Showing posts with label updates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label updates. Show all posts

Friday, September 29, 2023

well, sorta kinda

I ran my first marathon on Sunday, 17-Sep-2023. It took me 5 hours and 38 minutes. I was supposed to write this post the next day and had been excited about logging events of the amazing week leading upto it. But a certain listlessness came over me on Monday and I ended up spending the day watching Maa Vinta Gaadha Vinuma, and getting fairly irritated with the few people who were congratulating me for finishing the race. Broadly there were two reasons for the whining: 1. I felt like I didn't really earn the medal because I was constantly drinking electrolyte and eating energy bars throughout the run. It felt like I cheated my way through, of signalling fitness without actually being fit. 2. The congratulations had an air of social mores akin to wishing someone Happy Birthday or congratulating someone on their pregnancy. It just felt, no not fake but, shallow. There was no deep engagement or understanding except it being a slightly unusual entrant in polite, social small talk. Ofcourse, people for the most part don't give a hoot about what others do (I don't, so I assume everyone doesn't as well) and while I understand society works on the basis of these weak ties, maybe its my problem to not take it for what it is and compartmentalise well. Sravani, though, identified the problem brilliantly later the same day: "You can't be happy for long. You feel compelled to puncture it". I think she is spot on but let's leave that armchair exploration for a later blog post. To wind up that thread, since that day I've fallen sick, been stressed at work, vowed and failed, and didn't do anything much useful or fun. I feel surefooted now on more solid ground.

On 09-Sep, after two good GCPP lectures in one of which I got a laugh from the lecturer for characterising the Indian Constitution as "a philosophical treatise that makes some metaphysical assumptions", we went to Karunesh Talwar's special Adrak Ka Swaad in UNSW. That was good fun. The next day, Sravani and I visited a White Australian's house for the first time, a co-greenie, and ended up having a very good time. On Monday, it was another good discussion at the Socialist Alternative Reading Group though I'm getting tired of how everyone is already fairly convinced of socialism, so there are no arguments strong enough for people to question their priors. On Tuesday, I had a good conversation with a Dr. Haroon, also a co-greenie, who is trying to create a diverse group of people from the sub-continent to push back against the increasing Hindutva thought down here in Australia. On Wednesday morning, I handed out YES leaflets at the Westmead Station1. It was a lovely2 experience, and I chatted with this old lady I was paired with who is also an artist/ art instructor.  Later in the night I met Kruthi after 12 years and it was like entering a time portal. I hadn't realised how much I'd journeyed (too little objectively though), and all that that's happened over the interim period. On Thursday, I went to my first rally4 in Australia and that was a very illuminative experience. I couldn't find the group I was supposed to be with but nonetheless stuck up a couple of conversations, one very long with a Socialist Alternative member who recognised me from the reading groups, and we ranted and bitched about corrupt politicians and corporate types who weren't doing anything to halt global warming. On Friday, I rewatched Krishna and His Leela, and loved it more than I did the first time. Other than being fun and entertaining, I think it also raises important questions. To extend from Herzog5, we need 21st century stories for 21st century questions and complexities. And maybe part of the reason so much pop culture is obsessed with nostalgia is because it isn't able to create/ crack the new paradigm. On Saturday, Sravani and I had a long, hard argument which was only diffused by me having to run on Sunday. And Sunday was, for the lack of a better word, fun (bloody hell, I need a thesauraus). I had been fairly confident of doing the distance and after the first 10k I knew that as long as I didn't hurt myself or dehydrate and cramp, I'd finish the race. Kilometres circa 28-37 were the toughest due to the heat, the field of runners around me, and the slowness with which time passed but my playlist and my watch really helped. I'm glad I completed it, hopefully faster and purer next time.

Its funny how all this seemed so incredible as I was running and imagining writing this post on Sunday, but now just feels.. yeah, that wasn't too bad. I must've also read/ listened to some interesting stuff over the period but nothing stands out now, except maybe Prof. Amit Chaudhuri's philosophical-self-questioning-inducing6 Finding the Raga. 

It was a good week.

P.S: In other news, I've just started working on the Japan film primarily because Sravani said a while ago that she's really excited to see it. The ears of the old boyfriend inside perked up. Stay tuned.

1Infact, being vocal about YES has led me to a couple of intense arguments, primarily with Ankur and Prasad Babai, and while the conversations were thought-provoking, I couldn't find a way to persuade the other party because our primary assumptions about the nature of the world were quite different. I understood Ankur's POV but while he was letting fear of things taking an ugly turn stop him, I was more idealistic (and maybe naive in his eyes or, worse, a virtue-signalling liberal) and in need of a more redemptive arc for The Story of Australia. 

2I wanted to write enriching but thankfully realised it sounds too much like PR bullshit3. I think this is why language evolves: people find a nice way of communicating a deep, personal, human experience and soon enough the advertisers and PR fuckers take it over and corrupt it, forcing us to find new, purer ways to express.

3“An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.” -David Foster Wallace

4I also ended up being featured in the photo on The Guardian. In case you're wondering, I'm the genius holding the corflute upside down.

5"Give us adequate images. We, we lack adequate images, our civilization doesn't have adequate images. And I think our civilization is doomed, is gonna die out like dinosaurs if it does not develop an adequate language or adequate images." -Werner Herzog

6I initially wrote gobsmacking here but that's not what I felt except in a couple of occasions. Writing is so hard- to distil all the myriad and dynamic thoughts and emotions floating around in my head in the hours I spent with the book into one or two adjectives without exagerrating or doing disservice to my original feelings is so challenging. Not to mention finding a way to evade the catchy-line traps I must've setup in my head while reading and simultaenously anticipating this-ish post.

Saturday, June 24, 2023

er, arty stuff

I made a short film in Apr and May 2023- day night day night. I owe the title to Julia Loktev's film.



Also, between Jan and Jun 2023, I embarked on a solo podcast which only Sravani knew about. I recorded a poem everyday, and while the quality slowly went from atrocious to just terrible, I'm glad I persisted in reading a poem a day- almost a remembrance

I owe this title to a John Keats' quote- “Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity—it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”

--

Also, I mailed Meheranna a few thoughts after reading DFW's essay on Joseph's Frank's Dostoevsky in Consider the Lobster. His response was brilliant and succinct, and I'll check with him if he's okay with me publishing it on the blog. Until then, here's what I wrote.

--

that old, inescapable question

DFW's writing is dense; And busy. That much is obvious as one starts reading any of his (more accessible) non-fiction let alone his fiction. But when a little closer attention is paid, it begins to appear that the density is just an affectation or style. He usually has just one or two major themes to explore just like most essayists but unlike most his signature move has (had) been to transcribe, if not entirely accurately then atleast consciously, the process of arriving at and departing from various touchpoints. I don't mean this as criticism, infact I enjoy it more often than not, only as observation. The reason he became a zeitgeist-defining writer is because he was able to convey what it felt like to live in a (late-capitalist/ proto-internet) society where the sensory overload was extreme and in which one had to work really hard to get to the crux of one's thoughts.

