Life tells me otherwise...

The Silent Man

2011-04-17T22:26:00.000-07:00

On a given day if Tendulkar and Lara are in full form then I would choose Lara over Tendulkar.

There is something about Brian Lara’s batting that is slightly fictionalized – high back-lift, exaggerated movements in the crease, great flourish of the bat and his other mannerisms. When he plays his typical west-Indian pull, it reminds of a statue of Nataraj I had in my house in a dance pose. When on song, Lara is a like a performer on stage. Tendulkar on the other hand is all about precision – he is like that magnificent Swiss watch that never goes out of style or out of order. Lara’s beauty lies in his abundance and exaggeration, Tendulkar’s class reflects in the scarcity of movement.

Now the same thing can be applied to writing as well, isn’t it?

In the world of books I have come across three Brian Lara’s which I like – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Orhan Pamuk and Vladimir Nabokov. All of them are brilliant wordsmiths, extravagant with adjectives, words and descriptiveness. They smother you with beautiful words and take you to an entirely different realm.

But then there is a Sachin Tendulkar as well – John Maxwell Coetzee.

The first JMC book I read was ‘Disgrace’ (Booker Prize winner for the year 1999). It’s a story of a professor and his subsequent moral and social fall following an affair with a student. My early interpretations of the book were very simple. Its socio-politic impacts and the psyche behind it totally eluded me. The book was precise, dry and to-the-point kind of; if Ayn Rand’s assumes a confident tone in her books, JMC’s flavor is ‘Arrogance’.

As I went on to a read a literary dissertation on ‘Disgrace’ I was introduced to the various other finer points which I could not understand on my own. The most notable point was that of an intellectual man whose intellect is stifled. This is something which I observed in his another book ‘Waiting for Barbarians’ as well. JMC is a South-African by nationality and ‘Disgrace’ is set in post-apartheid South Africa. The book echoes of the impact of the new political conditions in South Africa. In his other book ‘Waiting for Barbarians’, yet again JMC explores the relationship between a man and government. After reading ‘Disgrace’ I could not help wondering whether the disgrace was implied at the political status of SA in the year 1999.

A lot of authors have their protagonists with similar kind of traits and the story is then built around them. A JMC lead is a sort of a misfit. David Lurie in ‘Disgrace’ is a professor of Romantic Poetry but he teaches ‘Communication Skills’ in the University of Cape Town, the magistrate in ‘Waiting for Barbarians’ is a man of intellectual choice and sensibilities yet he is working for a tyrannical empire. It would appear to me that these are reflections of Mr. JMC himself. JMC is notorious for his reclusiveness. He did not turn up to receive booker prizes for ‘Disgrace’ and also for ‘Life and Times of Michael K’. So much so, that for a noble acceptance speech Mr.JMC narrated an elliptical story (whose meaning and significance still eludes me). The story is titled ‘He and His man’- I think it is quite self-explanatory.

May be Mr.JMC sees himself as a misfit in the world which is around him? My guess on Mr. JMC’s personality was bolstered when I read his semi-autobiographical book ‘Youth’. The most startling point of the book being its honesty and as usual a language drained out of adjectives or floweriness of any kind.

It is the misfit-syndrome of Mr. JMC gives him a great power as an author. His books have a profound impact on the reader but they always keep you detached. You can ‘admire’ a JMC novel but you can never ‘fall in love’ with it. His detachment with almost everything in his book allows him to be honest and impartial. In ‘Youth’ (although the memoir is slightly fictionalized) the awkwardness of JMC, his inability to carry out small talks or for that matter to be with a women who can inflame his passion is visible and very honest.

JMC has a very interesting take on physical relations as well. He sees the activity as a basic human need. Be it David Lurie in ‘Disgrace’ or the magistrate in ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ their physical activities are driven by very primal instincts and often there is a deep sense of shame after the act is finished.

Sometimes I’m tempted to put myself in the shoes of a famous writer and think like them and I always think that they should show off their skill with an extravaganza of words, like a rich man throwing a grand party. I cannot imagine how someone like JMC be so mercilessly exacting with words but then I remember Sachin Tendulkar, instead of going down the track and smashing the bowler for a boundary he stays at the crease and played a little paddle sweep – the result is just as favorable and beautiful.

I believe that somewhere his perfect language brings out a great loneliness in the characters. He does not adorn the solitude with despairing words but his portrayal of a man of stifled intellect, a misfit brings out a deep sense of isolation. When I read Jhumpa Lahiri’s books I feel the same sense of solitude but then its solitude of different kind – it is about a person away from his motherland and finding his feet in an alien culture. In Ang Lee’s much acclaimed ‘Brokeback Mountain’ the vast landscapes bring out the loneliness of the two protagonists but again their alienation is sexual. But with JMC, the sense of isolation is very personal and sad. His ability of evoke a feeling is very subtle and polished.

A deviation from his normal themes of man versus government, or the fall of man from a stature can be found in his book ‘Youth’. In this book we see the early JMC, just out of college and struggling as an author – he finds his own poetry worthless and chooses prose. His early realizations on art and its inception in human mind are quite moving, in his own self-apologetic and dry manner he takes us through his tryst as a writer.

An interesting question that came to my mind while writing this piece is that can someone like JMC inspire a budding writer? And the answer which I found was NO. I believe an amateur writer would be far more impressed by the flowery language and the fragrant adjectives, JMC is not meant to be for inspiration, I think that it is impossible to reach his level of detachment and honesty when you are writing (and that too about yourself).

I have long believed that there is a silent man which resides in all of us (no gender biasness intended when I use the word ‘man’). He is the person who is standing on the bylines and is watching every act of ours – he does not speak a lot but he is observing everything. He knows what is right, he knows what is wrong. He is honest, impartial and critical. For me, that person is JMC is that silent man, not only it matches with his persona in real life but somewhere in his books as well he is that silent man – enduring everything quietly, being perfectly honest and deprived of all the nonsensical emotions.

It’s ringing…

2011-03-24T23:42:00.000-07:00

What if your ringtone defined your personality?

Here’s a hypothetical, perverted and abusive analysis which in any case should not be taken to your heart. Naraaz mat hona, Naraaz to Maharaj hote hain.

The conventional ringtone folks – These are the folks who put the official maker’s ringtone for their phones, like they would put the conventional ‘Nokia Tune’ for their Nokia phones. Such people lack imagination; they are mind-numbingly MORONIC and always eat dinner at the same restaurant. If you need a morale boost, you should meet these people. Their unexciting and mundane lives would make your life feel like a day out in Disney land. These people are also CEO and Vice-Presidents of their company.

The Silent ones – I’m sure that people who keep their phones in silent mode are shy and lack serious social skills. They might be closet homosexual as well. These kinds of people do not speak during meetings and they get bad appraisals. Their farts do not make noise but they smelly and unbearable.

The Bollywood fan club – People who put Bollywood songs as their ringtones are fakes. They are trying to get into your pants by faking a ‘cool’ pose. They do not have decent choice in clothes and they pick their nose all day long. They are also ‘Pheku’ and borrow money for buying cigarettes. They just loiter around in the neighborhood and then claim that they had gone to Khandala for an audition in the next Ramsay movie.

The Pop Song lovers - The people who put the latest Indi-pop songs as their ringtones are probably weak in hearing coz they think that indie-pop songs are good. These people are morally corrupt and have no values. These kinds of folks make good politicians, beggars and sales persons. Over the years they have developed a stupid laugh. Even if you cuss them, they will laugh. You can never make out what these people are feeling. These kinds of people are Chinese too.

The Hip-hoppers – When you see this guy – BOLT! He might mug you or just shoot you for the heck of it. He might hurl abuses at you, which you would have never heard of. This guy can write 1000 acronyms for female organ in less than 5 minutes. If she’s a girl, she might just be out of mental asylum.

The religious nuts – These people never get into a fight with anyone. They seldom leave their house either. They also think that Canada and Noida are very near. They walk meekly and cry very easily. They have been bullied so badly in school that they have no self respect left. They laugh at poor jokes and crack even worst jokes. Their dream car is Hyundai Santro Xing. If you ever meet these kinds of guys, please ask them to read this blog. If you ever met a girl like this, make sure that she NEVER gets my phone number.

The soft unheard ringtone kind of folks – Folks who put soft unheard musical pieces are pretentious, smug faced pigs. They think that they only see the European movies and copy the ending credits as their ringtone (they forget that I do it too). These are the kind of people who would always jabber away in viva examinations even if they don’t know the answer. If a guy is sporting this ringtone then he is the one who dates random chicks but never gets laid, for girls – they never find the handbags which they want. These people like nude art from a pornographic point of view. They can’t speak French and suffer from an abominable monkey breath.

The Metal heads – People who put heavy metal (or for that matter rock songs) songs or guitar solos as their ringtone are addicted to cocaine. By day, they do usual jobs but during night they send cheap undergarments in Kurla. These people have been kicked in nuts by prostitutes. Boys in this category sport long hairs which are handy to hold when you are beating the crap out of them. Girls have body piercing and they walk like drunken porcupine. Although they claim to love rock n roll, in reality their favorite music director is Bappi Lahiri.

The American pop lovers –They should be deported from earth or they should make to fight the Metal heads in a cage. These people have great desire to be in Oprah Winfrey show, but they don’t even know how to spell ‘Oprah’. These people constitute 82.9% of the illiterates in this world.

The weird voice worshippers – These are people who put weird voices/sounds as their ringtones. These people are not socially trained and they are not toilet trained as well. The only purpose they serve is that they serve NO PURPOSE. Their parents despise them too, their friends despise them too coz they do not use deodorants. They have spent time in the prison and are deeply insecure about everything in life. DO NOT EVER LEND MONEY TO THEM.

544 days

2011-03-09T03:13:00.000-08:00

There is a lovely little line in ‘Before Sunset’ in which Celine says “Memories are wonderful things if you don’t have to deal with the past”. Unfortunately, this is not true; in some way or the other we have to deal with the past – as pleasant or as acrimonious it may be.

Ever since I came back last year from Holland I have been trying to jot down a memoir of sorts of the total 544 days I spent there between November 2008 and July 2010. The moment I came back from Holland I was in a sort of transition phase from one country to another and besides my experiences were too fresh and raw at that moment to be put on paper.

Now that I’m fully Indianized again, I thought I would give it one more shot but even at this moment I’m pretty blank about what I’m going to write. Sometimes I feel writing is an escapism of sorts, you write to escape an emotion, an idea or an encounter in life. I guess I have not been able to write about Holland because I don’t want to escape or forget my experience and time spent there, a part of me wants to keep Europe alive – always.

I could relate a lot of things about my Holland trip to the time when I was about to join college. I knew that there would be lot of ‘Firsts’ in Holland like there were in college. It was the first time when I would cook for myself, first time when I would actually ‘Live’ in a foreign country and not just visit it and it would be my longest stint away from home. Holland does not boast of a large Indian community, I did not have too many colleagues out there and plus I was going in a country where I did not speak their national language. It looked like a catastrophe in making.

I did not know an awful lot about Holland before reaching there. In fact my knowledge of Europe was pretty much limited to countries like France (thanks to Da Vinci Code and The day of the jackal), Germany (Courtesy: Frederick Forsyth’s The Odessa File) and of course Italy. I had seen a lot of Switzerland in the Yash Chopra movies but all n all I was pretty ignorant. Only thing I knew about Holland was that they have a good football team.

I must say that I found my feet pretty quickly in Holland. My First Saturday in Holland I was raiding pubs and discotheques; A long night of reveling which started with an innocuous movie ‘Quantum of Solace’ ended up at 4.00 am in the morning. As I danced away at one of the discs, the music stopped for a while and I heard a song which reminded me of days gone by, it was Bryan Adam’s ‘Summer of 69’… at that moment I felt as if Holland had welcomed me…. In the next disc they played ‘Misrilou’ from Pulp Fiction OST…. And I felt that Holland had welcomed me with a loud cheer!

It was a bit surreal for me; to take things by the scruff of its neck for the first time. I usually start in a circumspect manner and then it takes me a while to come into my own but there was something in that November 2008 air which made me jump the gun. If one day I was dancing, the very next day I walked for 20 minutes in snow to reach my hotel. It was the first snow fall of my life and it was all over me. In its own way the country reminded me that it cannot be taken for granted.

Over the next year and a half I saw Holland (or may be European countries for that matter) as two countries – one had a glum, dark wintery sheen to it. You leave for office it is dark, you come back from office and it is still dark and it is cold as a son-of-a-bitch. The second was a bright and colorful face of summer where the sun did not set till 10.30 in the night. As much as remember the first in-your-face snowfall, I remember the first sunshine in November as well. I explored the neighborhood and the park nearby. In the park, a toddler (not more than 2 years old) waved and smiled at me. Although it is small and inconsequential, this remains one of my ‘Kodak Moments’ of the first trip.

Speaking of insignificant moments, one which comes to my mind was waiting for the bus at the Dillenburgstraat stop. I would cook with my colleague at his apartment and I would usually go back to my hotel room late in the night with at least half a bottle of Merlot inside me, I had fond memories waiting for bus in the biting November cold at that stop…as most of the times I had my IPod in my ear, sometimes in the dark of a night I would do a little dance as well. oh, yes! Daddy can shake a leg or two.

With temperature dropping as low as -13 degrees in the coming month, I had the pleasure of doing ice skating (without any skates) on a frozen canal besides my office. The Xmas of 2008 presented us with some holidays and the destination I had in mind was Paris –Cutting across Holland and Belgium we reached the great city on the Christmas night and it was a spectacle watching a blue Eiffel tower looking over a city which boasted authors like Marcel Proust, Jean Paul Sartre and was once the intellectual and artistic powerhouse of Europe.

Standing on the top of the Eiffel tower, I felt a strange kind of attraction for Paris. It was not the place where I wanted to be as a tourist, it was a place where I wanted to live. I wanted to be the person who would be able to tell that Pierre’s café is on the left hand corner on the next signal. I wanted to belong.

Many times in our lives we feel as if we are a part of an enclosed environment but being at Louvre museum, at the famous Champs-Élysées Street, then standing next to the grave of Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde at Père Lachaise gave me a feeling of witnessing something bigger. Call it an Epiphany of sorts if you like, but somewhere the horizons were expanding.

And if you thought Paris was all intellectual and artistic…you could not be more wrong.

I really had to pee after coming out of the Notre Dame; we spent half an hour looking for a rest-room. I have no words to express how I managed in that half an hour and how I felt after the big ‘release’ (that’s why in men when somebody says he has got balls, you really got to appreciate it). Besides for all the 3 days of my stay in Paris we had good Indian food, what else can you ask for?

My second essay in Holland began in March 2009 and I was in a truly international company. I shared a huge row house with people from all around the world – in that house there was one Dutch national, one German, one Chinese couple and one Hungarian couple. It looked like my horizons were expanding way too much! But I had a great time with all of them. In the summer of 2009 we had a big barbeque in our backyard where we polished off tons of meat and a crate of Heineken.

The more n more I stayed in Holland I developed a liking for Amsterdam. While the city boasted art of Rembrandt and Vincent Van Gogh; it was a place where you could buy grass legally off the counter, where prostitution was officially permitted. It was classy and it was wild too – my kind of place. In my two trips to Amsterdam as a tourist (and quite a few just to chill out) I came to love the central station, the Dam Square, the canals and the never ending tourist buzz. The fall of 2009 was particularly beautiful; walking in to Vondel Park was like walking into a painting full of colors. And as much as I enjoyed the moving experience of visiting the Anne Frank house, I equally loved the totally out of control pub crawl which ended at 4.00 in the morning.

While work kept me busy for most of the summer, a trip to Cologne (Germany) for a couple of days in October was refreshing. Sitting in a cruise, sipping a local brew with sun on your back and the beauty of Rhine River in my eyes – life could not have been any better. While I did see a lot of so called ‘tourist spots’, I enjoyed a 2 hour walk in a small village called Linz on the banks of Rhine. There is lot of Europe in those narrow cobbled streets.

The winter of 2009 was very severe with heaviest of snowfall in past 25 years. I got to see a true white Christmas. The snow fall was so heavy that for 3 days there were no buses or trains. I had to live like a mouse – stock everything at home and stay holed in. This one time I walked in shin-deep snow to the central station to get something to eat. And now I think I had seen enough of snow to last me a life time.

The coming months kept me busy and were excruciatingly hectic. By the time I would get a breather it was already April 2010. It was time for Queens Day! And this times yours truly and his group of trusted comrades had decided to go to Amsterdam. Queens’s day is a time in Holland for flea market, lots of beer and people going bonkers – its day when you can officially go crazy, we gotta have such days in India!!!

With a long weekend coming up in the month of May, I was ready for my grand finale – Switzerland.

I must admit that Switzerland was not my first choice. I wanted to go to Vienna or perhaps see a bit more of Germany but considering logistics and value for money; me and my droogs decided to have the Swiss delight.

Before I launch into the Swiss extravaganza, I want to ask all of you a question: Have you ever longed for complete anonymity? To be at a place where you don’t know anyone and no one knows you? And you are obviously far away from the internet and the mobile phone.
This was Switzerland for me – complete anonymity. My phone did not work there and I was hell bent on not checking my e-mail and had told all my loved ones that I’m going off the grid for 3 days. Switzerland is a place which offers natural beauty in all forms – Mountains, Rivers and great landscapes. While Interlaken offered a hiking trail, the crashing waves of Trummelbach falls were around the corner. If the small village of Muron offered mist and cold, Mount Pilatus offered a lovely snowfall.

Switzerland also has the highest point in Europe: the Jungfrau top. It is quite a delight that at the top of Europe you have an Indian restaurant – it was one of those moments when my slept patriotism woke up and I felt proud of being an Indian. But there was something more which I would cherish, eating that Indian food top of Europe; I felt that I had come a long way and the good part was that I had come here on my own. After a hellish 4 months of work and corporate war rooms I felt like I had earned this.

With a lovely trip to Mount Pilatus and a very cold cruise across Lake Lucerne, I returned back to Holland (not before I was bothered by volcanic ash and had to take a detour via Germany into Holland). The day I reached Holland was my 500th day; the next day my boss called me and said that I would be going back to India soon. The European vigil was finally over. After that there was winding up, farewell dinners and Souvenir shopping. In all the hubbub of activities I never asked myself how I felt about leaving Holland. I was perhaps in a happy-sad kind of phase, sad about leaving Holland and happy about coming back home.

There is a lot about Holland I miss and I thought it would be best if I list them down:

1. Little things like saying ‘Good Morning’ to the burly old sweeper who stood near the bakery shop.

2. Watching the rowers in the canal near to my house in summer.

3. The local Saturday market which sold odd trinkets to fresh fruits.

4. The eateries which I frequented – a Thai place near to my home, the Dominoes outlet, Subway, Wok to Walk, Charlie Chiu’s and the Turkse-Pizza place.

5. Black coffee at Starbucks.

6. The absolutely awesome looking girl who worked in a coffee shop in front of Starbucks.

7. The narrow path surrounded by trees which looked like a windows XP wallpaper.

8. The long walks in the summer with an aim to get tired.

9. The biting Amsterdam wind in winters (It really stings!!)

10. Albert Heijn departmental stores (and Fatima).

11. The late night parties when I would take a cab as late as 5 in the morning to come back to my place.

12. The sun in winters.

13. Fries @ Manekken-Pis

14. The guy playing music beneath the stairs at the central station (a lot of times he played the godfather theme).

15. The three weeks spent in working from an Amsterdam suburb with temperature dropping well below zero.

16. The smell of fresh waffles in the Saturday market.

17. The odd familiar feeling I had in the Kanalstraat market.

18. Free rides on my colleagues Mercedes Kompressor CK-230 (Bliss! Bliss! Bliss!)

These were probably the top few in my head, there are a lot more which I have missed or now they are fading away. I have consciously avoided mentioning the people I met during my tenure; I’m positive that I would start missing them all if I write about them.

By the time I reached Switzerland part in this post, I was a bit overwhelmed. I had to leave writing mid-way and then come back to the post after a few days. There is a lot-lot more to my European saga and a lot of it is about the music which I listened there. I’m pretty sure that more incidents will somehow leak out in my writing in posts to come but for now I will leave you with my exact thoughts reflected in a song:

“Sure as I am breathing
Sure as I'm sad
I'll keep this wisdom in my flesh
I leave here believing more than I had
and there's a reason I'll be
a reason I'll be back”

- Eddie Vedder OST ‘Into the Wild’

From Paris with Love

2011-02-13T21:35:00.001-08:00

Life, they say is a harsh teacher – first comes the test, then cometh the lesson. And often these tests are a test of your faith, integrity and character.

I remember an incident about 2003 world cup finals: India was sure to lose the game; everybody in the hostel had lost hope. Then suddenly the match was threatened by chances of rain and there was a remote possibility that match will be abandoned. I was still not optimistic but one of my good friends was… he even believed that if Sehwag continued and rain came, India might win on the basis of Duckworth and Lewis method! Perhaps in the grand scheme of things it was inconsequential for me if India won or lost but then in its own way, it was a test of character.

So when you left Celine (Julie Delphy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) at the Vienna station, promising each other that they would meet 6 months down the line in ‘Before Sunrise’, did you believe that they will meet again? Are you a believer or a cynic?

And it has been six months since I wrote about their day-out and if you remember, I’m here again to keep a promise which I made 6 months before.

It has been a 9 years since Celine and Jesse walked the beautiful streets of Vienna. Like two very different people; Jesse – embittered by a recent heartbreak and Celine – vivacious, intelligent and believing in all the magical things in the world….

This time around they meet in the most romantic city on earth – Paris. Jesse arrives in Paris as an author on a tour of his bestselling book – a book based on his one day in Vienna with Celine.

When asked by a journalist on what will be Jesse’s next book Jesse explains the concept of the book. On one particular juncture, he says that his protagonist of his next book is not ‘remembering’ a moment from the past but he is actually ‘In’ that moment. As he speaks about the moment from the past….. The camera reels off to the visions of Celine and the morning when they last met. And then in a jerk camera comes back to a nook where Jesse turns his head……Celine is standing there. He never thought about Celine all these years, he was always there with her ‘in’ that moment. They meet again – after 9 years. But just as before time is of essence again, Jesse has to board a flight back to USA in the evening, they only have time ‘Before Sunset’.

Sequels are a difficult sort of movies to make; they have to fill in big shoes of the first movie. The director has to maintain a sense of continuation about the overall theme of the movie yet present something new in it. The characters have to retain their old flavor and still live up to the current story and its characterization. The first thing I noticed about the movie is that the character of Celine is sans any makeup: the signs of ageing visible on the angelic face of Julie Delphy. A clear indication of the fact that time has elapsed – things have changed.

With a little awkwardness and reticence they start from where they left off: discussions and debates clamor into the quaint and calm gullies of Paris. If in the first edition of the movie Mr. Linklater makes several references of love and its transience, the second edition is about change and is about growing up – Change, more in view of the last meeting of Celine and Jesse in Vienna. Jesse finally confesses that he wrote the book so that he could meet Celine again via the book. They still have the same intelligence and wit about them. One would see both of them bit more restrained – We no longer see Jesse competing for emotions or ideas with Celine, there are longer sessions of hearing, similarly Celine is talking about her work and the world around them as compared to flippant conversation of a previous edition. A good bit in the movie is that they do not dwell upon the question of ‘What would have happened if we would have met again’.

A lot of Celine and Jesse’s talks revolve around ‘How they were at that time’ and ‘how they are now’. In a passing remark Jesse says that when he was younger he was insecure, his problems are deeper now but he is more equipped to handle them. He also confesses about the lack of passion in his marriage, and choosing his ‘best self’ over his ‘honest self’. Celine talks about her relationship too and some ghosts come out of the closet. Stuck in the cobwebs of life both of them realize they realize what they had between them was something magical. If in the first part the conversations was more about arbitrary yet interesting things (clearly putting forth the exuberance of a young mind), in their second chance encounter they share more about past 9 years (natural, isn’t it?) but the conversations are more mature, real and on the verge of being resigned in nature…..the growing up of the characters is via their conversation.

Call it a balancing act if you wish – while the first movie explores the hope and youth second takes a murkier look at the despair and cynicism. At this moment I wonder whether you would call this ‘growing up’ or you would just say that life happened to them. But Mr. Linklater deals with all these subtly using the magic of words and conversations. I think of him like a doctor who lures a little child with a candy but actually gives him a bitter medicine. The child still believes that he is having a candy.

There are instances in the movies which stand out for the detailing - in the first movie, in one of their fleeting conversations Celine says that she believes in the idea of reincarnation but in this part she casually negates it, thereby bringing in to light a simple fact that things change over the years. On the other hand, an astute viewer would remember a beautiful scene in the music shop in Vienna where Celine and Jesse steal glances; we see the similar kind of moments shared between the two characters in this edition of their meeting as well. Celine maintains a slight and very affable neurosis in the movie but one sees her a bit more cynical (or wiser, if you wish to call it). Jesse maintains his cynicism from the first movie.

Mr. Linklater inserts into the movie a hopeless kind of overlapping about the lives of Celine and Jesse. Jesse confesses that he thought about her a lot on the days leading up to his marriage; Celine says that she spent 3 years in NY (at the same time Jesse was in NY as well). Even after all these years we see them drifting them out of in and out of each other’s lives – be it physically or be it in thoughts. I mentioned a bit earlier about maintaining a sort of continuity in sequels: one notices that in the movie, even after 9 years Celine and Jesse get along like house of fire. Yes, there is initial awkwardness but it is matter of minutes that the protagonists retain their old charming self.

There is something about both the movies which make them tick – the fact that they are absolutely real. Jesse or Celine could be you or me walking and having a conversation in any city of the world. And perhaps herein lies the skill of the director as well, to make a movie out of a flimsy concept (two people walking & talking is hardly a theme) and that too make it so refreshing, profound is absolute masterclass. Sometimes I feel Mr. Linklater suffers from too much of modesty – the layers in the movie, its grandness of design and capturing the essence of romance is so much hidden. If you have what Mr. Linklater has, you should flaunt it. The movie excels in technology too; it is not easy to take a shot for the length of 6-7 minutes.

As I near the end of this post, I’m tempted to take a look at the two movies as a ‘whole’. ‘Before Sunrise’ catches the essence of meeting someone, of making that connection, of feeling the brilliant and luminous spark its next edition speaks about the same two characters faintly wondering about what they had and eventually realizing that somewhere their last encounter has left an indelible impression on them. Towards the fag end of the movie Celine finally breaks down and says to Jesse that she was happy till she read his ‘Fucking book’. She then proceeds to reveal what remains a ‘kick-in-the-nuts’ to all the romantic movies made till date.

She says that she put all her romanticism into that one Vienna meeting that after that she had never been able to feel the same for any other man. Ergo, the pink fantasies preached by conventional romantic movies do not come true. It is actually a wonderful scene in the movie where a hurt Celine goes totally irrational and blames her failed relationships on that one day in Vienna. While watching the chemistry between Celine and Jesse one is convinced that they are right for each other, yet it is a bitter truth (in movie so as in life) that sometimes we spent building our lives around somebody else.

The time as usual is running out (for me as well as for Jesse) but not before Jesse visits Celine’s apartment.

After some bantering Celine says to Jesse “You gonna miss the plane”….

The camera zooms to Jesse’s face and he says “I know”.

The movie ends here.

And now my dear Readers, whether Jesse boards the flight or stays back with Celine is a test for you – Whether you are a believer or a cynic?

X and the City

2011-01-23T22:57:00.000-08:00

Let us for once go back to our high school algebra and think about X…

X was the unknown for us; we labored through quadratic or cubic equations to find its value. Even in the daily usage of words we refer ‘X’ factor as something mysterious and unknown to us. While it was easy to find X in mathematical equation, in the equation of life X is a polynomial – it has many values and many facets. There is X factor associated with everything – a person, a place or may be at times with an object as well.

‘Dhobi Ghaat’ is an attempt to find the value of X and this time equation is Mumbai. I do not know if filmmakers have romanced with cities enough, my knowledge of European (or world cinema for that matter) is very limited. I know Woody Allen is one person who has had a long standing affair with New York.

Bollywood has romanced mumbai but perhaps for all the wrong reasons, when I think of Mumbai in movies two recent movies standout in front of my eyes – ‘Aamir’ and ‘Black Friday’. Both are gritty and brilliantly made but discover the darker side of Mumbai. ‘Satya’ is another movie which stares deep in to the soul of Mumbai, so does Mira Nair’s ‘Salaam Bombay’ but what Mumbai we look at – crime ridden, poor and harsh. We always looked at Mumbai as an fearsome opponent to be conquered – be it in a way of finding our dreams or be it in a way of getting a place to stand in a local train. We have never looked at the city with the loving eye of an artist, we never saw the poetry in its motion or the song which emanated from the sea – perhaps a few artists have done it but a layman like you and me was far too busy in untangling the cobwebs of life.

Kiran Rao takes a look at Mumbai and tries to find emotions in those streets; she tries to find some madness in the method. She does not look at the guns or the crime or the dance bars for that matter. She tries to look at Mumbai from 4 different perspectives – A painter whose muse is Mumbai (Aamir khan as Arun), A NRI who looks at Mumbai with curiosity of a foreigner (Monica Dogra as Shai), a newlywed bride who looks at Mumbai with wonder (Kriti Malhotra as Yasmin) and finally a Dhobi/gigolo/rat-killer/aspiring actor (Prateik Babbar as Munna) to whom mumbai is… well, his day-to-day life. Didn’t I tell you in the beginning that our good old X here is a polynomial?

If one is looking for a weekend entertainment then ‘Dhobi Ghaat’ is not meant for it. The movie is a slow, unhurried narrative which is refreshing…often a Bollywood movie has frenzy about it, sense of speed as if movie making was akin to winning a race. This movie on the other hand takes its time.There is lot of time spent on the imagery – be it via Shai’s camera lens or via Yasmin’s video diaries or Arun’s painting – Kiran rao has taken her time. I had similar feelings when I watched ‘Udaan’, that there is a lot of time given to the images in the movie… the time lapses forward in the movie through these images.

While we are on to images and long shots – I believe this is quite the hallmark of European film makers. Over the weekend I saw Michael Haneke’s ‘Cache’ (French) and Gotz SpielMann’s ‘Revanche’ (German) and I could not help but pondering over the use of images in the movie (at times repetitive). I believe ‘Dhobi Ghaat’ belongs to this category of the movies.

The stillness and the imagery also provides a good sort of commercial benefit – the jury at the Oscar awards which nominate the best foreign movie are the people who have grown up on European cinema, if at all ‘Dhobi Ghaat’ makes it to Oscar 2012, the jury might be able to relate to it. Also, employing Gustavo Santaolalla for background score will help after all the guy has won Oscars for best original score for two consecutive years for ‘Brokeback Mountain’ in 2005 and for ‘Babel’ in 2006. If you are watching the movie, be sure to take heed of the background score.

The movie lacks a strong script as such, it does not involve any major event around which a movie will revolve one may say that this is a weak point in the movie. Master of parallel storytelling is one of my favorite directors named Alejandro González Iñárritu (‘Amores Perros’, ‘21 grams’ and aforementioned ‘Babel’). But even his narratives have strong story about them. Characterization is not weak but at times lacks conviction. While Prateik absolutely wows in the movie, Aamir Khan’s portrayal as a Painter is a bit confusing at times – his reticence is quite unexplained in the movie, his inspiration doesn’t quite strike him as lightening – an ordinary person who does not know that creativity at times requires a maniacal discipline and loneliness along with inspiration may not find it convincing. An actor of Aamir Khan’s caliber emotes well but the painter Arun left me yearning for a bit more. It’s hard to believe that someone was better than Aamir Khan in an Aamir Khan movie.

The story drifts in and out casually between Shai’s images, Munna’s infatuation and a strange voyeuristic relationship between Yasmin and Arun. As I said earlier, with absence of a strong event, it tends to drift a bit but for me (strictly speaking personally) the wonderful imagery and Prateik Babbar’s portrayal makes up for it. The kid has got a tremendous potential, I hope he lives up to it.

