. This is a welcome relief for the small private companies. The whole purpose of putting route map in the notice was infructuous.

5)    Notice of the annual general meeting shall also specify the serial number of the meeting. By serial number I am assuming the no. of annual general meetings held in a company since its inception.

6)   Consent for shorter notice for the general meeting can be received any time before the meeting commences. It means that consent can be received 10 minutes before the meeting starts also. Government is toting this as “ease of doing business” 

7)   The authority letter from corporates for the annual general meeting shall,

(a)          in case of remote e-voting, be received before close of e-voting;

(b)          in case of postal ballot, shall be received alongwith the postal ballot form; and

(c)          if he is attending the meeting, then the letter should be sent before the commencement of the meeting.

8)   Nidhi companies are not required to provide e-voting facilities to their members;

9)   In case of Nidhi, no member shall exercise voting rights on a poll in excess of 5% of the total voting rights of the equity shareholders;

10)In case of a private company, a member who is a related party is entitled to vote on such resolution. This was always the case under the earlier Companies Act, 1956 also, only it has now been codified in the Standards.

11) The results of the voting at the general meeting needs to be displayed for at least three days at the notice board of the company at its registered office and also its Head Office and Corporate Office wherever it is situated. This is over and above displaying of the results at the company’s website, if any.  Before amendment, the three days’ time limit was not specified. This is another example of compliance overreach.

12) At a poll at the general meeting, it is not necessary that one of the scrutinizer shall be the member of the company.

13) Minutes of the meeting can be maintained in electronic form and it need not have a timestamp.

14) Minutes if they are maintained in loose leaf form, shall be bound periodically, at least once in every three years.

15) Minutes Book shall be kept only at the registered office of the company, not at any other place.

16) No need for minutes to state the conclusion time of the meeting;

17) Most of the other amendments are either rectification of the drafting errors or aligning the standards to be in line with the Act and/ or Rules thereof.

Brought in Dead

Written by Jack Higgins, but originally published under the name of Harry Peterson, this Nick Miller series features an apparent suicide by a young girl who has gone to great lengths to conceal her identity. When Nick and his colleague Brady finally identify her, she is Joanne Craig, a gifted painter and daughter of Colonel Duncan Craig. Joanne is a quiet, well mannered dutiful girl but changes completely upon coming into contact with one Max Vernon a rich thug & drug dealer. Under Vernon, Joanne becomes a drug addict herself, becomes pregnant and when Vernon throws her out, she goes and commits suicide. The judge and jury let of Max Vernon on no evidence basis. But the father who is an ex-military operative and an electrical engineer to boot, seeks revenge for the death of his daughter. There is a nice cat and mouse game being played between Max, Nick and Craig, with Craig using his intelligence to kill one of his Vernon's agents after another.

Jack Higgins, whose real name is Harry Peterson, is of course a well known author for his fast paced crime thrillers. This is my second book of him, first one being "The Last Place God Made"  

A Deadly Shade of Gold

My first one of the Travis McGee series by John MacDonald, the plot twists and turns literally into so many parts that you begin to wonder where this character came from. McGee is drawn into a murder of his close friend, who himself is drawn into some shady dealings with some pure gold Aztec statuette that have some value. McGee sets off on a quest to find out who killed his friend which takes him into a small village in Mexico. The plot slowly unravels every time McGee visits a new adventure, we start learning something about the story. Still it is not a linear narrative so we start tucking into one twist after another. We move from Mexico to Los Angeles, where the finale is set. Bodies start dropping one after another, all the bad guys go off one after another. McGee starts getting the hang of the plot more than us, of course, but we are still drawn to the end of the story through one sub-text after another. McGee is not the atypical detective, so his methods are unconventional but brutal in the end. Some perniciously vile characters are presented to us along the way.

John MacDonald is an American writer and the Travis McGee series spawned the 60s to mid 80s and were fairly successful.  This book was published in 1965.
My rating 3/5