Let me illustrate my statements by analysing this particular essay. The two main themes of the essay are: how Frank's biography belongs to that old(-fashioned) species, earnest and straightforward, against the more fashionable types (ex: theory-driven, ideologically-motivated etc.)
why Dostoevsky (hereafter FMD) is still relevant and how his 150-year old preoccupations are still grander and deeper than contemporary fiction.

He contrasts Frank's approach from more ideological academic writers, for whom he seems to have special contempt, and uses that 'more genuine' style to comment on FMD's writing itself. DFW thinks that Frank gets FMD, that his reading is the most apt, because both of them put the individual and the conundrums of the heart front-and-centre of their work. FMD is grappling with his debts, addictions, the in-flux social context of Russia, overarching ideological narratives but equally, if not more, he is grappling with more personal (existential, ha!) feelings of faith and morality. And Frank's approach is to consider all of them to explain why he wrote what he did. 

For the same reasons, obviously, DFW exalts FMD because of the passion of his moral dilemmas and the earnestness with which he approaches them. There is no distance, ironic (DFW's pet peeve) or otherwise, between the writer and his characters. There is no post-Joycean obsession with form nor a pathological belief, of the mid-twentieth century, that aesthetics is the only ideology that matters#.

FMD is concerned with the question of How to Live in a rapidly chanding world where older notions of morality and metaphysics are fast losing ground. The essay argues that FMD is the precursor, probably even an important motivation, to Nietzche's thought to whom we can trace back our contemporary atheism (that's actually too strong a word, maybe it should be called the post-faith condition). I don't know enough to comment on that but it does indeed seem like the questions and dilemmas of his time are what we ought to have if only we weren't so fatalistic. 

It is probably too late to bring back that innocent striving by dialing back the cynicism. So what do we do? Not incidentally, considering his preoccupations, DFW tried to make Post-Post-Modernism the way out (what he also called New Sincerity).

In a world where Faith doesn't have much currency, Aesthetics is insufficient, Politics is too temperamental, where do we turn to for, I ask this with a straightface, Moral Instruction? What decides our behaviour cannot be instinct/ myopic selfishness or social conditioning (sanctioning?) alone; So what should fill that space? How do I design/ identify my Dharma as a thinking-and-acting being in the world?

#He has a beautiful line in there about aesthetics replacing metaphysics.

Sunday, January 8, 2023

another year rolls by

I haven't done this in a long while i.e., take out my computer and start blogging. I have a topic in mind, to chronicle my recent India trip which was unbelievably great, but more importantly the desire to simply 'blog it out' and see where it takes me seems to be coming back. Probably it's a product of being in a good mental space compounded by a sense of new-year-new-beginnings. 

I now realise I've hardly mentioned our Fiji trip on the blog which, again, at the risk of sounding cloyingly cheesy, was very good. Just to be able to bask in the sunlight all day, and keep jumping into the pool next to the ocean at the slightest pretext with a bottle of wine always handy - what's not to like. One of the themes I've been thinking of quite recently, instigated by people around me who helplessly exaggerate, is if it's possible to put into words the exact tone and tempo of our feelings. Maybe that's what really great writers do, spend their days chipping away at the superfluous cliches and cheaply available adjectives, analogies and registers to find the language closest to emotion. But most of us seem to, either wilfully or otherwise, be too loud in expressing both our pleasure and consternation. To back to where we digressed from, ofcourse Fiji wasn't perfect, it wasn't like a bloody hotel commercial, there were still other emotions than just banal, advertisement-like joy (incidental but apt companion piece), but it was a great mental space to be in all in all, and something I was able to appreciate and be grateful for not just now but also when I was going through it. Vinaka Fiji.

The trip started off with Sravani and I doing the Satyanarayana Vratam at home and while I'm not a big fan of poojas and stuff, it was heartening to see Amma enjoying herself and hosting over 150 people who came. I'm really happy for the community she found in the new house and am thankful for their support. The next day I met Meheranna, Rajanna and Chaitanya Medi and that sitting turned out to be an absolute hoot. Sravani and I also visited Golconda Fort, like tourists with a guide and all, and it was lovely to accord the respect I do to other cities to my own city. The next week/ ten days was spent around Kittu's wedding and it was great fun meeting and talking to all these people, most importantly Uday anna and Nagesh babai. It was also lovely to see the affection Aparna's mother received from all her colleagues in the special reception and to put it together from what I'd heard about her from Aparna when we first met her. I met Chaitanya Kondapi and Kishore that night, and things were going well until the director of their film came over and forcefully steered the conversation into a boring, ranty realm. Then off to Bangalore where it was wonderful to meet Sravya, Purnima garu, Sandeep, Hareesh, TP/ Ranjitha, Ragini atha, Purna atha folks. The long conversation with Purnima garu was a special treat for she's been exceedingly kind and gracious on this trip (thank you especially for Tejo Tungabhadra; hope to read it soon). Once we came back, more dinners at various houses- Kiran, Anuradha atha, Sarada aunty, Shouri's Akka/ Bawa, Hemakka, Madhu atha interspersed with a visit to the bookfair (where Amma and I had a ball, for once I picked more books I felt like reading than the ones I thought I should- lots of వచన కవిత్వం, and where I spotted Siva Reddy garu and professed my admiration) and our trip to వెయ్యి స్తంభాల గుడి and రామప్ప (Ramappa was stunning). I also had a useful conversation with Srinivas Parimi garu, who I met during Vishnu Sahasranama parayanam in Sarada aunty's house, about a career switch into Bioinformatics. On the fourth, Sravani took me to this gorgeous indie bookshop in Jubilee Hills, Luna Books, and it was wonderful chatting with the owner- especially since the previous day we'd met Gattu, and I spoke to him about the future of Navodaya (with vague, rosy dreams of myself as a bookseller). So, yeah, to reiterate, its been an absolutely terrific trip (I'm sure I've forgotten to mention a few more highlights and not expanded on most of this stuff, not least because these are more shortcuts for me to jog my memory later than a detailed travelogue) and I can't wait to start working on my two new year resolutions.

Earlier today, at four in the morning when I was twisting and turning in bed, I figured that a large part of the reason we choose to write is to impose our presence onto the larger, impersonal world of events. It is our resistance against the transience of everydayness, our attempt to hold onto atleast remnants of all that we see, feel and think, to placate ourselves that all this isn't in vain, a hope that someone in the future might stumble across this and exclaim, "there was once someone like this". 