If the movie looks at mumbai from 4 different perspectives, there is a certain reflection of these perspectives as well. Mumbai is complex – just like way Shai finds Arun, Mumbai has sensuality about itself in which a naïve like Munna falls for Shai, Mumbai has an indifference which Yasmin finds in her husband and finally Mumbai has a strange inspiration which Arun derives from Shai. The relationships between the characters are also the X factors of the city.

There is a general complaint I have with all the reviews which I read (not for this movie but for others as well) that they fail to capture the emotions in the movie. While one speaks scores of things on the technicalities and the performance, I hardly find anyone trying to understand and explore the emotions behind the cinema. Folks! With all the technologies aside a movie is by the humans, of the humans and for the humans, you can’t take emotions and sensitiveness out of the equation. If you can’t swim in the sea don’t piss inside it to from the shore to make it dirty, if you can’t understand the sensitivity of the movie perhaps you should keep its criticism to yourself only and minimal to sophisticated words.

Finally, I don’t expect non-Mumbaikars to like the movie, personally (and not being offensive to anyone) I think an empathetic person is more likely to enjoy the movie than a hardcore analyst. The movie is about romance, romancing a muse that is beautiful, mysterious and unattainable and it would take a romantic to understand it (if you think romance is limited to love affairs only; please read the correct definition of romantic). You see just like the movie, the romantics also have an X-factor about themselves. And just as one thinks that the muse is about to become a lover, she does what has always been done over the centuries – she breaks your heart. The movie, with all its romance, does not shy away from the touch of reality which Mumbai has – a touch of tragedy, of loss and of the divide between the filthy rich and the filthy poor.

After watching the movie, I was discussing it with one of my friends and she sent me a lovely message which I’m tempted to put here (bear in mind I’m quoting)

“You know what I feel is the most beautiful thing in life – falling in love over n over again; with people n places n colors n nature n poems n movies n art n ourselves…..It makes life so worthwhile n so much isn’t it?”

While I don’t want to do a psycho-analysis but I’m guessing that it is the images of the movie which prompted these lovely words. Nietzsche says in one of his philosophical discourses that if you can’t understand me it means that you and I are not the victims of the same passion. If you don’t like the movie, you just have a different poison which victimizes you.

I have been in Mumbai for 5 years now but the images of the Muhammad Ali road, the rains, the marine drive and the sunset and the Ganpati Visarjan made me fall in love with the city all over again. I do not boast that I know a great deal about the city yet inexplicably I’m in love with it – just like a child who loves superman but doesn’t actually know what braniac is or what kryptonite is.

The movie rekindled my love for the city. It told me that amidst terrorist attacks, gang violence and the ever-crowded local trains the city still has an ‘X’ factor about it.

Me and My Haircut

2011-01-19T05:32:00.000-08:00

I know I’m taking a risk but anyways I will go ahead with it.

There is a question which irks the hell out of me (and I know this will be repeatedly used by my friends against me from now on). It goes something like this:

My Friend: Dude, where are you going?
Me: Going for a haircut.
My Friend: your hairs have not grown long enough.
Me: Arrrrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…..

I hate it when someone belittles my own judgment about the length of my own hair. I know my hair just as Sachin Tendulkar knows his batting. I know when to cut them and when they are threatening to intrude into my eyes are ears. THEY ARE MY HAIRS, BACK OFF!!

And just to avoid any toilet humor, I’m referring to hairs which grow on top of my skull.

The second most exciting day for me in any month for me is the day when I go for a haircut (obviously the first one is the pay-day). I love haircuts; it feels as if a big load has been lifted off my head (this is figuratively as well as literally). But I must confess that I know zilch about hair styling. A typical conversation between me and the barber goes something like this:

Barber: haircut?
Me: Yes.
Barber: how would you like to have your hair done?
Me: Keep it medium.

‘Medium’ – that is the magic word I always use, it’s like the ‘Maha-mantra’ which Baloo teaches Mowgli in ‘The Jungle Book’.

A haircut is the time when I’m at my laconic best. During the whole ordeal I’m quite. So, for once if you want me to see ‘shut-up’ version of me, you have to come to the hair salon when I’m having a haircut. Since I’m quite illiterate about hair styling, it keeps me away from the expensive places of haircutting. I must admit that I have been tempted to go in there, just for the sake of an experience and also sometimes there are pretty girls doing the hair styling. But a morbid fear takes over me; these are some of the doubts which linger in my head

• What if my lack of knowledge is exposed?
• What if people laugh at me?
• What if the latest trend in haircut is unpronounceable as the famous Iceland volcano ‘Eyjafjallajökull’?

Run Shantanu Run! A voice rings in my head and I flee!

I have fond memories of haircut as a kid. I and my dad would go to a place called ‘Avon Hair dressers’. For years I thought that the name as A1 and not Avon….fairly late into my teens I noticed that the actual name was Avon. So you can say that me and the whole haircutting ordeal started on a wrong note altogether.

Avon hair dressers were run by Mr. Kailas and Mr. Ram Das. Well, the real name was Mr. Ram Vilas but for some reason my dad always called him Ram Das – he never corrected my dad. Each time we would go for a haircut, Mr. Ram Das would offer us tea, my dad always declined. This happened almost every time we went there. I now think that Mr. Ram Vilas was avenging us for ruining his name. In an odd sort of way it was funny as well, it was like the incident in the catcher in the rye when the teacher tries to throw the magazine on the bed but always misses! It cracks Holden up in the book.

For over 10 years, I and my dad were faithful customers of Avon Hair Dressers. My faith and enthusiasm was strengthened by the fact that there was restaurant near by which made excellent ‘Chole Bhature’. I would invariably persuade my dad to take me there after the haircut. Thus, on a Saturday or Sunday morning I would have my treat.

If you observe, Haircutting salons are very interesting places. Usually they are situated in the heart of a market place and are thus aware of all the gossips and how the business is doing in general. Barbers are full of information ranging from – ‘Who duped whom in business’ to ‘who got beaten by his wife’. Bear in mind that this information was never shared with me firsthand. I just happen to pick up bits and pieces of conversations. At times during a discussion Mr. Ram Das would let out a cuss word (and I would try very hard to suppress my smile).

After the whole haircutting affair was over, Mr. Ram Vilas would ask me if I wanted a shave, still a toddler in Std. 3 I would decline with a sheepish smile. He would then go on to prophesize that he would be the one who would give me my first shave. Unfortunately this never happened.

We as educated human beings hate to be helpless or be in a situation they can do nothing about. But I have realized that in a barber’s seat you are totally at his mercy (Now I can understand how my married friends must be feeling like). He commands you to tilt your head in various difficult positions. The whole ordeal is like Kama sutra defined for your neck (just that there is no pleasure part involved in it). Mr. Ram Vilas would threaten me if I did not mind my neck, I would get hurt. This was a serious threat (right after Don Corleone’s ‘I will make him an offer he cannot refuse’). I was held at razor-point by a fat and short man, wearing white clothes! (p.s. remove the razor and dress that man in formals and you are talking about one of my bosses!!)

A barber’s salon is an amusing place too. Permanent feature of the place is a bottle of denim aftershave (which I seriously doubt is original), shaving round/v-john shaving cream, a bottle of powder which looks like ponds talcum powder but is actually not, a shaving brush – which looks like it has been through a wrestling match, variety of hair colors for men. There is always a book or posters of various hairstyles which the place has to offer. I’m sure that the models posing with flamboyant hairstyles would make great heroes in any Bhojpuri movie or would star in the next Altaf Raja video. Then there are a variety of scissors and what not! I must tell you that the literature found in a salon is exciting as well. A few years back I used to go a barber in Mumbai which kept old issues of stardust and filmfare.

Barber as a personality himself is full of humor and is very chatty. I mean a barber with razor in his hand with a deadpan expression on his face would look like a hitman or something!!This one time a barber asked me if I went to play Dandiya. Now my dancing skills are equivalent my knowledge about hair styles, so I said I did not. Then the barber went on to tell me that how he once went to play and someone while dancing accidently hit the dandiya on his hands. He promptly searched that creature down and had his revenge as well. Now, that would be a hell of a story to tell your grandkids, wouldn’t it?

The activities post the haircut is torturous as well. You are splashed with water from a spraying can as if you are a flower who is about to die (and trust me, from a close range the sprout of water is really uncomfortable). Another perplexing act is when the barber brings the mirror behind your back and asks for your approval. For a long time (years actually) I was clueless on what he is asking for? Is he checking whether I have a slot in my head like Keanu Reaves in Matrix? Meekly, I would always nod. Years later when I was in Holland, I was working on a tight schedule; I was working weekends as well. One day when I got few hours off, I had a haircut. Much to my surprise, the next day two of my female colleagues approved of my haircut….quite embarrassingly I confessed about my ignorance to the mirror trick. The ladies (one Dutch and one Moroccan) went on to explain me that the barber is asking you to check whether the hair level is uniform or not. Thanks to the lovely ladies, At last there is something about the magic of haircutting which I know.

Speaking about Holland, I was very skeptical about getting a haircut there. I was warned by a colleague to be sure and ask the barber first if he spoke English? So this one day I hopped in a bus and went to a barber. I entered a salon which was owned by a Turkish gentleman and his associate, thankfully they spoke English! After a good 10 months down the line I realized that one of guys giving me hair cut was from Iran. I was an Indian in Holland, getting a haircut in what looked like a Turkish haircutting salon from an Iranian – Damn it! Even my haircut was globalized.

In an unexpected conversation, once the barber asked me why we Indians have such thick hair. Suddenly advertisements of parachute and dabur amla kesh tel flashed in front of my eyes. But instead I preferred to tell him that it was genetic. During my entire stay in Holland, I was a faithful customer of Istanbul Salon; every time I would go there he would offer me tea – which I would politely decline. It was Just like Mr. Ram Das offering tea to my dad – people have Déjà vu, I was having a Deja – haircut!

OK, enough of snip-sniping I have to go now, got to get a haircut!

'Mankha','Diva' & 'Dhag'

2010-12-30T03:02:00.000-08:00

You are wondering about the title, aren’t you?

I know that the title of the post and the image are not at all in sync. But by the end of the blog, I hope I will be able to elucidate everything to my readers.

One of the earliest lessons that I learnt in life was on a cricket field. And it was simple – Never give up. I was lucky to be surrounded by individuals who rubbed this on to me. For anyone who has played any sport with some passion knows the value of fighting unto finish. It’s not over, till it’s over (and that’s from the 70’s).

This blog-post is about one such story, one such man and one such fight.

He was a struggling actor, perhaps spending a lone night in his apartment. A fight was going on – it was between a fighter called Chuck Wepner and the legendary Muhammad Ali. Everybody expected Ali to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee but Wepner and other plans. He fought Ali punch-to-punch till the 15th round, it was in the 15th round he was KO’ed. Nobody expected him to go this far. 2 weeks later Wepner got a call from someone saying that he will make a movie about the fight.

The struggling actor wrote a screenplay. It was about an underdog, a nobody, a low-level boxer getting a shot at the most coveted title in the sporting world: The World Heavyweight championship. Many prominent studios liked the script but wanted a more ‘known’ face to play the underdog boxer but the struggling actor insisted that he will play the lead himself.

The movie was finally made, on a shoestring budget; the movie went on to make millions. It also won the Oscar award for the best movie and best director for the year 1976 – The legend of Rocky ‘The Italian Stallion’ Balboa was born. The world stood up and took notice of that struggling actor – the one who goes by the name Sylvester Stallone.

For years – cutting across generations, sexes, languages and colors, Rocky has been voted as one of the most inspiring movies ever made. The movie, as diehard rocky fans would agree, is not about a man getting an unexpected chance but is about a man standing up to his own ability. About a man who wants to prove something to himself and he has only one shot to prove this. As the above poster says “His whole life was a million-to-one shot”, the million-to-one shot was to prove to himself that he is a man worth his salt.

I would not go detail into the Rocky series (6 movies made over a span of 30 years); you would find them easily anywhere. To be concise and precise – the movies deal with life of Rocky and his family – his hopes, his fears, his rise & fall and ultimately his coup de grace, all of them connected to the hallowed boxing ring. He fights varied opponents with different skills and superior physique – he fights his inner demons as well.

And at the end of all, just when everybody has wrote eulogy to the Rocky saga after the disaster of Rocky-V in the year 1990. Stallone; quite in tune with his screen-ego, made a grand entry back in2006. In the last edition of Rocky, the old decadent boxer says that he wants to go back in the ring because “He has still got some stuff down in the basement”. It would appear to me, as if Mr. Stallone had really some stuff down in his basement – there was something about Rocky he wanted to tell everybody, for one last time Mr. Stallone wanted to be toe-to-toe with his favorite character. Just as all great fighters has got one more fight left in them, Rocky had one more left hook to throw at his sniggering critics.

Rocky is not a pompous sports icon. He is a simple, down-to-earth and stupid human being. He does not have eloquence or grace; all he has is a truckload of grit stashed in his guts and a hammer like left hand. He has some pearls of wisdom of his own but they only shine once in a while. One of the best lines I like in Rocky is when he is asked why he likes this girl Adrian (Talia Shire)…he replies “We fill gaps. She has got gaps, I have got gaps. Together we fill gaps”. When it comes to boxing, Rocky has accepted his fate in a matter of fact manner, when Adrian asks him why he fights, he says “Coz I can’t sing or dance”. You see, he is born to be a fighter and fighters fight.

Over the years, I have found myself watching the Rocky series again and again. Characters like Rocky Balboa bring out a strong message – a message that to reach the stars you don’t have to tread the stairway to heaven, all you need to do is to keep ascending on that steep slope and one day you will be at the destination. You need more than talent to succeed, you need determination, you need the good old blood and guts routine, the patience to hang in there when the chips are down…as Rocky puts it in one of his quotes: “It does not matter how hard you are hit, all that matters is how hard you can get hit and still keep going.”

Earlier this year, when I was in Holland, things got rough in the assignment I was working on. The nature of work required me to work from a third party location. The pressure was tremendous, the harsh winter & snowfall did not make it easier. I would get up early in the morning, eat breakfast on train and then come back late in the evening and then cook food. The whole day at work, I was chasing hourly deadlines, I was attending meetings as well, there were people breathing down on my neck for answers. I would come back home, totally deflated: in body as well as in spirit and in these times I would go through the Rocky movies again and again.

I played my favorite parts of the movie: each movie has a sequence of training before the bout; these sessions were laced with generous amount of quotes dripping with inspiration like “You gonna eat lightning and you gonna crap thunder” and the most intense of them all being “Eye of the tiger”. I would see Rocky enduring tremendous physical agony; I would see him pushing himself to his limits. Then there was the scene on the docs when a jogging Rocky Balboa would burst into a sprint, leaving everything behind, he would leave behind the docs, the pain and the world itself. Images of Rocky climbing a snow clad mountain, ascending to the sanctimonious ‘Rocky Steps’ and pumping his fists in the air…my memories of these images are endless. I would play these training sessions and the fight following them. It did not improve things on the work front but at least next day I found the strength to get up and face challenges again, I would survive one more day of pressure and stress. Watching a rocky movie is like hands on training on courage and guts.

We all have a habit of seeing a creator thru the eyes of his creation (or at least I have). Speaking in same vein, I see a lot of Mr. Stallone thru the last edition of the Rocky movie. Even at the age of 60 something Mr. Stallone goes through an intense physical training. He pounds his hands on the beef; he pumps the iron and goes the distance with a superior athlete. Often we fail to see the effort put behind an act, whenever I see rocky balboa, I’m awed by the acts of Mr. Stallone. In the movie, when Duke Evers, gives a final thundering line to Rocky and says “Let’s go and make some hurting bombs”, I get Goosebumps. The last edition of the rocky movie is a fitting finale to the saga – Rocky goes back to the ring, one last time – not for money, not for fame…he goes for himself.

I come across a lot of people who do not revere Rocky saga the way I do, a usual remark from their side is “Whatever happens in the movie, in the end Rocky always wins”. I could not agree more with them .But it’s not about the destination but about the journey. Do you ever react in the same way when Sachin Tendulkar scores a hundred? In the first edition: Rocky enters the ring as an amateur, in second part...He fights with his right hand (originally the character is shown a left hander), in the third part: he trains as a colored fighter to beat one and in the fourth; he fights a much physically superior opponent. There are differences but it’s we who lack the discerning eye. Plus, to believe in Rocky you have to believe in the strength of human spirit, you have to believe that someone can rise beyond the obvious limits to that proverbial raised bar…you have to believe that Ishant Sharma can last 91 balls and win the test match for India.

There is one dialog in Rocky-II, which sums up the entire spirit and persona of Rocky and his movies. This is Apollo Creed (the world heavyweight champion who is about to fight rocky) speaking to his coach Duke. Duke discourages him to fight rocky for the second time, irritated by the protectionism of his coach Apollo asks him why he does not want him to fight Rocky…this is Duke’s reply, a reply which makes Rocky what he is:

Duke: He's all wrong for us, baby. I saw you beat that man like I never saw no man get beat before, and the man kept coming after you. Now we don't need no man like that in our lives.

This is what the character the movie is all about. It is about that last spark of a tired body and mind which pushes you to go that extra mile, which urges you to fight that 16th round, which constantly eggs you to become a hero. It is the same spark which made Steve Waugh play and score a century with a torn hamstring; it is the same amber which made Malcom Marshall pick up 9 wickets with a broken thumb and more recently our own VVS fighting back spasms to take India to victory against Australia.

And perhaps I should now come around a full circle…

This august, I was travelling back from Mumbai to Pune with my family. I was sitting on the back seat of a TATA sumo. Giving me company were my nephew and niece. They were happy to see me after a long time. My nephew was particularly animated, he had just learnt a few words and he would proudly show them off to me, for the entire duration of the trip he kept on showing me ‘Mankha’ (it is actually ‘pankha’ which in Hindi/Marathi means fan) which was whirring in the car,’ Diva’ (a small backlight which was in the car) and ‘Dhag’ (Marathi for clouds). At least 25 times, he repeated these words. Each time he would repeat it, I would see that he is so happy and excited. It is only in his little heart he knew what those words meant to him. He would say the words again and again with same innocence and enthusiasm. And just my nephew knew the joy of those words and what it meant to him. It’s only me and my crazy heart knows what the Rocky movies mean to me.

Shantanu’s Eleven

2010-12-16T21:57:00.000-08:00

One of these days when I was idling around, I thought (for some reason) it would be fun to compare writers with cricketers. Although, I don’t write much about cricketers and cricket, I’m pretty much a true blue cricket fan – if I have to borrow from the latest Nike ad, I would say that I ‘Bleed Blue’. In my own golden days (Girls, attention please) I was a decent batsman, handy wicketkeeper and a third rate bowler (not necessarily in the same order). I still follow the game with a great passion but I think my playing days are behind me.

So here I’m trying to create a ‘Writer’s XI’ (and frankly a bit clueless so as to where it will go). For obvious reasons I have skipped one-book-wonder writers like DBC Pierre, J.D. Salinger (No offence, Catcher in the rye is a great book). So as I put myself in the shoes of a selector (and a reader) it would be in the best of my efforts to pick up a good cricketing team which mirrors with my favorite writers.

Khaled Hosseini

This might be a leap of faith on my part but whoever has read Hosseini will rate him as a very good writer. What I like about Mr. Hosseini is his clutter free and uncomplicated writing – no hidden meanings, no curving metaphors but good old solid story telling. He puts a very interesting background in his stories – Afganishtan. In a country torn apart by warring clans, dictators and extremists Mr. Hosseini still manages to find a beating human heart full of good things. Both his books – A thousand splendid suns and The Kite Runner are moving account of life in trying times. And just as his books represents all the good things in testing times and his writing is clutter free – I can only think one person who represents all the good things in the field of cricket and his conduct matches his batsmanship – Rahul Dravid (India).

Yann Martel

There is something about Yann Martel which is mystic. He seems to be very profound in his book, yet his writing has a very frivolous and casual feel to it. I hope the word casual is not taken in a lighter vein. He makes an impact on you without shaking you to the core, when I finished reading ‘Life of Pi’, I felt at peace and really happy , sometimes I flip through the pages of Beatrice and Virgil and the same feelings come back to me. He is a bit odd in his approach but he is fantastic nonetheless. He could be that unorthodox yet highly effective batsman in your team or he can be a gentle medium pace bowler who is more effective than he looks and that is the reason I think he is best fit as Sir Richard Hadlee (NewZeland) . Hadlee was never an express bowler; he was a medium pacer but a master of his skill. After all, its not a joke to take 431 wickets in mere 91 test matches!

Frederick Forsyth

Respect!

In the stories of espionage, cold war games and hardcore mercenary combat; FF is better than god himself. Your masculinity will get a boner when you read his books (sorry girls, you may not enjoy his books that much). His books are detailed to the highest degree possible (all of them, no exceptions) and demand every inch of your attention when you read them. He is like that bowler you have to watch all the time; he is at you all the time – relentless like a hungry predator. There are two persons who are in the same league as FF (and it is really hard to decide which one I should go for) – One is Anil Kumble (India) and second is Glenn McGrath (Australia). And I think I’m going to give this one to Glenn. Actually Derek Underwood was similar kind of bowler but then I haven’t seen him play that much.

Mario Puzo

Does he need any introduction? What is the foremost thing which comes to your mind when you think of ‘The Godfather’? … Power. Whom do you think of power when it comes to cricketers? The game has seen hard hitters like Viv Richards, Kapil Dev, Yuvraj Singh and more recently Kieron Pollard but then there is one person who is a towering legend amongst all these, and I think he is pretty much undisputable equivalent of the godfather, a reflection of power and class….. Adam Glichrist (Australia). Close second being Virender Sehwag.

Ayn Rand

Miss Rand’s books are my first mistress (my first love will always be ‘The Godfather’).But then perhaps something about mistress would be infinitely thrilling than having a regular wife (oops politically incorrect again). May be one acts out his/her unfulfilled wishes when he is not chained by bonds of matrimony (ok, that was not a euphemism of weird sex acts). I mentioned in the beginning that I was a third rate bowler (may be still I’m) but then I had this burning ambition to bowl really fast. If you would still give me a chance, all I would want to do is go out bowl really fast, glare at the batsmen, cuss him a little and then give him a perfume ball right on his nose. Man! That would be wicked. Now there have been great fast bowlers all around: Lilly, Thompson, Hall, Roberts, Garner, Marshall, Holding, Croft, Ambrose and Walsh (and yes of course, Wasim Akram and Imran Khan). But I would go with Curtly Ambrose (West Indies). I remember his last test at WACA; I watched him walk away and may be with him my childhood dream of bowling really fast went in the pavilion as well (sniff sniff). Miss Rand’s writing has a razor sharp edge to it and has a great clarity in what she is writing, I’m also inclined to think of her writing as a brilliant batsmen – an ace technician and methodical. Who else but our very own Rahul Dravid?

J.R.R. Tolkien

Whom would you compare to an author who has got power and class to create an entire earth of his own? And then come up with something magical like ‘The Lord of the Rings’. When I see a writer of such Caliber he can only be a master strategist with vision and skill to execute that vision to perfection or he can be that diabolical puppet master whose tweak of fingers can make one character sinister and other heroic. To translate into cricketing language – he can be a captain or he can be a mystery spin bowler, who may look innocuous but has got so many varieties that the opponent (or the reader) would never be able to fathom. When I think of a skipper, one of the best that comes to my mind is Greg Chappell of Australia but somehow I would like to read more of JRR before I make him the captain, so for time I would stick with a spinner and when it comes to magic the world only knows Murali Magic, so the spot goes to Muttiah Muralidharan (Sri Lanka).

George Orwell

Somewhere I feel the ‘Big Brother’ is still watching. Although I have only read 2 of his books Mr. Orwell has been one of my favorite writers for a long time. Somewhere in both of his books (1984, The Animal Farm) he manages to convey a great sense of desperation. Both books end on a sad, nihilistic note. While 1984 is excruciatingly in-your-face, The Animal Farm is more satirical and allegorical. When I see desperation in his books it invariably reminds me of my favorite cricketer of all time, Aussie legend Steve Waugh. Somewhere in his batting I see the same desperateness as George Orwell, Waugh was always desperate to give his best, it would appear that he would rather die than walk back to the pavilion and maybe it is this desperation which mirrors with Orwell’s books. Steve Waugh was desperate for success as his team as well. Tom Moody once said ‘We were a unit hungry for success, Steve made us starving’ and when I think of Steve I can think of no one to replace him.

Orhan Pamuk

You expected him on the list, didn’t you? I have already spoken a lot about Orhan bey and his books. I think I have covered pretty much everything I wanted to say. The emotional ends of his characters – from extreme happiness to tears do remind me of someone, someone very special. When someone asks me about my favorite cricketer (actually nobody does) I’m in a dilemma. There are 3 people who share the first spot in my book = Steve, Sachin and Brian Lara. I’m especially fond of Lara for I too bat left handed like him and if you look at his performances, they too are at extreme end at times, like Orhan bey’s characters – Lara swings in the arc which consists of godliness and a mere mortal. I remember the Frank-Worrall trophy (I think 1997-98) when WI lost the first two tests, Lara scored 153 n.o. and 213 in the next 2 tests and WI won. So it is apt, that my favorite author is equated to my favorite batsmen – Brian Charles Lara. A close second, would be Mark Waugh (Australia) for his grace matches the writing of OP.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Confession time: by the time this blog goes on www, I may not have finished even one book of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s (I’m still reading Love in the Time of Cholera) but the man’s reputation precedes him. He has been touted as the greatest writer alive today and whatever I have read of him, I can say that he is every inch of the greatest writer alive today. Few years back when I took his ‘One hundred years of solitude’ I did not like the book at all. I think I did not understand it. But I think a man who can compare unrequited love to the scent of bitter almonds can only be equivalent to the man who bowled the ‘Ball of the Century’ – Shane Warne. Mr. Marquez, it would appear knows some kind of magic that he can bring the spirit of the most beautiful words to grace his books. He has control over those words, like Shane has over his wrists. It’s not too astonishing that both of them are magicians in their own right. Just as Mr. Marquez could define a love between a man and women, at every stage of their life in a single book, It is quite believable that Shane Warne too, could wrap the entire history of leg-spin bowling in only one delivery.

Kahlil Gibran

Fasten your seat belts, for you are in the greatness train. The prose and the poetry of Gibran transcend the realms of this world. I’m very sure he lived in a plane of senses where mere mortals are not allowed. You see, it’s the same plane where William Blake lived and had his divine visions. They roamed in a higher territory of human existence. And yet somehow they were still earthly enough to put those visions, sensitivities and feelings into words. They often say that one good rock song can change the society (ok, nobody says that only I do) but I’m pretty sure that reading one Gibran book can change your outlook towards writing. And one great should only be crowned by other, so I think one of the greatest all rounder Kahlil Gibran (Poet, Prose writer and painter) is only equivalent to the cricketing all-rounder Sir Gary Sobers (West Indies). And Sir Gary also happens to be the captain of my team.

J.M.Coetzee

JMC is perhaps the second greatest alive author today and you have to read him to believe me. In the past few months I have read 5 books – 2 of them have been by JMC and I think one of them (Youth) come across as one the best that I have read in last couple of years. JMC is a man of terrific skill and has a psychopathic understanding about what he is writing. If you read a Marquez, a Nabokov or a Pamuk book, you would see words used liberally. It’s like a word fiesta out there – revelry of beautiful expressions. But if you read a JMC you would see a great accuracy of expression, a great precision of words and of all a razor sharp sorrow that will cut you into pieces but all this is done subtly. He is like that perfect Swiss watch which never goes out of fashion; his books are oiled to perfection. He represents the perfectness in the art of writing. A perfection exhibited by none other than Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar (India).

As I scroll thru the list, I realize quite a few good books whose authors could not make it into world XI. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov are noticeably missing. But in all fairness before letting someone like Nabokov (a brilliant writer) I would want to read more of him (although I did let Marquez in, but then he is a great writer). I have consciously stayed away from other mainstream fiction writers like Grisham, Sheldon, Lee Child the only one who appeals to me in those genres is Frederick Forsyth.

So there I’m, at the end of my oafish exercise. Not sure what readers will make out of it, it looked like an exercise which I wanted to do myself rather that communicating something via my blog.

But then it’s Friday and the winter is beautiful this year (by Mumbai standards), nobody would mind my little indulgence.

The Man, The women and their secret.

2010-11-29T04:06:00.000-08:00

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns”.

These are the lines from Homer’s epic Odyssey; I find them intriguing as well as true. We all want to hear about ‘the man of twists and turns’ (the use of word man here or afterwards does not imply any gender biasness). A man with a mysterious aura around him is intriguing, he has a million possibilities wrapped in his persona – he could be Clark Kent, he could be superman as well. It’s the secret, the mystery which makes life what it is – the curiosity, which may have killed the proverbial cat but it’s actually the greatest catalyst to life and its discoveries.

It gives me tingles to imagine that what a person’s secret world would be like, my intentions are not voyeuristic but that of literary possibilities. A man’s dual existence – be it as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or be it as Peter Parker and Superman has set the stage for exciting stories and incidents.

The mystery could be surrounding a man or life itself. Perhaps it was curiosity which drove Prometheus to steal the fire from gods and we all know it was curiosity which made Mr. Newton think about apple falling from the tree. To look at this whole curiosity from a cause-effect perspective, it would be fair to say that curiosity pre-supposes a mystery, a secret, an unexplained entity. These are the little oddities which make life what it is; it opens the door to millions of possibilities.

There are plenty of secrets around us – of varied nature and type. If I have to start I would start from god (yes, let’s take up the big guy to the task first). Barring aside a mundane debate of existence of god, the big bang theory – we associate a great mystery with god as well when we say that ‘God moves in mysterious ways’. So it would appear that we are constantly surrounded by secrets all the time, yet we are just bothered about the 8.15 to 5.30 office and ensuring that we clock 9.15 minutes!!

Let’s now divert: let us whisper for once, via this post about you and me. You have some secrets, I have some too. Little did both of us realize that when we meet a new person we open ourselves to mysteries? Sometimes we pause in life to know those mysteries about each other but most of the times we just pop-up a “Hey, how is it going?” and move-on. We have secrets of our own, the ones which we keep purely to ourselves...Carrie Bradshaw in the famous Tele-series ‘Sex and the city’ calls them ‘Secret Single Behavior’. It is these little eccentricities which we have or rituals if you wish to call them which we do when we are on our own. But when we share our lives with someone we come to know about these little nuggets, secrets sometimes get busted too! Sometimes these are willfully shared.

It brings me to an interesting question: Why do we keep a secret? And I find this answer not in the exactness of a scientific experiment but in the fleeting nature of a quote: “The heart has reasons that reason knows nothing of”.

Just as human life is drenched in mystery; it is not surprising to find that secrets find their way in human literature as well. They can be in form of a ‘who-done-it’ mystery by Agatha Christie or they can be in form of hidden meanings in a poem, even the great poet Pablo Neruda says:

"Te amo como se aman ciertas cosa oscuras, secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.
(I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.)"

But I do not wish to give a dissertation on human life and secrets, if I continue more in the same vein, I would be shooting off in tangents. Let me come back to the centre: I have been plagued by a question: a question raised by a man, a woman and their story….How far will you go to keep a secret?

I must set a premise of this whole keeping a secret argument; a practical and worldly wise soul may simply claim “Why keep a secret, why inflict the burden upon oneself?” It’s a just question but only the person who is bearing the secret can know why he is going through an excruciating torture. If you have not kept a secret for anyone, however small it may be, I suggest you do not read the post further.

I would not give you the name of the man, the women or of their story. That would be quite an anti-thesis to all the glory of secrets I have been oozing with, for the same reasons I would also not give any ‘**SPOILERS**’. I had put up a picture on the beginning of this post, which would have been a give-away, moments back I deleted it. May be this way, you and I would share a secret. But then, I would leave enough clues and I’m sure that a smart reader such as you would be able to decode it.

