A different kind of BLUE!

“The scariest places in the universe are those where you cannot breathe alone — the moon and the ocean. The feeling you get when you first dive into the ocean, that jolt of anticipation of whether your oxygen tank is going to work, where your next breath is coming from, and then the silence, the bubbles clear from your initial splash and you take your first deep breath, it panics you because you pull in too hard for fear of not getting enough air in your lungs, then you look around and absorb your new territory, a world where humans don’t belong, where you are now at the mercy of what lies under the sea, breathtaking yet dangerous…”

Throw together the Oscar winning pair of sound designer Resul Pookutty and composer AR Rahman alongside the deep-sea director of photography Pete Zucarini (of the Pirates of the Caribbean fame), pop star Kylie MinogueKylie Minogue and an ensemble star cast of Sanjay DuttSanjay Dutt, Lara Dutta, Akshay KumarAkshay Kumar and Zayed KhanZayed Khan - and you still do not have a winner!! That after expending Rs 80-100 crores in producing what is touted as the most expensive of all Hindi flicks ever made!!

Going for it, Blue has got an awesome location in picturesque Bahamas, Lara Dutta is drop-dead gorgeous, the underwater photography is beautiful, the underwater stunts are amazing. If the underwater daredevilry isn’t enough, the motor-cycle chases are equally death-defying and above all Akshay is in top shape.

What doesn’t work however for Blue is Sanjay’s plus sized paunch, Zayed’s expression-less face (thank god it’s hidden for the most part in a motorcycle helmet, but still!) and above all the script that isn’t there! The end result for the deepwater magnum opus that opened this Diwali has proved to be a damp squib.

Around the same time, elsewhere in Maldives, a different type of BLUE was being played out. And this one has turned out to be a Super Duper Hit!

The words at the beginning of this report belong to Akshay Kumar, the protagonist of the film Blue. Almost as if they took a cue from those words, the President of Maldives Mohamed Nasheed and his team dived into the deep sea and conducted the world’s first ever underwater cabinet meeting there. Their express objective: to seize the world’s attention to the rising threat of global warming.

The cabinet ministers had undergone an extensive training spread over two months before taking to the ocean and hitting a depth of 20 ft for their meeting. Each of them was accompanied by their military minder and diving instructor whose job was to ensure their safety and health conditions were met. Two of the fourteen ministers who did not make the cut on health grounds were not included for the deep sea meeting.

Using white-boards and hand signals to communicate the cabinet approved a document which was signed off in the meeting calling for the nations of the world to drastically cut down on their carbon emissions.

Maldives, the world’s lowest lying country with a major portion of its land just 3 ft above sea level and susceptible to the ill-effects of rising sea levels has shown the way to the world. Akshay and company might be the macho men but Nasheed and team have proved to be the real heroes. Hope they have set the ball rolling in the right direction for the upcoming United Nations conference on the challenges of climate change to be held in Copenhagen come December.

Nasheed might like to say Here we come, Hopenhagen!

- myVox