A few weeks back, instigated by a heated conversation about my Australian citizenship, I proclaimed, somewhat rhetorically, that we are defined more by what we choose to resist and refrain from, than we what we permit and allow ourselves to do. I've got to think more deeply of that statement's import.

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

a balloon ride, 10k views, and some clarity

The last few days have been quite eventful. 

We went to Hunter Valley, a beautiful place, and thanks to Sravani, rode a hot air balloon. I was skeptical about the ride, assuming that I'd be bored standing in a soaring basket for an hour, but it turned out to be an amazing experience. The weather was a delight and the ride was incredible. One of the things we didn't realise until the pilot mentioned it, and which seems obvious in hindsight, is that because the balloon is propelled by the wind, you don't really feel movement. Because you're not fighting against the environment, it feels calm and reassuring. Take what life lessons you want from that. We were also thrilled to have a Masterchef-ish fine dining lunch and it was another memorable experience in its own right. Third anniversary turned out to be, despite our sour mood for not being able to cross the state, unexpectedly good.  

In other news, I sent the Cinema Kaburlu essay to Baradwaj Rangan sir as a submission for Reader's Write-in because I felt a few of his readers might enjoy watching it. He said he couldn't publish an already published work but said that he and his team liked the video a lot and asked if we were open to it being published on Film Companion South. That was an offer we couldn't resist and so now it's on their Youtube channel with over 10k views, way above anything I could've hoped for. 


More interestingly, after a brief mail from Meheranna got me thinking, I had the wonderful luck to read and discuss Isaac Singer's Gimpel the Fool in the Bangalore Writer's Workshop, and had sort of a eureka moment. Though now the write-up seems like an analysis of Telugu cinema, especially after FC posted it and the discussions that followed, what I was originally trying to understand was the relationship between myths and society. 

Why are we who we are as a people? What shapes our individual worldviews and our identities as one people? Language, geography and race seem basic but then we started identifying with others based on our shared myths- religion, nation etc. What qualities do we prize in our people, how do we process misfortune, what 'life lessons' do we teach our children? 

The fact that the most basic of our beliefs are learned came into my conscious thought after I had the immense fortune to read Erich Fromm's Man in Capitalist Society (which I haven't finished yet) and Rick Roderick's Masters of Suspicion (an astounding tour de force of intellectual history). And because I watched these films around the same time, I thought I saw patterns in them that reflected what I was learning. So I used those films to understand what Fromm and Roderick were saying. The film comparison actually started after listening to Devdutt Pattanaik compare Rama & Krishna to Rajnikanth. Then I was able to put those two together and say that:
    1. since so much of the 'Hindu' worldview (avatars, karma, bhagwan stuti, rebirth etc.) comes from our 'religious' stories- stories of gods, their devotees and the relationships of the god when s/he takes a human form
    and 
    2. since that must have percolated into the minds of writers as it does to most of us, 
    ergo,
Our stories (predominantly film because that's our only true pop culture) must reflect those ideologies. And we probably like them so much because they meet our expectations of what the protagonist does.

Another learning from this entire process is that though I've always treasured bottom-up, organic learning, top-down, conscious questioning also has its uses. 

Good stuff. 

Wednesday, December 11, 2019

semaphores to live by1

The purpose of education is to help us understand, and subsequently question, our own intuitions and desires, and be able to articulate them to other beings. We read, write, watch, discuss to be able to create/ update models of the world that we carry in our head. From a Biological perspective, I assume we do this to navigate the world better and increase chances of life and comfort. But I also think humans sometimes do things that cannot be explained by simple self-interest and that is fascinating. For instance, how does a soldier negate the urge of every cell in his body and give up his life for a cause he believes in? We regularly fight for something we believe in even if it means making ourselves more vulnerable in the process. This is because of a faith in something more powerful than physical existence- traditionally a god, more recently a more secular religion like maatrubhoomi or justice.

I once read somewhere that "for Marx, everything was money; for Freud, everything was sexuality; for Foucault, everything was power. You can take any powerful motivator and replace God with it to explain human behaviour". In similar lines, these days I'm thinking that the fundamental atom of a human society is justice2. As much as I understand the problems caused by such reductivism, I think it actually is a core component of what makes otherwise competitive humans cooperate. Karma is the highest form of justice, able to quantify and balance actions across lifetimes3. Liberalism is about justice; It argues that you have as many rights as anyone else and because we live in a just society, if your autonomy is being snatched away from you, we will come and ensure you will be given it back.

Ofcourse, this is mostly just promise because as (I've been told) Marx points out, there can be no real freedom as long as a person is driven by economic necessity. As Pankaj Mishra, who's Age of Anger I absolutely enjoyed reading, points out, powerlessness, usually economic, is the root of the conflict most nations are facing right now. Modern nation states promised equality and liberty to all its citizens. But in a society where there is such income inequality, any promises of social equality cannot be fulfilled. And pulling a thread from Vivek Chibber, what right now across the world seem like communal differences is essentially economic dissatisfaction forced to transmogrify into other shapes. Actually this is also the central argument of Rana Dasgupta's essay in the Guardian on the future of the Nation State. He argues that the Nation State, which promises equality and justice on the basis of birth in a certain region cannot hold its own when facing the promise by global Capital of economic equality.

The reason for the exploration of these concepts is that Sravani follows a lot of Indian journalists and politicians on Twitter and we discuss major actions by the government frequently. From what she tells me, and from the general perception of Twitter, we seem to have given up all pretensions of finding compromises for differing viewpoints and fight tooth and nail for beliefs we espouse. I can understand this behaviour. As much as I know that it is imperative for me to keep updating my models to stay relevant, probably because of how intellectually and emotionally exacting it is, I find it easier to stick to them and convince myself that the new data points are aberrations until I absolutely have to retire the old models and install the new ones. So this is not unusual behaviour. But it got me to thinking then why do we have this belief that we should always strive to be objective, rational and try to see the world from the other's point of view. I like the philosophy of liberalism because, fundamentally, it says that you are free to do as you please as long as you don't trespass on others' rights. Yes, there are many problems with some of its aspects but it is a good starting place. Many people subscribe to it in principle. The problem comes in application. Because as much as its easy to espouse such ideas, it becomes incredibly hard to practice it because we as many people must learn to co-exist and share limited resources.

In his brilliant Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, Pankaj Mishra writes, and decades later Yogendra Yadav too mentions the mentality, of the noeveau rich, and their desperate need to gain self-esteem, after becoming unexpectedly rich in India's privatization (falsely called liberalization) project, by reaching back to old traditions and religious practices. Evidently the next step in Maslow's Hierarchy. I have also been thinking about what Dr. Velcheru Narayana Rao garu must have meant when he said, "What we call modernity is the separation of a man from the society" and the sense of alienation that it creates and which religion can soothe temporarily.