The more I immerse myself in their story, the more I’m convinced that the concept of absolute good and absolute bad is a hypothetical one, of perhaps it’s a matter of paradigm and the oft discussed ‘Paradigm Shift’. The heroes and the villains walk through the same twilight where the evening and the night meet. Their paths, their ideas mingle with each other. In past, religion and literature have done their due in pointing out the good and the bad to us but in reality the distinct identification is not so absolute. A big mystery for me is what is good? And what is bad?

Art and literature have done their bit in pointing out good and bad in what remains a biggest tragedy to have embraced human civilization – The Holocaust. One instantly visualizes images of millions of cadavers, the smoke coming out of the chambers, the ruthless German guard and the man with the little moustache. Throughout the art world the subject of extermination of the Jews is more or less like a sacred cow – it is treated with utmost sensibility and care. Noted cine-makers around the world have contributed good movies be it Steven Spielberg’s ‘Schindler’s List’, Roberto Benigni’s ‘Life is beautiful’ or the recent ‘The boy in stripped pajamas’, one sees a very heartfelt narrative of the tragedy. These movies make you cry, make you question.

Bookshelves are filled with works on holocaust too; I hear Primo Levi’s ‘If this is a man’ is a definitive work. Anne Frank’s ‘Diary of a young girl’ is a moving account of the tragedy.

But have we ever given a benefit of doubt to the perpetrators of this crime? I do not wish to play a devil’s advocate to the Nazis, but as a writer for this post my idea is to serve perspective and not take sides or pronounce judgment. I live in a country where Ajmal Kasab also gets a lawyer, in the dominion of law, all are equal.

I do not wish to challenge the boundaries of the law; I certainly wish to challenge the compassion of a human heart. Was every German responsible for holocaust? The numbers say that there are about 8,000 Germans who worked in Auschwitz, were all of them as brutal as the other? What if there was one good amongst them? History has always been written by the victorious, would you be totally surprised if your perception of history is distorted? There is a wonderful line in the story which says “If you want to know about the holocaust go to literature, don’t go to camps. Nothing comes out of the camps”. The statement couldn’t be more incorrect. Literature from holocaust is a one dimensional view from one party, the story which I’m mentioning talks about the other side as well.

The story I wish to talk about is set in a post second world-war Germany and is about a woman and her secret (at least to begin with), through the wheels of destiny set in motion the man also becomes a witness to the secret. Their meetings are passionate and clandestine. You might say that they enjoy keeping the secret as well. Their so called ‘affair’ is a secret they share, yet one cannot say for sure that it is only the physical needs which drives them, there is more to the picture than meets the eye. The woman wants the man to read her books; this is the only other activity which they do together.

Just as they meet, they depart as well. The woman has her reasons to leave, we only come to them later but we see that the man is scarred for life. His other relationships with women are meaningless and often short. He openly confesses to his own daughter that he has never been free with anybody. He carries a secret too – a secret scar. This is how far he would go to keep a secret; he would rather ruin his life than blurt it out. Why does he keep a secret? Only he knows.

Their paths cross again, this time in a court room. The man witnesses the trial of the women. He has a secret with him, the one would change the nature of the trial but still he keeps mum, she seals her lips as well. The man suffers from the moral guilt of a lawyer, not being able to bring proper justice in this world. Time takes its course till they reconnect again, this time via books.

Just like any story which revolves around a central issue, the hidden playmaker in this story is the holocaust. But, unlike all its predecessors the movie does not deal with the images of Auschwitz or Krakow, it speaks of the aftermaths of the horrible incident.

The silence of both man and woman in the story (who are German by nationality) is largely attributed to what is come to known around the historians as ‘The German Guilt’. It was only a fraction of German army who were responsible for the holocaust, yet somewhere the whole nation bore the wrath, the wrath not from the outside world but from the inside as well.

In the larger scheme of things – the silence of both protagonists is the silence of guilt, which is metaphorically the German guilt. A prominent Nazi officer claimed in Nuremberg trial that "A thousand years will pass and this guilt of Germany will not be erased." The story which I mention is the ripple of effect of the same statement.

If one would see the story as a piece of art then the aura of secrecy slips by easily. It happened with me as well, but just as I witness the story again and again. I’m reminded by the power of secrets, their beauty and the little seed of human life which they carry in their heart.

The Ghost of the november past...

2010-11-06T05:49:00.000-07:00

“How does one ever write about a song?” I ask myself. You do not need a discerning eye to relate to any form of art, all you need is empathy. For once you have to get up from your comfortable rocking chair and enter into the artist’s world – a world of discontent. In order to write about the song I have to slip into a second skin. I have to swim across the ripples of time to reach a point when I’m pure – Pure, not in a worldly sense but pristine enough to write the words which will follow. I must subject myself to afflictions of body and mind .Yet I must not reek of them, I must be as scentless as Tamarisk flowers. My consciousness needs to be elevated to a level where one only sees darkness; the heart must reach vulnerability where it only demands hope. I should aim to ascend to a point where my voice must be accompanied by an orchestra – rising and falling between my own darkness and hope. I need to attune myself to music of the orchestra where my sobs must propagate into the strings of a guitar where my hope must rise with the rising chorus of the violins. I have to live in a world which moves with music – as beautiful as that world is, it is also a world which is ephemeral, and it exists as a twang of a guitar or the caress of a violin or in a simple hum of a piano-key.

I need to witness the death and feel its reverberations long in my heart. Yet I must also be that acute optimist which believes in life. I need to dissolve myself in a twilight zone – not the one where the night meets the day but in a zone where life meets death. And I must not falter and slip from this thin line – one step on either side would make me an incorrigible optimist or a vulgar nihilist. Somewhere through vicious acts of torture yet unknown to this world and to my own self, I must summon a feeling of love lost – not in the mundane cobwebs of life, but lost forever, forever in the lap of death. I must tell the hopes, desires and memories of that love as if they were my own.

Quite a herculean task, isn’t it?

I try to find some adjectives for the music in the song: heart wrenching solo, apocalyptic violins, subdued piano, sweeping overture, flowing string arrangement, rusty voice, the violent crescendo and so on. But I feel as if I’m going for a verbal overkill, trying to hide behind the façade of big and pompous words. But then I’m scared, very-very scared. The significance of this post unnerves me; the significance of the song and its memories unnerves me as well. When I write about this song, I feel like a doctor operating his loved one, his hands shake from the fear of failure.

The words stay with you forever, over the years songs have stayed with me forever stashed away in my IPod. They are like personal emotional tablets – you can diagnose yourself and treat yourself with them. When I feel a little flat I tend to play Audioslave’s ‘I am a highway’ or Green Day’s ‘Boulevard of broken dreams’. When I feel angry I play Metallica’s ‘Turn the page’. When I feel rebellious I play ‘Another Brick in the wall’ or better Skid Row’s ’18 and Life’…. I can go on and on like this, falling emotionally sick every time and recovering by myself. I have a song for every mood. With all fairness, it would be correct for me to say that more than people – it has been the books and the music which has been around me for the most of the time. But there is one song I never play, the particular one in mention here. You may think of me like a choosy little boy who wants to wear his best dress only on special occasions.

I have always felt that any great piece of art stems from the bottom of the heart of an artist. His best work is about something close to his heart. It is for this reason I have loved Rock n Roll, even with its wildness, the music comes straight from heart, it is the sheer honesty which makes it tick. The great thing about art in human life is its capacity to make us ‘feel’ and that’s why I love this song because even though for a tiny amount to time, it takes me to that November, the November which I will always remember. Why would I be then a vulgar analyst hell-bent on dissecting a melody using extravagant words? Do you ever spoil the beauty of a blue moon by measuring its diameter?

“So what is that attracts me to this song?” I again find questioning myself. “Human beings have not invented an emotional camera to capture their feelings”, that’s my first response to myself. In some way this song captures quite a range of my own emotions. The song is like a personal time travel for me. The moment it springs up in my IPod, a part of me travels back into the land of memories. When I hear this song, I smile, it’s a kind of smile I would flash to a friend I know for many years; the one who knows me very well. I softly mutter to myself, almost at a subconscious level “here it is again”.

Like the basic human nature itself, the song reflects between hope and disaster, between tears and smiles, between love and separation. The song, in its spirit, is so close to real life that it tends to take over the life itself. Till some time it flickers between love and loss but in the end, it just bursts out like a volcano. It’s not a dopey song sung by some boys in the backstreet, it’s about men who have seen the glitz as well as the gutter.

The song is inspired from a short story by Dell James called ‘Without you’ from a book called Language of Fear, Mr. James also happens to be the biographer for the band. Most of the readers may not like the story – It is about a drugs ridden self-destructive rock music icon battling the loss of his beloved. He is at the pinnacle of the music world, at the height of material success, yet he cannot be with the women he loves, it is this void in his life which pushes him to the brink of death.

To any living being, self destruction is not an appealing theme. It’s a tragic spiral in which when one descends, there are meager chances that he will ascend back to real life. Kurt Cobain, Jimmy Hendrix, John Bonham, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin – the world of rock n roll has its martyrs. Rock n Roll (and all associated genres) has always been scarred by drug abuse, violence and blasphemy. The song in its essence encapsulates the self – destructing spirit of a rock star – the reasons? Who needs reasons? No amount of reasoning can justify taking one’s life, but then, the song is about love and no amount of reason in this world can define or justify love as well.

The song is about that vulnerable spot in the heart, it is about that emotional ambivalence, it is about that constant sniggering doubt of an infatuated heart. While the words tend to portray the doubt, The musical assembly tends to give a feeling of grief to the listener – it is not just grief but a grief of varying style and magnitude – first subdued (the piano and violin in the beginning), then crestfallen (the mid-solo by slash) and finally erupting (vocals by Axl rose accompanied by Slash). The song, although not in a musical way but it is psychedelic in nature, you will not notice when it quietly slips into your being and become your song. Eminem says in his song “Music can alter moods and talk to you, Can it load a gun before you and cock it too?” Damn right Marshall Mathers, it can!

To view a song as an individual piece would be a folly, for it is a part of the jigsaw – it is a part of lesser known and unofficial ‘Death Trilogy’ from Guns n Roses – a trilogy comprising of this song and other two from the band- Don’t Cry and Estranged. In fact all the videos are deeply inspired from the story without you (or is it the other way round?). The videos are scenery of chaotic images and all of the images tell a personal story about the band. And with the images of a musician besieged with his love-life there are also reflections of an individual struggling to cope up with mercurial stardom. The songs (you will find it both Ironic as well as fitting) belong to two sets of albums named Use Your Illusion – I and Use Your Illusion – II.

“So, I have been honest to myself in writing this?” I find myself asking again. May be not, if I cannot be honest enough in writing this, I can be honest enough to admit that I’m not honest. But then I have long realized that being totally honest in non-fiction requires two things – a. you need to be a celebrity, b. you need to be courageous. And when it comes to writing the two things are related.

There is a story which goes behind the song; Axl Rose was working on this song on and off, he would play it randomly play the song on piano in the lobby of a hotel where they were staying and he would then say "Someday this song is gonna be really cool." Quite an understatement I would say.

For past 3 years, I have been trying to write about this song and borrowing a few lines from the song, for the past 3 years it has been ‘hard to hold the candles’. A lot of articles on the subject have met their grave in the recycle bin of my computer. As I think of the dying words of this blog-post, I feel confused – for I would never know if I would ever live up to my own feelings for the song. I feel like in order to write about this song, I have kicked a mountain and I’m waiting to see whether it shifts or not. After a long-long time I have exorcized the ghost of the November past and the ghost of the memory of the old November as well…

Oh, yes, the song happens to be named November Rain.

Kahaani Mere Ghar Ki

2010-10-25T20:10:00.000-07:00

The characters in the post written below are real and they have the exact weird and twisted personalities mentioned in the lines to come. Their semblance with their own neurotic, self-destructive and movie loving persona is not at all coincidental albeit it is deliberate and meant to demean their existence. This post has adult content of cheap and abusive writing, bad jokes, rodent and reptile cruelty and oh! Yes…. It has a mention of Rakhi Sawant as well. I repeat that following entertainment is very-very contemptible and melodramatic only thing which can compete with this post is a KJo movie.

Scene-I: The Breach

Curtains open at apartment XXX in Navi Mumbai

SJ: We have a rat in our house.

SD (mimicking ACP Pradyuman from CID): Oh My God! "दया ज़रा जा के पता लगाओ कहीं यह चूहा CWG village की गन्दगी से तो नहीं आया?"

SJ: Dude, we got to do something. I will bring the rat kill…. "इसे खाकर चूहे मरे बाहर जा कर"

SD (returning to sanity): Ok. Good idea. We need to block the small window above the kitchen or maybe we can get Naagin Mallika Sherawat from Hissssssssss , she can eat the rat!

SJ (thoughtfully): May be we should wait till Ganpati is over; we shouldn’t kill the rat during Ganpati.

SD: yeah, that’s a good plan. Let’s not tick off the big guy, its bad enough we drown him every year. Dead rat or not-I’m pretty sure that we are both going to hell.

And so the brave, young, handsome men endured the terror of the rat for days to come…

Scene-II: The enemy within

A sound coming from the house……Phat-Phat-Phat……

SD: What’s that sound, bitch?

SJ (worried): we need to buy 'लक्स्मन रेखा', there are ants intruding into our house from outside.

SD (sleepily): he…he…..Are those ants Australian? Then 'लक्स्मन रेखा' would work well. I think 'हरभजन रेखा' would work well too, I think just 'रेखा' would be fine as well.

SJ (mimicking the Asian paints ad): "ऐसा नहीं है भईया"!! We need to get rid of them; else they will come into the kitchen as well.

And the horrible sound continues if you ever visit the apartment xxx, the whispering stale wind would carry the echoes phat…phat…phat.

Scene-III: We got company!

Ganpati festival is now over and now the young knights have equipped themselves with Rat Kill and लक्स्मन रेखा(रेखा was not available)… the latter has acted really fast.

SJ (demonically): Ha Ha Ha….all the ants are dead.

SD: this is genocide. You have wiped out an entire generation. I’m sure Shobhaa De is going to write a book about it.

SJ (investigating into the kitchen): the rat kill is gone; I think our little visitor has fallen into our trap.

SD: Dude, I seriously hope he dies outside, if he dies inside I am not dumping his body.

SJ (looking around out in kitchen, pointing behind the fridge): when we moved in, why we didn’t clean this mess? There is so much of crap lying around here, I mean real CRAP from insects and looks like so many geckos are attracted towards it.

SD (bursting out in laughter): I can’t believe geckos are attracted to insect shit, how come their standard has gone down? Is it due to the sub-prime crisis? "दया ज़रा जा के पता लगाओ"

Scene-IV: Shit Happened!!

SJ and SD enter into the house...

SJ (to SD): Dude, Did you fart?

SD: NO!!! But what’s that stench? Is Varun Ahuja from hostel is making a comeback?

SJ (smelling): looks like somebody died.

SD (ominously): It’s that f@#*ing rat.

Then SD and SJ, clad in their shorts and sandos (ok girls and perverts I can see your hands down your pants) venture in to the land of unbearable stink. SD says that it’s like Frodo and Sam going into Mordor. They then debate over who Sam is and who Frodo is.

SJ (after searching for sometime and returning to ACP Pradyuman style): Oh my god! "यहाँ पे तो लाश है" I found it, the SOB died inside the house!

SD (gritting his teeth): I’m going to sue Rat kill or better I will go to "राखी का इन्साफ" for justice.

SJ: We need to get rid of the body

SD (curtly): You do it. It’s your equipment which has failed (equipment = rat kill, what else were you thinking?).

SJ (now speaking passionately): I kill the ants. I bring the लक्स्मन रेखा. I cook food as well; you should do something for this house! And FYI: MY EQUIPMENT WORKS!!

SD (at loss of words, then remembering the asian paints ad again):वाह छोटे तू तो बड़ा speaker हो गया है. Let’s remove the body together.

SJ: Deal. But I got to do some stuff first then we clear the body.

SJ leaves the scene, in the mean time ridden by the guilt of not doing anything SD clears the body himself and seals it in double d-mart bags.

SD (to SJ): It’s done.

SJ: wow! Where are we going to dump the body?

SD (whispering secretly): we should wear black trench coats with matching hats. I will make sure that my fingerprints are removed from the bag. You take out the vehicle and we will drive to the dumpster near the apartment. I will dump the body and then we will celebrate the death of the enemy.

SJ (in a hushed voice): and make sure that when you are near the dumpster, you collect your rotten brain from there as well.

Then in next few minutes, they dump the body and ride away in the dark lanes of navi mumbai.To celebrate the success of the ordeal, they watch Harold and Kumar go to white castle accompanied by beers.

Scene-V: Face to Face

SJ (with a broom in his hand, jumping up and down): हू हा , हू हा, हुर्र.....

SD: Dude, what you doing?

SJ: It’s the gecko, I want to get rid of, and there are two of them in my room.

SD: So, ‘हू हा , हू हा, हुर्र.....’ in gecko language means: ‘Go away from my room’? Maybe you should try ‘हू हा, हू हा’ It has got more african theme to it and get rid of the broom, you look like an idiotaa !!

SD departs into his room….After a few seconds

SD (visibly scared): There are two geckos in my room too. But I know just the kind of man who can help us with this problem.

SJ (curiously): Who? Rajinikanth?

SD: No.My dad.

SJ: WTF?

SD (explaining): I will ask my dad if he knows some repellant for geckos.

SJ: Let me Google it.

SD: What an idea, sirji!!

Dear reader, you may find SJ’s Googled result here: http://www.getridofthings.com/get-rid-of-lizards.htm
Here you will also find a quote from Jim Morrison about the glory of heroin.

SJ: They are afraid of naphthalene balls, let’s use them.

SD(looking distant and pondering): May be we should buy Sun Tzu’s ‘Art of war’ and lay out a strategy and then launch a full scale attack on the geckos.

SJ (incredulously): F**k Off! Let’s use the broom and the balls.

SD(laughing): Broom and the balls, sounds like a sequel to Pride and Prejudice!

The two soldiers now march into SD’s room to get rid of the two geckos. In the meanwhile one of the geckos has moved under the bed.

SD (in a Nana Patekar tone): ‘मुश्किल वक़्त, commando सख्त'. SJ, you watch my back…I will dump the two naphthalene balls under the bed and then we will take cover.

SJ: Really? Watch your back? There are prettier things in the world.

SD (tossing the naphthalene balls): Fire in the hole!

One of the balls hit the gecko on the nose and she runs.

SJ: Orbit white! It’s working.

SD (thoughtfully): Now we move in for a close range dog-fight, you drive her away with the broom and I will open the window.

SJ: हू हा, हू हा, हुर्र ....हू हा, हू हा, हुर्र ....

SD moves with stealth and open the window, a scared and wounded gecko glares at him. SJ continues to drive her towards the window. But the Gecko hides in the mesh of CPU wires.

SJ: She is not moving anymore. We need to get closer. The हू हा is not working.

SD (taking the broom, putting a hand on SJ’s soldier): I will see you on the other side, comrade. And if I die, tell Bhuppi in Pune to have an extra Manchurian on Wednesday in his office canteen in my remembrance and also tell Kapil that : ‘अच्छे लोगों की दुनिया में कोई कीमत नहीं हैं'.

SJ: whatever!

SD then pushes the gecko from behind the CPU, SJ stomps his feet to scare her and finally she is away.

SD: one down and one to go.

SJ: the other one is on the top of tube light and she is not moving at all.

SD (thinking): Shall we switch off the light? In that way she will think that there is no one in the room, also the insects will not come inside so she might go away.

SJ (dejectedly): FML! I’m playing mind games with a wall-lizard.

They then sit huddled in the corner watching the gecko but she is unmoved. SJ finally turns on the light.

SJ: I will climb up the bed and see if हू हा works. Comrade, I will see you on the other side but if anything happens to me, please bury my-iphone with me and gift a new toothbrush to our roomie.

SD (tears in his eyes): May be the force be with you!

SJ then does हू हा dance with the broom and the gecko moves, inspired by the success, he continues and the gecko is finally driven out. In the same vein with a daring combination of हू हा and the broom, the other room is also cleared.

Scene-VI: Inception

Scene opens with SD and SJ sipping coffee after office hours…

SJ: I had a weird dream last night, that there is gecko in the dangling plaster on the roof of my room and she is staring at me. Freaky!

SD (dramatically dropping the coffee glass and rising from the chair): You have been incepted. Now downwards is the only way forward!!

**Curtains**

Author wishes to address following entities:

• Pamela Anderson – Pam, you have to realize that this is not animal cruelty we had to kill/get rid of the damn things and BTW are you planning to strip soon for PETA campaign?

• SJ aka Swapnaj Jain – thanks for the encouraging lines of “you have got mad-mad writing skills”. For being a great cook, a fierce lizard hunter and a master planner when it comes to slaying rats.

• Bhuppi – मतलब जमता है तो wednesday को extra manchurian खा लेना.

• Kapil – Thanks for the line which we have been using for almost 8 years now!

• To the CID Team of Daya, ACP Saab, Abhijit, Dr. Salunkhe etc. – You know who you are and WE LOVE YOU!

• Laxmi Brand Jhadu – The faithful weapon in time of crisis.

• Van Haren – For making chappals fit for killing ants.

• Christopher Nolan for making Inception – Sir, It’s an honor to steal lines from your movie.

• Apple Inc. – For creating I-Phone on which this blog was read for the first time.

• Larry Page and Sergey Brin – For creating google and google transliteration which lets you type in any laguage.

The Yellow Lamppost

2010-10-14T03:44:00.000-07:00

As my day ends, I gather the remains of it and I trudge back home. It’s a long walk to reach home. The lamp-posts stand on one side of the road, all beaten and bowed. I feel like a king who has come from a great war and has lost everything in it. I burden the faithful road yet again with my desires, desperation and darkness.

I recollect my mornings- beautiful and brimming with vigor but the twilight is a long walk of solitude. I realize that somewhere the light of the day is blessed with magical powers, witchcraft, sorcery of sorts – it sucks the life out of you. I feel like Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde – one which wakes up in the morning is not the same as one which comes back in the evening.

I casually glance back on the road and I see traffic receding away from me, a city which gives you hoards of people, the same city gives you scores of lone moments as well.

After a few minutes the night descends upon the sky.

As sun’s last train departs from the sky and the engine of moon announces its arrival. A yellow lamppost comes to life. It rubs its eyes a little and finally comes to existence with a faint crackle. He is the opening act for the night; he is the overture before the black symphony takes over.

I often look at this yellow lamppost from my room. We often speak to each other via a staring contest. My gaze is fixated on it and a million thoughts swerve around my head, I need to look at the lamp’s glow – it is the epicenter of all my thoughts. My thoughts revolve around the post – like a merry -go-round does about a pivot. I breathe life in and out of my breaths, my body lies slumped on the window pavement but my soul hovers over the lamppost.

I look at the spreading light from the lamp, it is bright and it illuminates the road. There are some trucks standing nearby and some dogs napping. But who provides the light to the lamp? ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodies’, ‘who will guard the guards’,’ Who will watch the watchmen’ …He stands stoically – like a revolutionary facing a firing squad or like a soldier witnessing his own court martial.

Has he resigned to the darkness inside him? Or has he poured all his light out to the mankind – to those travelers on the road, to those scavengers in the alley looking for food, to those dogs who protect their turf, that he has no light left of his own?

The lamppost is often visited by an old moth. He doesn’t swerve around the light like young and vivacious insects but they whisper silently in the dark. This picture of a silent conversation often reminds me of a septuagenarian talking to his old dog. Both are tired of life, the ‘f’izz out of their life is gone and only a moribund ‘lie’ is left.

I see a truck standing just below the lamppost. I imagine whether the driver would be talking to his loved ones – somewhere in a village where there would be no electricity. Perhaps he would be telling his little son that one day when he would have enough money, they would stay at a better place. They would climb one step ahead in the ladder of life or maybe he would be telling his wife that he would he home for diwali and would bring presents.

I wonder what the lamppost would be feeling. What he is going to do this diwali? May be an old worker from the government would climb up and clean him. And for a day or two, a sparkle would remain in the eyes of the lamp – reminding him that there are still some remnants of life left in his attic. For once, the lamp would feel young again.

On the other side of a road there is a young man, talking to someone on phone. He talks in a sweet hushed voice, maybe it’s his inamorata. He would be making the promises of the future or repenting over the follies of past or it would be one those moments of intense longing when he just would have wanted to hear her voice.

” Does this remind him or his own youth?” a question that invariably springs into my mind. How he would be listening to those words – maybe he remembers someone as well, someone from years gone by – it was so long that it would now appear to him as another lifetime.

The lamp stands overlooking a huge building, perhaps there was a time when he would have been looking at the building but they don’t talk any more, an irreparable damage, a tease of a lifetime.

Then it begins to drizzle…

The tiny rain drops pass the lamp – he gladly shines a beam or two on to them, like an old railway station master of a dilapidated station happily waving green light to the new superfast train, but in his hearts of heart he wishes that someday some train would stop by.

The rain drops are oblivious to his presence; they blend with darkness and are not seen again. It appears as if they steal the light from the lamp and hide it in the bosom of the night. Just like I do, does rain makes the yellow lamppost nostalgic as well?

Weary souls continue to walk down the road and the lamp post continues to burn for them. Sometimes I could not help but asking myself “does the lamppost stare into the soul of these humans?” Standing aloft isn’t the lamp tempted to look what’s going on inside a man?

Can’t he just send one stream of light to banish away the darkness inside? Often I ask this question to him, but he has never replied or may be my voice was drowned in the endless dog barking down the alley.

The dogs keep a vigil near the lamp, they bark incessantly at times during the night. They are vexed by the fact that they cannot be one with the darkness. The towering lamppost acts as a moral messiah over them – he prevents them from sneaking into an unknown turf, the light of the lamp, acting on behalf of a light which emanates right from the heaven.

My legs are weary now; I have been standing at the balcony for long now, just letting my thoughts flow with the wind. I see there are a few playful insects bumbling around the lamp and from one angle it looks as if the lamp is happy, like an old grandfather who relishes each moment with his little grandchildren.

I slump into my bed; the remains of my day no longer remain with me. The ever consuming rage of night has gobbled them and used it as a fuel to light the moon. I feel a numbing pain flowing through my veins and lulling me to sleep. The lamp still stares…

A glow of light permanently comes through my window right till my bed. The lamp keeps an eye on me – is it mere platonic love or perversion? Will he secretly stimulate his darkness by borrowing some of my own? Sometimes in the morning, I wake up very happy and content; I feel as if someone has robbed all my sorrows, I miss that ever-present yet intangible tease in my heart. I suspect that it’s the lamp which has stolen it from me.

I wake up in the next morning and see that the lamp has lost its light. The dogs are not barking in the alley anymore and the old moth has also bid goodbye. The vigil of the old watchdog has just ended.

Mine has just begun…

One Fine day...

2010-09-29T19:06:00.000-07:00

Sitting in that café, I was restless…

And the fact that I could not find why I was restless made me more restless. May be it was the new city, maybe it was the jet lag, may it was at the prospect of seeing her. I had known her for so many years, yet my mind kept going back to one conversation we had years back…those were two hours of shy smiles and stolen glances and giving peace a few more chances.

I already had a cup of strong black coffee but still that did not help so I ordered for one more. After a few moments later, a pretty girl served me a cup. I left my normal seat and for a moment though would sit on the couch, but the couch it seemed was already occupied.

After a few moments, I saw her coming from the other side. She didn’t quite strut or ramp-walked like other girls, she moved with elegance she was completely unaware of, I liked the way she covered the distance between us. She entered the café and pointed me to a table of two which was empty

I moved to the table with her and we chatted, even after years it seemed so familiar, we had those silly awkward moments when our gaze would just hold each other for a while then, like a rubber uncoiled we would let it go. She had a cup of coffee and we had a sesame bun. She asked me where I wanted to go, I told her that I just wanted to roam around and feel the city.

A few minutes later we stood in front of an imposing building, she told me that we have to go inside and she will go and enquire about the tour timings, nodding to her like an obedient child, I stared at the huge skyscraper and the huge sculpture of Atlas in front of it.

After a rather informative tour, we were closing in at the lunch time, she took me to a local eatery where, according to her “Hamburgers were awesome”. After finishing my hamburger (which was indeed excellent), we decided to check out a couple of museums. By the time museums were over, I was craving for another cup of coffee.

“There is a Starbucks right across the road” she said.

“Why don’t we pick up the coffees and sit in the park nearby?” I suggested

As I entered into the park, I was transcended into a new world. The leaves had changed their colors and some of the old ones have departed from the tree. It looked like as if the whole place has been splashed with colors by a naughty child. It was fall time, perhaps the most beautiful season made by god.

We sat on the grass and chatted about the old times after sometime her phone rang.

“It’s my mom calling, I got to take this one” she said and walked away.

As she drifted away, I took a stroll through the park. At a distance I could see a tall man on a bridge. I walked towards the bridge, hoping to get a good view from there.

I walked towards the bridge; I could see the man on the bridge was tall and almost angularly skeletal. His hairs were blown away by the crisp breeze and a few buttons of his shirts were missing.

“Excuse me” I said. “Could you take a picture of me with the stream in the background?” I asked politely.

“Sure” he said. He looked at me and smiled. It was a strained smile but it was a smile of recognition.

After a few photographs, I saw that she was looking for me. “We got to see a few more places before it gets dark” she said.

“OK” I said robotically.

For a few more hours we did the touristy thing of brightly lit squares and then sun finally bade goodbye.

“Let’s have a quick drink” I suggested.

A quick cab ride later we were at a swanky looking place. After waiting for a while we were ushered in and I could see one table was empty.

A few moments after we sat at the table, the maître came to us and said “Sir, this table is reserved”.

“I see no ‘RESERVED’ sign” my friend protested.

“Can you step towards the corner for a moment?” he said to my friend politely. She obliged.

What followed was a few minutes of hushed whispers and lot of arm waving, my friend came back to me and said: “They have put a table for us near the bar, but we have to leave this one”

En route to the second table, she told me that the table belonged to some hot-shot. His name ended with word ‘way’ or ‘say’, I couldn’t hear properly because of the music in the place.

A couple of drinks later, we left the place and walked towards a residential area. she told me that she has to inform her friend that she was running late but her phone had run out of battery.

“I’m going to run to the nearest pay phone” she said.

“I will wait here on the bench” I said pointing to the bench near to the sidewalk.

As I sat on the bench and waited for her, a teenager came and sat beside me. He wore an unusually long coat and had something hidden inside it. He was also drunk. I grew a little skeptic, but then I heard the teenager humming something:

“Gin a body meet a body, Comin thro' the rye”. “Gin a body meet a body, Comin thro' the rye”

He seemed to be stuck at the lines. A few seconds later I chipped in and said:

“Gin a body kiss a body, Need a body cry?”

I knew that this as was an old song for children, even at this age I loved humming it. The boy looked at me underneath his cap and muttered a “Thanks”.

She arrived after making the call and we walked off. My watch said 8.00 PM. We both realized it was time for us to part. I broke the silence and said “I should get going”.

“I will call a cab” she said. In a moment I was in the cab, she leaned over the window and said “Listen, I will be in India by the year end, will you be around?”

“I might fly to Holland around thanksgiving” I said. We looked at each other and smiled. Perhaps we smiled at the irony of our fates. A wicked, wicked fate that never kept us in the same city at the same time.

I got into the cab and started talking to the taxi driver; he was a weird sort of a skinny guy with a Mohawk haircut and had eyes so intense that it scared the crap out of me. I told him my hotel address and we were on our way. On the way, the traffic was very heavy and at one corner of the street there was a jam. I got out of the cab to see what was wrong. At the same time, another guy entered the cab, thinking that it was empty.

“I want to go to 161 Lexington Avenue, Ra-ma-da Inn” the man said with a thick accent.

“This cab is taken, sir” the cab driver replied. The man got out of the car and started looking for another cab.

As I was nearing my hotel, I felt like taking a small walk. So I told the cab to stop a block ahead of the hotel. I paid him and walked in the crisp October air.

