Snacking with the Best

Buying movie tickets in Tamil Nadu, especially is Chennai, can be a real delight. Why? Because they can’t charge you a dime over `120, at least on paper. Much like their brethren from beyond Chengalpet, some theatre owners in the city have begun selling first day first show tickets for big film releases as ‘combo’ tickets at `250, that get you a tub of popcorn and a cola. People have grumbled, people have groaned, but eventually sipped their sodas and forever held their peace. Sadly, Friday’s fiasco over Kamal Haasan’s Uttama Villain being a non-starter after sold-out shows, made this issue flare up rather funnily.

While theatres grudgingly handed out refunds to people for their tickets, they asked them to hang on to the food coupons and use them ‘whenever’ or take the food on their way home. Now, popcorn and cola with the movie is cool. Getting it to eat on your way back home while disappointed is not.

Fans started an uprising in this latest ‘Cola’ war and threatened to rattle the window panes of the theatre unless they got their food coupons reimbursed. After a lot of haggling both ways, they reached a compromise. Plenty of Cola was handed out to cool tempers and most of them agreed to watch the other movie that was being screened instead. And in case you’re wondering, drinks and popcorn were on the house.

Highly ‘Confidential’

Getting details, even of the most innocous kind, out of a businessman is not the easiest of things to do. But the lengths some of them go, to hide such details can be absurd sometimes. When CE interviewed the global head of a major engineering concern a few days ago, one of the questions this reporter wanted to get answered was why the company’s sales had gone below a competitor’s. The businessman went on to assert that the company would not be able to disclose those details since they were a private concern. When asked if it wasn’t actually public information available on the public sphere, the businessman spent over half an hour explaining why this reporter would be unable to find any such information anywhere. Well, as it turns out, all it took was a Google search and more than 20 sites popped out, some with the company’s own statements on the same figures. So much for ‘private information not revealed by policy.’