This has been a muddled, meandering post, more of an unburdening of thoughts and concepts that have been swirling in my mind of late and less of a point to make. Now that I read what I've written, it makes me happy to see the esteemed company I've been keeping and as much as the roaring river of information that I've been scooping from intimidates me, it also rejuvenates me.

1 Semaphores are variables which Operating Systems use to allocate common resources to multiple competing programs. Our rulebooks, a clear example of which is the Constitution, are designed to perform the same function. On another note, I highly recommend Ian Cheng's Worldling Raga on Ribbonfarm to anyone interested in how new 'worlds' are created and how we access so many of them almost simultaneously.
2 "..in order to read Ambedkar as a thinker is to go with him on a journey of force, is to understand what really force is. Not what power is, not what violence is, not what non-violence is, not what inequality is, not what equality is, but rather what force is and this ability to comprehend equality in terms of force is radical equality." - Aishwary Kumar
3 Obviously, from what I see, all beings are not the same. Some are more compassionate than others, some more productive etc. Maybe by imposing justice, we try to shave off their edges. 

Tuesday, November 5, 2019

planned cities and poetry

We loved Canberra. Well, it was a great holiday- the drive was pleasant, we took a guided tour of the Parliament, stayed and took long walks in the beautiful suburb of Narrabundah, accidentally stumbled into the delightful, archaic National Film & Sound Archive, visited the National Museum and the War Memorial. More than that, I loved Canberra because of it's design, because of the township feel that I so adore, because of the wide roads and low-rise buildings. Until I saw the place, I couldn't imagine that a city could be built like that. Infact my only mental images of townships came from having spent a little time in Srirampur and the ITC Guest House in Sarapaka. I started reading about the design and construction of Canberra, came upon the Garden City Movement, Howard Ebenezer and incidentally stumbled across the same name again in Rana Dasgupta's astonishingly poetic Capital. There seems to be a part of me, and I'm conjecturing many people have similar feelings being slightly wary of my own exceptionalism, that craves for order, discipline, planning, geometric figures, that claims that continuous progress is essential and is possible only after we map the co-ordinates and set the direction. Ofcourse, contrary to that is the other part that abhors finality, which I'm sure you'll find multiple instances of in this blog, and seeks the momentary flips of the soul when it comes in contact with something transcendental and that craves for surprise, and since that cannot be designed, tries to give it a little more chance by keeping discipline at bay. The reason for this slight excursion, and Swageetam, is that these feelings seem to be universal. Dasgupta writes about how Delhi has been repeatedly razed down and years later is again the site for a new set of grandiose ambitions. He writes about how Delhi's story is less a continuous cycle of deaths and rebirths, and more of a low burning flame into which lives are almost fatalistically tempted to enter and be destroyed, creating a fabulous show while the burning happens until only ashes remain, hiding beneath them the fires refusing to die, waiting patiently until more dreamers and poets pass by.

Speaking of poets, I've had the pleasure of reading excellent poetry since the last few days. The catalyst has been Dr. Mrunalini gari interviews with writers and poets called Akshara Yatra, especially the one with K. Siva Reddy garu. I loved the way he read his poems, at the end of the interview, and that led me to reading out loud some his poems from పక్కకి ఒత్తిగిలితే- Of the ones I've read till now, my favourites are- పక్కకి ఒత్తిగిలితే, ఒక కొత్త ఊహ, పొద్దున్నే, సాయంత్రానికి, మూసీనది ఒడ్డున, వీడు, రోడ్డున పడ్డాడతను, వీధులే, అతని కల. ఏం కళాకారుడండి. ఆయనెదురు పడితే కాళ్ళమీదడిపోతా. ఆ ఊహ, ఆ శిల్పం, ఆ తత్వం. Which also lead me to start reading aloud other, for some reason Hindi and Urdu poems, I've always liked- Piyush Mishra's Husna, Aarambh, Duniya, Gulzar saab's Hindi translations of Tagore, Amitabh Bhattacharya's poems in Udaan, Irshad Kamil's poetry in Rockstar and Tamasha, and Javed Akhtar saab's poems in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. Life's been a song. I can't recommend Dr. Mrunalini gari interviews enough; There are so many accomplished Telugu writers and scholars who's work I'd been absolutely unaware of. I particularly enjoyed Janaki Bala gari and Prof. Velcheru Narayana Rao gari interviews. 

Tuesday, September 11, 2018

Update from Oz

Australia is beautiful. In a different way from Italy. Italy was filled with astounding cultural sights, breathtaking natural views, amazing food and wonderful people. Australia, atleast going by what we've explored in Sydney so far, doesn't have many beautiful buildings or wonderful ethnic food. But I am in love with its vast expanses, beautiful skies, community culture (free library, large parks and grounds that are free for all, well-functioning public transport) and the idea of an adult life that ventures beyond work and immediate family. We've been here 10 days so far and most time has gone into staying at home hunched infront of the computer. Despite that, we've visited the Opera House, Royal Botanic Gardens, gone on a ferry ride to Watson's Bay and abandoned the highly touted walk from Coogee to Bondi. More than that though, I like walking on these everyday roads. The grounds are breathtakingly large and green, every county seems to have its own fitness and sports centre, and I spent a lot of time today evening just watching a Net practice in a nearby ground. I'm also continuously googling for meetups in Art, Literature and Film areas and though there aren't as many as Id've liked (I keep hearing Melbourne is the larger cultural and sports centre), there are quite a few. This place also makes me want to go out for a walk or a run and I feel like there's more freedom for an individual to do what he wants or wear what he wants without attracting as many stares as in India. It's funny because I always thought I wouldn't like living in foreign (read first world, western city) but I really seem to be enjoying the opportunities available for an individual to pursue interests and passions. The orderly life, unlike the unnecessarily glorified India's 'Ordered Chaos', leaves enough mental space to venture beyond worrying about work, commutation and saving money. We noticed it a lot in Italy too. People not worried about bank balances (although it could be argued that we were only tourist-observers and don't have a real idea of how everyday-lives work) but spending time and money to find happiness now- eating out, meeting friends, taking a run, indulging in passions, discussing finer things. Pay more taxes and let the government help you with medical and educational expenses as and when you need it and don't worry about saving up for the children. Liking it, liking it a lot.