Just after a few minutes I saw that a man was being shot by other two guys. The man under target was an old man who was buying oranges. Just as he crossed the road and approached the car, he saw two men coming towards him, he hastened and called out to his aid but by that time he had got two bullets in his back and he collapsed on the bonnet of his car and then finally on the curb. I saw shooters taking aim at him again so I ran.

“Bang-bang” I heard two more shots. One bullet hit me on the shoulder and other crashed into my lower back….a darkness descended in front of my eyes.

And I woke up sweating…

“Bad dream?” my flat-mate asked me. Still too shocked to answer, I could only utter a feeble “YES”.

“Hang on, I will get you a cup of tea” he said and went towards the kitchen.

I went into the balcony and stared outside. It was hot; there was no crisp fall air, no falling leaves, there was no girl. It was a hot Mumbai morning. I stood in the balcony sipping my cup of tea. The dream has been so real that it scared the living daylights out of me. I stood there, recollecting the instances, focusing on the details:

I sat in the café named Central Perk, wait! Wasn’t that the place where characters from F.R.I.E.N.D.S hung out? Damn it! Those were the guys who were sitting on the couch and it was Rachel who served me coffee!

I continued the post-mortem of my dream. Next we have been to a park, I remembered the man on the bridge…tall, loose limbed with flowing hair. That man bore an uncanny similarity to Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark. I remembered the bar and the table from which we were asked to vacate……that table belonged to someone with name ending with’ way’. I tried to remember all the characters I knew – from books and novels and from Tele Serials. Then suddenly I remembered Jimmy Conway, played by none other than Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 gem ‘Goodfellas’.

As my mind was clearing up…. The teenager sitting on the bench was Holden Caulfield from J.D.Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’, singing the Robert Burns poem on which the novel is titled’. Then I was in the taxi with the driver with intense eyes and Mohawk haircut…”How weird for a taxi driver?” I said to myself…hang on! It’s De Niro- Scorsese combo again, this time from the 1974 classic ‘Taxi Driver’.

Then, the man who wanted to go to Lexington Avenue? I thought hard but it did not ring a bell. I hollered my roommate and asked: “Dude, 161 Lexington Avenue, Ramada Inn, sounds familiar?”

He thought for a while and said “Yeah, that’s the address where Tom Hanks wanted to go to in the movie The Terminal”.

The last part of my dream fell in place easily. It was the scene from ‘the Godfather’ where the Don Vito Corleone gets shot (Page no. 42, 43 from the novel); I had jumped in that scene to save the Great Don.

I pondered about the dream, these were the books and the movies and even the Tele serials close to my heart, and I remember an instance in college when I forgot the name of Michael Coreleone’s bodyguards during his time in Sicily (the godfather). I felt so depressed that I read the book again. I thought of fountainhead, a great book, a remarkable book, a book from which I could quote from left and right. Then there was Catcher in the rye, if I ever had to testify in court and there are no holy books available, I would be happy to take an oath upon this J.D. Salinger book.

These are the books, I had grown up with. Not as a boy from a toddler but from a boy to a man.

Then there were movies: What else I can say about Taxi Driver? Oceans of ink would go dry, if one went on the write about Scorsese. Albeit in a lesser vein, but same applies to Spielberg’s craft as well.

There I was, shell-shocked over a dream in which I had been all over my favorite movies and books and like a celebrity made an appearance in FRIENDS as well.. Yet there was something which eluded me, perhaps a common thing binding all of them. But for a moment I let it go. I walked into the hall where my flat-mate was watching TV; Katrina Kaif was perking up the screen, some new song was playing.

Out of curiosity I asked “Which movie?”

With his eyes still fixed on the screen, my flat-mate replied.

“New York”.

- A tribute to the city which continues to give us great movies and books, to the city I ‘grew up’ with.

My Name is Orhan...

2010-09-17T04:06:00.000-07:00

My Name is Orhan…

Last night (07.09.2010) I was visited by an old friend. It was not very late, perhaps around 10.30 or so.
The reunion left me dumb-founded as well as depressed. I was actually visited by an old feeling – the one I get when I finish reading a good book. You may find its reference here, in one of my earlier posts.

As I finished reading the book, I casually glanced on my bed. My company id card lay there, I felt a deep contradiction to what I read in the book and what was actually in my life and perhaps this rift left me depressed. But that was not the only reason…in today’s world we live a life filled with ‘Move on’ milestones – we no longer find time to dwell over an emotion, absorb it and live it fully. We have become human equivalents local trains, we stop and one station for 2 minutes and then move on to another. After reading a book filled with love, longing and passion, I got depressed for:

a. Not many people would read it
b. The fast pace of life, has sort of fast paced the way we feel as well.

I remember that it was year 2007 when I bought my first Orhan Pamuk novel ‘Snow’. I had no idea about what Orhan bey wrote about or even what the book was about. The only driving force for me to pick up the book was, a neat heading on the top of the title which said: ‘Winner of Nobel Prize for literature for the year 2006’.

As I proceeded to read the book, I felt pulled inside the book and all its pages. Reading the book was like walking on an emotional landmine, by the time I finished reading ‘Snow’, I was totally drained and felt vulnerable(as if recovering from a fever). I did not have the courage to pick up an Orhan Pamuk book again.

I felt infinitely intrigued by the man who could create a book like ‘Snow’, about the book’s political relevance in contemporary Turkey, the vulnerability of the protagonist ‘Ka’ (some of the book lovers will remember the character K from Franz Kafka’s masterpiece ‘The Trial’), the almost poetic prose and a rather fleeting and sketchy narration (yes, sketchy is the best I could come up with). To me, the author looked like a man after my own heart – the one who believed that Art should be for art’s sake. So I decided to know a bit more about the author

Orhan Pamuk is a resident of turkey. The underlying theme of most his books is the conflict between east and the west, be it in the form of politics (as in the book snow) or it could be in the form of art (as depicted in My Name is Red) or it can be social (as in his latest book, The museum of Innocence).

Over the years I went on to read a lot about (and from) Orhan bey and I have found great similarities in the way he writes (the underlying theme, the characterization and the narrative style), what always sweeps me off my chair is the sheer vulnerability and the emotional force around the protagonists (or I should say author’s ability to create such environment around them). Be it Ka in ‘Snow’ or ‘Red’ in my name is Red or Kemal in the recent ‘the museum of innocence’.

I have always believed that a writer is like a god and we are his blind followers, when we open a book, we open ourselves to this god and his beliefs and it is up to the god to lead us the right way. Orhan bey makes you like his characters, no, perhaps liking is not the right word, Orhan bey successfully generates a sense of empathy in his readers about the characters in the book. We do not LIKE them, we IDENTIFY with them (at least at some levels). It is by virtue of this miracle (empathy), we become his followers.

Speaking of writers, another train of thought that I always have is, that a writer is like a puzzle-maker: he loves hiding little clues in his book (a learned man would call them metaphors), very expertly he puts layers in-between his real purpose and what is actually stated in the book. He teases you, challenges you to crack the puzzle and reach till the prize. Orhan bey cuts through all these notions and comes across as a very honest writer! So much so, that whenever I read his book, I feel that the central character is Orhan Pamuk….but to this too is a exception….each Orhan Pamuk book has a character named ‘Orhan Pamuk’. He puts himself in the book and makes you wonder what the real Orhan bey is like. The self-referential act is a wonderful little twist to the whole reading experience. While the themes of the books may be allusive, layered with clandestine meanings – the characters are beautifully transparent.

A lot of the times we judge a book, on account of what ‘new’ it has to offer us. We tend to look down on the authors who keep on churning similar kind of plots, themes and characters. But we fail to realize that an author has a ‘comfort zone’ - A comfort zone are the artifacts in a novel which writer feels at home with and he/she is at his best when in the comfort zone. Yes, Orhan bey’s novel focus on the east-west divide, Yes, his protagonists and rootless heroes, vacillating between eastern culture and western modern influence, Yes, the women in the novel are stronger and slightly callous but open a new book and you are transcended into a new world – Snow takes you through political upheaval, My name is red takes you into the culture of miniaturists, Museum of innocence speaks about the heart and soul of a museum. We just need to be empathetic and discerning enough to see the differences.

Along with honesty, one of the key attributes of Orhan bey’s writing is passion. Opening an Orhan Pamuk book is akin to allowing you to ‘feel’ something. In the ever transient world, an Orhan Pamuk book is like a pause. You open a book, you enter a world where you have to feel the loneliness of Ka (Snow), the desperate search of Osman( The New Life) and the heart-wrenching longing of Kemal for Fusun (The museum of innocence) . And if my words are leading you to believe that his books are all about passion, romances and struggling characters, it would be a good idea to pick up ‘My Name is Red’, where Orhan bey takes us in the heart of Ottoman empire, in to the bright and colorful world of artists. I would also recommend opening his recent ‘The museum of Innocence’ where Orhan bey shows a super command over details (not of inanimate objects but of human emotions as well) and also shows the tenacity of statistician in recording all the emotions exactly and poetically.

One can also read a great about Orhan Pamuk by picking up his work of non-fiction ‘Other Colors’; a book comprising of essays on a plethora of fields – here one can find the roots of Orhan bey’s writing , his influences being noted authors like Marcel Proust, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann and William Faulkner. In lot of the essays the author speaks not only about the social issues of turkey, but of simple heartwarming topics like playing with her daughter on the beach and often at times extending to personal rants like his own smoking addiction. I believe, it is in the work of non-fiction which is an author’s true litmus test – where his choice of topics and the clarity of his own thoughts come through, Orhan bey shows a wide range in this aspect – putting forth views on politics, literature and Society with equal ease.

As I read more about the author on various websites and forums, I came across a wonderful trait which has escaped my attention. There is quite a bit of digression in Orhan bey’s books, his books are in form of chapters and often some chapters of his books are deviating from the main story (they contribute to storytelling but not directly, maybe that’s why I describe his writing as sketchy). To me, it is these acts of freedom, which make the whole book reading more memorable. Orhan bey himself claims that he is greatly interested in the beauty of the book.

But these acts of freedom are also coupled with a great discipline (he took almost 10 years to write The Museum of Innocence and never once a character threatens to become larger than the book).

It is often said that one of the greatest author alive today is Gabriel Garcia Marquez (100 years of solitude, love in the time of cholera). Like Marquez, Orhan Pamuk is also rooted to his tradition. His love for Istanbul is both passionate as well as undying. Many days after reading ‘The museum of Innocence’, I actually had a dream that I’m in Beyoglu (a neighborhood in Istanbul).

I must end on a confessional note, after I read ‘Snow’; I could feel a great deal of similarity between the protagonist Ka and myself. I do not know if this was really true or it was just a part of me which wanted to identify with something as beautiful as any Orhan Pamuk book... perhaps it is for the same reason I have praised Orhan bey too much and not mentioned single of his flaws, but then I’m not a critic (never want to be one).

However I would like to justify, all my praise for one of my favorite authors with one of my favorite paragraphs from his book ‘The New Life’, Hope you enjoy the wordplay too.

“Smile at me so that I can see in your face for once the radiance of the other world; It reminds me of the warmth in the bakery on a snowy day where I stopped after school to get sesame bun; It reminds me of the joy of leaping from the jetty on a hot summer day. Your smile reminds me of my first kiss, my first embrace, the walnut tree I climbed all by myself all the way to the top, the summer’s eve when I transcended myself all the way to the top, the night when I was blissfully drunk, the feeling of being under my quilt, the eyes of the beautiful boy who looked at me with love. All these memoirs exist in the other realm where I too long to be. Help me to get there, help me so that I may blissfully accept my dwindling with each breath I take.”

- A dying girl in Orhan Pamuk’s ‘The New Life’.

P.S. – It is noteworthy to mention that Orhan bey owes a great deal of his success to wonderful translations done by Maureen Freely (The Black book, Snow, Istanbul: Memories of a city, Other Colors: Essays and a story and The Museum of Innocence), Guneli Gun (The Black Book, The New Life) and Victoria Holbrook (The While Castle). You can read an insightful interview published in the Hindu here.

Ek Choti si love story...

2010-08-13T04:00:00.000-07:00

I met a girl and I fell in love.

I was coming back from Switzerland. My flight was from Basel to Amsterdam. As I stood in line to get the boarding pass, I could not help but noticing the girl standing behind me. Later, I got to know that my flight has been cancelled due to volcanic ash fiasco.

She told me that I could take a train from Basel SBB to Frankfurt and then change again and take another train to Amsterdam. Her name was Celine. I went with her... By the time I reached Frankfurt with her, I had the most amazing 6 hours of my life. And I could tell that she had the same feelings!

I told her that we get down at Frankfurt and spend a day together….She agreed and the rest as they say is history….at the moment of parting, we didn’t exchange phone numbers. We promised each other that we will not look each other up in face book. We wanted to keep the memory of that one day pure, she asked me my name…..I told her my name was Jesse.

I know the story is a bit incredulous and it is up to you, my dear reader, to believe in it or not. If you believe, you may go ahead and read else feel free to skip.

After meeting Celine, I realized something which was so glaringly ‘out there’ but everybody else seemed to ignore it. I realized that why love has to be – life long, clichéd and bound my rituals. I never bought a gift for Celine, we will never spent hours talking on phone, she would not buy me shirts – I will not buy her pink colored soft toys and I’m sure as hell that we will never be the part of same wedding website.

On my way back to Amsterdam, I wondered why our manifestations and representations of love or romance are so trite, predictable and at times out rightly boring? The chocolates, the roses, the valentines, the diamonds and the whole she-bang…

But when I met Celine, I realized that love need not to succumb to any social norms or pre-defined rituals… It may not last for eternity or next seven lives; it can come as a flash, as an instant and it can come in its most pure form. So much for the eternal lovers dying for each other, I understood that love, just like human life can be transient as well and perhaps its best to hold those moments precious and enjoy them, rather than ruing over the fact that it is not ‘forever and ever’

If you have come so far, you deserve to know that my story is not true.

But I have met Celine (Julie Delphy) and I have met Jesse (Ethan Hawke) in Richard Linklater’s wonderfully charming and verbally seductive movie ‘Before Sunrise’ (Both reprise their roles in the sequel to the movie… ‘Before Sunset’).

Jesse is an American; he meets a French girl named Celine on a train. They start talking and find an amazing connection, the next morning Jesse has a flight to catch from Vienna. He asks Celine to get down with her at Vienna…. The only time they will spend together is ‘Before Sunrise’.

Celine is Imaginative and believing, Jesse is original and a cynic. Like all youngsters, they both rebel in their own way. Celine’s rebellion is more against things happening in this world, Jesse’s anguish and expressions are more personal. Linklater explores the intellect in the 20 something, which I think has never been touched before.

But somewhere in those stolen glances, the simple theme and two youngsters walking in a beautiful city, is a masterstroke – Richard Linklater rediscovers love. He strips it all out of the clichés and breathes a fresh storm into it. It is a love which is fully aware that it is transient…It is a sort of narrative rebellion which kicks all existing love stories in the crotch. Love is eternal, you say, here is one which is not. Love is bound, by stars and compromises and sacrifices, you say, here is a one which is free from all.

Jesse nails the idea quite literally in the movie when he says “People have these romantic projections which are not based on reality”. Celine also remarks once "Well, who says relationships have to last forever?"

In his mild and unassuming way, the director rebels; and the non-conformance is not arrogant or revolutionary…it is touching & leaves that indelible impression on your heart. Linklater takes you deep into the psyche of a 20 year old…Jesse’s fear of being turning out ordinary, Celine’s constant fear of mortality (which adds to the whole love-is-transient, life-is-transient idea).

Their free mind, yet unadulterated by the world outside – the interesting and childish experiences they have, their thoughts original and not tarnished. Both Jesse and Celine are full of stories – wonderful little anecdotes, about their lives and the things which they have seen.

They roam around the city, the gorgeous city of Vienna… the ‘graveyard of the nameless’ where Celine talks about her experiences as a child (yet again, reference of mortality), The city square, the Franz Joseph statue where Jesse quotes from Auden’s ‘As I walked out one evening’ (and he precisely quotes lines of ‘you cannot conquer time’).

In between their exchanges, romance, they become aware that in the morning they have to part. They part the following morning, without exchanging any contact information, perhaps Jesse did not want his relationship with Celine turn like the one his parents have, May be Celine wanted to live like her grandmother, always thinking of Jesse for the rest of her life.

I’m often being told that great actors are the most natural in their art; perhaps it is similar with movies as well. They say that art is a selective representation of reality, but as you watch ‘Before Sunrise’, you don’t feel the movie, you feel it was real. To me, that is the essence of cinema, to bring it so close to your life that you, for once forget the difference between reality and reel.

And as the credits roll in the movie, I’m overwhelmed by an incredible sense of grief; I see the empty streets of Vienna, the garden where Jesse & Celine spend the night, the deserted restaurant, a part of me constantly tries to see both of them on those narrow alleys or those bridges. But then I remind myself…just as the transience of love, life…the movie had to end too.

P.S. – Dear Reader, for a plethora of reasons, the movie is very close to my heart. A few days back, I read a small article of rediff.com which said that the forthcoming movie ‘Anjaana-Anjaani’ is loosely based on before sunrise. The movie is being directed by a fellow named Siddarth Anand. I do not know how the movie will be, but I got mortally scared that they will screw up the viewing of original for others. In case you are planning to watch Anjaana-Anjaani, I would suggest first viewing the original one. If you are near to Mumbai-Pune, I would be happy to lend a copy of the movie to you. And just as Celine – Jesse decide to meet again after 6 months, I promise to meet you again after 6 months, this time I will put forth my views on the sequel ‘Before Sunset’.

The homecoming

2010-08-03T21:53:00.000-07:00

It was the summer of 2002; I had just finished 2 months of my first year examination – in all 17 labs and 9 theory exams. The Nagpur heat was at its best – it was probably around 45 degrees or more. The last exam was engineering drawing, after I finished the exam I knew I was going to flunk.
I walked back to the mess and one of the seniors asked me how was the exam, I lied and said ‘Nikal jayega’. The Jamuna mess was at its tasteless best on the last day of the first year, cabbage curry was totally insipid and yucky (so bad that I still remember it).

But a part of me was happy, I was going HOME.

That was my first homecoming; it was the first time I was away from friends and family and on my own. I was super excited about going back and meeting them.

I must confess that over the years the zest of going back home faded away. By the time it was third year the hostel had become home and I looked forward to the end of the vacation when I would be back on my own turf and since then the definition of home has changed…

Home is a place where you are comfortable, where your loved ones are, where you learn your first lessons of good or bad, where you take your first steps. And as they say, there is no place like home.

Speaking strictly in a geographic sense, the concept of home eludes me, my sense of belonging stretches from Ramtek to Utrecht.

I remember Rocky saying in his plain straight-from-the-heart wisdom “When you stay in a place long enough, you become that place”. I think it holds good for me.

Coming back from Holland to India, I had feelings similar like I had in first year of college but in moderate proportions (I’m maturing, can you believe that?). But I did not get time to breathe and soak in the fact that I was back in India (or Home) after 15 months, family functions and social commitments kept me busy.

After a good week or so I had to go to my friend’s wedding near Nagpur. Being in Nagpur gave me some familiarity, it was a place where I had spent 4 years and in a way it was good to see that the place had not changed too much…some of the old shops were still there, at least they gave me that comfortable feeling that I’m in a known place.

In a whirl-wind visit to my hometown, I became more and more comfortable and I could see the glimpses of my life 4-5 years back….Meeting my aunt, spending time with my friends and yes, after Mercedes driven luxury buses in Holland, I was back in travelling in ‘Lal Dabba’ (ST buses) and still traveling in 2nd class by train.

Coming back to Pune I went into my old listlessness. Somehow the city disappoints me, I can never feel the same about it the way my friends do….my friends who have got their first salaries here, got their first independent rental apartment(s), got married and even booked houses for themselves have a great love for the city.

What my friends feel for Pune, I feel for Mumbai. After idling around in Pune for 10 days or so, I was in Mumbai (had to search for a place for myself) and I was in love all over again. There’s something about Mumbai, which you can just feel and can never be written in words.

Mumbai meant going back to the office, to the familiar too milky cappuccinos, to old friends & colleagues, to the same old resto-bars and to the cutting chais and wada-paos. Finally the feeling of homecoming came back to me!!

1st of July marked a sort of important date for me. It was the day when I completed 5 years of employment. It is supposed to be a big deal. The whole organization gets an e-mail from the HR mentioning your career and significant achievements and a little something about you. But somehow the e-mail came late (about a good 30 days later), but the date was not insignificant at all.

You see I got the e-mail on August 3rd; it was the day when Sachin Tendulkar stepped on the field to play his record 169th test match. On the occasion there were many write-ups on popular web-sites but one particular talked about his first test match. It was the time when Sachin was batting against another debutant Waqar Younis, he was hit by a bouncer on the nose and he began to bleed. His elder brother, who had accompanied him on the tour, said that the ball hit Sachin so hard that he could hear the thud in the stands.

Medical staff rushed to the ground for assistance but Sachin refused and he replied ‘Mein Khelega’

And boy didn’t he play!!

It dawned upon me that perhaps I was being too vain and expecting some kind of welcome or a great emotional moment to remind of coming back home. Being in Holland for such a long time, I thought it would be a point of inflexion in my life but it just turned out to be another point on the curve.

I spent far too much time on finding that elusive sense of belonging, but all that was required was to shrug off the wondering and get in the trench again.

So I quit wondering about home(s) and all the other boo-hoo around it and decided ‘Mein bhi Khelega’.

Go ‘See’ Raavan (and just don’t ‘Watch’ it)

2010-06-23T06:28:00.000-07:00

Prologue

“Very well. Since you're all out of perspective and no one else seems to have it in this bloody town, I'll make you a deal- you provide the food, I'll provide the perspective.”

-Anton Ego in Ratatouille.

The Perspective: The epic and the movie.

From the outset we have accepted the tale of Ramayana as the ultimate tale of Good vs. Bad. Lord Rama was the ultimate man, Sita the most virtuous lady, Raavan the ultimate villain and Hanuman as the ultimate devotee and confidante.

Like any classical mythological tale, the good and bad were clearly defined. We knew which side to root for; we knew which side would win. I dare say; it was all predictable. Mythology or the mythical tales serve a purpose; they act as moral guidelines for the mankind but put them in a literary perspective, you will not find anything new.

How many of us have pondered over Ramayana as a story and not as an epic? How many of us have dared to imagine a shade of grey in the persona of none other than ‘Maryada Purshottam Ram’ itself?

To a poor story-writer like me, half of the battle is won here; the ‘Human’ touch on the epic is amazing.

This is a masterful angle using which Mani Ratnam comes down upon the whole Ramayana and sets it in the contemporary background. We, as Indians have set the epic on the highest possible moral pedestal. Ratnam beautifully slips in an element of doubt and comes up with a brilliant question of ‘What If?’

What if lord Rama paid a price to become the most virtuous man ever?
What if Raavan, claimed to be the most learned man of his age fell in love with Sita?
What if?

What is important in a story is the perspective from which you see it. A very classic example is the movie Godfather where noted cinema critic Roger Ebert points out that we begin to see the world of godfather as an insider and we generate instant empathy for the characters.

Never ever in the first scene you see anything remotely similar to a gangster. Don Corleone could just have been a senator as well! You don’t see stiff necked robotic bodyguards; you don’t see whory looking bimbos. Pete Clemenza is not an Armani clad cigar smoking ‘caprogeime’ but he is a jovial fat guy dancing at the wedding… you instantly generate an affinity to the characters.

Similarly , Raavan is a story told from the perspective of Ragini… stripping down to the bare minimum, she is a women and there are two men – one represents stability, charm and has a respectable position in society, he is your ‘good on paper’ guy.

The other is a renegade outlaw who wears his heart in his sleeve and emotions are on the tip of his tongue. He comes from an extreme background, given to violence and hardships. He makes mistakes, he cries, he admits he is wrong, he unabashedly claims that he is in love; he vehemently claims that he is jealous.

He is Raavan you see, the proverbial ‘Dus Siron waala’, but the ten heads are not, the real ten heads, it’s a mere allegory to a man of many emotions – a human being, just like you and me.

So what if Sita chooses the Raavan and not the Rama?

Rama aka Dev

“Jab haath mein Bandook hoti hai to biwi ke bare mein nahin sochta. Aur Jab biwi haath mein hoti hai to kuch nahi sochta.”

So when Dev was searching for Ragini – What was in his mind? ‘Biwi or Bandook?’

Was he a man in love looking for his wife?
Or he was a cop on a mission trying to hunt a criminal?
And did he really thought about nothing else once he found Ragini?

This for me sums up what the character of Dev. He is the lord Rama in the movie and he represents the so called righteous side. His devotion to his work is something like Roark’s devotion to his buildings. He is mechanical, unrelenting and plays ‘no hold barred’ game when it comes down to duty.

One has to see Dev as an idea and not as a man, it is only when you see him as an idea, you can see him in the mould of lord Rama – the perfect man, the perfect cop.

When Roark bombs the Cortlandt at the end we do not hate him, why then we hate Dev when he uses inhumanly measures to catch Beera?

This is where the genius of Mani Ratnam comes in to picture – he brings out the perfectness of Dev in such a manner that his character steps into a grey shadow from a white light. It is for his uncompromising values, we see him as a grey character.

A normal human being loves values such as kindness, empathy and love, but Dev is often showed devoid of them, but yet as an idea he is unimpeachable.

You say he is ‘Maryada Purshottam’, well sometimes you got to step on some toes to get there.

Sita aka Ragini

In the battle of good vs. evil, Ragini is one character which has seen both the sides. And being a female character her perspective is one which is more sensitive and appealing.

She has been the object of affection of both the good party and the bad party. She has a husband who loves her and then she has seen love in its most pure form: Love just for the sake of it, the one which expects nothing, demands nothing, the love which is just mindful of its own existence without giving a care to its material form and Ragini witnesses all this from the last imaginable person, from her captor.

Observe in the movie that never does once Beera misbehaves with her or tries to take advantage. I think this fact is of significance, when viewed in light of what happens to Beera’s sister.

She walks a very thin line of fidelity and drawing feelings for another man. She wants Beera to spare Dev, yet she stands in front of Beera when a gun is pointed at him. He is willing to be with Beera if he would spare Dev, while this can be seen as her growing feelings towards Beera, it is also a nice little touch on the fact that a wife can go a long way to protect her husband.

As much as she understands her husband, she asks him a very apt question: “Are you here for me or are you here for Beera?”

While on one hand her feelings for Beera move from hatred, to acceptance, to empathy and then to love, her feelings for her husband wanes to doubt and disbelief.

Look at the scene where Beera asks her if she loves her husband, she cannot look into her eye and answer. While we claim Dev and Beera to be perfect good and perfect bad, the final decision of good and bad is what we see from Ragini’s perspective.

In the epic Ramayana , we ourselves, judge the good and bad, in the movie Raavan, the perspective is much more of an inside view and comes from someone who is in the situation (and not from a third person).

While reading an interesting review, it was mentioned that the song ‘Khili re’, describes the relationship between Dev and Ragini. The song is more been filmed as an art of seduction and not that of companionship, however, I could not get much insight into it while I was watching the movie.

Raavan aka Beera

When I think of Beera, I’m reminded of two sequences in the movie. The one which I call the ‘Galat’ (wrong) sequence, it’s in this sequence (after watching Ragini clad in a native outfit) he says that there are so many things which went wrong, that he is a bad (wrong) person, he kidnapped her that was wrong, he did not kill her that was wrong. And notice that he is surrounded by innocent kids in the scene.

The second one is sequence when he very frankly claims that he is burning (he is jealous). He speaks full of emotion, yet he is oblivious to his own suffering. He knows he cannot have Ragini, he confesses that he is jealous…. He never confesses he is sad, we never see him sad. We see him cynical towards Dev

Beera is a man of emotions and he is one who is not afraid to express them. He is in love with Ragini and he can do anything for her, he can ‘kill’ someone, he can spare someone’s life as well.

There’s so much of Beera which I saw in the songs: Look at Behne de. Lyrically, the song threatens to take on emotions of both Ragini and Beera. Ragini wants to die; Beera wants to drift away in love. Look at his eyes thru out the song. At times he carries an expression of bewilderment, he watches Ragini in a sort of unbelieving manner….as if he himself can’t believe that he is in love.

Watch the Ranjha-Ranjha chant, he enjoys the dual with Ragini when she attacks her. He does not hit back. In fact the fight itself is beautifully filmed, a fight which starts with violence ends with a sexual tension with Beera and Ragini perilously close to each other.

Thok de killi, is a song of pure joy and very primitive in its nature. You see Beera the leader here – the leader of the pack and yet one in celebration with his comrades.

He is not afraid of dying, yet he is strangely reluctant when it comes to killing Dev.

I see Raavan as a lover. The Raavan of the epic was consumed by rage and his own ego. Beera’s rage and hatred are extinguished by love, while this reformation is not visible on a mental level but there are bits and pieces in the movie which indicate of what he is doing.

Raavan, The movie

Mani Ratnam sets the ball rolling pretty quickly with the abduction happening very quickly. He deviates from the normal concept of building up the characters and then letting an event takes place.

He lets the event to happen first and then builds up the characters as the event progresses. He makes us see the movie the way he wants to.

At the outset we don’t see Dev as a brilliant cop, Ragini as a lovely wife and Beera as an outlaw. He lets a dramatic incident takes place and then places the characters in the incident (rather than placing the incident in the characters life).

He hides some incidents carefully. When Ragini is kidnapped she does not know why she is kidnapped, in fact we as audience do not know for 60% of the movie that why Ragini has been taken captive. Just as we think that we are beginning to understand the characterization, he slips in a second incident to put us in a new perspective.

But I do feel a bit puzzled that why did Mani Ratnam had to map the facts 1-on-1 with the epic like cop picking up Beera’s sister from the nose and thus representing Shurpankha case in Ramayana and then here is Beera threatening to kill Ragini in ’14 hrs’ (which echoes of 14 years of exile lord Rama was sent to, but here Sita is in exile with Raavan, which is a delightful little twist).

Musically and technically the movie is awesome (and really I need not say anything more). I would again give credit to Mani Ratnam for finding unexplored natural beauty of India.

The actors do well. I was mortally scared that they would screw up, but Abhishek does a decent job, at times he gruffs a lot like his father but then he fluctuates well in all the emotions. Ash does OK too, people claim that she has screamed a lot in the movie, I agree, but look at her character & look at her situation and you would scream too! I must confess I’m not her big fan but I applaud the sheer physical tolerance she has shown in the movie.

Vikram gets a raw deal, I hear great things about this guy from my south Indian friends, but as Dev he does not have much on display. The character is pretty much one dimensional and frugal on emotions, but in retrospect, the character of Dev is so much about what is not shown than what is shown. I will soon catch up with Ravanan; I think Vikram would make a much better Beera than he is as Dev.

Epilogue

“Are you not entertained?”

- Russell Crowe as General Maximus in Gladiator.

Antichrist: Art in the time of depression

2010-06-14T06:20:00.000-07:00

Once in a while comes a piece of work which tends to challenge our view-point or our premise, Which challenges a long held dogma, while the more perceptive ones tend to stand up and take notice, the others let it go.

As I do a little bit of writing myself, I often come across my friends who hold different opinion on what I write/ what I have written, while some tend (or want to) see ‘beyond the obvious’, others are satisfied or more focused ‘on the obvious’.

Let me elaborate a bit more on the ‘premise’, when we see a movie, the prime focus is to get entertained, when we hear a song we want to hear a melodious voice in our ears or a perfect symphony of music instruments – seldom we do see a movie as a medium thru which a director is trying to say something, we don’t see a song as a poetry, we don’t see the years of hard work gone behind playing the instrument.

Don’t get me wrong! I’m not trying to deride a particular taste or uphold another; I’m merely trying to indicate that the first and the foremost motive to experience art is to tantalize our basic senses of sight, hearing or taste.

But what if you witness something which is not meant to be ‘entertaining’? (Not entertaining in ways of appealing to your primal instincts) but still it reaches you and shakes you, quite frankly, leaves you stunned.

When I began watching Lars Von Trier’s (LVT from here on) Antichrist, I did not know what the movie was about, I sat watching the movie with a blank mind, I did not know what to expect, I just got a recommendation for the movie from a reliable source and that was enough for me.

But through the movie I went through turmoil – there was brilliance, there was more brilliance and then there was that extra brilliance. But at the end of movie I was shaking and it was not because of the skill with which the movie was made, but because of the sheer horror, yes, there were some scenes when I had to close my eyes!

Before I jump into the movie and the intricacies (I would try to avoid spoilers), I have a general observation about story telling which I would like to share: Somehow a happy emotion does not serve as a good starting point for any story or to be more blunt, happiness is where the story ends and not where it begins with.

A character ridden with grief, guilt, pressure and despair presents greater and far more interesting possibilities in a story than a happy one – this is where I loved the movie The Departed, it’s a simple cop and robber story, but you add high pressure on the protagonists and you see wonderful things enfolding in front of your eyes. I certainly believe that extraordinary circumstances or unhinged emotions are more exciting.

Antichrist uses this to a brilliant extent; the movie starts with death of an infant in the family while his parents are engaged in passionate sex (if you plan to watch a movie, I would recommend also focusing on the opera in the background and not solely on the genital-splashing, the scene, by the way, is highly stylized).

So the child dies and the Father (Willem Dafoe referred as ‘HE’) and Mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg referred as ‘SHE’) are distraught, So much that ‘SHE’ has to be hospitalized, but finally ‘HE’ beingbehavioral therapist decides to treat his wife himself. What follows ahead is something which got me infinitely intrigued, as ‘HE’ decides to treat ‘SHE’; ‘HE’ uses reason as his weapon – ‘HE’ confronts ‘SHE’ with her trauma and tells her that it is logical to feel the grief and the trauma she is going through right now. Hidden craftily inside the therapy sessions is the age old struggle between Mind and Heart, the rationalization of grief vs. pure grief.

Yes, ‘HE’ begins rationalizing her grief. It is interesting to notice that ‘HE’ shows little empathy while treating ‘SHE’. ‘HE’ is very detached, treating her more as a ‘patient’ and less as a ‘wife’.. It is during this phase, one sees the true unhinging of her mind, a mind under tremendous sorrow, wavers and it behaves erratically, it makes accusations, it conjures images, so much so, that it is only quelled by the most primal instinct of sex. And all this is stupendously portrayed by Charlotte Gainsbourg; it is, hands down, the best female performance I have ever seen. Here are some moments to watch out for:

Scene where ‘SHE’ accuses him of being distant and indifferent in one frame and then in the very next ‘SHE’ kisses him. I loved the way the whole scene is sketched out; it swerves from one emotion to another in a blink of eye.
Suffering an anxiety attack, ‘SHE’ tries to injure herself but when ‘HE’ saves her, the very next moment they have sex, in a very interesting way, and ‘HE’ says that ‘SHE’ is using sex to distract herself from grief.

The mind then slips into an irrational fear.

‘SHE’ tells ‘HE’ that she is afraid of Eden, and so they retreat to their cabin named ‘Eden’ (thus depicting the scenario of the first man and women in the Garden of Eden.)

In fact the whole movie has a lot of biblical undertones and references, most of which I could not comprehend, and to be honest, if I indulge in extending this write up to the mythological extensions of the movie I will end up digressing and going beyond the scope. To shield my own inadequacy I would rather continue writing about the movie as a whole rather than its mythological allegories.

And once they reach Eden, all hell breaks loose.

From a narration point of view, the movie takes an exciting turn where in it shifts from words to more graphical sub-conscious images, notably the scene when ‘HE’ tells ‘SHE’ to imagine that ‘SHE’ is going towards the Eden via the woods and the scene where ‘HE’ sees a deer with a dead new born still attached to her (thus signifying the grief which ‘SHE’ is still carrying with her).

Inside the Eden, Gainsbourg instability goes to a level higher, being in a place which she fears the most, ‘SHE’ slips into the shell of a person who has totally lost confidence and is now covered totally by grief.

‘SHE’ tells ‘HE’ of how one day she heard a child crying and ‘SHE’ thought it was their son. When ‘SHE’ went to see her son, he was playing peacefully (this is a brilliant scene where in the background there is just a haunting noise of a boy crying), her fear for Eden makes one believe that she was troubled before but she just manifested her fear into the cabin and the forest.

The second part of the movie brings a lot of ‘nature’ into factor, ‘SHE’ attributes her lot of insecurities and fear to nature (thereby using it as an alibi) and as an afterthought I wonder if the nature has been used as an analogy to human nature.

During the therapy sessions with ‘HE’, ‘SHE’ says something of great significance ‘Nature is Satan’s Church’. Going back to my initial comment about the Nature being explicitly shows as flora and fauna but implicitly referred to as human nature. I find the comment relevant, in the later unfolding of events we realize that SHE was completing a thesis on genocide – where in women were killed because they were considered synonymous to evil, may be in the loneliness of the forest and the cabin, these images were ingrained in SHE’s mind and she made a comment that nature is Satan’s church.

Very real life logic to this statement can be: To an extent a nature takes its course of a female body  Nature has been defined as Satan’s Church  Women is evil.

From here on the movie lurches dramatically into primitive violence, the first phase of the movie was operating very much in the complexity of human mind, the second part is vivid and graphical but the third one goes purely takes a physical route of anger and sexual violence.

I believe that this is the part of the movie which will put everybody off a bit. The violence is explicit, gruesome and downright scary and without saying much, all I could think at the end was a very basic question: How far will you go in any work of art?

With the ending in the movie, I got tangled in more questions: Are the visuals really arty or just artsy-fartsy? Do the visuals add to the viewer experience or they are mere show offs? Are the male and female genitalia on display adds to the movie or just to tantalize and make it look like a soft porn?

On a more meaningful note, I wondered what Anti-Christ is really all about: does being anti-mind is equivalent to being anti-Christ? Is the irrationality, the fear is anti-Christ?

On a mental level, it made me wonder what solitude can do to you. I wondered at the progressive degradation of the human mind when it is crippled by fear.

But I could not help applauding the sheer courage displayed by everyone in the movie esp. by LVT himself, it has been said before that being a creator means having an uncompromising vision, a movie like Antichrist is a controversial one and it takes lot of courage to make a movie with such bold theme and performances. The actors have done equally well, in terms of skill as well as courage to play their parts to perfection.

It’s hard to define Antichrist in terms of ‘Rating’ or and I would think twice before recommending it to anyone. So much for the courage displayed by the crew and the cast, it takes heart to watch the movie as well, but may be movies like Antichrist are like Mount Everest, they stand there as a challenge – Take a shot if you dare!

For Tugga...

2010-03-02T10:16:00.000-08:00

Its Sachin everywhere isn’t it?

There are discussions about his leaps of greatness and the heaps of runs he seems to be scoring in past 36 months or so. In a sense his phenomenonal run over the past 3 years or so (after the 2007 world cup debacle) seems to be lifted out of, what I always call, the perfect story , the one of a man seemingly rising from nothingness and void – he could be a roman general named Maximus or a Philadelphia southpaw named Rocky Balboa.

While reading one of articles on Sachin I came across a lovely snippet from an eminent writer, it went something like this:

“Lance Armstrong once said that he wins the Tour de France not when he is cycling down the Champs Elysees but when he is out in the mountains facing icy winds while others are cozying in their blankets for an extra hour”

Before we go back to the lines, I have a general theory which many of you of us would agree, during our life time we see so many people in school, college and professional life who are so much better than us when it comes to pure, natural ‘ability’, we look at them and we envy their skill and secretly wish if we had the same ability, so that we could do so much….

Yet these are people end up living similar life like we do (at least looking from a high level of judgment) or perhaps it would be fair to say they don’t live up our expectations of what they can achieve.

This always made me believe that its not about the ability but something more than that, if success just was a multiple of talent, you and I would have been languishing at the bottom of the table, but we are somewhere out there, in the middle, struggling our way up to the top, we may never get there but we keep pushing….

We fight.

That’s the simple thing… in this matter there are no choices.

Yes, ability is important but one tends to miss the all important very basic qualities which thrust a great ability into a phenomenal success…. Grit, determination, perseverance, dedication et al.

I go back to the lines about lance Armstrong…

Sachin did not scored this 200, when he dabbed a wide-ish delivery for a single, but he scored his 200, when at the age of 12 he played matches while his other friends played in backyard, he got this 200 when he stayed at his aunt’s place while a normal 12 year old would stay at the comfort of home, he got this 200 when he decided to continue batting against Waqar Younis even after being hit, he got his 200 when he was booed off his own beloved Mumbai , he got his 200, not for his skill but for his …... (You can fill in the blanks yourself)

While you may fill in those blanks with your choicest of adjectives, I would just like to write ‘Tugga’ in there…

Let us accept my dear friends that people like Sachin Tendulkar and Lara put in all the efforts to reach the pinnacle of professional sport but they had the talent, when it came to ability, they roamed in a territory which others wanted to acquire. They honed their skills, worked on it but they had it in them from the time they were born.

Some of the greats were not that lucky in that matter. Yet they went on to be the greats of the game. It is athletes such as these who stand as a living example of quotes like “It takes ordinary persons to do extraordinary things”.

When I used to look at Tugga playing , he never painted a pretty picture, his pull strokes never reminded me of the Taandav pose Lara would get into, his straight drive did not breathe the same exaltation in to our soul like the ones from little master. He would come into the field with absolutely ‘give-away-nothing’ steely expression, he would bat with a red handkerchief in his pocket and would bat like he was batting for his life, as if he had summoned his last ounce of strength to defend his wicket – When Sachin bats it’s a pure joy of living, Lara batted like a hurricane which could not be stopped, When Tugga batted, it was a matter of life and death.

Since my boyhood I have always been a Tendulkar fan, so much towards his batting but I was also very attracted to the fact that if I could bat as well as Sachin I will not have to study, but to my grief I’m a southpaw and hence could never emulate Sachin. As I grew old enough to stay up late and understand English commentary, I was attracted by a Lara’s batting, I mean here was a guy who was a lefty like me and was world class, when on his own, Lara was far more devastating (and to date I would pay more to see Lara in full flow than Sachin).

Then during a test match against South Africa (early or mid nineties), my attention went to Tugga, he had come into bat at 96/4 (or something like that) & he and Greg Blewett went on to have a huge partnership, It got my attention for the obvious reason, the great story you see, a human rising against all odds, since then I have passionately followed Tugga and his batting, he did not pose a pretty picture, played an awkward looking cut, kind of controlled flick and once in a while would launch into a slog-sweep but then whenever a bowl would be bowled at him, he would mumble ‘come on-come on’. This man had one hell of a fight in him.

A famous incident which comes to my mind is Tugga mouthing the F word to, 6 foot something Ambrose, if you are playing in Caribbean, you don’t mouth a man like Ambrose it’s equivalent to disrespecting a don in his territory, obviously sparks flew… Ambrose needed to be physically dragged away from Tugga .Later in his book Tugga wrote that he cussed Ambrose because he was scared….sometimes you are brave, sometimes you pretend to be…there is not much difference, isn’t it? Oh! By the way, in that match Australia managed 127 something and Tugga had got 63 of them!!

In the same series against west indies he went on to score a double hundred, determined not to throw his wickets away, he took body blows from Ambrose and Walsh, he went on the score 200 n.o. when he came back to the dressing room his team mates could see the bruises on his body….

And I can also never forget his innings of 150 odd against England played with a torn hamstring, Tugga knew how to keep going, and literally, at all costs.

Once a Sri Lankan player asked him whether he meditated before coming to bat, because at a certain point while batting he appeared to be in a ‘zone’ of his own, totally unaffected and unfazed.

Career, controversies and accolades apart, I think everybody who has played along him or against him would have got a hands-on training on things a sportsman can only ‘acquire’ and is not ‘gifted’ with. An average Joe like me would look at him and feel a kind of semblance in terms of skills and think “If I can be mentally tough as this guy, I can go places”.

I do not wish to take away the Sachin Limelight nor do I want to take a deliberate opposite stance in my blog but I just felt that there is more to a great sportsman than just great skill but once in a while comes an athlete who says that everything about a great sportsman is just his ability to summon his last ounce of strength and fight through, to stand toe to toe and do the Rocky act.

Again, Again and again...

-For Stephen Rodger Waugh a.k.a. Tugga

I'm Jack's bulging bicep

2009-09-17T07:08:00.000-07:00

There’s something about the 90’s decades which changed cinema – technology.
Right from Jurassic park to Matrix, the excessive use of CGI changed the look of the celluloid. It was a moment of tremendous success, it allowed a director to imagine as well as put his imagination into practice (or in screen in this case).
But CGI almost saw the end of one more era in movies – the great art of hand to hand combat. One seldom saw the fist fights or the slam bang kicks, they were fading, even if they were present, they were coupled by CGI. It was only in the period cinema one saw the swords unsheathed or people sparring at each other.

Then in 1996 a guy wrote fight club, certain director named Danny Boyle read the book but did not make a movie out of it, another guy named Bryan Singer (remember The Usual Suspects?) also got a copy of the book but did not have the time to read it. Finally, David Fincher picked it up and said, “What the hell, I’ll make the movie out of it”.

There’s a reason why Fight club did not do well at the box office (released in the year 1999), it was a movie, at least a decade ahead of its time, you put that movie in theatres in 2009, and I guarantee that Tyler Durden would be the Demi-god of today. His popularity would run higher than Barack Obama’s polls (that too on the best day of his campaign).

It is futile to discuss what the movie is about, the name pretty much gives it away. It is about a generation of men (sorry, I have to be gender specific here) joining an underground cult of sort, it is about a self proclaimed revolutionary, a modern messiah out to resurrect the consumerism infected society.

Cinematically, it is about fists, brawns and masculinity put back in the mainstream. As I read in one of the articles, fight club is about ‘Disneyfication of Masculinity’.

Ours is a generation which knows depression and stress and we have three answers to tackle them: over-eating, shopping or alcohol. Yes, it’s true, when we are depressed we want to do something ‘good’ to ourselves, which in action translates into eating something yummy, buying something good or just momentarily losing it all in a pool of alcohol. Fight club is a aberration, or should I say it is a new path – if you are depressed and frustrated and pissed off, you are welcome to the club, you just have to follow the rules. The first rule of fight club is that you do not talk about fight club; the second rule of fight club is YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB.

Yes, my dear droogs, in a century of metro sexual George Clooney and Perce Brosnan, fight club put Dara Singh back on map with great audacity and panache.

And the instances of masculinity are put aptly everywhere: the author joins the support group for testicular cancer, a group of gents with their balls removed and finding themselves troubled. He meets bob, an ex body-builder but now a distressed owner of ‘bitch-tits’ thanks to the side effects of testicular cancer. Bob breaks down after the sessions; he feels he is no longer a man. Bob joins Fight Club and rediscovers himself by pounding others with bare hands. Nirvana!

Not only it is just about people getting in an underground cult and fighting each other – it deals with an interesting concept of reality via three different characters: Narrator, Tyler and Marla. Tyler has actually hit the ‘Rock Bottom’ (hitting rock bottom means a phase in addiction where an addict realizes that he is in dumps and then it speeds up his recovery). For me the concept of Rock Bottom translates into reality, Tyler has realized the true nature of society – a slave of products which they buy and he’s out there to change it, one fist at a time, one fight club at a time. Narrator is a victim – slave of DKNY shirts and Gucci shoes, for him the reality is blurred, he does not understand it and hence makes no effort to change it. Marla too has hit the rock bottom – but she prefers to play the innocent bystander and makes it to her use.

As much as the idea of brawn and masculinity has been revisited and rediscovered, fight club also takes a potshot at the themes such as ‘Self-discovery and Self-Realization’, and quite masochistically, the path for self-discovery begins with Tyler scarring the narrator’s hand with a burn. This is actually a fantastically filmed in the movie (and described in the book as well) where the narrator, delirious with pain travels – three zones of time, one when he was in college (not filmed in the movie but is mentioned in the book), the other where he sees Martha as his power animal from therapy sessions and the third is present. And there’s an interesting line in the book as well which speaks of rather unconventional way to self-realization it goes “May be self-improvement is not the answer, may be self-destruction is the answer”.
I can put an analogy to this: When confronted with a problem, a human being tries his/her level best to solve it, but he/she can also try his level best to run away from the problem – evading a problem is a solution to it as well.

In quite a punk-rockish way, the movie speaks of gaining control by actually loosing it, it speaks of forming the new rules but only at the cost of breaking the existing the breaking ones. It speaks of a revolution but of a spiritual kind and promises to bring back the humanity to the Stone Age – to wipe out the slate clean, to start afresh, and to build at the cost of destruction.

While I would skip the obvious (and a little exaggerated) commentary on the consumer mad America, it is an interesting idea that a man is pushed to the primal instincts of a caveman by consumerism (which is eventually leading to depression).

To dig in a bit deeper, Chuck Palahniuk primarily writes the Transgressive fiction and he had interesting view on the style of his writing:
“I always want to keep the story moving. This means a constant flow of plot points, occurring in short scenes. Over the length of a novel, this forces the plot beyond any moderate crisis. What might be the dramatic peak of another book will just be the first-act peak in my books. If I have a bold, upsetting idea, I’ll use it as soon as possible. Otherwise, I find my flow of ideas stops. No matter how appalling the scene, you can always top it eventually. Plus, books have such a tiny share of the public attention. No one reads. With all these strikes against books, I think their advantage is the ability to address topics and depict scenes that no other medium can. If writers don’t go to these extremes, no one will”

I agree with the last lines, the most atrocious characters have been conceived in books – The Joker, Dr. Hannibal Lecter and now Tyler Durden. At every moment of the fight club you know something exciting is round the corner. And the narrative in the book as well as in the movie is stylized, seductive and very appealing.

Another glaring example of vulgar masculinity is the fact that there’s hardly any stress on the female roles, Marla has a substantial role but the character has less significance in the mainstream ideas promoted in the cinema. In a write up from Chuck after the end of novel, he actually mentioned that he had gotten kind of sick watching the book shelves filled with the works of Amy Tan.

What strikes a chord to me as a reader was that it uses very basic human instincts and emotions in the movie – violence is a very primal instinct when they are threatened or their existence is at stake. In case of fight club, when the masculinity is at stake something or someone rises up to claim a stake for the brawn. In a world where we have international women’s day, fight club is a good reminder that mischief, mayhem and soap are important too (ok ladies; take that with a pinch of salt). Interestingly, with all the blood and the gore, it seems the protagonist/ the narrator/ the author are calling out for a plea of attention.

We often fail to see beyond the obvious and hear what is said between the words, Fight Club is a book / movie which has multiple layers are interpretations, some of them in favor and some of them mocking upon the loopholes in the movie (esp. as a social commentary). But in either way it remains one of those works which shocks, entertains and influences, borrowing from the movie itself:

If you read it at a different time, with a different state of mind, you WILL become a different person.

General thoughts on cinema, genres and audience

2009-08-24T07:15:00.000-07:00

Over the years I have come to believe that cinema is a medium that caters to all the senses. And on top of it, it is one medium where one sees the maximum of human skill in all forms – It can be in the form of jaw dropping looking Madhuri in Dhak-Dhak or seedy, dinghy and smelly looking by lanes of bhindi bazaar in Aamir… it caters to all tastes, in all forms and at all intellectual levels.

As I sit clicking the keys, I cannot help going back to the review of ‘Kaminay’ I just read on one of the popular websites. The review column used a term that has been ringing on my mind too for the past few years (rather subconsciously and not thudding out loud); the term is ‘Smart Cinema’.

And I think of Pulp Fiction…. I think if in the future we ever have a genre of cinema termed as ‘Smart Cinema’, pulp fiction would be the fountainhead, closely followed by Fight Club. Since there is no official definition of this kind of motion pictures, let me share with you, what I think of these types of movies.

I think smart cinema is something that does not go on a splurge, it is constructed on a limited budget, with intelligent use of resources and there’s a great amount of thought and detailing that goes into it. The smartness reflects not only on the marketing or the promotions, one can see it in the movie…. An intelligent theme, tight story, decent performances and funny dialogs, I think you will find them a lot in the smart cinema.

That’s why I’m a gia-normus fan of pulp fiction; it is a brilliant, innovative and very funny. The dialogs border on the verge of being literary works (admittedly in a rather obscene and ludicrous way), the characterization is spot-on (It revitalized an otherwise sinking career of John Travolta) and a twisted narrative pattern which one seldom sees. It is a kind of movie that throws a challenge at the viewer, to understand the movie, to read between the dialogs and to figure out the black and the white from the otherwise gray characters…

While it seemed that Hollywood will run away with all the applause, our desi directors have stepped up to the challenge as well, past few years, I have seen some movies which I have truly enjoyed not only as entertainment packages but from a creation point of view as well. Being Cyrus, Khosla ka Ghosla, Johnny Gaddar, Aamir, Oye lucky lucky Oye and off late Dev D to name a few.

I had an interesting state of mind after watching Dev D, I could not decide if I liked the movie or not (My mom asked me on how did I like the movie and I said I have not decided it as yet). I had expected the movie to make some kind of impact on me, you know, a kind of emotional one, so there I sat in the hall, waiting for that one line, one scene or one expression which would sum up the experience of movie for me…..but it never happened.

Since watching the movie, I have pondered over it for a long time, on the theme, the work and the obvious reference to the Devdas……then one of these days I was watching Anurag Kashyap’s interview and he elaborated on how the movie merely drew an inference from the old classic but yet it reflected upon a modern day relationship. It then all clicked to me – the whole idea of modern day relations, of the original theme of ‘Love’ in Devdas replaced by ‘Lust’.

Somewhere I was beginning to see that the genre of smart cinema focused also on the box-office, although not glaring and very obviously as a Karan Johar movie but subtly and in a more quiet way.

Make no mistake, I’m not against movies targeting the box office, but I’m against a school of thought which seems to be focusing on the end result (box office success) rather than the process itself (movie making).

But then there’s something I did like in Dev D, it was the character of Chanda, I think it was the only character which showed genuine emotions on the screen. The rest of the main cast always found a way through actions (or alcohol) to transform an original emotion into something else. A good and much talked off example is a scene where Paro works on the hand pump after her little sexcapade with Dev does not go the way she would have liked, she vents out all her energy and frustration on the poor handle!!

Another is a face painting scene where Dev and Chanda paint happy faces in the balcony, considering their rather tragic lives; the scene is quite ironic and artistically conceived.

Lot of smart cinema is full of such incidents. Going back to the Pulp Fiction (and other Quentin Tarantino movies), there is a very beautiful term used for all the Q.T. movies (and other smart movies as well, including Kubrick’s a clockwork orange), it is called the ‘Aestheticization of violence’; look at a movie like Kill Bill Vol. I, the movie has a lot of violence but it is highly chick and stylized……It’s a smart concept, where one can take the abominable and gross part out of the blood spilling and turn it into something very enjoyable. Reservoir dogs is perhaps a notch below, the violence may be stomach - curding for some viewers.

As I traced back my liking to Chanda’s character, I began to analyze my own movie taste, in the year 1994 Pulp fiction was released and the same year saw two other great movies as well: Forrest Gump and the ShawShank redemption.

Welcome, ladies and Gentleman, to the old school….

I do not remember any lines from Pulp Fiction, but I always remember Red from the Shaw shank redemption, standing in the hay field and reading a letter from Andy and one line says “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies”. And think we all remember what Forrest’s mother told him about life (Hint: A box of chocolates).

I was in college, it was around 2.00 am in the night when I finished watching the Shaw Shank redemption, and I knew that I had watched one of the greatest movies of all time. It is this kind of feeling that none of the Q.T. movies can give me.

Yes, the best of the movies I have watched are the ones which made me learn something, which made me sit glued to them and drew me into long discussions, not only about the film but also about the characters and made me infinitely curious about the creator and his ideas. These are the movies where you see a genuine love for making the movie without resorting to box office tricks, there is focus on getting the gig right and not on the groupies banging on the door after the gig.

It is in these movies you remember the character and not the actor – I remember certain guy name Red from ShawShank redemption, I remember Eddie Dupris from Million Dollar baby, I remember a helpless Ned Logan from Unforgiven……. I do not remember Morgan Freeman.

We all remember Forrest Gump, Captain John Miller, Chuck Noland, Victor Navorski and Michael Sullivan but we see the characters when Tom hanks plays them, we seldom see Tom himself.

Agreed these are great actors! Bigger picture: these are great movies.

I wonder if the different between the smart and the genuine movies is a kind of generation gap, a gap not that of time and age but that of thinking and the way we perceive the world around us. The different between the smart cinema and the genuine cinema is the difference between Will Hunting and Sean Maguire in Good Will Hunting.

But there’s always an interesting argument from an audience point of view, why do we really need a smart cinema? Why to stress our brains in watching a spiraling story like Memento? Discuss incessantly the theory behind the matrix? Or bomb one out by watching a mind-boggling Mulholland drive? Life can be much simpler and yet beautiful by watching nice movies like Little Miss Sunshine or adorable Juno.

I buy this argument; my dad loves watching old ‘Dhishum-Dhishum’ movies (preferably those starring Dharam paaji) so I really can’t complain.

But I feel that the question of why to make a complex / off-beat cinema just because it has fewer takers or does not do well at the box office is very one-dimensional? One of the major reasons that India makes the cinema with more or less same ingredients is because of the fact that audiences have the same kind of taste. A very few directors have tried to change their taste.

Human nature, by its very nature, demands for something better. We want a better car, a better society, a better country, what the hell! Every time he comes into bat, we expect a better Sachin Tendulkar as well. Why then are we limiting ourselves to the same kind of cinema? An artist of any kind thrives on adulation, by repeatedly accepting his stale old creations we are limiting his creativity to a limited spectrum.

Whenever I watch a brilliant cinema, read a great book or listen to a spectacular song, I think it would be so hard to better them but then there’s always some scope of improvement. Just as I thought they could not better Finding Nemo, they made Ratatouille…when the euphoria of Ratatouille was barely over; we were drugged with Wall-E, just as Wall-E was dubbed as perhaps one of the great animated movies ever, someone made Coraline….. The potential is infinite, it’s just our horizon is limited.

Over the years my perception over the cinema has changed a lot, may be that’s because I have tried to see the effort behind the creation, the idea of the creator rather than just focusing on the entertainment value, perhaps, if all of us try to be more understanding , we would enjoy the whole experience more.

Augustus

2009-04-29T08:10:00.000-07:00

A young man stood silently on the hill. Beneath the ground there was a vast ground. The sun had just come out and the air sky had the exotic color of white, red and blue.

“Red – for the blood that the earth will witness, white – for every war must bring peace and blue for the flag that the lancer will bear today” he said to himself.

Today was the day of war, in a few hours the armies will march out to the ground to fight the barbarian army.

It all seemed so non-consequential when it had started. The emperor had imposed the taxes on the neighboring warring clan. The clan had refused to pay the taxes. And the emperor had then declared the war ….

But the might of Rome faced an even bigger problem; they did not have a general to lead the army. The emperor had long pondered on the worthy warriors – there was Herminius who was a skilled warrior but knew (and cared) a little about strategy and politics, then there was Vitus, the most experienced and the most skilled warrior and perhaps the best suited for the position, he had good relations with everyone in the senate and was a man who was not afraid to speak his mind ….. Yet at times he seemed too frivolous to command a legion.

And then he heard about Augustus …

Augustus was nobody before everybody knew him, he was an enthusiastic battalion leader with keen interest in war-strategies and politics, his knowledge, and even at the tender age was as ripe as that of a seasoned warrior. Augustus enjoyed close companionship with the emperor during a recent assignment. The emperor’s personal belongings were being transferred from his summer home to his palace and in a freak bandit raid all the belongings were looted. It was left to Augustus to retrieve the lost belongings or to bring the bandits to the justice. Augustus did both. The emperor was impressed by Augustus’s efficiency and took note of him.

And when the hour came to decide upon the new general, the emperor took council of the members of senate and some trusted friends, with great debate and reasoning they all decided to name Augustus as the general, for he had one great quality that eluded the might Herminius and the experience Vitus – Augustus was incorruptible.

And at the dawn of the war, the newly appointed general waited for the sun to come out.

Augustus heard pebbles being crushed by two set of feet, his hand tightened on the sword, he turned back to see Herminius and Vitus standing there. A little known fact was that the three were good friends.

“General” Vitus said, raising his sword as a mark of respect, Herminius although barely 3-4 years older than Augustus did the same.

“You can spare yourself of these formalities when we are in solitude” Augustus said.

“I was just getting used to calling you the general” Vitus said in a jovial tone.

“Shut up, Vitus, you know you should have been there in my place” Augustus said.

“You feel you are not good enough to lead the roman army?” Herminius asked.

“I think the magnanimity of the occasion has unnerved me” Augustus confessed.

“I always wanted to be the general of the roman army but perhaps a bit later this is too soon. I do not doubt my ability but the wealth of experience eludes me” he continued.

“Pondering, when the enemy stares in your eye, are not the earmarks of a great warrior” Herminius said.

“Tell me Herminius, Did you not want to be the General of the Army?” Augustus confronted him.

“I have the strength of the sword with me but I do not have the guile of a tactician” Herminius said. “I can go and slay a million, but I cannot scheme the attacks, I’m the sword-bearer, just like my ancestors were” He said looking at the rising sun.

“What about you, Vitus?” Augustus said turning to his senior warrior. “I heard that half of the emperor’s advisors recommended you as the general”.

“And yet the emperor chose you….” Vitus said.

“You enjoy an impeccable background, decent warfare acumen and some flair with the sword” Vitus said

“But you have a great asset which eludes both me and Herminius” he said looking at the rising sun

“And that would be?” Augustus said, for the first time directly looking at Vitus.

“You have the discipline that takes to be a great leader; you have the perseverance and an incorruptible soul” It was Herminius who spoke.

“I have my share of wine and women” Vitus said. Vitus was well known for his lecherous habits and drinking.

“The children of Rome will not look up to me” he said.

“But I know that when in comes to the warfare, you are the best we have, I feel I’m not the right person when there’s someone else who’s better than me available” Augustus said in a rising voice.

“It’s mighty modest of you to say that” Vitus said laughing

“But haven’t you heard that the best man in this world may not get the deserving position” he added.

“It’s not about what is happening in the world but in front of my eyes” Augustus said.

“You’re being naive” Herminius said.

“Your reluctance will lower the morale of the second line of support” Herminius was now getting angry at the last moment drama.

The first line of support of the Roman army was lead by Marcellus in the center, Vitus on the right and Herminius on the left. Augustus had insisted that the best warriors should be the once in front.

“I wish to be in solitude” Augustus said, not wishing to pursue the debate further.

For sometime Augustus pondered over the words said by Vitus “The best man in this world may not get the most deserving position”. He had heard these lines before; years back when he wished to be comforted after a loss in the battle, his general had iterated the exact lines to bring him face to face with the harsh reality.

It was an hour after the sunrise that the battle had to start. Augustus recounted the events that lead to his appointment as the General of the Army – he had shown sparks of a leader in his older battalion. And as soon as the opportunity came he formed a new battalion and plotted the whole attack on the local bandits, blocked the entry and exit points and the whole raid a great success.

He remembered his childhood games of the same nature when he would make stories and play with this friends, he would always be the one to do all the things.

And suddenly a reality dawned upon him – He had grown up.

He held a great power with him now, on his commands his men would kill another men. On directions of his sword, Men would march to death; they would walk to any corner of the earth to fight with him. He owed them life, death and much more. And with the stroke of that realization, Augustus realized that he had to live up to his name.

“We are all born to achieve a higher stature; our life is a constant struggle to better our own reflection” He remembered his first philosophy lessons.

Augustus thought of the struggles he had gone through to learn all the moves in the sword-play, the countless nights spent debating and formulating the war strategies with his fellow battalion leaders. All that which only seemed like food for thought at that time was leading somewhere….. This was the culmination point of all those years.

“I’m here today, at this moment, in this place because I’ve always wanted to be” Augustus spoke to himself.