Tuesday, August 21, 2018

discussing films

  • We spent a good two hour discussing films: Dhiraj, Sandeep and I
  • Pathaka trailer, Bhardwaj's previous films, Shahid Kapoor's strange career graph where his memorable roles are unfrequent and are interspersed with horrible film choices
  • Manto and its phenomenal cast 
  • Cast Away, Wilson and minimalist movie posters
  • Scorsese and his dichotomy: Gangster Rock and Meditations on God
  • The genius of Wes Anderson and his inimitable, literary sensibilities
  • Kieslowski's Dekalog
  • Shaun Carruth, Primer, Upstream Color, Predestination (which I wrongly called Proposition)
  • Richard Linklater, Before Trilogy, Boyhood and how he makes films on the events that happen between the events other films are made of
  • Ramu and how Shiva paved the way for Satya and Black Friday
  • TVFs brilliant content- this, this and this
  • Biswa Kalyan Rath's astounding standup and that 1 min episode of his in IIM that comes in Comicstaan S1E1
  • Recommendations to watch Laakhon mein ek and Yeh meri family

Monday, March 19, 2018

Here and Now

I couldn't send a post for AZIndia Times March edition because I was facing Writer's Block; I know that is a really immodest statement but it wasn't laziness because I tried writing multiple times, even going so far to use Cold Turkey Writers with a challenge of 1000 Words, and nothing, Nothing, came out. It was strange because I've always been able to write something (no matter how unoriginal) and send it across. Not last month. It wasn't as much an need-to-put-an-original-argument crisis as writerly ennui. Which is funny because I was atleast able to write about the ennui earlier. Maybe like Meheranna put it the other day, it is just connubial bliss. I'm floating in some sort of a wonderfully warm-woolly bubble since marriage and it seemed to have reached its apotheosis then. I'm still reading and thinking about interesting things but for probably the first time in my life, firsthand experience has completely overshadowed it. It just feels so good going from one day to the next now. I still have mood swings about the job and my inability to stick to a discipline but they're not overarching themes anymore.

Jordan B Peterson is astounding company everyday and after a brief stint away from Pocket and Feedly (and the myriad blogs and website I follow for "intellectual" stimulus), I'm back to using them albeit in a more controlled fashion. I've been meaning to write about learnings from the JBP podcast for a while now but he packs so much in each of his talks that I may have to listen and read multiple times do a modicum of justice to the breadth and depth of his lectures. I've always loved writers who are generalists and can use theories and frameworks from one field of knowledge to shed new light on a totally different area of knowledge. One of the criticisms meted out against JBP is that he really doesn't have anything new to say but just collates data from different fields and presents it in one narrative. I think we need more people like that, those who not only have the required authority on the subject but also are able to put across their learnings in an extremely compelling manner.

Most of what we know, the frameworks and mental models we use to navigate reality, comes from secondhand or tertiary sources. I've always been obsessed with Truth. With the Best way of doing things. With doing the Right thing, the Beautiful thing. I read a theory somewhere that according to Hindu scriptures, that not only is Satyam- Shivam- Sundaram the sweetest spot but you can't have any one without the other two. Truth, Ethics and Beauty (Digressive Fun Fact- Anand Gandhi once spoke about how the three stories in Ship of Theseus are based on each of these tenets and how those character were trying to reach salvation via the path they chose). JBP, a Darwinian, says Utility trumps Truth. And all the mythologies that have existed and seeped into our culture for a few millennia do so precisely because they are wonderful tools in helping us deal with the ethical, aesthetic and existential questions that we face everyday. I've really found his ideas of Order and Chaos (Culture and Nature) very useful in making sense of most things I unconsciously do. I hope to finish Maps of Meaning soon. After Nassim Taleb and Venkatesh Rao, Jordan B Peterson is one of those phenomenal generalists whose paradigms have completely altered the way I view the world.

A couple of weeks ago Sravani and I did an Oscar movie spree watching 6 of the films nominated for Best Picture. We're still unable to decide whether Phantom Thread or Three Billboards is the best picture but Shape of Water is definitely the worst in the list. Even Spielberg's The Post, despite its extreme shallowness and unoriginality, was more stimulating. She really like Lady Bird and my thoughts on that film are more conflicted, which I wrote in a now-abandoned post. Things are going well.

So long.

Sunday, November 8, 2015

Tyrion or Littlefinger or that sharp-witted Raven?

Rafi saab, Zindabad!

I saw Akshay Kumar, live. Like 20 feet away. Beat that in an update post. 'Course it was disorienting as hell. I've almost never seen celebrities up close. Except Andrew Symonds who I saw prowling on the boundary line, while I sat at the topmost row, and probably because of the ambience and the distance, that didn't feel very weird. I never bump into celebrities in airports and shit, possibly because I hardly give them a chance to bump into me. But Akshay Kumar, and Ayushman Khurana, and Vishal-Shekhar, whose concert was just phenomenal. True to word, the Flipkart Fly High party was one for the ages. Flipkart's an amazing company. There's smart people, and lots of parties, and lots of perks, and Macbooks, and very smart people who're very passionate about the work they do. Man, if stupidity is contagious, then intelligence is inspiring. You're not restricted from doing anything in office, so you'll find people reading, sleeping, playing, goofing around, arguing, working intensely and brainstorming just for the kicks. Its refreshing to be among a bunch of people who like coming to work, if you can call it that, every morning. I love this place. I'm sure my IQ must've increased atleast by a couple of points since I came here.

Apart from that, Bengaluru's been fun. Sravani took me to a couple of Carnatic concerts, but in tradition of my adherence to Donkey-Perfume proverbs, I didn't even know what the hell was even going on. But we're going to a Karthik Iyer concert in a couple of weeks. I hope he plays a few Raja- Rahman covers, otherwise it's going to be another waste of seat space. I also take part in the film discussions between Sandeep and Shravan, who make Kannada short films. I ( almost ) wrote a satire script for a 4-5 minute movie with Sandeep in it, but again, never got around to actually finish it. Never share a flat with somebody who's very committed. He yells at me every couple of days for not seeing anything to the finish. But then again, like that popular Telugu adage Birth- Habit- Cemetery so subtly puts it, its hard to overcome inbuilt vices. Very.

Talking of vices, I'm still not finishing most books I start. A recent exception being The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which despite the unimaginative and fairly generic writing, packs a punch in that climax. It wasn't as big a voila moment as the Gone Girl revelation, but I have to admit it was a bit of a surprise. I also met Purnima Tammireddy , who I had been acquainted through Kinige Patrika and we spent a great two hours talking about Saramago, Kundera, Meheranna, Calvino, Telugu Bloggers, Mullapudi and urban writing in Telugu. A complaint both of us had was that there was hardly any good urban writing in Telugu since the 1980s. Sure, there was political writing and casteist writing, and preachy writing and a lot of phony writing masquerading as well-intentioned, but there was hardly any these-are-our-lives-and-this-is-how-we-live art, in both cinema and literature, based on which our children could know the lives we lived. And a couple of weeks later, she lent me Cosmicomics and Cardus on Cricket, two books I've been meaning to read for a long time but haven't gotten around. I have partly read both of them, and as much as Cardus is a pleasure, I'm still not getting very comfortable with Calvino. I've never been a big fan of smart writing, if you know what I mean. The kind that plays around too much with the form, that is very self-conscious of its existence, that revels in its own wit and intelligence. The bits of Infinite Jest that I've read, for instance. While I claim I appreciate highbrow art, I suppose my tastes are tuned to middlebrow. Eventually, for me all art should come down to this- a conversation with a fairly intelligent, interesting man as he narrates anecdote after anecdote in a voice grizzled with age and experience, with a twinkle in his eye. It probably is a very limited way to look at it and that's why I'm trying to broaden by spectrum.