And at that juncture, a blood-red sun rose in the sky….

An hour later, the armies marched outside and the first line of attack took the position.

“Marcellus, fall back to the second line of attack” came a voice from behind. It was Augustus.

Augustus rode out to the center, his horse slowly clicking the heels and just as he entered the first line, a young soldier of raised his sword in respect and said “General”.

And just as Augustus rode through a sea of roman soldiers, he saw the familiar faces; old comrades, friends and even some battalion leaders; they all raised their swords and addressed him as ‘General’.

And when finally he stationed himself between Herminius and Vitus, Vitus slowly said in his ears “Welcome Home, General”

Augustus turned back and took out his helmet, looked directly towards his army and said

“Sons of Rome,
I see courage in your arms,
And I hear a heartbeat full of faith,
I witness the longing for glory in your eyes,
And I see the years of wait.
Ride with me across the field,
Do not let your heart flutter at the enemy’s trumpet
Let not your feet tremble with the call of war.
We are here not by fallacy or by chance,
We are here for we are destined to become better men then we are”

With the last lines, Augustus charged ………………..

Us and Them

2009-01-21T04:22:00.000-08:00

No. It’s not about Pink Floyds’song.

A few months back one of my friends had gone for a picnic of sorts with his colleagues (female), tagging along with the ladies were some of their friends (guess from school or college days). I was casually gazing thru the snaps he had clicked, I asked him

“How were the boys?” (Just to measure them up, it’s a guy thing)

“Woh sab ghar mein rahe hain?” (They all had stayed at home). My friend replied.

Over past few years this has become a key factor for me and my friends. We usually look down upon someone who has spent his entire college life at his home – To say euphemistically and to say the least, we feel that such guys are total dorks (I’m being gender specific here, this categorization holds good for boys only but yeah, Of course, there’s always exception to everything in life.). This got me thinking about the kind of boys I see around me, I called them ‘US’ & ‘THEM’

So here’s a vis a vis between ‘US’ and ‘THEM’

1. ‘Them’ are a very regular and non-interesting breed, in all probabilities; they flinch at the smallest of idea of leaving their home. They love the comforts available, even the little one’s like getting a hot chapatti in dinner, having a glass of milk ready when they are going to bed or never to bother about laundry. ‘Them’ are usually in a comfort zone

2.‘Them’ still play cricket with their buddies (these are the same buddies with whom they went to school as well).

3.They have the luxury of having a separate curry made for them if they don’t like the one which is cooked. I once went to a colleague’s house wherein he had prepared a fantastic ‘Baingan Ka bharta’ and one of the ‘Them’ from our team refused to eat it as he doesn’t like Baingan – I was aghast!!

4.‘Them’ like things done in a certain manner – like they’ll have Pakoras with specific chutney or some crap like that. I mean ‘Them’ have standards (which is always good to have) but they are not flexible. But ‘Them’ have some good points as well – they are more organized in their personal life, they have healthier life styles and in all probabilities.

5.In my infinite wisdom, I once theorized that there are two types of men – one like cricketer Rahul Dravid and the others like former west-Indian great Brian Lara. ‘Them’ are the Rahul Dravid – Likeable, consistent and good boys, they are like the band MLTR –love songs only.

6.‘Them’ suffer a major drawback; their decision making is rather slow. I mean those boys who are used to their parents taking decisions for them found themselves a little out of sorts when they have to the decision making mode. In the long run they turn out real fine with decisions but usually are not rapid-movers.

7.‘Them’ have a poor sense of adventure; their escapades usually are like ‘sneaking out and drinking beer’ and of those sorts. Or it would be about how they went into an all night trek where they had camp fire, everybody around ‘Them’ was drinking but he sat quietly enjoying the fire (and in all probabilities sang songs as well). Hardly adrenaline pumping!!

8.‘Them’ seem to have a low intensity when it comes to friendship, I mean they have good friends but they don’t have what I would call real great buddies. I may sound a little contradicting here, for instance, imagine someone staying in same locality throughout his life and not yet having a real ‘chaddi-buddy’ but I guess just their friendship goes through such normal incidents, it ain’t that intense.

9.‘Them’ are definitely more stable in their head (read – totally unimaginative).

10.‘Them’ are the kind of folks who are more likely to have girlfriends as well (and the sad part is that they end up marrying them too).

11.‘Them’ are emotional and display their emotions (even amongst guys).

12.‘Them’ would have taken his family out for dinner and would have bought gift for his family from his first salary.

13.‘Thems’ are the kinds of guys who do their MBA’s as well.

14.‘Them’ have girls-boys groups they play silly games, keep stupid nick-names and gift each other chocolates/demand for a party for no particular reason.

15.‘Them’ are not so good with words. A little dim to respond/understand to quick joke or sarcasm. Usually they tell you the SMS jokes. ‘Them’ are touchy; they’ll avoid you, if you continue the leg-pulling.

Ok, we now the flip the coin to land on the other side.

1.‘Us’ are usually found not in their home but in so called ‘happening area’ of their respective town/city/village. They are very likely to treat their homes like hotels and thereby not making ‘mama’s boys’.

2.They worship home-cooked food (not only cooked in their home but cooked in anyone’s home), years of staying away from home and eating shitty food have taught them value of good home meal. These are a kind of breed which can eat all kinds of vegetables cooked without any hang-ups.

3.‘Us’ don’t play a lot (negligible and iota are appropriate words too), they are essentially lazy creatures. They usually get-together at someone’s place and only watch sports. They are fairly reluctant to carry work of great physical labor (with exception, of course, if you know what I mean) and are very likely to squabble over small issues like ‘who will fill the water bottle from the tap?’ or ‘who will bring milk to prepare tea’.

4.‘Us’ don’t really have a specific way of wanting things to happen (not at least the trivial ones). But there are certain areas where ‘Us’ are very meticulous and usually these are the important things to them (which may seem perfectly crazy to a ‘Them’).

5.‘Us’ are like Brian Lara, they swing from godliness to impoverishment, on their day, and they are the best, funniest and smartest guys around on other days…. Well, you better not talk about the other days. ‘Us’ are like the rock bands – there’s grunge, punk, heavy metal, psychedelic …. ‘Us’ have all the shades.

6.‘Us’ decide quickly but often end up making wrong decisions. Some of it because they don’t have anyone to guide them and sometimes because they are purely headstrong.

7.‘Us’ have a scores of adventures to tell and most of them are those which you cannot mention in public forums. They have lots of stories which apparently take great pride in telling.

8.‘Us’ value their friends a lot (even at times at par with their family), for most of their lives, it has been their friends who have been around in all big and small moments. They have inherited some parts of jai and veeru’s soul in them. ‘Us’ can tell more stories about their friends than they can tell about themselves.

9.‘Us’ are wild-childs’ – they are the nearest cousins of Holden Caulfield and Vernon Little with a dash of The Joker thrown in.

10.‘Us’ have gone through at least one break up or un-confessed love or have gone through a horrible tortures phase where they were ‘just friends’. They are usually single and scoff at couples but they are in need of a nice girlfriend/s (and as desperately as the world today which is struggling to come out of credit crisis).

11.‘Us’ are more emotional but do not show. If an ‘Us’ is crying, trust me, he would be seriously hurt.

12.‘Us’ would have spent half of his salary on parties, other half would have gone in paying the debts of friends (without interest, of course!) and then, when his salary would have been exhausted he would have asked for money from his buddies to buy gift for family.

13.‘Us’ have tried as many time to clear the MBA exam as Indian cricket team has tried to win a test series in Australia.

14.‘Us’ only have all boys groups. If they want to be with girls, the boys group is avoided. There is a silent pact (much like omerta) that when an ‘Us’ is with a girl, his leg may never be pulled in girl’s presence (with little he knows, this may be his first and last ‘date’ with that girl). It is later when his leg is pulled mercilessly.

15.‘Us’ are not touchy about leg-pulling. They are capable of inflicting intolerable cruelty via their quick tongue lashing (all in good humor of course!!). Very capable of making original jokes.

The hard fact of life – ALL THE ‘US’ TRANSFORM TO ‘THEM’ (now, you know why the world is such a rotten place to be in?)

One Small Voice – the Mumbai Terror attacks, me and Andy Dufresne.

2008-12-04T07:35:00.000-08:00

It was a normal morning for me in my hotel room; I woke up at 6.30 am and switched on BBC, and that was the first time when I heard about the terror attacks. I was busy getting ready for the breakfast and the intensity of the moment didn’t quite hit me.

In a while I landed downstairs for the breakfast and watched the entire episode on the CNN for half an hour or so, and it is then watching that telecast I felt emotions coming to me – the first pang was that of anger and then that of helplessness. I was angry for what was happening to my city, the city which I love and I’ve been staying for past 3 years. So what if the hotel Taj-Mahal is around 40 km from my place, I felt as if the blast has occurred at the Jumbo king wada-pao joint right across the street from my home.

And then came the helplessness …….

I do not know what I would have done if I were in Mumbai but even sitting miles away in a bus and heading to my office I felt helpless. There was nothing that I could do, far less than catching the perpetrators and bringing them to justice, I was even incapable of going at the attacked site and help someone out and it was the helplessness of the worst kind for it did not rose out of lack of ability but out of lack of opportunity.

In the office my colleagues kept asking me if my family was fine, I told them that my family does not stay in Mumbai but my other acquaintances were safe and sound. I remember South Mumbai fondly for it is very rare that I go in that area, when some ole friend drops by and wishes to see Mumbai; we usually catch the harbor line local to the CST station and see the gateway and the Taj-mahal hotel and the famous marine drive.
One of my friends who did not like Mumbai at the first go (he did not see the south Mumbai area) loved the city when he saw the south Mumbai.

Post attacks I saw the rage pouring in and people bashing up the politicians left and right (not that they don’t deserve it), questioning the credibility of the government and openly condemning their impotence. There were heroes and there were villains, there were eulogies and there were denigrating remarks …. Yes, the protests were important for they not only show resistance to the obsolete way of governance but they are the harbinger of the first wave of change but my biggest fear is that we may start loosing aggression via these protests …. So much for the solidarity shown by 100,000 people in Mumbai and across India I think they are beginning to loose the plot here, I sincerely feel that all these people (with no offense meant to them) will resume their regular lives when the anger and the despair dies down and this brings me to the ultimate question

Are these passing emotions or really the beginning of the revolution?

India has fought the terrorism before in Punjab, although that may be of a relatively small magnitude but I assume that it at least it took a decade to wipe it off completely, and perhaps it will take a great amount of time to eradicate the likes of LeT and Al-Quaida from the face of this earth. The India people have showed unity before as well, that was in 1947, this time it is to fight the AK-47. With all good intentions, a great poem by a renowned lyricist and emotional speeches the question remains is how this has to be achieved?

It is at this moment I remember Andy Dufresne and the Shwashank redemption. Much like cinema buffs world wide, The Shawshak redemption remains one of my all-time-favorite movies and a source of inspiration. In face of a great tragedy Andy puts up the most brave, intelligent front ever witnessed and in the end he emerges as a superior human being and isn’t that what we are trying to be in face of such a calamity?

I sincerely hope that amidst this emotional outrage and tragedy there are someone out there who are thinking about protecting the potentially unguarded coast-line, I hope there is someone out there who’s perhaps trying to build a low-cost baggage screening device and have it installed in every hotel or perhaps policies are being set up where in all the police van are fitted with cameras and have GPS tracking. Anger as an emotion is not a problem-solver

I hope amidst all these there’s a human being who has not fallen to slogan, rallies and to the passing emotions, someone who’s gone back to the drawing board to chart a plan or perhaps someone who believes in acting before speaking, I hope amidst all of these people there’s a Andy Dufresne.

‘I’m Happy Miss Rand’

2008-09-18T01:16:00.000-07:00

I always wanted to start my blog in a conventional manner. By convention I mean to write something that was expected out of me. I juggled with two topics to kick start my virtual notebook – I thought I would write about two folks who come very near to be my idols – Late Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain and former Australian cricket team captain Stephen Waugh. But then I wrote ‘Never Mind’ and then rest, as they say is history.

Anyways, I’m posting something which I expect myself to write. The expectation to write this piece springs not only from admiration but also from a simple fact – I owe it to the book which I’m going to write about. I owe it to Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead’.

Coming back to my first post on my blog, the protagonist, in his dying moments finds the ultimate truth about the world and how it operates and he coins his defense towards the unjust and sinister ways of life, he coins his own salvation mantra – ‘Never Mind’, when I first thought of this phrase it had an exact literary cousin, much grandiose and bigger in nature, Jamie’s Never Mind was equivalent to Howard Roark’s – “The defense rests”.

I don’t want to discuss the story of the novel. That would be an anti-climax, this means to be a more personal tribute/analysis rather than a literary dissertation.

I do, I don’t and the struggle within

‘Howard Roark is not practical’; ‘Howard Roark only did those things because someone else did not’.

I remember the early reactions from two of my friends about Fountainhead. It was the first time; I came around talking to them about the book. And in these two reactions lies the beauty of the book (or the sheer force of it).

We all have read about comic book heroes, the batmans, the supermans ET. Al. We love their stunts and adventures. We love superman when he lifts a crashing aero plane, we root for Spiderman when he jumps from a wall to wall in NY. Their actions are not judged on the basis of feasibility or the practicality of their occurrence. We enjoy their fictitious antics.

Moving ahead to the real, we love a Cat Shannon , John McClain, a Charles Calthrop and a Jason Bourne. They dodge bullets, the jump from planes, yet we accept their actions with the same ease as we would accept the coming of Sunday after Saturday.

To cut a long story short, you judge fiction on the basis of ‘whether I like it or not’ but after reading Fountainhead one always thinks ‘whether it is possible or not’. The book, over to top it may seem to a few, but to a majority (including your humble blogger) the book drives you to think whether such life, such philosophy is feasible or not.

You want to transform the Roark’s, the Wynand’s and the Toohey’s in you and around you. You want to see if it is possible or not, although a work of fiction …… the book pushes you towards to explore a reality (although of a varied nature). And it is this struggle within which is compelling and quite grueling at the same time. I think the best books are those which leave you thinking, rather than leaving you entertained (and yes Great books leave you mesmerized).

Power and Violence

In a few of my personal favorites I’ve felt a strong undercurrent of emotion, an emotion not visibly present in the words but somewhere it wanders in the background. I always find a great amount of hidden grief when I see the godfather trilogy… there is mourning for love in Pamuk’s Snow and there is almost a divine mist like feeling in Gibran’s The Prophet.

Whenever I read fountainhead I see a surging violence in the pages, something that is aptly defined in the book by Mrs. Keating about Howard Roark:

“She stood looking after him through the screen door, watching his gaunt figure Move across the rigid neatness of her parlor. He always made her uncomfortable in the house, with a vague feeling of apprehension, as if she were waiting to see him swing out suddenly and smash her coffee tables, her Chinese vases, her Framed photographs. He had never shown any inclination to do so. She kept expecting it, without knowing why”

For me, this pretty much summed up everything. The hidden violence seems to be the author’s frustration about the world and everything wrong in it. What makes the violence more visible is the superhuman restraint displayed by the characters.

Fountainhead is a book of powerful characters – mentally and emotionally. This is one of the reasons the book makes a strong statement and this is the reason why it is subjected to criticism. The characters are almost omniscient; they know all about the other characters, lot of things are said via eyes and body language. To me, this indicates two things – the author has a clear cut idea of characterization and the characters are too well synchronized with each others. However the flip side to this power is that characters fail to exhibit a range of emotions (or behavioral patterns). I mean one doesn’t see the character of Roark growing horizontally in the book, it only grows vertically.

Characters – Translating ideas in to flesh.

For any author, the characters serve a very fundamental purpose – they are the carriers of an idea, a thought or a philosophy. Clarity or the transparency of a character is directly proportional to the clarity of the author. A muddled pen can never sketch a clear character. A good author always has great control over the character, their behavior and range of emotions.

In Rand’s all works (fiction) she has displayed an amazing clear-headedness about her characters. Someone who has read Rand’s earlier works (the likes of We the Living) will finally come to understand and admire her growth, if one compares Kira Argunova (the protagonist in we the living) to Dominique Francon (heroine in The Fountainhead) he/she will see an amazing clarity as well as an astounding growth in Rand’s writing.

The Fountainhead is a book which sets a platform for Rand to launch her philosophy. The characters and not characters but ideas, and they are ideas in most pure forms – staunch and unadulterated. Fountainhead applies her philosophy to individuals, in her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged; she applies the philosophy to the contemporary American society and their way of living.

Fountainhead, true to its name is the one which lays the foundation for things to come….

P.S. – As I finish writing this bullet, I cannot help but marveling at her non-fictional works as well (For the new intellectual, the romantic manifesto etc.) I have never been able to finish these books, but off and on I pick them up and read through some portions, her clarity remains unbeatable in both forms viz. Fiction and Non-fiction. It’s almost as id Rand is writing/proving a complex calculus theorem rather than writing a book. It is this clarity which is something which is very refreshing in all of her works.

Fountainhead – The write up

A book is not only about, characters or ideas. A lot depends upon the way it is written. I have read a great many books in which I personally felt that a great idea has been ruined (I invariably feel this with 800+ paged books, I’m a great fan of compact and well-edited books). In a lot of books, I feel some of the pages and conversations are redundant (strictly personal opinion). I do not mind reading lengthy descriptions or details; I think they speak a lot about an author’s ability to transform the atmosphere around the reader.

Whenever I read fountainhead, I have not seen too much of wastage of pages, characters or dialogs. They all seem to fit in, I might debate with myself saying that a lot of dialogs between Toohey and his protégés seem a waste but by and large it is one of the most well written book I’ve ever read. All the characters are like parts in a well-oiled machinery, which works with a supreme precision and knows what it has to do, when it has to do and why it is doing that. They are all parts of an equation; even if one variable changes the entire equation goes for a toss.

Being a student of science, I can safely compare fountainhead to a proof of a theorem, where each step has a meaning, a function. Even if one step is left out the equation is complete.

After Reading….After all these years

I read Fountainhead in the year 2002; I’m trying to recollect what my reaction was after reading it? However, my memory fails me. But I can vouch that I would have felt the same as I feel till date after reading a great book – a feeling of exhaustion combined with wonder (a wonder to the point that I sometime refuse to believe that a human mind can conceive something as brilliant as this). It happens very frequently that it is usually late in the night when I finish reading a book; I stare into the dark outside and somehow I feel more bewildered and lost.

I have felt the same feeling again and again whenever I read fountainhead. I read some pages and shut the book and walk out to allow the wonder to fade, every time I’ve read the book (I have read it 5 times at least I guess) it has given me a new insight, a new perspective and a new idea to ponder upon. It’s like gazing at a great picture from different angles, from every angle you can see something new and profound.

After all these years, I’ve finally made peace with the book. I haven’t read the book in past 3 years or so but there’s a lot I’ve picked up from it, in terms of words and in terms of thought (on top of my mind the first quote which comes is “A man’s first duty is towards himself”). I no longer torment myself putting my thoughts parallel to Roark, Wynand or Dominique Francon for that matter (a very floydian way of saying is that I’m comfortably numb) or try to find Keating and tooheys in this world …… Miss Rand, I’m just happy.

3rd July 1969

2008-07-03T04:01:00.000-07:00

Philadelphia, Today

He saw the ship receding from the docks of Philadelphia, the ship looked a little hazy; he was looking it from the smoke of his cigar. The ship was receding away from him.

“Unfortunately not everything fades away like this” he said with a hint of gloom

“I’m 59” he said to himself and slumped on his chair.

“I had a reasonably good life”, he thought, Alicia had been a faithful companion until cancer killed her couple of years back. His son visited him frequently and had decided to marry a lovely girl from a respectable family.

For, Marvin S. Buckle, life seemed to be a walk in the park.

Then he suddenly remembered the night of 3rd July 1969, it had just rained in the evening and the earth had intoxicated him with the smell of the soil, suddenly the same smell came back to him and his studio apartment seemed to stifle him, he ran to open to window to feel the fresh air, the air almost lunged towards him and pushed him back. He stumbled upon the cup-board near by and a photo frame fell down.

He looked at the frame with guilt, as if he did not deserve to look at it.

He picked up the frame and put it in his rucksack. He dialed his airline agent and booked a ticket.

Nashville, Tennessee, Today

John Woodcroft woke up in cold sweat. His breath was heavy. He stared hard in the darkness, trying to figure out the meaning of the dark in front of him. That night of 3rd July 1969 was also dark. Then he broke into a maniacal laughter.

“I, John ‘Woody’ Woodcroft, a decorated soldier of the Vietnam War, am waking up in fear and cold sweat” he said laughing.

He took a swig of the bushmills kept near to his table. The alcohol didn’t quite help either. He tried turning on the radio, the late night radio was playing a loud song. He listened to the song carefully, it echoed of voice of a girl shrieking. He broke into cold sweat again.

He got up from the bed and called a trusted friend “Dan, I need some money” he said.

“Jesus, its 2 in the morning, woody” an irritated voice came from the other end.

“I need it tomorrow” woody said affirmatively “I’m dropping in your den at 11” he hung up.

“Tomorrow” he thought “I’ll catch a flight to Texas”.

He turned off the radio and picked up a photograph kept near the table, he glanced at it for a while and smiled a little, it was a sad nostalgic smile.

He kept the photo back and tried to sleep.

State Medical Centre, Cleveland, Ohio, Today

“What’s your name?” asked the doctor to an old man sitting in front of him.

“Smo ….” The old man was about to say ‘Smokie’ but he paused and smiled a little.

“Sebastian Reese” he said in a gruff voice.

“I’ve some bad news for you Mr. Reese” said the doctor in a crisp voice.

“Your cancer looks real bad, you need some chemotherapy sessions” he added.

“And then I’ll be cured?” Smokie asked.

“I cannot give you an answer on that right now, we’ll have to see your progress after the sessions” doctor said.

“Thanks a lot, Doc, I’ll think about it” Said Smokie, he took his reports and walked out.

Outside the hospital Smokie lit first of his innumerable cigarettes. “I’m 62” Smokie said to himself

“No point in living beyond this” he concluded to himself.

He walked casually along the semi-crowded street and turned towards his travel agent’s office.

“Smokie’s dying, but I have one last stand to make” he said to himself while trudging the stairs of the office.

Smokie booked the ticket and paid to his agent in cash, on a corner of his wallet for a rumpled and folded photograph. He looked at the photo and smiled, a tear fell on his eye from the photograph.

A remote church in El-Paso, Texas

Neil O’ mally got up early in the morning. He got up from his room and walked towards the balcony. He came out and took a deep breath-the sun and the morning colors filled him with freshness.

He showered and shaved and got ready to go to the church. After a few minutes of brisk walking he was in church. He liked the peace and the familiarity of it; years of hard life had taught him to value peace and home, El-Paso was home and he was a janitor in the church

He said his morning prayers and saw an old man entering the confession box. In a rush of blood he entered the confession box.

He was now face to face with an old man, the man started in a slurred voice “Father, I did something terribly wrong years ago”

“Tell me about it” Neil said in a heavy but calm voice. He was trying hard to keep his voice from shaking.

“I was posted in Vietnam in 1969, I was a tunnel rat” the old man paused for a while.

“The Viet Cong had built tunnels to combat the B-52 bombings, the tunnel rats were the specialized individuals who raided to tunnels to kill the enemies” said the old man in-a-matter of fact manner.

“Did you kill anyone in the tunnel? Do you regret that?” Neil quizzed.

“Heck! I killed a lotta guys, I don’t regret that” Old man said

“I see you were decorated for that” Neil looked at the badges on the old man’s heart

“Yeah!” old man said with pride “I got my dog-tag too” he showed them to the Neil like a child showing his first drawing to his parents. He had a single tag hanging around his neck

“Anyways, this is not about killing guys. On the night of July 3 1969, me and a bunch of us raided the last tunnel, the next day we were to fly back home. I, with one of my partners came back early and started drinking to celebrate” he remembered.
“You see, alcohol always got me, it drove me nuts, and I was on a real high” he paused and swallowed hard for a while.

“Then she came….. I was really drunk. She was not a whore or something but I just felt like going bang-bang with her for a while, if you know what I mean” said the old man sheepishly.

Neil nodded.

“I fooled around with her for a while, but she kept on saying NO, NO” Neil noticed that the voice of the old man was totally dispassionate.

“I was too drunk and then she said that she had to go home, I followed her” old man continued.

“She lived nearby and had to pass through a deserted road en route to her home” he said.

“I confronted her again and she declined again” old man swallowed hard.

“And then father, I did something terrible…..I raped her on the gun-point, shot her in the back of head” his voice came straight as an arrow.

“And does it still haunt you, the memory of your act?” Neil asked.

“It does not. Sometimes I wake up in cold sweat and I hear her shrieking but then, the next day I’m happy and bouncing along nicely” old man said.

“It’s not the guilt that bothers me, it’s the absence of the guilt that burns me” old man confessed.

“Will god forgive me?” he asked.

“Have you forgiven yourself?” Neil asked.

“I guess, I have” said the old man with some thought. “I have forgotten the incident but perhaps it has not forgotten me” he added.

“I’ve forgotten the incident when I was not able to sleep after coming from the war, I forgot the incident when I was getting married, I forgot the incident when my business failed, I forgot it when I was getting divorced. I forget it when I drink …. It’s as if all these acts have been crimes, kind of activities that made me forget my bigger crime” he added in a single breath.

“Do you feel any better after the confession?” Neil asked solicitously.

“May be I do, May be I don’t” he said getting up from the chamber.

“Be in peace my friend, I’ll pray for you” Neil said

“Good day, father” old man got up and left.

He came out of the church and looked around; the place looked exactly that had been described to him. He had not visited this place ever, yet the area looked very familiar to him. Even in an unexplored land he felt a sense of belonging and comfort.

He tried to forget what he had said to the father, it was truth, he had been haunted by his act for some years, he saw the girl in her dreams, she was begging, crying, pleading to leave her, but he had been too intoxicated to listen to her. Then the dream had faded away, sometimes it came back to him but the occurrences thinned over a period of time ….. Was this god’s way of forgiving him? Or he had lost all the conscious? Had he really sold his soul in pursuit of his daily bread? Had the pleas of the girl drowned off in his own pleas of survival ……. Was he a criminal? By court of law he was, but had he really indicted himself in his own court?

Later in the afternoon a second man walked in to the confession chamber ……..

“How’s it going, father?” his voice was gruff and husky.

“Good afternoon, Sir” Neil greeted him correctly.

“I’m dying, father” the old man said.

Neil O’ mally felt as if he had been hit by a bolt, he was awestruck by the plainness of the voice which declared its end.

“Do you regret that you are dying? What can I do to assuage your agony?” Neil said in an avuncular tone.

“Perhaps it’s unfair to say that I’m dying, I think I was dead long ago, I think I’m dying again” said the old man, “But I have a last stand to make before I go in my coffin” there was a touch of heroism in his voice.

“I was a tunnel rat in Vietnam” he started.

“I was with my buddy, raiding a tunnel somewhere in the outskirts of the Ho-Chi-Minh city, we were to go home next day” he started, he narrowed his eyes to remember the facts.

“It was 3rd July 1969, I went in the tunnel first and my buddy behind me. I had my M1911 with me, it was a lousy piece, it made a big bang in the tunnel which left both rats deaf for a while, and I did not have my Luger with me”.

“So, I went it the tunnel and it was dark as hell inside, I treaded cautiously, there was some water in the tunnel and I hated that, it made noise and alerted the ‘nam soldiers” he said

“We got to a point in the tunnel, where we had two ways, my buddy went on to one side and I went in to another, a few steps later, I heard splashes in water” he continued

“I flashed my light and saw a Vietnam soldier running towards me, I aimed and fired, it was a lousy shot and I missed” his voice seemed to be panicking a bit.

“Then suddenly the nam’ soldier came down on his knees and started pleading, I was partly deaf by the M1911’s bang, but still I pulled the trigger once again and shot him twice in the head” the old man stopped and started coughing, a spot of blood came out from his throat.

“My buddy came, he asked if I was all right, I said I was. I told him I shot a Vietnamese soldier. Even he did not notice that the dead body had no uniform on It.” he paused with a heavy sigh.

“Do you feel guilty of his death?” Neil asked

“I don’t know. I feel guiltier of not telling my friend in the tunnel, I mean in the tunnel I trusted him with his life but I did not trust him with my secret” he pondered.

“Will god punish me for killing a man or will my conscience punish me for not trusted my friend?” he asked

“I cannot answer that for you, my friend – which agony has been darker for you – the killing or hiding the truth?” Neil asked.

“Can one choose his crimes on the judgment day?” he asked with a sad smile.

“We are all sinners, perhaps our capacity of the crimes are different. All I can say that the true believer will always be forgiven” Neil said.

“I’ll take your leave father” he said getting up “I’ll spend rest of my days waiting for my day of judgment” and with a coughing sound he left the church.

Moment of weaknesses, the word lingered in his mind for a while, “Is it just the euphemism for crime?” He thought. Then something came to his mind and he shrugged off the conflicting thoughts. A human being does everything to be happy ….but of all the crime he commits the biggest is the evasion of truth to him.

During late evening, a third man walked in wearing a sleeveless shirt. He entered the confession chamber.

“Do cowards go to heaven father?” he had spared himself from all the formalities.

“We all have courage in our heart, it is just dormant at times” Neil consoled him.

“I saw one man kill another on July 1969 and I kept mum. It was on 3rd July 1969, I saw that bastard putting a bullet thru Sarge’s head. His back was turned to me, I felt like grabbing him and wreck his treacherous neck but I was numbed with fear” his voice had genuine self loathing.

“I have been a true soldier, father, but I failed a fellow soldier, and I failed his family” the old man was sobbing uncontrollably now.

“A day will come when you will redeem yourself, if your grief is genuine, you will have redemption” Neil said.

“Will I ever be able to forgive myself father?” He asked trying to control himself.

“You’ll have to; you have carried the burden for a long time” Neil advised.

“Forgive yourself, my dear friend, for then only you’ll find peace”

The old man got up and left ……

Later that night Neil O’Malley stood in his balcony. He looked at the moon hiding behind the clouds and coming out, he tried to lose himself in the game of moon and clouds but his thoughts went back in time.

He went inside his room and changed to his night-gown, he noticed his hands were trembling. With his shaking hands he opened a drawer.

3rd July 1969

“Let’s meet here when we get off this hell-hole” said Neil to his cronies. Woody, Marv and Smokie looked at the picture curiously.

“What is this place?” Marv asked.

“It’s a church in El-Paso” Neil said. “El-Paso is where I grew up”.

“Sounds good” Woody said.

“Let’s go Neil, we got a last tunnel to hound” Smokie said

“Yeah, let’s finish it and get back home” Neil said.

Then he had gone into the tunnel with Smokie where Smokie had accidentally shot a guy. He had noticed that the dead body was no that of a soldier, It was that of a civilian. He had pretended to ignore it; Smokie was shell-shocked when he had seen the dead body. He went to the base, to report this to his sergeant, lest someone else should discover the body and put him and Smokie in jeopardy.

Sarge had been in the woods near by, his orderly told Neil to look for the Sarge in the west side of the camp. He saw Sarge with some American looking soldiers; he got suspicious and listened to their conversation. Soon he realized that the strangers were drug peddlers, they bought heroin at a cheap rate from Vietnam, used the American cargo planes to ship the heroin to America and then sell them at a high rate. He had chastised Sarge for being corrupt and dishonest. The altercation became a heated one and he had shot the Sarge. It is then Marvin and seen him.

After dumping Sarge’s body in the bushes he had taken a long route to reach the camp, he was to meet Woody, Smokie and Marv and they were to take off to home.

En route to the camp, he had seen a young girl lying dead; she had been raped and had been shot at the back of her head. He remembered the time when woody has walked in this morning in the chamber; he only had a single dog-tag in his chain. Neil had seen the other tag near the dead women’s body.

It was he who had told them that they would meet here, they were to meet, the meeting was meant to be an act of rejoice and celebration. After all the years they did meet but under the clouds of shame, anger and repentance.