My tryst with audiobooks so far has been incredible. Perfume, read by Sean Barrett. A Free Man, read by Vikas Adam. The Harry Potter series, read by Jim Dale. Ushasri Ramayanam, read by Ushari. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, read by Jonathan Oliver. And the book I'm having an amazing time now with is The Game of Thrones, read by Roy Dotrice. GRRM's writing is extraordinary. I don't know how he manages to flesh out real human characters in just a couple of lines. To give you a recent example, there is a portion of the book that I heard yesterday where Catelyn Stark must convince a cunning, mean old man called Walter Frey and in just a couple of paragraphs, you get an idea of what this man must've been like to live with. And almost every one of Tyrion's lines is a gem that'll make even Aaron Sorkin green with envy. And Dotrice takes this material and fuses the narrations of the characters with life and energy and emotion and identity. If the purpose of art is to transport you to another world, these two magicians are to be listed among its greatest practitioners. Outstanding. To pick my favourite voice acting among this extraordinary collection is a tough task but as much as I love Tyrion and the Old Bear's raven, the honours should go to Littlefinger. Dotrice's voice drips with mockery as he voices Littlefinger. Astounding. Next on my list of audiobooks is Robert Hardy's version of the abridged version of Aubrey- Maturin. For those of you who've not heard of them before, I can't recommend Peter Weir's Master and Commander enough. Bromance at its best.

Yet its not just all been good films ( loved Talvar and the visceral experience of The Walk ) and great books. I've also been doing a bit of Android Programming and I must admit its quite tough, more so because my Java has always been below par. But the OS part was fun, thanks to good old trusty Linux. But I got a lot of homework to do. That's that then. And oh, Vikranth recommended this fascinating course a couple of weeks ago and I'm just starting on it. Quite interesting.

And for now, that's all folks.

Sunday, April 27, 2014

published work update

Amma's been reminding me for a while now that I haven't been blogging regularly. Since she asked again today evening, I sat down to write something but wasn't in any mood to do and so what I did instead was post some of my published ( a big word considering that many of the journals I wrote for are defunct now ) work. The idea was to congregate my various posts floating across the web and make this blog double up as an archive in case someone wants to read this stuff years later ( yes, like Sravani points out, I'm Reality Challenged). Most of the pieces are reviews because there was a time not too long ago when I dreamt of being a film critic ( Roger Ebert, Baradwaj Rangan and Raja Sen are some of my favourite writers. It's a pleasure reading their work for their mastery over form, the experience they bring to criticism and their sophisticated worldview ). So, that's about the proliferation of blogposts in your aggregator.

That apart, I've relocated to Hyderabad. I'm listening to Wes Anderson's movies soundtracks. In love with Hardest Geometry Problem in the World, This Time Tomorrow, Mr. Fox in the Fields and Le Temps de l'Amour among others. Also been watching Matt Zoller Seitz's amazing Video Essays on Wes Anderson. Entertaining and Enlightening. In one of my recent posts, I mentioned about two happenings that I was excited about. One was the NYC Midnight SSC Story I wrote, The Incessant Storm, and the other was a Telugu short story I wrote that got published in Kinige Patrika, Astitvam. It's been an exciting time, especially with my conversations in Chennai with Abhishek, Patel and Yash, spanning late into night, where we talked politics, philosophy, ethics, ambitions and a little bit of SAP. I also finished reading UR Ananthamurthy's Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man, the AK Ramanujan translation, and though I was underwhelmed by the ending, it triggered some interesting ideas.

I've also started meddling with Magix Music Maker and I put up a simple composition I made with soundloops on SoundCloud. The track is called Night Lights and though all I've done is mix-and-match various pre-recorded soundbits, I had an incredible time doing it. In regards to this, I am working on something more ambitious, which also happens to be a collaboration, and I hope to finish it in the stipulated timeline. By the way, I came across this awesome track by Akira Kosemura which is called Precious, and it's been playing in a loop ever since.

But beyond all this, one of the best things that's happened in recent times is my acquaintance with Meher Sir, who's name I first came across while reading this brilliant Kasibhatla gari interview but got to know a little better after Kinige published my story. I am still going through his work, which is of very high calibre, but if there's one thing I've realised from our conversations, his insights, criticisms, translations and stories, it's that he's one of those originals. A true artist.

That's all for now. 

Saturday, November 30, 2013

Chennai Update

It's been a long, long time since I've been up here on the blogging front. Not that I haven't been writing, though not much, but I haven't had access to update. It's funny how exactly a year ago things were so different- I was in Ayyapa Deeksha, profusely reading and doing Yoga, and writing hundreds of words everyday to meet the daily quota of NaNoWriMo. So, what have I been upto? Well, for beginners, I just turned into a SAP BW Consultant. It's good but what's better is that I've been assigned to start working on SAP Predictive Analysis, a tool used, like its name suggests, to go through huge amounts of data and run algorithms on it to predict trends for forecasting. Interesting stuff. Apart from that, I've been meeting old family friends, visiting the Anna Library ( What a place for a date; Can you know more about the other person than when you're discussing books? ), spending long nights discussing life and philosophy with Abhishek, Mahesh, Yash and the likes, meeting people from various parts of the country and most importantly, been wearing formals to work. Everyday. The reading's been happening too- Abraham Eraly's The Emperor's of the Peacock Throne, very one-dimensional but a page turner nonetheless, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland, the most disappointing of all her books, a terrible bore despite me loving the short story version in The Newyorker, and am currently on VS Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, a book of such astounding brilliance that it probably is the most immersive reading experience I've had since One Hundred years of Solitude.

Also, now that I have the Lumia, I'm using Phonly to follow blogs and Evernote to keep notes on the go. Technology's good. Coming to films, I watched Before Sunrise, reminded me a lot of Woody Allen, Pyaar ka Punchnama, the first half was wild but the second half was plain boring and rather juvenile, and Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, terrible screenwriting but Farhan's sincerity was palpable. So, it's been a rather eventful 45 days or so in Chennai. The place is good and I am planning to write a longform post on how I see the city and it's culture, so I won't delve into it now. Talking about planned assignments, there's something big that I'm planning on but it requires discipline and preparation even to get started. The deadline's 60 days away and though I have no real hopes of winning it, I atleast want to finish and submit it for contention. Let's see how that pans out.

And by the way, being mentioned on BackgroundScore.com, a blog maintained by a critic I hugely admire, was really flattering.

More later, then. 

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Google- your search ends here

That title, folks, absurdly enough is the name of a mouth freshener Vinod offered me at Andhra Cafe.
Tagline and all.

"The amount of stock the owner thought would last an year, got sold out in a month", he said, proudly, before continuing, "It's got Sodium Saccharin in it, which is unhealthy, but you know, what isn't?", matter-of-factly.

My last fortnight has been filled with experiences like these, not exactly bizarre but a little out of the ordinary; Interesting enough to bring me out of the rut, but not so much that I lose all my bearings. The wheels of my second short finally seem to be rumbling into momentum, thanks mainly to Sravani, and I've been meeting all kinds of people to discuss it. And coming back to Facebook has had its share of quiet surprises. Getting back onto the social juggernaut seemed intimidating at first, the information overload was tremendous, but I've talked to a lot of people I've been meaning to since a long time. Which made me think about an article I read about Facebook and Twitter, in which the author argues that the relationships formed through these networks are emotionally wafer-thin. I agreed with him when I read it, which I see a lot of people do, but once I've gotten back and am pinging friends to fury, I think he didn't get all of it right. It might be true that what we see about the other person is a masked version of himself, that he's creating a virtual image of himself that he wants the world to see him as, but that's true to any social interaction. One, all of us are modelling ourselves in a certain way to create a perfect balance between what we are, what we want to be and how we want the world to see us. That is as much true to the physical world as to the virtual. But two, more importantly, how a man creates an image of himself and what that image turns out to be, when observed over a period of time reveal his true identity.

I personally got off Facebook because I thought I was spending too much time on it instead of doing something productive. But then I spent so much time on it because I didn't have anything interesting to do. And either way, who of us can predict, looking into the future, which of our actions are productive. It's a truly ridiculous notion, to live a life with one eye on the benefits to be reaped in the future. Another reason I got off Facebook was because, which I recently read in a study to be true, it started depressing me. The study said that since people only post updates either when they are happy or when they think they are living a meaningful lives, each of us assumes that everyone else is leading a more fulfilling life than us. And this I think is a rather accurate reason but I'm sure we're going to adapt to this too, and level the effect out, because we've already turned Facebook into an Irani Cafe like environment where after a hard day's work, we can unwind and relax.

Anyway, I had a great time at the ComicCon. We, me, Kishore and Vivek, bought this mini-series comic book called Aghori, published by Holy Cow, and I absolutely loved it. And since going totally berserk over the beauty and genius of comic as an art form, after reading the tremendously powerful Daytripper by Gabriel and Fabia, I've been encountering some great stuff- Ramayan 3392 AD, Grant Morrison's 18 Days, Jim Ottiviani's Feynman and Jess3's The Zen of Steve Jobs. I watched a couple of good movies too, Rush and The Lunchbox, thought Battle Royale was extremely overrated and still am ambiguous of my feelings about Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors. Reading has been paltry because of the rather mediocre books I've chosen, Haruki Murakami's What I talk about when I talk about Running and Vikas Swarup's Q & A, but Mary Roach's Stiff has been a rather whimsical read. But the most rewarding development has been by sudden interest in Hard Rock. I started searching for music for my next short, and to the suit the mood, I started browsing Hard Rock and Metal albums. I highly recommend Sam Dunn's Metal: A headbanger's journey and it's sequel, Global Metal, for anyone who's looking to get into the genre, because it provides a great launching pad for total noobs. I discovered Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and consequently, Eluveitie and Nine Inch Nails. Another serendipitous discovery has been Joe Satriani's Unstoppable Momentum. Invigorating.

It's been a rather eventful fortnight, meetings with old friends and strangers with shared passions, infusion into things I never thought I'd be interested in and stumbling across insanely interesting books. Its been a period where I have spent less time obsessing about the past or the future, instead acting upon things that captivate me now.

As I re-read the post, I realise I've done a very patchy job. But I'm glad it's out.

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

update

The problem with growing up is that we are typecast. We are forced to become something. A stereotype. What are you? An engineer, a filmmaker, a cook, a professor? We are not any of these. We are almost, more often than not, all of these and more. I'm surprised by the human mentality to find a job that one loves and stick to it until we turn 60. Well, being able to do that is an art form. It requires discipline, tenacity and passion for doing it well. But before deciding what we want to do for the rest of our lives, it is also important to ask why we have to choose something. All our lives, we've been taught to be well-rounded, to be atleast good at a lot of things, and very good at a couple of things. Then, why suddenly are we made to find a career so that we can grow vertically. That's one way to live, definitely, but I've always been more mesmerised with the horizontal. I'd rather be an amateur at everything than be an expert in one. How are you going to make money then, start a family and feed your kids then? If you don't have a job and a rising salary to meet your growing financial needs? I don't know, really. And I'm not considering it right now because that is not my headache yet. But I am not ready to sacrifice living to making a living. I don't know what this is about. The only reason why I'm posting this is because it has been a long time since I've posted anything.
Later.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

daily check-in, lol

Its been a long weekend. Strange. But its been eventful. 3 great movies- Ananthapuram 1980, Premalo Padithe and Eega. Test driving cars. A long, wonderful conversation with Rahul, Vivek and Gattu at Ashok. Reading The Perfect Storm and The Blizzard. Listening to Mychael Danna and Hans Zimmer. Riding extensively across the city in fair and foul whether. And writing, feeling the bumps made by the pen, seeing my hand churn out intricately shaped a's and t's, listening to the pattering of the rain. Its been an eventful weekend. There's nothing else to write apart from this really. We spoke about the current organizational structure. About how flat hierarchy and calling the boss by his first name is just bullshit. We spoke about why it is important to truly believe in the work you are allotted to do. And I decided that when one day I'll have a company, I'll treat it truly like a company of people. People who don't work for a paycheck but who work because we share the vision. Because they too, like me, want to do something because we understand, endorse and believe in our goal. I should go get some sleep. Its been a long weekend.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Shock of the century

Its been one long, long day. Started off on a pissed note that I woke up so late. Its 1.30 in the night and I'm still up, listening to Mayakkam Enna BGM and writing about how long a day its been. But the shock of the century came when I was riding in the rush hour traffic in Bazaar Ghat and Kishore told me about Raghav and his love. Shocker. Not in my wildest dreams that it did seem to be that Raghav, Palabugga, was capable of something like this. Took a long time sinking in. But I'm really happy about it. I love the way he's talking about her. Shy, nervous, giggly, and really happy. There's nothing like it. A girl to call my own. Pretty wonderful actually .Thanks to his love story, I'm revisiting my own. Feels good.