“We are all criminals”

Woody was guilty of feeling no shame for what he had did to the girl, his crime was somewhere lost in thoughts of earning the daily bread, a crime lost in the applause of the medals or lost in the smiles and laughter of his infant child or lost in his grief of divorce.

Smokie was guilty of killing the innocent and then being gut-less enough not to confess it to even best of his buddies. As if he had turned back to himself, perhaps what happened with him was an accident. But still the dead civilian deserved a burial, he was not an enemy, he was a human being. Smokie did not bury the civilian; he could not bury his guilt either. He had recognized Smokie from his gruff voice and the rod-thin hands and now his partner in the tunnel was dying, not of cancer but of his own guilt.

Marvin was a coward; he could not defend his sergeant. He was paralyzed by his own fear, the fear of the tunnels excited him but he could not conquer his own fear. Would Marvin stop him from killing the Sarge? He did not knew, perhaps Marvin was not a criminal in the book of law but in his own books he had indicted himself. He had pronounced himself as a criminal too. He still had the same tag around his neck which he had scratched read as Marv S. Fuck.

And he was the worst of all of them, he knew the crimes of each one of them but he had stayed quite, he had committed a crime of passion himself but he had digested all the crimes to become a disciple in god’s house. Perhaps he should go to the confession chamber but then wasn’t the mirror the best confession chamber of all?

“We all are criminals in some court or the other.” He said to himself.

He looked at the photograph in his hand. It was a smiling picture of the four tunnel rats of the alpha battalion – Marvin Buckle, John Woodcroft, Sebastian Reese and Neil O’Malley.

He smiled a little – It was a smile of innocence.

A 'Clock Worked' Brilliance

2008-06-13T03:44:00.000-07:00

At the outset, I wish to set an expectation for this new label. I’m not taking the role of critique who wishes to point out snags in works of art or some one who’s qualified to tell – ‘What-could-have-been-better-in-it’ . I’m a commoner who enjoys all the three things. My view is amateurish and full of wonder, the same kind of wonder and excitement that my little niece feels when she sees the clouds (and then she comes running and tells me that the two white clouds look like her favorite characters Tom and Jerry).

There are some things which make one feel great about being alive. These are the moments of genuine happiness, excitement and pride. I have mine share of these moments too, some of them are personal while some of them are from celluloid other are from real life and experiences.

One of the greatest joys in my life is watching Sachin Tendulkar batting: I feel hallowed, privileged and I thank god for sending me to earth at a time when Sachin is around. His straight drive right past the bowler is one of the greatest sights I’ve ever witnessed. I sit comfortably numb when Sachin is in full flow, I don’t have the words to describe his finesse. I’m in awe of genius at work.

A friend of mine once told me that the most brilliant works in literature have been very simple. I could not agree more, genius lies in simplicity, making something complex look ridiculously easy. When Sachin hits a straight drive, I feel I can hit it too – that’s his genius which makes it look so simple.

Clockwork orange essentially is a complex book – I would attribute that to the use of language. The language used by the protagonist Alex is NADSAT – a mixture of some gypsy slang and a few words taken from Slavic. But in one sentence Burgess makes the whole book ridiculously simple and when you read that line, you bow to his genius, for the time being lets focus on the book and we’ll come back to that particular line later ……

Enter Alex DeLarge … He is 15, violent and unrepentant. He and his droogs (friends that is) are the night crawlers. They move not like shadows in stealth but like the night itself, mindlessly raping females and beating people. They drink milk laced with abusive substance and steal from the common folk. No, they don’t need the money, they were not abused as children (not at least mentioned in the book) nor they are deprived of any worldly possessions. Simply, they are bad boys.

You give away to Burgess’s genius when you see him putting two greatly contradicting ideas in the same book, and both of them put with a ease and finesse – he yields an amazing lyrical complexity to the book with the language and at the same time he justifies Alex as ‘Someone who just goes to the other shop’ (The context goes something like this: Alex narrates saying that when people are so good, no body comes up to them to ask ‘Why you are so good?’, so why do you come up to me ask why you are so bad? I just decide to go to the other shop). Monstrous. Brilliant.

What follows in the book is a very compassionate description of blood and violence (Alex narrates and he refers to blood as Sweet Krovvy). Violence is a powerful weapon of expression – when used innovatively. There’s a violence used in V for Vendetta which makes, the character V, look superhuman. Quentin Tarantino has used this weapon brilliantly in Pulp Fiction as a tool of humor and then in Kill Bill to create a spectacular revenge drama. Burgess uses violence as a way of life, or symbolically life itself.

The initial parts of the book are Alex and his friends’ and their mindless orgy of sex and violence: Stealing automobiles, raping women and hitting the helpless. But that’s not all Alex does, he comes back home late in the night and listens to music – he listens to his Lovely, Lovely Ludwig Van Beethoven. He associates his violence with the music, when the bassoons raise he imagines the bombs exploding, when the trumpets fly high, his hands fly high to hit. He thrives on music and on the violence. In a way, I felt the same too, when for the first time I heard Beethoven’s Fifth (I heard it played on guitar by Joe Satriani), I felt that this was one of the most violent piece of music. I love the 5th. Alex loves the 9th.

At one instance he and his droogs enter a writer’s villa and rape his wife and then crippling the author for the rest of his life. While reading thru all the antics of Alex and his droogs, I did not feel a hatred for Alex (I was more fascinated by the ease with which he carries out the violence). He seemed normal, I did not find his actions disturbing, I would not attribute this fascination to my love for violence but to the way it is portrayed, it’s as if Burgess ‘grooms’ his readers for the violence. I just felt that Burgess had made me get used to it. Burgess has created a master evil. An evil so perfect that you bow to its genius.Throughout the book, I was hooked to Alex and his acts. Burgess had drawn me in the world of Alex.

In its soul, the novel has a prophetic sound to it, something you would relate to George Orwell’s 1984. The dystopian world where the Alex lives in, the violence and the lawlessness. There is an instance in the book where Alex thinks about his kids and says that they’ll do the same things as he’s doing today. Behind the terrible rein and violence and power (would the word power be a misfit here?) there is a quite helplessness.

Alex is finally nabbed by the authorities and sentenced to 14 years of imprisonment (he’s betrayed by his droogs). Even in the Dungeon’s the Alex’s love for violence continues. He then volunteers for the new ‘Ludvico Technique’, it is a venture undertaken by the government to eradicate the crime. The criminals are subjected to extreme treatments which make them incapable of committing any crimes for the rest of their lives, and then the criminals are allowed to live like ordinary citizens ……

In the world outside, Alex is rendered helpless, the treatment has rendered him so helpless that he cannot even protect himself from being attacked by his old friends turned foes, he’s beaten by a group of old hags (Early in the book he tortures one of them), the writer tries to avenge his wife’s rape from Alex and almost kills him. And worst of all he loses his love for music.

After fiddling and touching with many themes in the book (the dark future, the reckless youth, the political manipulations and the classical good versus evil theme) Burgess arrives at the final and perhaps the most important undercurrent of his book – Can you deprive a human being of his right to choose?

Alex is‘Clockwork’, piece of machinery or a small machinery calibrated to commit violence, he only has a colorful appearance (represented by Orange). According to Burgess, a man only has a colorful or a nice exterior but in the end he’s just a piece of machinery to be used by the good forces, the bad ones and the ‘Almighty State’ (I’m borrowing the words from Wikipedia).

But is it fair to deprive a man of his power of choice?

Violence is the response has to everything, when he feels that his power is threatened he chooses to use his Brtiva (knife that is), when he’s happy, he doesn’t play around like a normal 15 year would do, he chooses to hit people. Yes, he is monstrous, yes he is anti-social but he is violence and violence is him . When you take out his capacity to hit (not to forget self-defense), he becomes some one else, almost like a zombie with his soul taken away.

The book left me exhausted. It gives lot of food for thought, a new perspective on choices and to add it introduces the reader to a lyrical narration, innovative use of language and oh! Yes! And it introduces you to a character called Alex DeLarge, a ‘clock-worked’ brilliance that you’ll never forget.

The Brown Envelope

2008-05-28T21:44:00.000-07:00

I have a brown envelope in my hand, it has finally arrived. I’ve waited for it; it was not an ardent wait, filled with discomfort or passion, but a kind of wait which stays with you … stays with you for a long time. I’ve the envelope in my hand now and I feel no excitement. I picked it up from the mailbox, my hands did not grab at it, a casual flick of hand amidst the heap of papers and I have my prize.

I take one step and I come to know where the excitement has vanished, the first step is almost like a leap and when I touch the earth, I feel a twang in my body as if my nerves were the six strings and the whole body was a piece of wood….. I move in conscientious manner but I cannot hide the haste in my walk. I reach for my drawer and I hide the envelope from my eyes ….

As soon as I keep the envelope in the drawer, I feel a surging anti-climax. I know that I’ll not open brown envelope, but for how long I’ll hold on, I don’t know, I like to surprise myself, I like to keep myself in suspense.

My writing instincts take over me, I remember the college days when I used to receive letters from my sister and from home, in its own way that day was a fairly emotional event……I would come from the classes during the lunch time and drop by at the post-office and would be surprised to see a letter for me. I would not read the letter but keep it in my notebook (again a minor act of self torture), I would then have my lunch (which prolonged my excitement at times took it to the peak). I would then walk all the way to my hostel room, bolt the door and read the letter.

The walks down to the hostel were painful- I say painful because of the variety of emotions crowding in my head- excitement, a bit of nostalgia, sadness, all of them hoarding up to make their presence felt, there racket was that of a sweet discomfort. During walking I used to be happy-sad, sad because on the back of the mind was looming the reality – that soon I will finish the letter and the banality of daily life will take over, on the other hand I enjoyed the prospect of dwelling on the contents of the letter (specially those coming from my sister), I would store the contents in my head and would go over them again and again, they kept me awake during mundane lectures. I would then indulge in imaginary replies to that letters and surprisingly when the time came to write the actual replay I felt at loss of words, but I liked the times when I just stayed and lived in my own thoughts.

Sometimes the postman would come and deliver the letter in my room; I hated the directness of that event. It was too brutal to my choice.

I almost went through a similar set of emotions when I held the brown envelope in my hand, but I avoided feeling all of them, I preferred dumping the emotions in the drawer or was it the envelope that I dumped?

The excitement seemed to have percolated in my work as well, I worked at a feverish pace (it almost amazed me); I mean I had nothing to do for the evening but still I amazed myself. I almost forgot about the envelope when it was time to head back to home I opened my drawer to pick up the earphone, I saw the envelope again. I took it in my hand, I felt no emotion, and I had, yet again, successfully killed my emotions.

But some excitement was still alive ….I walked out of the office at 7.15 PM, it was not completely dark, I looked up towards the sky and put my fingers on the lips, I had gestured the heavens to be quite, Its a gesture which said “Not you today, today it is my day”, blast from the past, I remembered the day when I had first done it. It remains the happiest day of my life. In retrospect, I’m now thinking whether it is good to show your audacity (or to mention it like this) in a public forum.

Sitting in the bus I started weaving some dreams around the brown envelope, how would I open it? Would I open it at all? Should I gift it to someone special? Then I started thinking, to whom should I gift it, I had almost decided upon the person but then I felt may be I was not ready to give such a gift to anyone (the envelope is nothing but precious to me and I’m not self-less) on the other hand may be that person was not ready to accept the gift either. Lingering on to the thoughts of gifting and such, I was jarred back to reality when I accepted to myself that I’ll never understand the contents of the brown envelope….

And there is a pun involved in not understanding it, in my life I’ll get many brown envelopes but I’ll never understand their contents ….. I guess anybody who has ever got a brown envelope, never fathomed the greatness of it.

Anyways so I boarded the bus and the music was playing in my ears, I do that a lot, In fact I feed music to my ears all the time, it serves two purposes – I enjoy the music and it keeps the other noise out. I was in the bus and I played music to keep the noises out. I was listening to music but I was not registering it. It did not matter what song was playing, I sort of half listened to it and then moved to the next song, its as if I wanted a song where I could stabilize my thoughts, where I could focus. Suddenly I was drawn back to the song; it was pink Floyd’s ‘Brain Damage’ from Dark Side of the Moon. Something finally got my attention!

I observed that I like listening to Floyd when I’m thinking something, it helps me to imagine better, its like a leaf which is already blowing in the wind is thrust higher by another gust…I did act funny in the bus, once I got up to get down at a stop which was not mine, at another instance I found that my cell phone was not in my pocket (only to realize that I was holding it in my hand and listening songs on it).

I was still holding the brown envelope and almost treacherously I moved my fingers on the lid and tore it to make a small opening, but I stopped myself and resisted the temptation to peep into it. As I got down from the bus, a new surge of excitement took me over, I knew that I’ll write what I’m writing now, I’ll write about the brown envelope, I had already started scripting the initial lines in my head.

I touched home only to realize, that Mumbai Indians were playing today and more importantly Sachin Tendulkar was playing. As soon as I got home, I was in for a third surprise ….. My room had an unexpected visitor in form of a very stupid and injured pigeon, it took me and my friend a while to drive him out, and in the meantime Mumbai Indians had picked up two early wickets.

I had ordered a heavy dinner, I had some mangoes with me (Alphonsos, not particularly good though), a black forest ice-cream in the fridge … it was enough for me (considering I had to digest the excitement of the arrival of the brown envelope as well).

Anyways, for a good two days I did not see the brown envelope (I hid it under my bed sheet during the pigeon raid lest it would get dirty), I saw it today again, I held it and felt nothing. Still as a mark of respect I kept it in the locker in my almirah, I kept my promise to myself, I did not open it.

I tossed it casually in the locker perhaps in the same way I’ll toss it in trash-can one day, unopened.

Making it 'Count'

2008-05-14T06:27:00.001-07:00

I’ve nothing but contradiction to offer when it comes to the idea of ‘Quantization’. A methodology or a process where we try to measure anything (and everything), right from the thickness of a human hair to the distances in the galaxy, numbers are a great power.

In my opinion, human beings have learned HOW to measure things but somehow forgot the step one involved – WHAT to measure. Let me come back to this statement after a while, for time being, let’s chit-chat.

Way back I wrote a story called ‘Man who sold the world’ (my learned rock n’ roll lovers know that this song, originally sung by David Bowie is covered masterfully by none other than late Kurt Cobain). The story was about a magnificent cine star, he abruptly loses his mental balance and fades away in an asylum and refuses any treatment, a puritan of an artist he goes bonkers when he realizes that his fans and media have only reduced his artistry to – number of award he has won, the amount he charges for a cinema, the number of Mercedes he owns etc. to cut a long story short, he and his art is QUANTIZED. I wrote this story as a mark of protest for all those who slandered Sachin Tendulkar by focusing on the years when he had not performed well.

My brother aptly pointed once “If you torture the data it will show you anything”. One can point at most of the sportsman’s records and find flaws, if you are hell bent on finding glitches, I’m sure you will.

I wonder if one ever uses number of attendees in a performance to draw its worth, or judges the greatness of a brilliant book by the number of copies sold. Why are we judging skill by numbers?
Mathematics is meant to elucidate and unravel, to lend power to a man so that he can bring the distances of Milky Way and diameters of an atom on the tip of his pen. Mathematics was never a tool to capture the genius.

Does that mean all the numbers, the quarterly results of the multi-nationals and the number of marks scored by a student standing first is worthless? NO, they are not. Numbers are meant to quantize the effort, the hard work, the persistence, the planning. We often fail to realize what to count and what not to.

As I said, I have nothing to offer but contradiction when it comes to measurement, let me put forth my other perspective – if you learn a new thing, you should take an exam to see how well you have learnt it, In the corporate world, you move by numbers. Yes, even in academia the numbers matter, you can be a brilliant student but no one would accept your brilliance if you are scoring 20/100. A GDP is a benchmark for a nation’s growth, the rising inflation is an alarm bell and the stock market indices are the reflections of national and international economy.

Allow me to be naïve; if we measure so many things in the world, how come we have conveniently forgotten some others? I mean why are we not calculating on how cultured a human being is? How mature he/she is? Why there is no ‘good-o-meter’ to define the goodness of Homo sapiens? I’m confused.

At times the counting/measuring seems good but on the other hand it seems like a very vulgar idea. I guess human being screwed this thing right at the beginning of civilization or something like that (may be Adam would have asked Eve about the diameter of earth or something!).

Let me now come a full circle, this is the time of appraisal in my organization. It is the time of excitement, of despair and making plans of joining a new company for more moolah.

Some typical conversations go like this:

Employee1: What is your rating?
Employee2: I slipped 0.2 from my last year ranking.

Employee1: How much hike you got?
Employee2: I got 10% only, I thinking of joining some product company. They give around 40% hike.

Employee1: What is your annual package now?
Employee2: Oh! I’m almost touching …….. (Gives out the number of zeroes in his salary)

There is a part in the appraisal process known as ‘Development Plan’ where each employee identifies what is the kind of training is required for him and what her/his career path is. Seldom one pays attention to this, it is just about numbers, numbers and more numbers.

I felt so disappointed after seeing the atmosphere around my cube after the appraisal letters were distributed; there was an air of cynicism around, almost a sad laughter, the ones who got the less money were laughing to hide their disappointment, lucky few who were handsomely paid could not express their happiness lest they would hurt others. Everybody was stifled at his/her own position.

One of my colleagues came and asked me “Is 10% a good hike?” he was sad, perhaps he wanted to hear some soothing words from me, unfortunately I had none to offer.

On my way back, I wandered off to thoughts which blamed me for being old fashioned. What happened to good ole’ job satisfaction? My best days at work were not the ones when I got the salary but were those when I solved a knotty problem (Having said this, I sympathize with those who have worked hard but have not got proportionate monetary rewards). Money is supposed to bring happiness, but it seems money seems to be the ONLY happiness for some. May be I was not thinking smart, but whatever I was thinking was making sense to me.

On another realistic note, appraisals depend upon a plethora of factors like performance of company, project etc but I guess grief tends to overshadow truth at times. Anyways just as I wrote this, I remember the IPL match I was watching the other day, a fielder made a brilliant diving save and stood up in a flash.
His balance and recovery was amazing, all the commentators vowed at his skill, but then a line came up on the screen and killed everything, the line read:

“Tatenda Taibu bought at IPL auction for $ 125000”. Some people are genetically programmed to kill my joy!!!!

Anyways, before I sign off, let me leave you with some things which might prove a handful to count.

1.Try to count the coldness with which Michael Corleone stares in The Godfather (I had almost forgotten the look, till an article reminded me of it).

2.The energy unleashed in your body when you hear the solos by Slash in Guns N’ Roses Sweet Child O’ Mine.

3.The beauty of the picture of Sachin Tendulkar playing a straight drive against Brett Lee.

4.The number Goosebumps you get when you turn the pages of your favorite thriller.

5.Try to measure the most happy moment in your life.

And coming to counting again, oh! What the hell! This is my 14th post!!

A date with the ‘Lone Star State’

2008-04-22T06:10:00.000-07:00

On Airplane Journeys

There is something about the airplane journeys which I find terribly exciting. I love the part when the plane starts on the runway for the take off. It ambles slowly along the strip before suddenly bursting into speed and then taking off. I always imagine Rocky Balboa running on the docks of Philadelphia, he jogs around slowly (with Bill Conti’s Gonna Fly Now playing in the background) and then as the song is about to reach it crescendo, Rocky picks up speed, leaving all the ships behind. And just when the plane has taken off in the sky, it reaches into a spotless white sky; it’s that portion of the journey when there is no sound, a complete calm. It’s amazing to witness such violent sounds and complete calm within a few seconds.

Orhan Pamuk and the great sounds of cities

I was reading a Pamuk article; he said that every great city in the world has a sound. My mind immediately went back to the Dadar railway station or for that matter any other station in Mumbai. The sound of Mumbai is the sound of the local trains, the loud horn with which it arrives, an innocuous speed when it begins to move, and the thundering speed which it gains – as if all these were the different nodes of the oscillation in the sound. Then there is the sound of buses, the incessant tick-ticking of the conductor’s ticket-punch, and his hurried cries of ‘Pudhe Chala’ (move forward). My city has a sound; I was just too ignorant to hear it. America has a sound too – The sound of cars heading on a freeway. That’s the first sound I heard when I landed. And this sound has many pitches…. The road shudders when a ford pick-up truck races by, the wind cuts itself when a sport car whizzes through, and there is a respected fear when a Toyota sedan walks by…. This was the first sound that I heard in USA …. America had sounded right.

When the music stops…..

The corporate world today makes a lot of hue-n-cry about Stress. There are a plethora of stress busters’ activities available (Kick-boxing is the first one which comes to my mind). I could not agree more, stress is everywhere – even when you are driving the honking adds to it. I saw a bit of innovation in this field during my stay in USA. When I walked out of my office space towards the corridor or towards the elevator, there was always this faint music playing which was very refreshing. After a hard day’s work or walking off with your mind filled with a knotty problem, the music was more than welcome. From the sound of it, I think it was Handel or Bach (I’m just guessing I have not heard these masters a great deal). Perhaps great organizations can now stop spending on stress-busting sessions for their top managers. A little music would just be fine. Less money, more profit. Sounded very lucrative, or perhaps sounded more American to me.

The Yellow cabs and Mr. Benson

“I’m a self-employed contractor. I would appreciate your repeat business. Please ask for my business card” – Driver.

These are the first words you would come across when you jump into the backseat of a yellow cab. I liked the way the request is made to the customer – it is very assertive and self-respecting. A little message on a cab taught me a great deal about the dignity of labor in USA. I and my colleague rode in yellow cabs to our office place. Now, someone who has stayed in Mumbai is quite used to waving out to vacant rickshaws or taxis or simply hollering to make them stop, yellow cab was a welcome change.

You called up the yellow cab number; they send a cab to pick you up. Apart from this, every cab is equipped with a monitor and a key from where in the driver can inform about his current location to the yellow cab office, the driver also receives his next pick-up destination via the monitor. To add to it, every yellow cab is fitted with a camera which takes a snap of the passengers. I loved the yellow cab system for its sheer simplicity, the technology it used and the speed with which it operated.

One of the yellow cab driver we befriended was Mr. Benson, Mr. Benson was from Nigeria who had spent a good 20 years in USA, he was a nice, chatty gentleman (who made sure that he took us via a long route to earn one dollar extra). On more than one occasion it happened that he came late and we had to wait for him in the hotel lobby (some communication goof up!). He was visibly distressed and requested us to be clearer in giving out the time at which he should arrive. His words were “I’m a responsible man, I can arrive on time”. However, unfair it may seem but I could not help comparing an Indian driver to a USA cabbie, not only in terms of arriving in time but also about wanting to be good in his job.

Although, he’s one of the millions yellow cab driver but he wants to do well or perhaps strives to be better whatever he’s doing. From, arriving in time to making up that extra buck for himself, Mr. Benson had a thing or two to teach me.

Men who can sell the world….

I remember watching a popular cartoon during my childhood days; the cartoon was duck-tales. It was the adventures of Scrooge McDuck, his pilot Launch pad and his three nephews. There was a saying that appeared in more than one episode which said that “Scrooge McDuck can sell ice to Eskimos”.

There is an Uncle Scrooge in every American entrepreneur.

I’m still in awe of the American’s capabilities to sell their products. They are definitely the Marketing Gurus of the world. My hotel room’s smart card did not have the hotel’s name or number but it had number of Dominoes’ Pizza’s home delivery. The back side of the grocery bill was not blank, it had advertisements too. The American television is flooded with ad’s of a plethora of consumer goods (A stark difference – Americans advertisements are consumer driven, whereas a large portion of Advertisements in India are investment centered). Americans are excellent in the art of packaging goods, everything looks so attractive and beautiful that you eventually fall for them; no doubt that USA is the biggest consumer in the world market. The consumption starts at home!!

And as I was on the escalator moving towards the boarding gate, a piece of music came in to my mind. It was from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, the Hotel Tomoyasu theme – Battle without mercy and honor. And just like the theme the USA is also grand.

Two o' Clock

2008-03-17T03:36:00.000-07:00

It’s 2’o clock in the morning. 20th October 2007.

I don’t recollect when the last time I was awake till this time was. Perhaps at an obscure party where I was too tired to remember anything.

The night has quietness; the only sound that I hear is that of my fan and an envelope on the floor, trying to hold itself against the fan. After a few seconds there is a shifting sound – my hands against the pages of the diary. I try to remember the night and all I can think is the silence and then I suddenly remember another 2’oclock …. It was distant and silent too.

My throat is wet; I just had a glassful of water and a juicy apple. That 2’o was with dry throat and dry eyes, the stomach used to be half full and I used to be hunting for morsels – I was once a scavenger in the dimly lit corridors. Yes, even at 2’o clock the corridors are not dark there is a little light that peeps through some rooms.

This 2’o surviving, satisfied and breathing, that 2’o was living, happy and panting. Life at that 2’o was not a brilliant sun shining but a single coherent beam of light. A night with childlike exuberance and zeal for life, this night has poise and an acknowledgement to life and its potency. That night was cocky and exuberant. This night is suave and confident.

I look at the watch and a few moments have gone by. I look at my watch again …..

It’s a swanky, designer one – reflecting a choice, a flavor, I go closer and I see reflection of another watch, another one is an old regular, round dialed watch. It is also showing 2’o clock.

Few minutes ago, I looked out of the window and I saw light in one of the door, I’m looking up again and seeing my own window – there’s the reflection of my fan, the petrified envelope. I see no lights outside, it is completely dark. At a different 2’o clock I saw lights, a fleet of them ascending towards mountains towards the foot of god. I called it the ‘Stairway to Heaven’. And there was that old yellowish, faithful lamp, strong as a lighthouse. There was a boy talking on the phone, that boy looked like me.

Now there are two envelopes running in opposite directions. I open the window and look outside, the cricket is chirping – at least some things have not changed.

Memories play hide and seek with you. They hide in a closet, inside you and just when you’re about to win over them. They startle you by jumping out. A glance at the watch ….. 2:15, envelopes still murmuring, I get up place the diary on the shelf. The lights go out. I’ve lived one more 2’o clock.

Wait, it’s not dark ….. I see a round blue flame. Life is still alive.

The day when the lights did not go out

2008-02-06T04:13:00.000-08:00

There are traditions which are like rootless heroes – no body knows from where they’ve come, where they were born, who the progenitors were and why they were followed in the first place. These traditions have evaded all these questions and had stood the test of time. One such tradition was “The day when the lights did not go out”. For reasons unknown, the day was always spoken as a memory and rememberance.

It was the last day in the hostel for everyone. The outgoing batch lit candles in their rooms and stayed up all the night. Some claimed it was a vigil for the four years which they spent in the campus; it was a vigil to memories, a few emotional ones claimed it was the funeral for the past four years – years of gaiety and fun, the cynical ones claimed that it was an attempt to burn down the wretched college hostel. There were as many reasons, as there were students.

This day was decided as soon as the dates for final exams were announced. Representatives from each discipline gathered to fix upon a convenient date ….. As the tradition was for the last day, the party started from early evening and lasted till midnight and then it was the time for the vigil. No body was allowed to sleep; no body was allowed to say NO to a drink. No artificial lights were allowed, lighting candles was mandatory.

No body had ever refused to the tradition except Stephen. He claimed that it was stupid, sans any logic and foolishly romantic, his room mates Keane and Al had different opinions – Keane was ready to ‘Live it up’ on the last day while Al was indifferent to the whole tradition. It didn’t matter to him whether they celebrated it or not. Right at the stroke of midnight they stood at the door of their room – their breath was heavy with alcohol and mind laden with memories.

Stephen had the key in his hand and he was trying hard to find the hole.

Al – Stephen can’t find the hole. He once said that it was not important to find the holes, if you don’t find them, create them. “Find your goal and you’ll get the hole” he had said, damn the double entendre! That’s Stephen for you; annoyingly naïve at times. He believes he can change anything and fight anything and beat it. His self-assurance is scary at times. He doesn’t know when to hold on and when to let go.

Keane – Hold on …. Stephen will try to hold on, hold on to the past, live backwards and rue the fact that it is all ending. Gibran had said that “Greatest sorrow of today is the joy of tomorrow”. Why do we have to hold on to anything but our today? This is the moment when I’m living, alive, breathing and happy and all I’ve to do to close the eyes acknowledge it. Why to find happiness in darkness of past or in the light of future? Happiness is in the twilight of today.

Stephen – Happiness and today are opposite poles, they attract but seldom meet. I wonder if one has ever found out the exact line between happiness and satisfaction, if you’re happy you slip in to a shell of comfort, you lose the eye of the tiger. Only the greatest on this earth have been happy and satisfied. Happiness is numbing, when one is happy he’s not striving for anything higher. I’ve found the hole and with a push the gate will open, the gate of my past, there will be the familiar smell of stinking socks, tobacco and soggy clothes…. It is in this enclosure I’ve learnt to look ahead. It is my past which has made me what I’m. Why should I let go things which shaped me?

With a push the gate opens. Steve crashes on to the bed, Keane switches on the computer and Al is busy packing. Stephen takes off a candle and switches off the light. He lights a candle.

Stephen – This one is for Keane and for my past, may it burn and keep all of me in myself. There is Keane fiddling with the computer. He has always has a smile on his lips, its amazing how he can just focus on today and not anything beyond it. Has he ever thought of the past and what he has lost? Or of the future and what it will be like? I wonder if he has ever wandered in to these territories’ and let his thoughts loose for while. He’s the one who lives for the moment – I have never understood what it means. This is the moment when I’m looking at him and thinking about him and that over shadows the moment and I’m not even aware that it has passed by, only when it is lost I feel what I’ve lost.

Keane switches off the monitor. One candle light is not sufficient to make him see clearly. He bends down and takes out a candle from his bag and lights it.

Keane – I’ve lost. I’ve lost a lot in my past and I’ve gained in past all that adds up to a zero. There’s nothing I would take from it and there’s nothing I would give to it. I’ve taken the experiences with me and I’ve paid the price in form of my agony. Everything in a normal human being’s past adds up to nothing, past is dark; if Stephen tries to go there it’ll only be dark. My candle is lit to give him light in that darkness and to give light to Al, lest he finds a dark alley in an otherwise bright future.

Al stops packing reaches inside his bag and whips off a candle, in the next moment, third candle comes to life.

Al – FUTURE. Future is where my life lies, today is a mere tool to shape that future. This is me – in flesh and in blood but me with my share of flaws and glitches. There shall be a day when I’ll iron out the flaws and have a share of new ones and from that day again I’ll build my future. I’ll be the cement, the sand, the handyman, the daily laborer and the architect of my own future. My candle is to burn the mistakes of today and to burn Steve and his madness for past.

Stephen was lying on the wall, looking towards the ceiling. He got up and rummaged thru his shelf again and took another candle and lit it.

Stephen- Madness – there’s a thin line between bravery and madness. And it takes a brave man to stride to victory and the bravest of the men were those who had conquered their past. What is future? But a foggy vision, what is today but a mere moment? People who know me blame me for living in the past, reminiscing the old forgotten moments and dwelling on them for too long but these are the moments that have shaped my present and my action of present will decide the course of the future …. Even in the largest of the corporations, the strategies for today and tomorrow are fabricated on the basis of the data of the past. One candle is for the victory of the past and for Al, for he has to realize that the first step towards the bright future is from the darkness of the past.

No body has spoken a word since they had entered the room. There were sounds of laughter’s and songs ringing in the corridor. There was a hint of eye contact between Stephen and Al .They looked at each other and smiled for a while. Al lit a candle.

Al – past, is Steve’s idea of immortality, if you live in the past, you don’t change. You stay what you are with all your baggage. There is the same you, the same good things and the same bad things. You’re stagnant, and the only time a man is rendered immobile is when in its grave. And in a strange way the significant moment of your life, is just a moment…… you don’t remember the past or see to the future. In an odd sense, at that juncture only the present matters ….. My candle is to that significant moment and to Keane.

Keane came back in to the room; he had a candle in his hand. He casually glanced up in the room; Al and Stephen were reading in the candle light, he waited a bit longer looking at the room; he wanted to fill his gaze with the room. He then placed a candle on the table and lit it. He put the candle besides Steve who was reading the book.

Keane – Any significant moment in life has a history or past behind it. Arriving at that moment is the destination and the past is the journey to it. Right from the birth of a nation to its destruction, there’s a past and there’s a history …… I wonder if one moment is sometimes a mere culmination. My candle is a reluctant tribute to the force of the past and to Steve.

Knock on the door. Al gets up to open it. Its Salvatore “Sally” Steppe, Sally needs a light for his cigarette; he actually needs to talk to Stephen … he calls for Stephen and they stand chatting in the corridor.

Al walks backs to his book, he keeps the door open, the noises are pouring from the corridor – the noise, the alcohol, and all choke him for a while. He borrows a candle from Keane and lights it.

Al – That’s Sally and Steve, they seldom meet but they are the best of the buddies. They don’t hang out together or do the regular guy’s stuff together, its just their common beliefs that bring them together. Sally has come to solve an old dispute but Steve says it doesn’t really matter, all that matters is that they stay friends. And I know that they’ll stay friends for the rest of their lives. A bond for the future, cemented by the beliefs of the past, not the kind of beliefs that are lost in the harsh realities of life but beliefs that are held close to your heart right thru out your lives. A candle goes for the Steve and his past.

Keane doesn’t take out a single candle; he takes out two at a moment. Lights one candle and rolls back in to his bed.

Keane – I never thought Al would light so many candles, may be his vigil is for his future. I guess life is not just about that moment, but a bit about moments to come as well. “Focus on what is left and not on what you’ve lost”, that seems to be Al’s motto. The clock is ticking by, its like with each moment of the second’s clock, a moment is slaughtered and the clock doesn’t ever stop; it keeps on moving forward, it never goes back, never stays at the same place. This light is to Al and to the clock that always moves forward, towards the future.

Stephen comes back in to the room, Sally chatting up with Bob in the corridor. Stephen has a candle in his hand; he places it near Keane’s bed. And goes back to his book, but his mind is still in the corridor.

Stephen – I would walk a million light years, to hear what Sally has said. He said it didn’t matter to him that I was hurt, all it mattered was that he made a mistake. Sally didn’t come to apologize to me; he came to apologize to himself. Then we hugged each other, not a perfunctory one but a deep embrace where both of us tried to squeeze each other. As if the one who pulled the other harder, loved the other more. And in that moment, I knew what friendship is, may be all it takes is a moment of enlightment to understand certain things in life. My flame is for that moment and for Keane.

Sally walks in to the room; he has a candle in his hand. He takes the matchbox from the shelf and lights the candle and puts it near to the door.

Sally – It’s a strange night. It’s darker than usual before but there are lights everywhere. It feels as if a huge meteor has split itself in to pieces and lit every room. This is a night which knows no time. The best things in the life are timeless – our favorites songs are those which are hymned by the generations, the stories we heard in the childhood are still being told today to the children and will always be. My candle is to one those timeless entity called friendship – May this light never go out.

He looked at them and closed the door.

“We did light some candles finally” Keane said enthusiastically. It was the single line spoken in 2 hours.

“I guess we had reasons to light the candles” Al said laughing.

“We’ll always have reasons to light candles” Steve finished with a faint smile.

An Affair to Remember

2007-12-27T19:46:00.000-08:00

Summer of 99

My class 10th exams were over. I had a choice of deciding my prospective location for holidays. First was my native place, where I could go and raise hell with all my cousins, second was Mumbai, where some of our family friends were residing. I chose for Mumbai.

I arrived at the Dadar station with my father. I don’t have first recollection of my first impression; we took the local train from Dadar to Bandra and reached our destination. I remember it was fairly early in the Morning and even at that time there was a beautiful girl (with light parrot green top) was travelling in the local.

My rest of the Mumbai trip was very usual, a very routine trip any tourist would have. I roamed around with my dad at the gateway of India, boarded the ferry (nearly got seasick) et al. My evenings were dedicated to the Bandra suburbs (I was very excited at the prospect of seeing bollywood stars!!). Bought a bright red T-shirt (thoroughly disapproved by my mother) and a denim shorts (Real sexy one’s, kind of shorts Urmila Matondkar wears in the movie Rangeela). I was petrified with the idea of travelling in local trains (and hence dad had to shell down for taxi every time we went for an outing).

Summer of 2001

This was just before my engineering admission. I had come to Mumbai from Pune to submit forms for the admission procedure. It was one of those trips which I remember not too fondly (Got food poisoned and puked 5 times). My brother had a heck of fun pulling my leg all the while.

Winter of 2004

Whirl wind visit. I came along with my parents to attend a wedding. After the wedding got over, we stayed at one of our family friends’ place. They stay on the 31st floor of a sky scraper, while everybody had drifted off to sleep; I walked up to the balcony: I could see all of the Mumbai basking in light. Whenever I visit their place and plan to stay over night I always look at the city and its lights. Sometimes during the night I wake up and if I look outside the window, I only see more lights …..As if the city never really never sleeps.

Spring of 2005 - Winter of 2007

To be precise it was 15th of August 2005.

My first job. My first salary. My first whiff of Freedom. On India’s Independence Day, I had signed the first rental housing contract. I was back in Mumbai.

And it’s been 2.5 years now that I’ve been here and I can’t get enough of this place. Before I launch into an uninhibited praise about Mumbai, I agree with each and every shortcoming that my friends and readers will point to me about the city: The crowd, the pollution, the traffic jams and the sky rocketing real estate prices, not to forget the terror attacks to which it is prone.

But there’s something about Mumbai, which makes it ‘THE’ city. The speed of life, the network of local trains and buses, the financial clout which it holds not to forget the film stars and the glitz of the movie world.
I’m a huge boxing movie fan (The likes of Rocky series, Million Dollar Baby are the movies which I can watch over and over again) and there’s something which is common about living in Mumbai or dancing around in the boxing ring: Being on your toes. As any boxing enthusiast will tell you that you should be nimble footed while playing, quick to shift your balance, throw your body weight on the other side to deceive the opponent, and land a right hook when the opponent expecting a left one. The speed of a Mumbai day is something which teaches you a lesson or two about time management and always being on your toes.

For anyone who’s used to a leisurely and laid back pace of life, being in Mumbai is like sitting in an F1 car, you’re on the move 24X7. You move with the city and the city moves with you and even if you stop, the city will drag you all the way with you till you learn to get up, shrug off the laxity and cope up with its speed.

Mumbai has a cosmopolitan culture. Although it’s a part of Maharashtra but one hardly sees a noticeable impact. Migrants from various states have carved their business niches: The Gujratis have pioneered in share markets; the UP wallahs have monopolized the taxi transports and so on. Being bought up outside my home state as well, the cosmopolitan nature of Mumbai is something which I’m very comfortable about.

The most memorable sights in Mumbai remain the skyline as seen from the Nariman Point. One of my friends who had visited Mumbai earlier (but had never been to South Mumbai) didn’t quite appreciate the city the way I do. A few months back he saw the southern Bombay, the southern part has some old buildings, some heritage of sorts – fair to say it was the moment when he fell it love with the city. He also made a very interesting remark about the city and its residents, he said “It seems in Mumbai, everyone has struggled and after years of haggling and scratching they have made peace with the city and with each other”.

The statement seemed very correct to me particularly in light of the huge number of people the city has given home to: There are people who commute across the length of the city, they push, shove each other to get a seat in the local train, they yell at each other if they are standing on their way, they jibe at you if you’re a slow coach but the same people are the first to rush to a stranger’s help in case of terror strikes or the torrential floods. Somewhere amidst this entire struggle, people have come to love and respect each other.

A personal incident comes to my mind, during this rainy season, it was pouring like anything, and I was on one side of the road and had no umbrella. I was all drenched and at that juncture a young guy came from behind and put an umbrella over my head and said “Bhai, baarish mein kyon bheeg rahe ho?” (Why are you getting wet in the rain?). It’s a very simple gesture but I guess you can see such gesture in Mumbai only.

Another incident that comes to my mind was this summer when I was heading towards a plush pub to celebrate a friends’ birthday. I had come from my place and was to meet one of my friends at Kurla station, after meeting him I got in the line to buy ticket for our next destination. I was standing in the line and besides the line there was a little boy who was begging, on the boy’s lap there was an infant who had thrown up. A young guy came and dropped a one rupee coin in the boy’s lap, the coin trickled down and fell in to the vomit, and the young beggar just wiped the coin and put it in his pocket.

I merely remarked at the irony of the situation – In the same city, there was a swanky pub where I was going, a popular international music channel was holding a show there and in the same city there was that little beggar …….. You get to see the both sides of life in Mumbai; the city is a great leveler.

There are a lot of things which I have come to like about the city – The breeze on the bandra band-stand, the buzz at the dadar station, the jumbo king wada pao’s, the local trains, the little navi Mumbai sky line across the palm beach … the list goes on.

And what remains a very strong memory is the air in Mumbai, not the cool breeze that blows across the sea shores but the one which blows on the plains. The air is neither hot nor cool; it’s a very still breeze that blows, very reminiscent of the city, its efficiency, at times the clockwork like precision.

Winter 2007

I panicked.

It so happened that due to some emergency work in my organization I landed up in Gurgaon. In a way I was happy, I was back in the territory where I grew up, but I remained in a mild state of panic.

And I suddenly realized that I’m panicking coz’ I’m missing something (which made panic even more). I ran a quick check in my mind – Did I miss my family – NO!! My Friends – NO! The cute girl who sits next to my cubicle – NO!! . Then the light dawned upon me that I was missing being in Mumbai.

With due credit to Gurgaon and the rapid development that has taken place, it still lacks the wonderful local transport which Mumbai has. I had to wait for a cab to pick me up from guest house and drop me to office, but I missed local trains and the buses. It just felt that someone has put me in a bullock cart while I’m used to travelling in Ferrari.

With my stint over in Gurgaon I was elated to be back in Mumbai. I didn’t quite realize that one can miss a place so much (apart from home).

A few years back – Summer of 2003

A conversation which had stayed in my mind over all these years, I was in IIT-Roorkee for a paper presentation. I was taking an evening stroll with my friend, we happened to pass by the palatial electrical engineering department building where the paper presentation was going to be held. My friend, impressed by the IIT said to me:

“I always wanted to belong to this kind of place”

I said “I don’t want to belong to any place” (my rather dormant sense of independence becomes ferocious at times).

But after all these years (and especially last couple of), I think I was wrong in saying that.

The Unspoken

2007-11-23T07:09:00.000-08:00

Jessica stood quite for a moment.

She had just come back home from office, cursing the rains outside. Out of her habit, she had peeped Stephen’s(Her flatmate) room. Stephen was fast asleep. Jessica then had glanced on the mails and saw a wedding invite. It was from her ex-boyfriend Wendell, she had just gone numb for the moment.

She rushed to kitchen to fix a cup of coffee for herself and all the memories had come back to her. It has now been four years that she had broken up with Wendell over a stupid fight and they had abruptly stopped talking. It was as if the ghost of their ‘relationship’ had not been put to rest. She almost laughed at herself that she still felt bad about Wendell getting married. On an instinct she wanted to call her best friend and blurt out everything to her, but she stopped.

Somehow she knew what Veronica would say, she would tell her to ‘Move On’. This was one phrase Jessica had come to hate, everybody told her to ‘move on’ but nobody told her where to??
How was one supposed to stop thoughts clouding up in your head?? She tried to lose herself in work but as soon as a pile of files was lifted from her desk, another pile of memories was created in the desk inside Lost in her thoughts; she did not notice that Stephen was standing right besides her asking her to fix a cup of coffee for him too.

“Where are you lost, kid?” Stephen chided
“Nothing” she replied and went on with her job.

She sat near the window pane, in a gap between the grill and the shutters, sipping coffee she turned to Stephen.

“You, Ok Jess?” Stephen asked “You seem out of sorts today?”
“Nothing” she said “Just some things coming back again”

“And is this the old thing that is getting married on October 18th?” Stephen asked laughing.
“Yeah!” she said with a smile.

“You want to talk about it?” Stephen offered, and sat at the pane near her.

Jessica then talked about her relationship with Wendell and about their break-up.

“How did you feel after the break-up?” Stephen asked

“I felt as if someone had stabbed thru my heart and left the blade there” she was now looking outside then window towards the rain. “And just when I felt that the wound was healing, something came again and twisted the dagger an inch deeper in to my heart”

“Wow!” Stephen said “That’s a pretty painful feeling to have” he said slurping his coffee with an irritating noise.

“Do you understand how it feels?” she asked him angrily.

“Let me ask you something” Steve said finishing his coffee. “What kind of person you were 4 years back?”

“I was very headstrong, almost impossible to convince. I guess I was very moody back then, like a typical 18 year old” she concluded.

“And what happened to all that now?” he questioned again.

“Life knocked a lot of sense in to me, I broke up with Wendell but I had a long way to go, so despite of anything and everything, I had to get on with the things.” She said.

“There were these long hours when I kept on thinking about what had happened between us , I slowly came to realise that somewhere in my pig-headedness , I was very wrong. I learnt to control my mood swings. As a line goes from Kurt cobain “The greatest day I’ve ever had was when I learned to cry on command” she said in a faint trembling voice.

“I began to value my friends more, I learnt to like people beyond my own comfort zone, it seemed OK if they did things which I did not like and I did not feel bad about it” she took a deep breath and stopped. Stephen was looking straight into her eyes. He looked calm.

“Do you still like this Wendell guy?” Stephen asked ominously.

“I do not know; It’s a question whose answer remains unspoken in my head till date” Jessica said.

“I tried hating him for a long time but in the end I felt that I was not being myself , I do not know what I’ll do if he comes in front of my eyes , a part of me wants to kick him hard and the other part still likes him” she said in a resigned manner.

“You’ve learned to love beyond your pain” Stephen said calmly.

“Let’s look at it objectively” he got up like a science professor and began to talk.

“Vita mutator , non tollitur – Life is changed , not taken away” he said getting up.

“I won’t tell you to ‘Move On’ because I’m sure people on the left and right of you have already told you that”

“You just said that you were a different person back then and you’re a different person now. None of this would have happened if you would not have broken up with this prick of yours” he said walking around the room.

“If you would have gone the distance and married Wendell, do you think you would have had this change in you?? “

“I agree this is a painful way of learning, but let’s face it kid, things get rough in life at times” he said rolling up a newspaper and chasing a fly with it.

“Take a pick – Would you become the same old person with Wendell? Or rather be what you are today? “

“I would be what I’m today” Jessica said with a touch of disbelief. “But it’s not that simple, Steve” she protested.

“I agree. It is not” Stephen said (by now two flies have been slaughtered). “You’ll dangle between two thoughts wherein, you would miss Wendell and where in you’ll love what you are today?”

“It is the price you’ve paid to get rid of some bad habits, call it a rehab of sorts” Stephen was now amused at his own analogy.

“Have you ever thought of LOVE, Stephen?” Jessica asked suddenly.

“Did I hear VODKA???” Steve replied (now desperately searching for another fly)

“Ow!! Come on!! , I mean right from Bee-gees to Bryan Adams have sung about it, folks have written about it, some of them have died for it as well. Is it really worth it?” Jessica looked irritated.

“Do you believe in yourself and what you are today?” (The flies had finally met their graves in the trash can)

“Yes” Jessica said

“Then love made you what you are” She had never heard Stephen so sure of himself.

“And you’ve paid a price for it and whatever pain comes along with it you’ve to bear it” Stephen said

“Old man dies, young girl lives – fair exchange” he said mimicking Bruce Willis from Sin City. Jessica burst out laughing.

“Thanks a lot, Steve” said Jessica getting up. “I needed that”

“You’re welcome, kid” he said taking a bow.

“Now I’ll run and get something for us to eat” he said, donning his favourite red cap.

“Hey, Can I borrow your mobile phone charger? Mine is not working” said Jessica taking the empty cups.

“Help yourself, it’s on my shelf” said Stephen moving out of the door.

Jessica went to Stephen’s room and took the charger. She saw something shining in the trash can and picked it up out of curiosity.

It was a wedding invite addressed to Stephen. It read:

Wendell weds Irene.

Irene was underlined again and again.

A tear quietly dripped out of Jessica’s eye.

An Indian’s answer to Australia’s sledging

2007-10-24T21:28:00.000-07:00

Let me play the confession game first. I’m a true blue Indian Cricket fan. Much like millions of others in my country, the game and its outcome dictates my emotions (At least momentarily!!). I celebrate when India wins and I loose my temper when India loses ……

Off late, newspapers in India have been filled with the drama surrounding recent India-Australia series. While the Australians have avenged their defeat in the 20-20 world cup semi-final by defeating the Indians in their own backyard, a lot of verbal abuse and ‘Sledging’ has left a bitter taste in everybody’s mouth. Some of the Indian Team members have blamed their counterparts of foul-mouthing; The Australians have blamed the Indian crowd for racist remarks against one of their players.

Let’s take a step back and have a look at what really sledging is?

Wikipedia says:

Sledging is the practice in cricket of insulting opponents to break their concentration and cause them to make mistakes. Sledging is effective because the batsman stands within hearing range of the bowler and certain fielders. The aim is to intimidate or distract the batsman into making a fatal mistake and being dismissed. Sledging thus tries to "break the flow" of the batsman's game. There is debate in the cricketing world over whether this is poor sportsmanship or good-humored banter.

The definition above actually uses the word ‘Insulting’ very liberally. Lot of the times the Insults used is profanities/ vulgar comments (Sometimes even about families) and thus definitely very disturbing. It is the Australian cricket team who has pioneered the art of sledging (Termed as ‘Mental Disintegration’ by the former Aussie great Steve Waugh). Sledging need not necessarily be verbal, it can be in form of a gesture or a glare as well.

As explained in a recent article on a popular website by a former Aussie bowler, this is the way the team sledges:

When a batsman walks in to bat, they talk loudly about him (something derogatory or insulting), enough loudly so that the batsmen can hear. This throws the batter in rage and he loses his wicket. Sometimes the Australians remind the batsman about how he had failed in a particular occasion. The player is also reminded that how his house will be stoned, effigies will be burnt if he fails to deliver in crunch situation (Yes That happens in India a lot).

Whatever mentioned above is very mean, rude and against the sportsman spirit. But, let’s face the facts for a change – Sports is a business today and stakes are very high, every individual wants to do well and earn money, no longer is the gamesmanship present. It has really become kind of war. Hence the above tactics yield a very simple equation which works well for the Aussies, the same has been mentioned in the article:

Pressure + Expectation = Failure

Anyways, I really don’t intend to get into the technical details of sledging and blame the Aussies. They are a great team and play fantastic cricket. Our very own team India has also been quite a spitfire, A relatively younger team which has tasted success in recent 20-20 world cup, fought ‘Fire with Fire’. We too hurled abuses at the visitors, made faces and gave insolent statements in media. This has definitely added a new spice to cricket, although for some people, the spice is a bit too hot.

I feel that the Sledging carried out by India is more of a reactive measure than a proactive one (I never miss a chance to throw some management jargon!!). I really don’t think that Indians have any where near the Australians when it comes to mastering the ‘Mental Disintegration’ techniques. We only make faces at them (Which makes us look like monkeys) or use the F word (Which gives us a stature befitting a truck driver). Plus, All this yelling and face making tells the opponent that there strategies are working on us.

So what can we do? Let them talk? Hear to their obscenities? We (By we, I mean the Indians) really don’t have to do all this stuff? For I’ve a remedy, its been long forgotten but was recently revived by a Bollywood flick …….
In the year 1915, A Gujrati gentlemen came from South Africa and without throwing a single stone or hurling a single abuse at the ruling British government, he played a pivotal role in the Indian independence struggle. That man was named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. All of us are quite familiar with Gandhij’s non-violent ways and his principles of truth and non-cooperation.

The same has been revived in the recent movie “Lage Raho Munnabhai” and his philosophy was given a local name ‘Gandhigiri’.

Wikipedia says: "Gandhigiri" refers to the practice of the ideals of Gandhi. It is a colloquial form of Gandhism.

As a country, I really don’t think it’s in the Indian gene to be rude to people (And I’m sure it is the same with the Aussies too). Respect is a value which is very important to the Indians. While the culture tells you to give respect and to respect others also, it doesn’t teach you to receive crap from anyone.

I say we put Gandhigiri into practice against Australia ……….

I know that the idea may sound far fetched or a little weird but I’m sure it’ll work (And don’t make that face! You may very well discard this as one of the innumerable bouts of insanity I have).

Anyways, so this is what is intend to do when I say that Team India should Gandhigiri ..

Next time when Brett Lee bowls a bouncer to Sachin and gives him a glare, Sachin should walk up to him and say “That was a great delivery mate!! You’re very strong and I appreciate that you bowl at 150 KMPH, I want to tell you that I respect you as an opponent”.

When Ponting would slam Harbhjan for a six, He can walk up to him and applaud him “Well played, mate!” I think the same Shreesanth can do with Hayden or Symonds.

Between the two overs when two Indian batters are talking to each other, they can talk loudly enough for the Australians to hear….. and can put a word or two of appreciation against their opponents.

After an Australian victory, It would be a nice gesture to send a bouquet of roses to each Aussie player.

Oscar Wilde has rightly said “Always Forgive Your Enemy Nothing Annoys them More”.

If peace and non-violence can drive the mighty Britons away, then these are only a bunch of cricketers we’re talking about!!

What more that the Australians would feel ashamed of their foul mouthing and at least the game won’t get a bad name. And in the process we can teach the world that you don’t have to be physically intimidating or use cuss words and brand oneself as ‘Aggressive’. Being smart is also being aggressive.

Confession game again: I personally enjoy sledging, whenever I played in school or near my home. I was never short of a word, I was the wicket-keeper and in close proximity to the batsman so I always made sure (If batsman is not stronger/older than me) that I did my best to unsettle him. I never used the cuss words (All were friends then) but put a little derogatory remark for batsman like “He can’t hold the bat or hit the ball”. Unfortunately my physique never allowed me to be physically intimidating!

But whenever I see Indian team being sledged, I feel bad (for they eventually end up loosing after that). Anyways, I hope I’ve not gone overboard in condemning the Aussies, if I’ve, do forgive me.

Before signing off let me share a very humorous comment made by an Australian wicket-keeper to an English batsman: When England’s Ian Botham came in to bat, Geoff marsh asked him casually

“How’s your wife and my kids” !!!!!

A Lesson Learnt ....

2007-10-01T00:51:00.000-07:00

A few days back, I went to the local market. I wanted to buy A new strap for my wrist watch. The watch I have is quite an exotic one and the strap was a bit hard to find. I came around the sector 17 area and what surprised me most that there were around 4 Titan watch showrooms within a distance of few meters (Boy! some thought they have put in deciding the showroom locations).

Anyways so I entered the showroom and approached to a rather indifferent looking guy at the counter and asked him.

"Iske liye belt milega kya?" (Do you have a belt fitting this Watch?)

The guy took the watch and looked at it and shrugged

"Mushkil hai, Iska notch chota hai" (It’s difficult, the notch is Small). He then took me to his technician, he's the guy works on watches. Mr. Technician had a superficial glance at the watch and declared that there's nothing that could be done.

I moved to the next showroom.....

On the counter was a rather eager looking young man and a girl. I expressed my desire to buy a new belt for my wrist Watch. The girl and the boy were instrumental in showing all The types of steel belts they had. Although they were not Technicians but seemed perceptive enough to see which belt would fit in the notch. After quite a thorough search and Inspection I was not quite satisfied and left the shop. After Walking a few paces I turned back went right back in to the Same shop and asked for a specific kind of belt.

By this time the girl had left the counter and it was just the guy who attended me before. And thus followed a good 15 mines of Selection and rejection of steel belts (I can get quite finicky at times about things I like). Finally I selected a belt and asked if They could fit this one for me.

The boy went to the technician. After the belt was fixed I Tried the watch on but it was a bit too loose.

"Yeh belt chota karke milega kya?" (Can you reduce the length? Of the belt, then?). The new belt was a bit too loose and big For my rather slender wrist. The technician obliged but fastidious little me was still not satisfied! The technician Then declared that there was no provision in the belt to reduce Its length further. Helplessly, I asked him if he could cut/reduce the length of my old belt ....... but in vain.

I decided to try my luck at the third showroom....

Entering the showroom, my spirits dampened a little for this was A rather small shop (And I presumed that it would be Under stocked), anyways I repeated my same rant to a guy (He Seemed to be rather senior and not a salesman. Let’s call him GM).

He glanced at my watch and then asked the salesman nearby to remove a similar kind of belt from a brand new watch. He Then took me to the fourth shop where the technician was sitting..... As usual I decided to pick his brain a little on Watch-belt-science.

I was trying the new belt and yes it was loose again.

"Yeh chota ho sakta hai kya?" (Can this be reduced?) I asked."Nahi, par isko kaat sakte hain" (We can't reduce the length but we can cut the belt) He replied.

"Kaatne par problem to nahi hoga?" (Would the belt of reduced length cause any problem?). I asked.

"Thoda haath mein chubh sakta hai" GM replied (It can prick in to your wrist a little). But he then explained me that if we file the jagged edge of the belt it might not be a problem at all. I decided to give his theory a shot and said that I'll try.

GM then gave fluent orders to the technician, which were as follows:

"Cut the original belt and see if it hurting the wrist, if yes, leave the operation there, Else make the same changes to the new belt".

The technician did as advised and Bingo !! I had the exact fit that I wanted, on top of it he gave me the remaining part of the steel belt and said that I can fix it again if I wanted to.

In the end I left a satisfied customer. I, myself working in the service Industry could make out the remarkable difference in the attitudes of the three shops. While the first one didn’t address the situation correctly, Second one lacked the experience to tackle it. While this incident may seem a little boring and trivial there's something interesting I picked up from it, I jotted these 5 points in my mind as I was on my way back home:

1. Never say 'NO' to a problem at the face of it - You might not have a solution today but tomorrow is another day.

2. Have right people at the right places - In the first shop neither the guy at desk, nor the technician seemed enthusiastic about the work.

3. Back up youth with experience - In the second shop the young boy and girl were eager to help and hard working, but they missed simple trick of asking in the next shop if they had the kind of belt that I wanted.

4. Think 'Out of the Box' - The best thing about GM was that he asked his guy to remove a belt from a brand new watch to fit into my used watch, such an act would definitely please a customer and he'll feel serviced better. I mean the watch from which he took out the belt must have been worth a couple of thousand rupees at least, I had a very small request (worth a few hundred rupees only) but stil I got the previliged treatment.

5. Go that 'Extra' mile - GM not only made sure that I was satisfied with his services but also did that extra bit on working on the two belts (with which his technician also learned a thing or two). As it is said that your superior/mentor's attitude percolates in to you ethics as well, the technician took out his little needle and cleaned my watch's dial and the backside of it (hardly a significant effort but noteworthy nonetheless).

At the end of it I was pretty happy - Not just for my new strap but also for a free lesson in management !!!

Work,Work and Work

2007-09-06T22:19:00.000-07:00

Ah! It’s been a while since I've been in this part of my world. I almost forgot that a bit of me existed in bits and bytes. I would blame my long absence from this virtual world for three reasons: Work, Work and Work.

Well, I really have not been slogging hard (not at least in last month) But life kept me busy(and I kept life busy) right from December last Year. I really didn't have a topic in mind for my so called 'comeback' bog so I thought Why not just ramble and get junk out of your system?

Mr. X - He's a good friend of mine. X got married this year, his wife was working in other city sought transfer to Mumbai.But somehow her arrival got delayed. In between Mr.X got so busy in work that he could not find any time to find a suitable place for his wife. To add to his woes he got a bad stomach ulcer(Reason: Irregular food timings). It was pretty safe to say that Me.X was love as well as stomach torn.

Mr. Y - Again a nice chap. About 8 months ago or so Y, in a rather unfortunate and freak accident one of his ligament in his foot(In case you don't know, ligaments are a group of tissues connecting bones) got torn. Now ligaments injuries take a logn time to heal, Y had been taking rather costly physiotherapy sessions for a long time. And then came WORK, Y got so busy in work that he had no time to go to the doc and start sessions again. Quite gallantly Y limped on and off to work.

Ms. Z - (I hate this part). It wrecks my heart to see beautiful girls falling sick. Much to her credit Z worked to her full physical capacity, stayed as late as she could but Alas! the evil work took its toll on her. Coupled by Change in Season and overwork Z fell down with a viral fever.

Mr. S - He survived. His skeletal little frame fell after the work was finished. Fell to a throat infection( doc strongly warned him to reduce the intake of tea and coffee during office hours). And S is quite proud of it!!!

S is me. X,Y,Z are my teammates. And I do have a topic in mind : WORK.

The word is overused, common and utterly non-significant. But Is It really that banal?? My tiny-miny and rather routine interaction with this outer world I have come across a variety of people, each of them harbouring a different attitude towards work.

Lets not get into types of people and their work ethics for that would be a rather boring and judgemental discussion. During peak time of the work I jumped in to a train of thoughts (as HH in Lolita would say) rather than trying to understand people and their way of work I got
interested in a basic question :

WHY WE WORK ? . A very common answer would be that all of us work to earn money - But how much money? Is there an end to it? While lingering into this idea I thought whether a human being's real worth is by the number of zeros he has in his/her salary ??? (Yes, that actually sounded ominous and philosophical in my mind too), anyways I could not find a suitable answer to this question so I moved on ...The only logical answer that I found to this was Francisco's speech in Atlas
Shrugged.

WORKAHOLICS - There are quite a few who would brand themselves as workaholics.I'm not quite sure what really makes a workaholic, I mean there is no standard defined by govenrment or a medical body saying that "X person spending Y hours in office for Z number of days would be branded as a workophile" (I know I'm sounding very naive here). Or Workoholicism is afiliated to all thought patterns that converge at work ?? Once it happened that I was stuck with a problem in office and
thought long and hard about it before going to bed, I woke up in thenight to get a glass of water and the problem was still humming in my work! Does that make me a workaholic? I don't think so.

I LOVE MY WORK - Some people claim to love their work, So they put lotsa effort in to their work.May be 'Accomplishing' something at the end of the day gives them a kind of satisfaction. I can quite relate to these kind of folks, if not specifically but on a general level. Although I'm not sure how long they can put in hours after hours to attain their goals(Sure there are folks who have done acts like these, but for discussions' sake lets consider normal human beings like you and me). I wonder if so much attachement with one's work is good - Is it better to be detached? Or be militant about the outcome of your work? Or to strike a balance between them? These were the ideas that kept
bugging me for a long time .....

Is working really a boring and moronic job ?? Well, I cant comment on other professions mine seems to be a rather emotional roller-coaster ride. There are moments of frustration,anguish and helplessness(programming can be quite a challanging,yet frustrating job). Then there are moments if relief, which one would assosiate with accomplishment of work, a hint of patience-Sometimes you've to stick to your guns and wits to solve a tricky problem.

I work in a Industry wherein I have to communicate with folks around the globe - I've been fortunat eenough to communicate with folks clients in three different locations viz Europe,America and Africa. I personally felt that the Americans are the ones who have the best work ethics - they strictly work for the stipulated time and are off after that(no slogging, or late nights for them). It gives them so much time to do other things in life!!, Anyways,working in a service Industry has its own shortcomings.

See,I tried not to categorise people as per their work habits but I ended up doing the same !!!

So How do I feel about all this?? (Since it is my blog, You cannot get away without listening to my expert opinion!!).

I think there's more to work than earning money.There is the simple essence of victory.Finishing a piece of work gives us a victory,A feeling of achievement and most importantly 'Satisfaction'.A very basic element of man versus problem struggle. So what all of us(X,Y,Z and me) had to slog for 3 months or so? Agreed that we suffered physically as well as mentally - Eyes burnt,Necks ached and the Spinal Cords hammered. To cut it short I felt as if I had stood 15 rounds of boxing against Rocky Balboa and at the end of it I felt:

May be, Just may be I've one more round left in me.......