Balki's right about Ilaiyraja. His background scores are pieces of sheer genius. I love the way backgroundscore.com analyzes background scores and tries to convey their meaning. The brilliance of background score lies in its subtlety. To elevate the scene without being noticed. To live inconspicuously in the background until deliberately brought into the spotlight. Raja and Rahman are masters of the craft. But I have to admit I fell deeply in love with BGMs of Mayakkam Enna and 3. 3 is an extremely romantic album, like it ought to be, obviously. Anirudh's done an amazing job. I had a feeling that it was heavily Western music influenced, baroque sometimes, but I'm just a novice when it comes to music genres. Every note in the music score of 3 is like an ode to the madness of love. And I like it better in Tamil. One, because it makes more sense musically. And two, importantly,  because I can avoid Roop Kumar Rathod's pathetic pronunciation. I love listening to Kannazhaka with her, especially the intro violin part. Been finding some extremely addictive pieces of music on Youtube- Canon in DMahaganapatimO Re Chiraiya, Jurassic Park theme and Carnatic Titanic OST.


Thanks to Raghav coming back, life's getting more exciting. Now I realize what I'd been missing all along. Those totally carefree times with friends. And I know all of us are rejuvenated because it seems like the good old times now that all of us are together here again. The vibes are catching up. Lots of interesting movies coming up. Sakuni, Oka romantic crime katha, Viswaroopam and Andala Rakshasi. Mouth-watering prospects. That's really about it for now. 


But Raghav, shocker ra!

Sunday, May 20, 2012

whatever

I have nothing to write. I'm writing because I've vowed to. Because I've decided to post something now. So what should I write about? Office is getting a little better, I've recently watched Batman Begins and The Dark Knight again, and that's about it really. Yea, playing FIFA 08. Bored to hell. I don't want to talk about the other proceedings in my life. I can't post that stuff that's far too personal nor can I stand a long time without telling the world I'm still alive, still trying to write. I'm stuck between Paripoornananda's Bhagad Gita, Chaganti's Hanumath Mahatyam and Nolan's Dark Knight, Advaita's Gates of Dawn. The unplugged version is brilliant. I'm stuck between watching Midhunam, reading Sri Ramana and reading Garcia Marquez, WhatIsStephenHarperReading.ca. Weird fuck. Why am I even posting? The kind of insecurity web's built into me is amazing. Anonymity is virtually nonexistent, being ignorant is not an option and if I don't post stuff atleast once a fortnight, or check my mail and facebook atleast three times a day, I start getting nervous about what I'll be leaving behind. Nobody's pushing me. Apart from the fear that tomorrow I might cease to exist and not leave anything substantial for people to talk about me. How foolish. People won't remember me for a long time anyway, why should they and even if they do how will it help me? Why do I want to chronicle my emotions and anxieties for my kids to read. Rahul Ram talks about Asheem's death and he says, "People didn't pay much attention to Asheem's absence. In a way its comforting because we'll still manage the live acts without him. But its scary that nobody cares if you are there or not." Anonymity scares the shit out of people. People want to be remembered, quoted and believe that their loved ones won't cease thinking about them. Ignorance. Now I realize why people turned to fiction. Its much easier portraying emotions, letting out insecurities and fantasies when you are masked. When people cannot differentiate between fiction and truth.

Some visuals in The Dark Knight are genius. Especially the scene where joker walks out of his battered truck, or the scene where he walks away with Lau and is riding in the Police car, with his head out. Or maybe its the background score. Haunting. Some stunning visuals.

Nothing else.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

G Major

I've been getting pretty frustrated everyday while returning from office. Cribbing and complaining. Wanted to yell at the world today up here but somehow, suddenly, all that rage is gone. The moment I realised nobody can change my life apart from me, I STFU, took my guitar out and started strumming. I jotted down a list of to-do things too and I hope I'll start ticking them off soon. Adios then, my guitar's waiting.

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

It's been great fun

Long since I posted. Been a little hung up with quite a few things on the plate. For one, the plate got so loaded that I had to push away some things, like the SEO Stuff; I had been so saturated having written content for about 50 days that I couldn't write no more for shit, even at the cost of losing all that I made scraping my ass off. But I feel much better now. Apart from that, I got my degree and have been visiting Government Schools in the city to prepare for a report on SMC Meetings for Pratham. More on that later, when I write a detailed article about it. Got through my TFI first round but got kicked out after the Phone Interview. No surprises there. Officially became a part of Grameen Bank's PPI Certification Reserve Corps. Hmm, what else. I know this sounds like a sad post full of accomplishments and rejections but that's pretty much what's been happening of late. Went to Ooty for a couple of days with Amma, stayed in a lovely resort called Glyngarth Villa but came back before the scheduled time. On the LSP front, working on YBI's magazine and will start working for FDR from Friday. Really excited about it, to be working for Karthik, Dr. JP and now Abhishek. Watched Cinderella Man and half Requiem for a Dream. Lux Aeterna is the composition of the month. Despite Chammak Challo giving tough competition. Watching OCW Single Variable Calculus lectures, 18.01. Aiseech. Reading Said Sayrafiezadeh's When Skateboards will be Free. Loving it. I mean that apart from, FDR material on Lokpal and DVVS Varma's booklets Janarajakiyam and Madhya Niyantranaku Mahodyayam. I know this sounds like a lot of boasting but to hell, I'm in the mood now. Amma wants me to cut all this and start preparing for the IBPS exam. Oh! yea, btw, Ram wants me to learn Drupal and I haven't started it yet. Will tonight. Starting a running regime. I don't know, that's about it really then, lots more to do though. The work schedule of these people I'm getting associated with is jaw-dropping and I can help myself immensely if I try working half as hard as them. Applied for IRMA, waiting for TISS notification. Before I leave, yea, spoke to Ragini Atha about agricultural NGOs and she's promised to get me associated with a lot of ones she knows. Great great stuff. Especially, DV Sridharan's story. Google pointReturn.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

far eastern philosophies

A quick note up here. Been reading Robert Twigger's Angry White Pyjamas since yesterday, started reading Hagakure and watched Sarvanand's Andari Bandhuvayya today. There's something about a totally clean conscience you know. About using your instinct more than your head, about letting your intuition guide you. The soul is cleansed only after it passes through the fire of pain, after the realization that sacrificing all that you have is easier than sacrificing all that you are. De-cluttering, unlearning is a million times tougher than doing the opposite. Like the famous Zen koan says, "As long as the cup is not empty, all the water will only spill out." The sheer insight of ancient wisdom. There's a line in Orange, in the end, when the hero says, "I've given up everything for her. All that I can give her now is me." The self-effacing freedom in giving up everything for the one thing. Maybe that is moksha. Giving up everything for your simple minded belief in bliss. Talking all this, understanding all this, like Twigger says, intellectualising all this is far easier than experiencing all this. But talking will take us nowhere will it? Or maybe it will, because, like the Hagakure discourses, "First intention, then enlightment."